Little Audrey a Victim No More

The latest issue of the Skeptical Inquirer reports the death, on April 14, of 23-year-old Audrey Santo, the brain-damaged girl in Worcester, Massachusetts, who supposedly exhibited supernatural abilities.

Known as "Little Audrey," she had been in a comalike state since August 9, 1987, when, at the age of three, she suffered a near-drowning. Controversy began a year after the accident, when her mother, Linda, spent $8,000 to take her to the shrine at Medjugorje, Yugoslavia, in hopes of a miracle. Instead, Audrey suffered a sudden cardiac arrest. Although she survived, the air ambulance that was needed to rush her home cost $25,000—a sum her grandmother had to mortgage her home to pay. Linda Santo's response to the near-fatal incident was to blame it on the proximity of a Yugoslavian abortion clinic (Harrison 1998; Sherr 1998).

Soon, Audrey was being promoted as a "victim soul." However, Catholic theologians, observing that that term was not an official one within the Church, questioned whether Audrey demonstrated the capacity—at the age of three or later—to make a free choice to suffer on behalf of others.

After Audrey was exhibited at a stadium with some 10,000 in attendance, and a window was added to her bedroom so that pilgrims could file by and pray for her to intercede with God on their behalf, the local bishop ordered that such practices be discontinued. Also curbed was the practice of offering oil-soaked cotton swabs as healing talismans. These restrictions may have diminished revenues, but the Santo family's situation was perhaps less financially desperate than many imagined, since Audrey received round-the-clock nursing care from the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind (Weingarten 1998).