A statue of St. Michael the Archangel with what appears to have a substance resembling blood dripping from his forehead. / Alicia Martinez
Denver, Colo., Mar 7, 2022 / 18:00 pm (CNA).
On Feb. 23, hours before the world would hear that Russia had invaded Ukraine, a statue of St. Michael the Archangel, the patron saint of Kyiv, began to emit a dark liquid which appears to be blood. A video shared on Facebook of the occurrence quickly made headlines.
Alicia Martinez, 57, of Broomfield, Colorado, a Denver suburb, is the owner of this statue. In an interview conducted in Spanish with CNA she called the experience “inexplicable.”
While speaking to a friend on the phone, one of her roommates knocked on her bedroom door telling her to come quickly. “I asked him what was happening, but he was standing there shaking,” she said.
That is when she witnessed her statue of St. Michael appearing to bleed from the right side of his head. “He’s not crying,” explained Martinez, who is originally from Zacatecas, Mexico. “He’s bleeding from the forehead. [The blood] passes around his eyes. It doesn’t enter his eyes.”
She added, “It was dripping like when you cut yourself and the blood drips out; that’s how it was.”
At a loss for words, all she could do was ask God what was happening. “I said, ‘God, it’s either something good, or something bad. I don’t know what it is, but something is happening here,’” Martinez recounted. “It didn’t feel like it was something bad. It was an inexplicable sensation, but it was beautiful.”
Still questioning her experience, Martinez called a friend of hers who is a priest in Mexico. He told her this was nothing bad. Instead, he told her to pray more, that what was occurring was marvelous, and that her home was blessed.
Martinez was told by another friend who is a religious sister that the blood would not stop flowing until it reached the head of the devil on which St. Michael the Archangel steps. The nearly 30-inch statue bled every day for a week, until it stopped when the liquid fell on the head of the devil depicted in the statue.
Mark Haas, public relations director for the Archdiocese of Denver, told CNA March 7 that the archdiocese “has just recently been informed of this claim and we will investigate.”
In an interview with the Spanish news agency Primer Impacto, Monsignor Jorge de Los Santos, pastor of Our Lady Mother of the Church in nearby Commerce City, Colorado, said, “For the Church to take a position there would need to be a long, thorough, complex investigation in order to make a decision.”
Martinez has been put in contact with a representative from the Archdiocese of Denver who is in charge of cases considered miraculous. If Martinez decides to continue with the investigation process, the object will be put through several tests to see if miracles occur.
After posting the video on Facebook, Martinez, who works at a grocery store, received several comments that she was only seeking money or fame, which led her to remove the video. She expressed multiple times that this was not her intention in sharing the video, but that it was “something real that happened to them [her and her roommates].”
“What I was seeing was something real. It was something that doesn’t have an explanation,” she expressed. “This is not fraud. This is not to become famous. None of that. I know it’s something divine from God that doesn’t happen to everyone.”
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