Suddenly, breathtakingly, they do.

The movie, which immediately segues to the wails of Tom Waits’s “Way Down in the Hole” and the smashed streetscapes of 1970s Chicago, focuses on a multilayered search for the miraculous.

Its protagonist is Rev. Frank Shore (played by Harris), who is a “miracle detective,” a conflicted priest with a drinking problem, who investigates reported miracles for the Archdiocese. Against his will, Shore is sent by the bishop (an Irish good old boy who reminded me of my uncles) to investigate a statue of the Virgin which purportedly weeps blood.

“This one’s an old-fashioned girl,” jokes the bishop, as he complains about people who see the Virgin in a slice of bologna or a foggy window. The statue is associated with Helen O’Regan, a recently-deceased widow, who lived in a parish convent after she abandoned her teenage daughter. There, Helen befriended and, supposedly, later cured an abused young girl named Maria.

By the time Shore arrives to investigate, sad little Maria has turned into a trash-talking teenage prostitute. This increases his cynicism and desire to expose O’Regan whom, it later turns out, was the Gypsy girl of the opening scene.

Against his will, however, Shore becomes deeply involved in O’Regan’s cause, despite his passion for her angry, beautiful daughter, Roxanna, who is colorfully played by Anne Heche. From a similar background and as intense as Shore, Roxanna seems perfectly suited for him.

There’s an inevitable quality about their attraction, aided by the strong chemistry between the actors, which at least one reviewer found an impediment, since Harris is, after all, playing a priest.

“Harris has a screen presence so robust and sensually confident that it seems impossible that such a man would take a vow of celibacy,” he comments. It seems equally ridiculous that Shore/Harris could give up Roxanna for his devotion to Helen’s cause, even if, as Shore comes to believe, O’Regan is a “saint of the people.”

But he does, leaving Roxanna in a thunderstorm to investigate the statue, since, as the bishop has told him, she weeps only in November and only when it rains. Then Shore reaches up, amid the soaked throngs, to taste the Virgin’s tears, the salty-sweet taste of blood.

It’s a wholly carnal scene, and, strangely, also a miraculous one, especially, it seems, for Shore. The tears heal him, not just spiritually, but intellectually; “reasonable doubt” has comprised much of his torment. For he’s not just a Chicago street kid, but a theologian, both attracted and repelled by incarnational devotions, those associated with the old immigrant world of statues, beads and scapulars.

The Third Miracle embodies something the reviewer entirely misses—the bifurcation in our culture and in Christianity between rationality and religion, matter and the divine. Shore comes to devote himself to an examination of the miracles connected to “the people’s saint.” In later scenes, when a team of Vatican investigators comes to town, Harris’s written report on his investigation is central proof of “Helen’s miracles” as divinely inspired—not rationally explained or influenced by the occult. Like the tears, he has come to believe, they are evidence of the sacred piercing into the mundane.

The reviewer was mixed in his opinion of the film, saying that “even the tackiest cinematic apparitions from the spirit world convey a sense of awe that a high-minded movie like this cannot produce.” But to me, awe is generated not so much from the miracles themselves, but from the faith of believers, rarely evoked in film, but omnipresent here, its own miracle.

By the finale, Shore seems convinced of what he cries, in despair, early on—“Credo quia impossibile.”

I believe because it is impossible.