MANNERS & MORALS: St. Anne’s Tears

House cleaning one morning, Mrs. Arthur Martin of Syracuse, N.Y. dusted the plaster statue of St. Anne a little too hastily: it toppled from the window ledge into the cement driveway below and broke into pieces. It was swept up and dropped in an ashcan and there the eldest of the Martins’ four children, a lively, questing, eleven-year-old named Shirley Anne, found it.

Shirley Anne took the head of the statue out of the ashcan. Only its nose had been dented. She pressed her lips affectionately against it. Then she ran shrilling into the house: “Mom, the statue cried. I kissed it and it cried.” Viola Martin knew her daughter to be a perfectly normal girl, neither withdrawn nor possessed, but sufficiently imaginative to be pecking out on a typewriter a “book” she called “The Haunted House.” Mrs. Martin decided to say nothing. “Nobody would have believed us.”

But Shirley Anne told her classmates about it, and her father, who is a milkman, mentioned it along his route. Last week—Holy Week—thousands of people who wanted to believe and thousands who were merely curious descended on Hawley Avenue and the two-story frame house with its artificial-brick sides. Some of the visitors knelt, prayed, and saw tears. Others, including newspaper reporters, said they saw moisture on the cheeks of the statue.

Police, fearing that the old staircase in the Martin home might collapse, barred visitors from the house. The street had to be roped off but the pilgrims still came, hoping to dip handkerchiefs, rosaries, even facial tissues in the scant droplets that sometimes fell when the child kissed the head. Only Shirley Anne’s grandmother claimed they had the healing virtue: they had cured her neuralgia, she said.

Shirley Anne kissed the head for a television audience, and hustling video men, seeing that moisture was being recorded on the studio screens, breathlessly described it as the first “spiritual manifestation” in television history. A local Unitarian minister wondered: Could it have been saliva from the girl’s lips? The head was porous and had been left outdoors: Had it been exuding moisture? Shirley Anne had her own simple answer: “God made it cry for some reason.” The chancellor of the Syracuse Diocese was cautious; as others had done, he conceded that moisture seemed to show on St. Anne’s face when Shirley Anne kissed it, hastened to add that “the explanation of the fact, or its significance, has not been established.”