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One of the most important teachings of the Catholic Church is that Jesus Christ is present at and in the Eucharist in His body and blood, humanity and divinity, in the form of the bread and wine.

It is a mystery so vast that many people, even Catholics, sometimes have their doubts, said Msg. Gaetano Bonicelli, the President of the Committee for Italian Eucharistic Congresses in a recent statement. And so, from time to time, God intervenes with miracles, signs which cannot escape notice, in order to strengthen the Christian faith regarding the essence of this mystery. These are the so-called ‘Eucharistic miracles’. Throughout the history of the Church, there have been some 162 of these miracles in various parts of the world. The oldest is one which occurred in Lanciano, a lovely historical town in the Abruzzo region of Italy.

In 750 AD a monk, while saying mass in a church in that city, began to have doubts, at the moment of the consecration, as to whether the mystery of transubstantiation had really taken place, whether the bread and wine had truly become the body and blood of Christ. While he was breaking the host, this changed into human flesh, and the wine into real blood. Stupefied and shocked, the monk tried to hide what had happened but then, overcome by emotion, he showed it to the parishioners who thus became eyewitnesses of the event, and spread word of it throughout the town. People, priests, monks and the bishop himself rushed to the church, and all were convinced of what had happened: the host was no longer unleavened bread, but flesh, just as the wine was blood which, in the meantime, had coagulated into five globules.

Many documents mention this miracle. Five hundred years later, the Church of St. Francis, Lanciano, was built, and the precious relics have been kept there ever since.

Over the centuries, various experiments have been carried out to verify the nature of those relics. The last investigation, between 1971 and 1981, was carried out by Prof. Odoardo Linoli, head physician at Arezzo hospital, and Prof. Ruggero Bertelli, a lecturer at the University of Siena. The relics were subjected to every possible scientific test. The conclusions, explained in a long report by the two illustrious scientists, caused great excitement among Catholics, and wonder and amazement throughout the scientific community. The blood from the Eucharistic miracle in Lanciano, they wrote, is indeed real blood, and the flesh is real flesh. Both the flesh and the blood are of a human nature. The flesh is made up of muscular heart tissue. Both the blood and the flesh have been identified as having blood type AB, which corresponds to that found on the Shroud of Turin. At the moment of the miracle, the flesh was living flesh, which then followed the law of rigor mortis.

There is another curious and perplexing detail about this case, a sort of ‘miracle within the miracle’. The five coagulated blood globules, although of irregular dimensions, all weigh exactly the same.

Let us think about the Eucharistic miracle of Lanciano when we go to Mass next Sunday; that we may come to a better understanding of the Eucharist. It is the sum and summary of our faith: when we share this sacred meal, we do indeed share in the life of Christ. We are experiencing the result of God’s desire to come to us and to be one with us.