An Italian man ripped out his own eyes in the middle of a Sunday church service, the Daily Mail and Italian media reports.
British-born Aldo Bianchini, 46, used his bare hands to gouge out both eyeballs while fellow parishioners in the northern Italy church watched on in horror.
Emergency responders picked up his eyeballs from the floor of the church, Fox reports, but surgeons were unable to save his sight.
Bianchini later told surgeons he heard voices telling him to do it.
"In all my 26 years of service I have never seen anything like this before," Dr Gino Barbacci, the emergency physician who treated Bianchini, told the Daily.
"He was in a great deal of agony and he was covered in blood . . . to do something like that requires super human strength."
Reverend Lorenzo Tanganelli, who was conducting mass before the incident unfolded, told a local Italian newspaper he was about to read a sermon when chaos erupted from the pews.
"This man at the back of the nave started tearing at his face and I realised he was gouging out his eyes," Tanganelli said.
"We were lucky that at first one of the closest people to him was an off duty paramedic who was the first to help him but I have never seen as much blood as I saw today."
NBC Bay Area, who also reported on the incident, reminds readers that in the Bible's Gospel of St Matthew, Jesus tells his disciples: "If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away.
"It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell."
