ORLANDO, Fla. – When Castle Designs opened its Orlando gallery Friday morning, Chiem Nguyen was waiting, along with four other members of his family and employees of his nail salon. A Catholic and a Vietnamese immigrant, Nguyen came to the gallery to pray at a statue of the Virgin Mary, asking for help in locating the father he never met.

“We’re going to find him,” said his wife, Tien Nguyen, as the group approached the statue they believe has been weeping.

The five people, the latest of hundreds to view the statue in the past week, knelt and prayed the rosary in front of the copy of Michelangelo’s famed “Pieta,” which depicts Mary holding the body of Jesus after his crucifixion. Some of the women ducked under the guard rope to kiss the feet of Jesus and Mary.

Stories of a weeping Virgin Mary, or of holy images appearing in unlikely places – a grilled-cheese sandwich, a tortilla, the window of an office building – present a dilemma for the Catholic Church.

These phenomena, based on hundreds of years of sometimes embarrassing experience, can be the product of anything from wishful thinking to hysteria or even fraud. Church officials are also wary of subjecting sincere believers to ridicule and, by extension, of letting the church itself be vulnerable to ridicule.

A statue perceived as weeping can “have a significant impact on many souls,” said Carol Brinati, spokeswoman for the Catholic Diocese of Orlando. “It is beneficial to everyone if these questions are fully investigated and answered confidently by spiritual and scientific experts. Church authorities must proceed with caution.”

After sending a priest to investigate the marble carving at a gallery earlier this week, the Diocese of Orlando declared that the streak coming from Mary’s eye was “a natural occurrence.” Nonetheless, the diocese said it would accept the statue if the gallery decided to donate it.

According to Les Roberts and Kim Wilson, owners of Castle Designs, when the sculpture was unpacked a month ago, employees noticed a black spot on the statue’s eyelid, well above the tear duct. After four weeks left outside and exposed to the elements, the statue’s dot had grown to become a thin line stretching down Mary’s cheek. Then the rumor that the statue was weeping made its way into a local television-news report.

Roberts and Wilson said Friday that they accepted the diocese’s findings but added that many visitors during the past week were deeply affected by seeing the statue. “We’ve had people collapsing out here, praying,” Roberts said.

It is not the first time that an image of the Virgin Mary has caused a stir in Central Florida. In 1996, some people in Clearwater said they saw the miraculous image of Mary in the window of a finance company. Others contended it was a coincidental mixture of condensation and an oil slick on a tinted window. Still, thousands of worshippers came.

The Catholic Diocese of St. Petersburg did not endorse the vision. A vandal shattered the image in 2004.

Such phenomena raise complex issues, says Michael Duricy, lecturer at the International Marian Research Institute at the University of Dayton, and they should not be dismissed out of hand.

“If I hear about an inanimate object that has some type of physical change to it – like a small dot that transforms itself into a long visible line – I think that there is something curious there that is worth investigating,” Duricy said. “When that happens, a reasonable person might suspect that something unusual is going on there.”

Added Duricy, “There is a hunger among people who want access to a goodness that is beyond ordinary goodness that occurs in everyday life.”

For Chiem Nguyen, standing before the statue left him with “a very surprising feeling.”

“I can’t describe it, but I believe it,” he said.