Every other month an old German priest with a wispy white beard comes to this ”valley of the wood carvers” to pick up statues of the Virgin Mary.
He loads them into the trunk of his car and drives down the winding Val Gardena Valley in the Dolomite Alps to Montichiari, a dusty little town 140 miles away, and blesses them at a peaceful grove two miles south of town.
The 74-year-old priest, Rev. Thadeus Laux, is the founder and chief priest of the international Maria Rosa Mystica Society, which has headquarters in West Germany.
Devotions of the society include reverence for the Virgin Mary as she supposedly appeared to an Italian woman beginning in 1947. The society distributes statues depicting the Virgin Mary as she appeared in the apparitions, with three roses across her chest. The statues are known as the Madonna of the Rosa Mystica, or Maria Rosa Mystica.
Last year, Laux named Rev. John Starace, a priest who lives in Brooklyn but is affiliated with a diocese in India, as the society`s U.S. director.
Two of the statues crafted in Sankt Ulrich found their way to the Chicago area, one to St. John of God Catholic Church, 1234 W. 52d St., and the other to the suburban Evergreen Park home of Mildred DiCola.
In May, 1984, both statues began to shed what Father Starace and others said were tears. He also says another such statue wept during a bus tour he was conducting in Italy, and he has told of similar incidents involving 90 other identical statues around the world.
The weeping statue in the Southwest Side church became celebrated and some people called the events a miracle. The statue that supposedly wept in the Evergreen Park home was unpublicized until last weekend.
Both statues were purchased from Father Starace by DiCola`s late husband, Anthony, who donated one to St. John of God church and kept one.
In Italy, outside Montichiari, at a peaceful grove known as Fontanelle, new statues of Maria Rosa Mystica, fresh from the wood carvers, are lined up on a platform under a giant wooden crucifix. Father Laux blesses them with holy water from a fountain.
The grove–with a bubbling brook and four spouts of fountain water, set in yellow cornfields–has been famous for centuries for what believers call the healing properties of its water.
Once blessed, many of the statues are shipped in pilgrim buses to the society`s headquarters in Essen, West Germany, by Horst Mehring, 68, a retired businessman and Laux`s chief aide.
In the last eight years, the phenomenon of the Rosa Mystica has turned the peaceful Fontanelle grove into a bustling shrine for pilgrims. Dozens of buses from all over Europe arrive each day with pilgrims who pray for hours and have fits of ecstasy on the spot where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to a local peasant woman, Pierina Gilli, in 1947.
French pilgrims, most of them old and frail, mumble litanies as they climb on their knees up the stone stairs on which the Madonna supposedly descended to bless the fountain water. The pilgrims climb toward the locked shrine containing the life-sized wooden statue of ”The Madonna Who Cries Tears.”
But the statue here does not weep. ”She has done so in many other places,” said Rev. Luigi Mosconi, a priest who led a group of pilgrims.
A small, portly man, Father Mosconi said the principal festivities occur Oct. 13, when ”hundreds come in procession carrying their statues on their shoulders to have them blessed and baptized under the stars.”
Father Mosconi spoke as pilgrims filled plastic containers with holy water and two women shrieked in ecstasy at the sight of the wooden Madonna until Father Mosconi told them crossly, ”Be quiet.” They obeyed immediately. The bus pilgrimages are part of a package tour that includes not only a visit and prayer session at the shrine, built in 1972, but a visit to Pierina Gilli, known as ”the seeress,” who is said to have conversed with the Madonna at least 15 times.
Gilli lives in a stylish country house built for her by donations from Rosa Mystica followers.
A poor peasant before she saw the Madonna, Gilli has built a second house next door for her 49-year-old retarded granddaughter. It took three rings of the front-gate bell before Gilli, a sprightly 74-year-old, peered through a window and shouted, ”Consultations are only from 3 to 7 o`clock. Come back later.”
It was then 1:30 p.m. Five minutes later, a bus with 40 French pilgrims pulled up. Gilli immediately opened the gates and mumbled prayers.
The pilgrims filed through a garden, past a huge Madonna statue, into a chapel inside the house. Here they knelt on prayer benches as Gilli started them on a litany that abruptly ended when she snapped, ”Now you go on praying yourself,” and walked into her own room.
”I`m not allowed to talk,” she said. ”But everything I have seen is true. And if you want to know the whole story, then go around the corner to the souvenir shop.”
Did she ever see the Madonna cry?
”I can`t say. Go to the souvenir shop.”
Before leaving, pilgrims drop donations into a plastic bucket in wads of 10,000 lire notes, about $5.
Around the corner is Nicoli Aldina`s souvenir shop. He is a distant relative to Gilli. The shop is crammed with fiberglass statues and statuettes of the Rosa Mystica, ranging in price from $10 for a finger-sized example to $650 for a 4-foot statue. ”And they won`t break,” said Aldina`s daughter as she dropped one on the floor to demonstrate. ”Oh, sure, they sell like hot cakes,” she added.
On sale for $2 are tin coins, light as feathers and stamped with ”Maria Rosa Mystica.” According to Gilli`s revelations, the Madonna told her to have statues carved and coins stamped in her honor. This order is mentioned in the society`s official bible, which, critics note, virtually obligates believers to buy these trinkets.
Booklets in eight languages tell the story of the miracles. The Italian version sells for $1.50, the foreign versions for $3.50 ”because they had to be translated,” the seller explains.
The level of antagonism in Montichiari toward the Rosa Mystica Society is surprisingly uniform, stoked by the local parish church that posts warnings on the church portals in Italian, French, German and English. The warning, signed by the Archbishop of Brescia, Bruno Foresti, says: “
–The so-called apparition of the Rosa Mystica at Montichiari and Fontanelle shows no reason for credibility.
–The cult of the Rosa Mystica is not approved and cannot be practiced or favored.
–Whoever favors it, prints publications or organizes pilgrimages does not help but perturbs the beliefs of the faithful, inducing them to violate church orders.
Parish priest Don Bertoni said that priests from as far away as Argentina and Chicago had visited him this year to find out why their statues had wept. ”I told them that the Madonna probably wept because they did not obey the instructions of the church,” the priest said. ”Our Madonna here has never wept.” The priest said his parishioners don`t believe in the miracles. ”They all know Pierina,” he said. ”But we do not ostracize her, and we look after her as we would look after anyone who is sick. She comes to mass every morning and once I did set foot in her house, but only to tell her of the bishop`s orders.”
At the Vatican in Rome, the Congregation of the Faith, the department responsible for testing the credibility of miracles and apparitions, ruled last year there was not sufficient evidence to believe a miracle had occurred at Montichiari or Fontanelle.
So staunch has been the local opposition to the Weeping Madonna that Father Laux recalls in his writings that when the Fontanelle statue had been carved, ”We had to take it, in the middle of the night and by moonlight, secretly to the grove to avoid the anger of the locals.”
In 1949, the archbishop of Brescia sent Gilli to live for 18 years in a convent after she had claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary. But she found a champion in Msgr. Abate Rossi, the parish priest who traveled to the wood carver`s valley of Sankt Ulrich and in 1949 asked local carver Caio Perathoner, father of eight sons and two daughters, to make a 7-foot statue of the Madonna. The statue was placed in the Cathedral of Montichiari, where it still stands.
Once Gilli was allowed to leave the convent in 1968, she reported, almost at once, to have seen the Madonna at Fontanelle. She said the Madonna told her to build a shrine and place a wooden statue of her above the springs.
Father Rossi died two years ago and Gilli then traveled to Sankt Ulrich, where half the population of 4,000 works as carvers, a 300-year-old tradition that provides the main income of the 30,000 Ladini people, a minority group living in the valley. They speak their own language and also German and Italian.
But Caio Perathoner had died, so the order for the new statue was given to his son Ulrich, 41, one of the valley`s most gifted wood carvers.
Ulrich, a man with the watery blue eyes of the mountain people and a wry sense of humor, recalled that ”Pierina explained to me how the Madonna should look, very sweet and with three roses over the chest. She came a second time to look at the face. She wanted me to make some alterations in the expression. I don`t believe I did. It was a good work, life-sized and very realistic.
”I must admit, however, that my Madonna never cried for me, even when I went to see her two years ago at Fontanelle,” he said.
Soon after the statue was taken to Fontanelle in 1972, Father Laux appeared at Sankt Ulrich to order replicas of it. Because Ulrich was not interested in making replicas, his brother Bruno, who took over the family business, organized four other brothers to work on the orders.
Most of the replicas are used to create prayer societies for believers, who gather around the statue to pray and sometimes take it on pilgrimages.
In his writings, Father Laux said that by 1974 the carvers had made 250 statues ”and they are making more as quick as they can,” he said.
How many have been carved since 1974 is anyone`s guess. Bruno Perathoner, 45, said there have been ”hundreds,” but he added that there is a black market in plastic and fiberglass statues and that some are made from pressed wood, ”which has nothing to do with us.”
Under an old code among wood carvers, no family can copy another`s model, so the Perathoner family has a monopoly on the Rosa Mystica boom. And judging from attendance at the shrine, the number of believers is expanding rapidly despite church disapproval.
