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November 27, 2005

Through the Eyes of Faith

I first heard about this earlier in the week when there was a short spot on the local news, but now that AP and ABC News (and The Huffington Post) are carrying the story, I thought I would put in my two cents.

It seems that a statue of the Virgin Mary at the Vietnamese Catholic Martyrs Church in Sacramento was seen crying blood shortly before mass on November 20. To put it a little more analytically, a priest first noticed two red streaks extending downward from the corners of the left eye of the statue. You can see a picture on the ABC website. The Diocese of Sacramento has not commented.

What interests me is what various people have said.

"For people individually seeing things through the eyes of faith, something like this can be meaningful. As for whether it is supernatural or a miracle, normally these incidences are not. Miracles are possible, of course," Murphy [deacon of the diocese's mother church, the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament] said. "The bishop is just waiting and seeing what happens. They will be moving very slowly."

Let's take stock of what Rev. Murphy said in the first two sentences quoted above. Even if it turns out not be a miracle, which in Murphy's mind it likely isn't, it can still be meaningful to people who see it "through the eyes of faith." So "through the eyes of faith" a fraud or bird droppings could be meaningful to someone other than the perpetrator or the bird. Amazing.

Note: I am not claiming that this is a fraud or the droppings of a red fruit eating bird, at this point I'm just suggesting two possible non-miraculous explanations.

Rev. Murphy last sentence is also telling, "The bishop is just waiting and seeing what happens. They will be moving very slowly." What is happening is that flocks of faithful who are coming to the Church get their spiritual batteries recharged and when the frenzy dies down my guess is that the Church will have a good unpublicized naturalistic explanation but they will have also gained the benefit of the event. From the Church's point of view it is simply too soon to break the news.

Let's look at another paragraph from the AP article. This about the reaction of two nuns,

Nuns Anna Bui and Rosa Hoang, members of the Salesian Sisters of San Francisco, also made the trek Saturday. Whether the weeping statue is declared a miracle or not, they said, it is already doing good by awakening people to the faith and reminding them to pray.

"It's a call for us to change ourselves, to love one another," Hoang said.

Again, even if it isn't a miracle, it still does good. Now I suppose that when threatening people with eternal damnation is not enough to awaken them and remind them to pray, a little fraud or bird poop or whatever can come in handy.

And then there is Mr. Troung, a parishioner at the church,

"There's a big event in the future earthquake, flood, a disease," Truong said. "We're very sad."

While the Rev. Murphy and Sisters Bui and Hoang see good in this event, Mr. Troung sees disaster. It is all through the eyes of faith.

By the way, I'm not so sure of my bird poop hypothesis. If you look at the stain that runs down the nose, you'll see that its highest point it under the brow but above inside corner of the eye. On the one hand, I'm not sure a bird could have made a deposit at that exact location. On the other hand, I've never seen tears, bloody or not, come from that part of the face either. But then, I've never seen a statue cry blood. Perhaps they cry blood from just above the eye.

Posted by Duane Smith at November 27, 2005 1:08 PM | Read more on Religion |

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