The Weeping Icon of Island Park

Spring 1960. Lent. In the home of Peter and Pagona Catsounis in Island Park, a village on the South Shore of Long Island, hung a lithograph of the Virgin Mary. It was a paper print, not a painted icon. A Greek nun had given it to the couple as a wedding gift. It was Western in style, the kind of picture found in many Greek homes.

March 16, 1960. Pagona Catsounis was praying before the image. In the account of Father George Papadeas, she "literally froze as she saw a tear welling on the eye of the lithograph print." Newsday put it simply. She "saw a tear emerge from the figure's eye."

She immediately called Papadeas, the parish priest of St. Paul's Greek Orthodox Church in Hempstead. He came and verified the reports. The writer Michael H. Brown later wrote that the first weeping came "at the very hour" priests were praying the Akathist Hymn. He also wrote that Papadeas saw the eyes on one of the icons moving for hours.

The icon reportedly teared for several days. Word spread. Hundreds were drawn to the small apartment, in what Newsday called the "miracle of Norfolk Road."

Archbishop Iakovos, primate of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America, visited the home. A newsreel crew filmed the crowd as the picture was carried out of the house. Brown describes a procession of thirty cars. At St. Paul's the congregation made the sign of the cross as the icon entered. The newsreel, filed under March 24, announced that it had been declared "an authentic spiritual manifestation" and enshrined "in solemn rites."

The New York Journal-American added a detail of its own. It reported that "a trinity of white sea gulls, soaring against the blue sky over Island Park," had heralded the enshrinement of the Madonna of the Tears. Brown wrote that gulls circled over the church during services.

The Ecumenical Patriarchate proclaimed the Lamenting Mother of God a "Sign of Divine Providence." Faithful of all denominations made the pilgrimage. The cathedral says thousands came from near and far. Newsday counted tens of thousands. The icon is permanently enshrined at St. Paul's, now a cathedral.

It was not alone. Brown records icons weeping in private homes on March 16, April 12 and May 7, 1960. All three were taken to St. Paul's.

No police, laboratory or scientific examination of the icon is on record, and no hoax allegation either. Sceptics of weeping images in general point elsewhere. Joe Nickell called such events "a purely psychological and/or fraudulent phenomenon," and has written of "nondrying oils like olive oil that have become favored for weeping-icon trickery." Others suggest condensation. The usual explanations for porous statues fit a paper print poorly, and nobody tested this one either way.

Papadeas told the story in his book Why Did She Cry? The Story of the Weeping Madonna. Newsday later named the event one of the most memorable on Long Island in fifty years. In June 2008 another icon at the same church, of St Nicholas, was reported to show moisture and was filmed. The Catsounis icon is still there, behind the walls the procession entered in 1960.