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| The Eucharistic Miracles of Lanciano (top) and Santarem. |
(Corpus Christi 2014 (A): This
homily was given on June 22, 2014 at St. Pius X Church, Westerly, R.I. by Fr.
Raymond Suriani. Read 1 Corinthians 11:
17-34; John 6: 51-58.)
[For the audio version of this homily, click here: Corpus Christi 2014]
I have been blessed to see two
Eucharistic miracles in my life. I saw
the first one eleven years ago in the Church of St. Stephen, in Santarem,
Portugal.
The story of that particular
miracle, which some of you have probably heard before, involves events that go
back to the mid-13th century. A woman who lived in Santarem at the
time was greatly troubled by her husband’s adulterous behavior—as she should
have been! Unfortunately, however, she
made the mistake of going to the local sorceress—the local witch—to find a
solution to her problem. The witch
promised the woman that her husband would change his ways and become faithful
to her again—if the woman obtained for the witch a consecrated host from the
local church. (In case you’re not aware
of it, certain people involved in the occult—especially those in satanic cults—love
to get hold of consecrated hosts in order to desecrate them.)
So the woman pretended to be ill
and went to see the local priest at St. Stephen’s, asking him for prayers and
for Holy Communion. The priest
innocently gave her the Eucharist, which the woman took out of her mouth
(obviously when the priest wasn’t looking) and put into the veil she was
wearing on her head. But she never made
it to the witch’s house. As the woman
left the church, the host began to bleed!
She panicked (which is quite understandable!), ran home with the
bleeding host, and put it into the cedar trunk where she kept her clean
linens. During the night, however, the
woman and her husband were awakened by bright rays of light coming from the
trunk. At that point, she confessed to
her husband what she had done. Not
surprisingly, both were converted on the spot!
The two spent the entire night in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. Some neighbors also saw the light that
evening, and they began coming to the house the next day. Finally the parish priest was told. He took the Eucharistic miracle back to the
Church of St. Stephen, where it’s been ever since—and where I saw it in 2003.
The other miracle, which I have
preached about on several occasions in the past—and which is one of the most
extraordinary Eucharistic miracles of all—I finally got to see in person on our
recent pilgrimage to Italy.
I’m talking about the Eucharistic
Miracle of Lanciano. It happened back in
the 8th century, when a priest of Lanciano was having doubts about
the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. Not surprisingly, he prayed to have those
doubts removed. Well one day, as he was
celebrating Mass, God answered his request in miraculous fashion by literally
changing the bread and wine into flesh and blood at the consecration. The elements were never consumed; they’ve
been preserved for 13 centuries at a shrine in Lanciano. In 1971, the Church decided to have the
elements analyzed by a team of scientists.
Their testing led them to the following conclusions:
- The blood of the Eucharistic Miracle is real blood
and the flesh is real flesh. Both
belong to the human species.
- The flesh consists of the muscular tissue of the
heart.
- The flesh and blood have the same blood type (AB
positive).
- The proteins in the blood are in the same proportions
as those found in normal, fresh human blood.
- There is no trace whatsoever of any materials or
agents having been used to preserve the elements.
This is probably the most famous
of all the miracles that have occurred since Jesus instituted the sacrament of
the Eucharist at the Last Supper.
Now you may be surprised to learn
that one of the lesser known Eucharistic miracles took place just a couple of
decades ago—in the 1990s—and it involved our present Holy Father, Pope Francis,
when he was a bishop in Buenos Aires.
I read about this one just the
other day.
Here’s how writer Alicia Colon
described the miracle in an article she wrote last year for The American
Thinker web site:
On August 18, 1996 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, at Holy mass, a woman
discovered a discarded host on a candleholder and brought it to Fr. Alejandro
Pezet who placed it in a container of water inside the tabernacle of the chapel
of the Blessed Sacrament. The following Monday, August 26, upon opening the
tabernacle, the priest was astonished to find that the Host had become a bloody
substance and he notified his Bishop Jorge Bergoglio [now Pope Francis], who
gave instructions that the bloodied flesh be photographed. When the photographs
were taken on September 6, the bloodied flesh had grown significantly in size.
After it had been kept in the tabernacle for a few years the Bishop decided to
have it scientifically analyzed since it had not suffered any visible decomposition.
…
In 1999, in the presence of then Cardinal Bergoglio, Dr. Ricardo
Castanon, an atheist at the time, sent the fragment to New York for analysis,
but did not inform the team of scientists its origin so as not to prejudice the
study. One scientist, Dr. Frederic Zugiba, a cardiologist and forensic
pathologist, determined that the substance was real flesh and contained human
DNA, and furthermore he concluded was a piece of heart muscle. …
Here is some of his testimony:
“The analyzed material is a fragment of the heart muscle found in
the wall of the left ventricle close to the valves. This muscle is
responsible for the contraction of the heart. It should be borne in mind that
the left cardiac ventricle pumps blood to all parts of the body. The heart
muscle is in an inflammatory condition and contains a large number of
white blood cells. This indicates that the heart was alive at the time the
sample was taken. It is my contention that the heart was alive, since white
blood cells die outside a living organism. They require a living
organism to sustain them. . . . What is more, these white blood cells had
penetrated the tissue, which further indicates that the heart had been under
severe stress, as if the owner had been beaten severely about the chest.”
Oh yes, one more interesting fact
about the flesh in Buenos Aires: DNA tests revealed an exact match with the
flesh at Lanciano, along with the same blood type (AB positive)—which indicates
that the two pieces of flesh came from the very same person, even though the
miracles that produced them were separated by more than a thousand years!
Why am I not surprised?
I tell you these three stories
today because it’s very easy for all of us (including us priests!) to lose our
awareness of the miracle that happens at every Mass! Because the Mass is such an ordinary part of
our lives as Catholics, the constant temptation is for us to begin to look at
the Eucharist as something “ordinary.”
And it’s not!
In fact, I believe that’s why the
Lord has given us these special Eucharistic miracles over the years: to make
clear to us that the Eucharist is anything but “ordinary.” In paragraph 1376, the Catechism says this: “Because Christ our Redeemer said
that it was truly his body that he was offering under the species of bread, it
has always been the conviction of the Church of God . . . that by the
consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole
substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of
the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. This change
the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly called transubstantiation.” As St. Paul puts it in today’s second
reading, “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood
of Christ? The bread that we break, is
it not a participation in the body of Christ?”
And
yet, as we all know, 99.99999% of the time the accidents (i.e., the physical
properties) of the bread and wine don’t change along with the substance. Even after the consecration, the host still
looks like bread and feels like bread and tastes like bread; and the
consecrated wine still has the physical properties it had before the
Eucharistic prayer was said over it.
So
Jesus has given us these miracles to help us to trust in his word and to look
beyond what our human senses tell us.
Notice that in today’s gospel from John 6, when the people object after
Jesus tells them he’s going to give them his flesh to eat and his blood to
drink, our Lord doesn’t back off! He doesn’t
say, “Well, I didn’t mean it literally!
I meant it symbolically.”
No! He gets even more emphatic about it! He says, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son
of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you.”
Lord Jesus, today we thank you for loving us by giving your life for us
on the cross—and by humbling yourself in this way and becoming our spiritual
food. Help us to be more aware of your
presence in the Holy Eucharist in the future—so that we will always be
concerned to be reverent and properly disposed when we receive, and so that we
will be open to all the graces you want to give us in and through your holy
Body and Blood. Amen.