c. 1998 Religion News Service

WORCESTER, Mass. _ Mystical things reported to be happening around a bedridden young girl are making this industrial New England city a pilgrimage site.

Audrey Santo has been in a coma-like state since, at the age of 3, she nearly drowned in her family’s swimming pool. That was 11 years ago. Since then, word has spread about healings, weeping statues and bleeding communion wafers in the Santo home, where the girl is under around-the-clock care by her family and nurses.

An annual Mass for Audrey, sponsored by family and friends in the parish church, drew 800 people in 1996. Last year, 4,000 from all over the country overwhelmed Christ the King Catholic Church to pray for _ and to _”little Audrey.” This year, the 23,500-seat football stadium at the College of the Holy Cross has been rented for the Mass on Sunday (Aug. 9) afternoon _ the anniversary of the day Audrey’s mother, Linda, found the toddler floating face down in an above-ground pool.

Since being released from the hospital in 1987, the paralyzed girl moves only her eyes and occasionally wiggles a finger. She breathes through a tube inserted in her trachea and is fed through a tube to her stomach. Her pediatrician, Dr. John Harding, said Audrey suffers from a rare disorder called akinetic mutism, which is not precisely a coma.”In an official coma, there is no sense the patient has any awareness of another person in the room,”the physician said.”She really has a kind of awareness. She doesn’t sit up and talk, but you are aware that she hears things. You know when she doesn’t like something.” Audrey’s family members say they they know when she is happy or agitated by looking at her eyes.

Harding said strange things happening to and around Audrey cannot be explained scientifically.”I am no Sherlock Holmes,” he said, but what is happening”is either a hoax or a miracle, and I don’t think it is a hoax.” For example, several years ago she developed an extensive rash that typically occurs with chemotherapy without receiving such a treatment. “She does unusual things like this and you kind of wonder,”Harding said.

Audrey’s mother doesn’t wonder. She said she received letters from people who said they were healed of cancer after praying to Audrey.

Bishop Daniel P. Reilly of Worcester appointed a commission to investigate, but it has made no report. Raymond Delisle, a spokesman for the diocese, said the commission is making a thorough investigation.

Priests from as far away as the Philippines and Rome who say Mass at the Santo home are doing so without official endorsement, Delisle said. Nevertheless, a chapel in the garage and a tabernacle in Audrey’s room were approved by Reilly’s predecessor, Bishop Timothy Harrington.

Bishops traditionally are wary of reports of miracles and apparitions. They don’t want to discourage people in their faith, but they also don’t want to encourage what may turn out to be a pious fraud.

Even the most revered sites involving apparitions of the Virgin Mary, such as Fatima, Portugal, and Lourdes, France, fall within the church’s category of”private revelation,”which Catholics may accept or reject.”No bishop wants to handle anything like this. It’s messy because it doesn’t fit in anywhere,”said the Rev. John J. Foley, pastor of Christ the King.”This thing has taken on a life of its own ever since good old Mother Angelica, God bless her, put this on television.” That hourlong TV report, broadcast on the widely watched Eternal Word Television Network founded by Mother Angelica of Birmingham, Ala., is what brought 4,000 people to Foley’s church last year _ 3,000 of them standing outside.

Reports about Audrey are being spread by a coterie of devout Catholics who believe that Jesus, and more often his mother, Mary, are appearing to ordinary people to call for prayer and repentance. They make pilgrimages in a quest for such manifestations as weeping statues, bleeding communion hosts and other phenomena.

It’s a quest that is scoffed at by some within the church.

The Rev. Richard J. McBrien, who teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame, said:”People are free to believe what they want, and if they want to gather with this common belief that is their right and privilege, but the rest of the church need not pay attention to it. It has nothing to do with the Gospel. Weeping statues and other odd developments have nothing to do with what Jesus taught us about human relationships.” Audrey is being portrayed as a”silent soul”in a spiritual drama, bringing people closer to Jesus through her suffering. She is said to have special power to intercede with God ever since her mother took her in 1988 to Medjugorje, a village in Bosnia that is the site of reputed apparitions of the Virgin Mary.

Instead of being miraculously cured, as her intensely religious mother had prayed for, Audrey was stricken ill and rushed home.

Not long afterward, nurses reported smelling roses in her room when none were there. Then statues appeared to be crying oil and blood. A videotape of priests saying Mass in the garage chapel shows them being startled when they see blood on a communion wafer.

Some people report being cured after having asked Audrey’s intercession. Sheryle Parolisa of Methuen, Mass., credits Audrey for her son Joey’s recovery from an motorcycle accident in 1994. He suffered severe leg fractures and was told he probably wouldn’t walk again.

But when Sheryle Parolisa returned home after visiting Audrey, she said, she was shocked to find Joey on his feet. Joey said he just had a feeling he could walk.

Audrey, said her mother, is”a statement of life in our culture of death,”a comment that echoes a refrain of Pope John Paul II.”Audrey doesn’t speak, but God is speaking around her very powerfully,”Mary Cormier, a spokeswoman for the Santos, told about 70 visitors to the Santo home on a recent Wednesday.

There is a year-and-a-half-long waiting list of people wanting to visit the home, Cormier said.

On a recent visit Audrey, eyes closed, lay still under a white blanket with pink lace frill, her head turned to the right where her maternal grandmother, Percilla Nader, sat. Also in the room were a nurse and a priest.

The girl’s skin was translucent white and contrasted with her long black hair that has never been cut and that fell in a sweep across the bed.”She looks like a Dresden doll,”a visitor remarked.”Whether Audrey has her eyes open or closed she knows you are here and you can ask her to intercede to God for us,”Michael Nader, the girl’s uncle, said.

Noting the many religious images, Nader said that”the majority of statues have either wept or bled.” He pointed to figures of Jesus and Mary that had brown stains below their eyes that he said was dried blood. Plastic cups were taped to several statues to catch drops of oil.

Mass was said on a temporary altar on the backyard deck. About 50 women and 20 men sat on folding chairs as the Rev. Michael McNamara of Boston, the main celebrant, was assisted by six other priests and two deacons.”God is pouring out his love for us through his oil”that is found all over the house, McNamara said.

DEA END RENNER