Our Lady of Máriapócs, the Weeping Icon

Of all the languages I have ever used, and I have used every one of them, the shortest and least translatable is a tear. So when I wanted to say something to a country that had been bled for a hundred and fifty years, I did not send a preacher. I made a picture cry.

Understand where I chose to do it. Not Rome. Not Vienna, where the Emperor sat. A village called Pócs, in the eastern marches of Hungary, where the roads turned to mud in November and stayed mud until spring — a place the great powers of Europe had used as a threshing floor for a century and a half. The Turks had come and gone and come again. The plague had come. The imperial soldiers who were supposed to be the liberation were quartered in the villagers' houses eating the villagers' winter stores. The church was made of wood. The people were Ruthenians and Hungarians of the Greek rite, who chanted the same liturgy as Constantinople in a language the courts of Europe did not consider worth learning, and who were poor in the specific, grinding way that leaves no monuments.

On the wall of that wooden church hung an icon of a mother holding her Son and pointing at Him with her right hand — the ancient gesture that means, this is the Way, look at Him and not at me. It had been painted twenty-one years earlier by a village priest with a brush, for a man who had vowed it in thanksgiving because he had come home alive out of Turkish captivity. He could not afford to pay for it when it was finished. Somebody else paid, and gave it to the church. That is the entire provenance of the most famous image in Hungary: a debt of gratitude, a man who could not settle his bill, and a neighbour who quietly covered it.

On the fourth of November, 1696, during the Divine Liturgy, a man in that congregation looked up and saw that the eyes of the Mother of God were wet.

They were wet for two weeks.

I want you to notice what I did not do. I did not make her speak. I gave no message, no secret, no schedule of chastisements, no instructions to build anything. I have given such things elsewhere and will again. Here I gave tears and nothing else, because a country that has been told for six generations that its suffering is the ordinary cost of being small does not need information. It needs to know that Heaven is not indifferent, and that is not an argument, and it cannot be delivered as one.

They were suspicious, and I am glad they were. Men climbed up and took the board off the wall. They wiped the face and watched it wet again. They turned it around, looking for a wick, a channel, a hollow, a trick — because there is always some clever man ready to sell tears to peasants, and honest doubt has always been My friend and never My enemy. Commissions were convened. Sworn testimony was taken from dozens of witnesses, and among them were Calvinists and Lutherans who did not pray to her and had no reason on earth to help the Catholics prove anything, and imperial officers who had seen too much of the world to be moved by village enthusiasm. They all swore to the same thing. They had watched her weep.

Then the Emperor heard, and did what emperors do. He sent for it.

They carried her west in the winter — five months on the roads, town by town, and every town she passed through kept the day she came as a feast for the rest of its history — and they installed her in the cathedral of St. Stephen in Vienna, in the greatest church of the greatest city of the region, where she hangs to this hour and where, in the language of that court, they call her Maria Pötsch. Within weeks the imperial army broke the Ottoman host at Zenta, and the whole city said it was because of her, and I will let them keep saying it, because gratitude that is slightly overgenerous is still gratitude.

And she never wept again in Vienna. Not once, in over three hundred years.

The villagers of Pócs, who had lost their icon to the capital, were sent a copy — a painted consolation prize, a substitute, the sort of thing that is meant to keep the poor quiet. In August of 1715, in front of a crowd, the copy wept. In December of 1905 it wept again, for over two weeks, and this time there were photographs and physicians and a modern episcopal inquiry with modern instruments.

Do you see it now? They thought the wonder lived in the wood. They thought that if you moved the correct board to the correct cathedral you would own the mercy that came with it. But I was never in the pigment. I was in the village. I have always been in the village — in the mud, with the poor, with the ones nobody would think to conquer a country for — and when they took her image to the palace, I stayed exactly where I was and wept again through a copy, so that no one could ever say I could be relocated by an imperial decree.

The wooden church is gone. In its place there is a basilica now, and the descendants of those muddy Ruthenian and Hungarian villagers pray there in the Greek rite in the Hungarian tongue, and once, in 1991, a Polish Pope came and stood among two hundred thousand of them in a field and sang their liturgy with them.

The woman in that icon is still pointing at her Son. Nobody has ever needed her to say anything more.

The Record

The icon of Máriapócs is a Byzantine-rite image of the Theotokos of the Hodegetria type, painted in 1675 by István Papp, a local Greek Catholic priest, for László Csigri of Pócs, who had commissioned it in fulfilment of a vow made in thanksgiving for his release from Ottoman captivity. Unable to pay, Csigri forfeited it; it was purchased by Lőrinc Hurta and donated to the wooden church of Pócs, in Szabolcs county in the northeast of the Kingdom of Hungary.

On 4 November 1696, during the celebration of the Divine Liturgy, the icon was observed to shed tears from both eyes. The phenomenon recurred intermittently until 8 December 1696. The icon was removed from the iconostasis and examined during the period; ecclesiastical commissions collected sworn depositions from a large number of witnesses, and the surviving records indicate that these included Protestants (Calvinist and Lutheran) and officers of the imperial garrison as well as Catholics of both the Latin and Greek rites — a range of testimony frequently noted in later assessments of the case.

Emperor Leopold I, informed of the events, ordered the icon brought to Vienna. It was carried west over roughly five months in 1697, with public veneration in the towns along the route, and installed in St. Stephen's Cathedral, where it remains, venerated under the German name Maria Pötsch. Devotion in Vienna associated the Habsburg victory over the Ottoman army at Zenta on 11 September 1697 with her intercession. The icon has not been reported to weep again since its arrival in Vienna.

A copy was sent to Pócs to replace the original. This copy was reported to weep from 1 to 5 August 1715, and again from 3 to 19 December 1905, the latter event examined by a diocesan inquiry and widely documented in the contemporary press. The village was renamed Máriapócs, and the shrine became the principal pilgrimage centre of the Hungarian Greek Catholic Church, drawing pilgrims across confessional lines from Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Ukraine, and Poland.

The present pilgrimage church, built in the 18th century in place of the wooden church, was raised to the rank of basilica minor by Pope Pius XII in 1948. Pope John Paul II celebrated a Byzantine-rite Divine Liturgy at Máriapócs on 18 August 1991 before a congregation reported at roughly two hundred thousand; the Hungarian Greek Catholic Church was raised to a metropolitan church sui iuris by Pope Francis in 2015, with Máriapócs as its national shrine. The Church has never issued a formal doctrinal declaration on the supernatural character of the lachrymations; the shrine's standing rests on the depositions of 1696, the later inquiries, and more than three centuries of authorized public veneration.