The Cult of Little Audrey Santo: Victim Soul or Fraud?

[Cleopatra7]

The discussion on how Mother Angelica actively wanted to suffer in her last moments on earth got me thinking about this case, which I don't think has been discussed before. Audrey Santo was a young woman who died in 2007, almost twenty years after she fell into a swimming pool as a young child and suffered severe brain damage. That alone is a tragic story, but there's more to it, in that her mother claims that Audrey became a "victim soul," who suffered on behalf of the world's sinners, and was capable of working miracles for others even though she couldn't heal herself:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Santo

http://www.littleaudreysantofoundation.com/ (Official website, including the drive to have her canonized)

http://www.csicop.org/si/show/miracles_or_deception_the_pathetic_case_of_audrey_santo (Skeptical Inquiry's take)

I'll say right off that I think this whole "victim soul" routine was a pious fraud on the part of Santo's mother. I don't think Linda Santo was/is actively trying to scam people so much as she was projecting her own religious beliefs on her daughter to make sense of the tragedy that had befallen her. She probably does think her daughter was a miracle worker who brought people closer to god, even if she or some other family member was the one faking the weeping statues and pictures. The way in which Audrey was treated during her lifetime was grotesque, especially having the window cut into her room so pilgrims could gawk at her, and having her wheeled out into the stadium with 10,000 onlookers. Treating a disabled person with dignity doesn't mean turning them into a sideshow display. The whole idea of a "victim soul," which isn't found in mainstream Catholic theology, is also grotesque, and makes god out to be a sadist who enjoys torturing sick children. At least the Catholic hierarchy hasn't endorsed the Little Audrey cult, and hopefully she won't be canonized, because this sends all kind of wrong messages on a variety of issues.

 

[nausicaa]

Wow. Blast from my past. My mom and I saw a piece about this on TV when I was seven or eight. My mom (normally a nominal, fairly level-headed Catholic) was enraptured. I kept saying, "This is creepy. What's wrong with that girl? Why is everyone looking at her?" as they propped her up and caught her tears in little glass vials. My mom told me it was beautiful and I didn't understand it. 

I stand by my original "creepy" assessment.

I am really glad the Church hasn't canonized her and encouraged this behavior. All the weird oil and bleeding hosts and collecting it in containers. Yuck. It's all the stuff about fringe Catholicism that gives me the heebs. 

[mango_fandango]

Ooh. I remember seeing a documentary about her on YouTube. Very weird. Definitely agree that the mother was crazy.

And apparently there's been some thing about applying for the process of sainthood? Da. Fuq.

[nausicaa]

3 minutes ago, mango_fandango said:

Ooh. I remember seeing a documentary about her on YouTube. Very weird. Definitely agree that the mother was crazy.

And apparently there's been some thing about applying for the process of sainthood? Da. Fuq.

On the little Audrey site they have a gift shop and all proceeds go towards funding her canonization process. There's also a full size brick and mortar gift shop. 

[libriatrix]

7 minutes ago, mango_fandango said:

And apparently there's been some thing about applying for the process of sainthood? Da. Fuq.

Yeah, that's the way sainthood works. For someone to be canonized as a saint, you have to apply for the RC Church to investigate the person's story and decide whether they qualify for sainthood or not. 

[laPapessaGiovanna]

21 minutes ago, libriatrix said:

Yeah, that's the way sainthood works. For someone to be canonized as a saint, you have to apply for the RC Church to investigate the person's story and decide whether they qualify for sainthood or not. 

And it's an expensive process. 

[Cleopatra7]

1 hour ago, laPapessaGiovanna said:

And it's an expensive process. 

This is why most canonized saints until John Paul II's canonization frenzy were priests, monks, and nuns, rather than ordinary lay people because their religious orders/dioceses had the money and connections to lobby for the canonization of their respective group's potential saint.

[laPapessaGiovanna]

2 minutes ago, Cleopatra7 said:

This is why most canonized saints until John Paul II's canonization frenzy were priests, monks, and nuns, rather than ordinary lay people because their religious orders/dioceses had the money and connections to lobby for the canonization of their respective group's potential saint.

Yes but I think it wasn't the only reason. Saints are regarded as people who went as near to perfection as humanly possible. And religious life was considered way more perfect and pure than lay life. This at least until Vatican II. Then things slowly started to change a bit.

[sparkles]

I can only hope that Jahi McMath's "mother" never hears about this and gets ideas. It could add a whole new level of WTFery to the freak show she's created.

[Cleopatra7]

11 minutes ago, sparkles said:

I can only hope that Jahi McMath's "mother" never hears about this and gets ideas. It could add a whole new level of WTFery to the freak show she's created.

Jahi McMath's mother is some kind of Protestant, meaning she'd have to think of a new angle than the "victim soul" thing. But she did get an award from Teri Schiavo's parents, so maybe she'll think about "swimming the Tiber." I'm sure many "culture of life" type Catholics would love donating to prop up a corpse indefinitely.

[hoipolloi]

Wow. This is really disturbing in so many ways.

Re: beatification & sainthood. It's my understanding that even when the potential saint is an RC religious (priest or nun), it can still take years, as in a decade or more, even when they're "fast-tracked."

[lilwriter85]

When I was a kid in the 90s, Unsolved Mysteries did a segment on her and the claims about the oils from the statues healing other people. I think I was maybe 9 or 10 at the time when it aired. The Penn and Teller Bullshit show did a segment many years later where they called out the mom on her hoax.

[Four is Enough]

I'm a cradle catholic and I've never heard the term "victim soul" until now.

[Mercer]

As an Episcopalian I do believe in saints, but I don't believe in the concept of a "victim soul" or that a human being can somehow redeem sin through earthly suffering.

I don't in general have an issue with people holding various sorts of folk beliefs that give them comfort outside of religious orthodoxy, but to me this situation is highly problematic because the bottom line is that Audrey was a person and was treated as an object for the sake of other people's emotional gratification. That's really not okay.

I don't think Audrey should be treated as a saint. She was an unfortunate young woman who had a sad life, and was exploited for other people's gain. Even if that gain was about religious belief and not primarily about money, it was still exploitative and unfair to Audrey, and I don't think the Church should encourage other families to do the same thing by validating what her mother did, even if there was no malice involved.

[feministxtian]

Reason #178569423 I left Catholicism.

[bea]

Believe it or not, my father's second cousin was one of these quasi-saints. She died when she was 10, from leukemia, and my father's aunt (a religious fanatic) began a drive to have her canonized as a saint. Her parents did not support this drive, but a local order of Catholic priests became involved and the petition made it all the way to Rome. This was in the forties, when people were more willing to believe this sort of thing.

Anyway, in order for the petition to go any further, they had to verify that her body had not decomposed, for some reason. Despite her mother's objections, the order of priests and the local Bishop prevailed, and my father's cousin Jane was disinterred. I don't know what they found. The family claims that her body was not decomposed, but who knows what the actual situation was. The one that verifiable thing that happened is that Jane's mother spent the rest of her life in a mental institution, unable to get over the fact that her daughter had been dug up under the coffin opened. My father told me that Loretta, Jane's mother, was unable to get the sound of the dirt sliding off the coffin out of her head for the rest of her life.

So, hey, that's creepy. Anyway, this sort of story is not actually all that unusual. What's unusual is that it is happening right now, and not in the thirties or forties.

[ladyamylynn]

This is creepy as hell, and now I have to read everything on the internet about it.

[NeverAFundie]

3 hours ago, hoipolloi said:

Wow. This is really disturbing in so many ways.

Re: beatification & sainthood. It's my understanding that even when the potential saint is an RC religious (priest or nun), it can still take years, as in a decade or more, even when they're "fast-tracked."

And even waaaaaay longer.  Mother Teresa died in 1997; almost 20 years ago.  The Vatican recently announced that they have JUST "recognized" her required "second miracle," and her official canonization is scheduled for September.  And this is Mother Effing Teresa we're talking about. 

[Cleopatra7]

29 minutes ago, bea said:

Believe it or not, my father's second cousin was one of these quasi-saints. She died when she was 10, from leukemia, and my father's aunt (a religious fanatic) began a drive to have her canonized as a saint. Her parents did not support this drive, but a local order of Catholic priests became involved and the petition made it all the way to Rome. This was in the forties, when people were more willing to believe this sort of thing.

There has actually been an increase in the number of visionaries, miracle workers, and such in the Catholic Church over the past 200 years. I'm not sure if the number of people who really believe in these things has increased or decreased, but it seems like the people who do believe, really, really believe and use the Internet to broadcast their feelings. I think the reason why Padre Pio, for example, is so popular is because he was perceived to be an "old school" medieval type saint who rebuked the modern world with stigmatas, magical cures, visions, and insulting a woman for wearing pants in his confessional. The miracle industrial complex turned Medjugorje from a small, rather depressed town in former Yugoslavia to a major tourist destination, even though the visions there have not been endorsed by the Vatican and even many conservative and traditionalist Catholics think it's a fraud:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_response_to_the_Medjugorje_apparitions

Visionaries are increasingly used as an alternative form of authority among conservative and traditionalist Catholics, because these "visionaries" tell them the kinds of messages they want to hear (e.g., Vatican II was bad, communion in the hand is irreverent, people need to say the rosary more, Latin Mass rules, mass in the vernacular drools), whereas they may feel like the actual Catholic hierarchy is too focused on social justice and not enough on individual piety. Just look at this nutty exchange from our OCD friends at the Catholic Answers forum on Audrey Santo, and make sure not to miss the comments from the poster who claims to have a bi-locating visionary friend who personally talked to Audrey and gave her stones from Medjugorje:

http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=80757

[NachosFlandersStyle]

Oh man, I love reading about grotesque Catholic history, and there are a bunch of young women who claimed similar status throughout the 19th-early 20th centuries. Of course most of them were making those claims on their own behalf. Some were obvious malingerers, some were truly ill and were trying to exercise whatever social influence they had as bed-ridden peasant girls. It's a really fascinating phenomenon from a purely sociological/ gender studies standpoint but there doesn't seem to be much scholarship about it. 

39 minutes ago, ladyamylynn said:

This is creepy as hell, and now I have to read everything on the internet about it.

There's a great/horrifying website that lists a ton of similar stories:  http://www.mysticsofthechurch.com/?m=1

[Nikedagain?]

45 minutes ago, ladyamylynn said:

This is creepy as hell, and now I have to read everything on the internet about it.

So super creepy. And I'm heading down the rabbit hole right behind you...

[sparkles]

5 hours ago, Cleopatra7 said:

Jahi McMath's mother is some kind of Protestant, meaning she'd have to think of a new angle than the "victim soul" thing. But she did get an award from Teri Schiavo's parents, so maybe she'll think about "swimming the Tiber." I'm sure many "culture of life" type Catholics would love donating to prop up a corpse indefinitely.

If she thought there was money in it, I wouldn't put it past her to conviently convert. 

[Mary C Doates]

1 hour ago, Nikedagain? said:

So super creepy. And I'm heading down the rabbit hole right behind you...

Watched the video on YouTube (it's about an hour long). Very disturbing, especially the past about the baby whose parents decide that visiting Audrey can cure their son.

[nausicaa]

2 hours ago, ladyamylynn said:

This is creepy as hell, and now I have to read everything on the internet about it.

This should really be my life motto.

[Howl]

8 hours ago, nausicaa said:

 as they propped her up and caught her tears in little glass vials...

These are called lachrymatory bottles, unguentaria, or unguentarium, among other things.  Creepy indeed.  Over the years, has it become clearer why your mom was so attracted to this?