By: Alexandria Addesso
Over 2,000 years ago thirteen men sat down to have a meal around the time of the Jewish Passover. At this supper the bread and wine was blessed as was their custom, but the bread was declared the true Body and the wine was declared the true Blood of the man that was saying the blessing, a man though considered fully human was also believed to be fully God. With this declaration also came the stance that whoever believed and consumed this meal would have eternal life, yet this teaching was so hard to understand that many stopped believing and following Him after it.
The next three centuries those who still celebrated this meal, then commonly known as Christians or followers of the Way, were deemed cannibals for such beliefs and many were killed. Over 1400 years after that initial supper, although this belief flourished into an organized religion and was now accepted among many people, a disgruntled monk disbelieved and started what is now known as the Protestant Reformation. And thus today there are over 40,000 Protestant denominations who also do not believe that the bread and wine truly becomes the Flesh and Blood of Christ, but instead only a mere symbol of it.
Yet, what happens when science intersects faith? Can science ratify or disprove religious beliefs or are the two fields too different to even be spoken about in the same breathe without starting arguments on both ends? When a Catholic (or Orthodox for that matter but the theology differs only very slightly) priest says the words of consecration over the bread and wine it is believed that transubstantiation occurs, that the bread and wine become true Flesh and Blood. But the accidents, the wine and bread, appear the same as they did before the consecration. This is the true for most Masses, but there have been 140 Vatican approved Eucharistic Miracles, when the accidents literally became Flesh and Blood verified by objective science.
The first such recorded miracle of this sort took place in the 8th century in what is now known as Lanciano, Italy. A monk, who was struggling with his own personal belief in the True Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, was saying Mass at the Church of St.
Legontian. After the consecration the host became Flesh and the wine physical Blood that coagulated into five globules differing in shape and size. It was stored, never deteriorated and multiple ecclesial investigations have been done on it throughout the centuries. The latest scientific investigation took place in 1981 by scientist and Professor in Anatomy, Pathological Histology, Chemistry and Clinical Microscopy, Odoardo Linoli with the assistance of Prof. Ruggero Bertelli of the University of Siena. Their findings discovered that the Flesh contained myocardium, the endocardium, the vagus nerve and also the left ventricle of the heart for the large thickness of the myocardium. The Blood was type AB positive and contained proteins only found fresh blood.
One of the most recently verified Eucharistic miracles took place in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1996. After Mass was said at Santa Maria y Caballito Almagro Iglesia, a woman informed the priest that a defiled host was discarded in one of the candleholders. Upon finding it the priest placed it in a container of water, which is the protocol when finding a consecrated host unless you are able to immediately consume it then placed it in the tabernacle. About a week later when the tabernacle was opened the host had turned into a bloody substance. The local cardinal, Jorge Bergoglio who is now known as Pope Francis, directed that it should be professionally photographed.
The host sat in the tabernacle for three years with no visible sign of deterioration before Bergoglio ordered for it to undergo scientific testing. The sample was sent to the San Francisco Forensic Institute, and to keep the study completely unbiased none of the scientific team was told where the sample came from. After testing it was discovered that the Flesh was heart tissue and the blood was type AB positive with DNA features of that of a man from the Middle East. Upon further research the DNA matched that of the sample from Lancing.
“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. 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.
Thus, their presence indicates that the heart was alive when the sample was taken. 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,” testified Dr. Frederick Zugibe, cardiologist and forensic pathologist from University of Columbia in New York.
While these are just two of the 140 known verified Eucharistic Miracles, there are a number of disproven ones as well. Quite often bacteria on hosts can cause a red fungus that may have a blood-like look to it. This is what happened in December 2015 at a church in Kearns, Utah. After simple tests by a biologist that bacteria was verified as the culprit. Every investigation is addressed with reverential prudence as well as skepticism until proven otherwise.
For those who live and die by empirical scientific evidence, what happens when such evidence is used to prove what they had always shook their fists at? Does one lose faith in science or gain faith in something else? Keep an open mind.
Over 2,000 years ago thirteen men sat down to have a meal around the time of the Jewish Passover. At this supper the bread and wine was blessed as was their custom, but the bread was declared the true Body and the wine was declared the true Blood of the man that was saying the blessing, a man though considered fully human was also believed to be fully God. With this declaration also came the stance that whoever believed and consumed this meal would have eternal life, yet this teaching was so hard to understand that many stopped believing and following Him after it.
The next three centuries those who still celebrated this meal, then commonly known as Christians or followers of the Way, were deemed cannibals for such beliefs and many were killed. Over 1400 years after that initial supper, although this belief flourished into an organized religion and was now accepted among many people, a disgruntled monk disbelieved and started what is now known as the Protestant Reformation. And thus today there are over 40,000 Protestant denominations who also do not believe that the bread and wine truly becomes the Flesh and Blood of Christ, but instead only a mere symbol of it.
Yet, what happens when science intersects faith? Can science ratify or disprove religious beliefs or are the two fields too different to even be spoken about in the same breathe without starting arguments on both ends? When a Catholic (or Orthodox for that matter but the theology differs only very slightly) priest says the words of consecration over the bread and wine it is believed that transubstantiation occurs, that the bread and wine become true Flesh and Blood. But the accidents, the wine and bread, appear the same as they did before the consecration. This is the true for most Masses, but there have been 140 Vatican approved Eucharistic Miracles, when the accidents literally became Flesh and Blood verified by objective science.
The first such recorded miracle of this sort took place in the 8th century in what is now known as Lanciano, Italy. A monk, who was struggling with his own personal belief in the True Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, was saying Mass at the Church of St.
Legontian. After the consecration the host became Flesh and the wine physical Blood that coagulated into five globules differing in shape and size. It was stored, never deteriorated and multiple ecclesial investigations have been done on it throughout the centuries. The latest scientific investigation took place in 1981 by scientist and Professor in Anatomy, Pathological Histology, Chemistry and Clinical Microscopy, Odoardo Linoli with the assistance of Prof. Ruggero Bertelli of the University of Siena. Their findings discovered that the Flesh contained myocardium, the endocardium, the vagus nerve and also the left ventricle of the heart for the large thickness of the myocardium. The Blood was type AB positive and contained proteins only found fresh blood.
One of the most recently verified Eucharistic miracles took place in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1996. After Mass was said at Santa Maria y Caballito Almagro Iglesia, a woman informed the priest that a defiled host was discarded in one of the candleholders. Upon finding it the priest placed it in a container of water, which is the protocol when finding a consecrated host unless you are able to immediately consume it then placed it in the tabernacle. About a week later when the tabernacle was opened the host had turned into a bloody substance. The local cardinal, Jorge Bergoglio who is now known as Pope Francis, directed that it should be professionally photographed.
The host sat in the tabernacle for three years with no visible sign of deterioration before Bergoglio ordered for it to undergo scientific testing. The sample was sent to the San Francisco Forensic Institute, and to keep the study completely unbiased none of the scientific team was told where the sample came from. After testing it was discovered that the Flesh was heart tissue and the blood was type AB positive with DNA features of that of a man from the Middle East. Upon further research the DNA matched that of the sample from Lancing.
“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. 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.
Thus, their presence indicates that the heart was alive when the sample was taken. 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,” testified Dr. Frederick Zugibe, cardiologist and forensic pathologist from University of Columbia in New York.
While these are just two of the 140 known verified Eucharistic Miracles, there are a number of disproven ones as well. Quite often bacteria on hosts can cause a red fungus that may have a blood-like look to it. This is what happened in December 2015 at a church in Kearns, Utah. After simple tests by a biologist that bacteria was verified as the culprit. Every investigation is addressed with reverential prudence as well as skepticism until proven otherwise.
For those who live and die by empirical scientific evidence, what happens when such evidence is used to prove what they had always shook their fists at? Does one lose faith in science or gain faith in something else? Keep an open mind.
