A CHURCH warden has gone on trial accused of dripping his own blood on the face of a statue of the Virgin Mary so that it appeared to be weeping.People flocked to the Santa Lucia church in the northern Italian town of Forli two years ago after the "miracle" was spotted by two elderly women.
The 1.22-metre statue became a media sensation until Monsignor Lino Pizzi, the local bishop, had it removed and called the police to investigate.
Vincenzo di Costanzo was charged with denigrating religion after forensic experts discovered that the bloody "teardrops" matched DNA swabbed from his mouth.
"This is highly sacrilegious," said Alessandro Mancini, the prosecutor in the trial, who has accused the warden of conning local Catholics. Di Costanzo denies the charges and has offered to take a lie-detector test.
There has been a rash of weeping Madonnas in Italy in recent years, and the Vatican has been wary of approving the incidents as miracles.
The most famous came in 1995 in Civitavecchia, outside Rome, when a 46-centimetre statue in the garden of a family home began crying blood.
Thousands of believers descended on the house and the local bishop said he had witnessed the tears.
But the Vatican refused to acknowledge their veracity after Fabio Gregori, the statue's owner, refused to take a DNA test.
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