You can see where this is heading.

Within days, hordes are descending on the residential block in Siracusa. The family lets them troop through their modest living room, pray, and tramp out the back door. The local top prelate, at a loss for how to call this one (genuine miracles in this century have been few and far between), starts making phone calls. The town doctor and local pharmacist show up as representatives of the world of detached authority figures.

The pharmacist performs perhaps the most common scientific test known and announces that the water leaking from the Madonna's eyes tastes just like human tears. (Careful kids, don't try this at home. It takes years of pharmacology training in order to know how to lick salt water off a chunk of plaster.) On the third day, a scientific team arrives in time to take samples of the last tears to flow down the plaster Madonna's cheek. She stops weeping at 11:40 a.m. on September 1, 1953.

The samples turn out to have the exact chemical composition of human tears, and basic chemistry precludes that either gypsum or the paint on the relief could have produced such a liquid. No longer weeping, the Madonna proceeds to perform a whole passel of miracles of the curing-the-blind and healing-the-maimed variety.

The little mass-produced plaque is quickly proclaimed a holy, miraculous relic and Siracusa sets about building the requisite God-awful enormous church to house it, across the street from the archeological museum. Recently completed, the oversized shrine resembles nothing so much a giant alien badminton birdie that landed out of bounds smack on a site that turned out to be, as they dug the foundations, a temple to Demter and Kore/Persephone, Sicily's oldest goddesses (lots of ancient devotional statuettes for the Archaeology museum).

I, until this morning ignorant of all this history but knowing vaguely that some Big Time miracle thingy from the 50s was cooling its holy heels in that skyline-defining ice cream cone structure, decided to stop by this morning on my way to the San Giovanni catacombs.

If you will kindly recall from a few paragraphs ago, the Madonna of the Tears started weeping at 8:30 a.m. on Aug 29, 1953. Today is Aug 29.

I showed up at the church around 9am, and ran headlong into the Mass celebrating the exact moment of the 45th anniversary of the miracle. The miraculous Madonna plaque itself was in attendance, looking kind of funny and out of place. Up at the altar was this itty bitty kitschy Christian cast-off, mass produced to be placed above the mantle of people who are just a little too religious.

And here it was, surrounded by legions of the faithful in a structure built for it alone and that clearly follows the architectural premise that if you pile cement high enough into the sky, God will notice. There were grown-ups dressed like ersatz cub scouts passing 'round the collection plates. Throngs filled the church. People wiped their hands down their faces repeatedly as they prayed and moaned. Weird weird weird.

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