In honor of the upcoming Feast of Corpus Christi i would like to invite yo to read a post I wrote years ago about how Eucharistic Adoration helped re-kindle my love for Jesus and my faith. Please read Meditating on the Feast of Corpus Christi. In this feast we celebrate the wonderful gift of Jesus’ real presence in the Eucharist. We honor His body, blood, soul, and divinity truly and substantially present in the Eucharist.

In meditating about the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, I will like to share information about one of 126 Church-approved Eucharistic miracles. This one happened in the church of St Mary in Buenos Aires, Argentina on August 15, 1996. During mass a parishioner accidentally dropped a consecrated host on the floor and did not pick it up because it seemed dirty. Someone informed the priest and he put the host in a container of water so that it would dissolve and put it in the tabernacle per operating practice for this situation. The idea is that once totally dissolved, it is reverently put in the earth. However, after several weeks instead of dissolving, the host became larger and full of blood-like stains and the appearance looked like tissue. The priest informed Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio (known today as Pope Francis!). The Archbishop asked them to take professional photos and to wait. They waited for 3 years.

Professor Castanon Gomez offered to pay for an investigation and the Vatican approved the study. Samples were taken to the Forensic Analytical Genetics Laboratory in San Francisco and they confirmed that they found DNA from human blood. The lab contacted famous legal histopathologist Dr. Robert Lawrence, because they found tissue and he was the expert on tissue. He confirmed that the samples contained tissue of an inflamed heart. He said that the person to whom the tissue samples belonged must have physically suffered a lot.

On March 2, 2004 they took the samples to the greatest expert in cardiac pathologies and forensic medicine of the heart, Professor Frederick Zugibe, from Columbia University, without telling him that the samples came from a consecrated host. This was his conclusion:

The tissue is the muscle of the heart, of the myocardium, it is precisely the left ventricle and “the patient” had suffered a lot. Your patient has some thrombi, at certain moments he could not breathe, oxygen did not reach him, he labored and suffered much because every aspiration was painful. Probably they gave him a blow at the level of the chest. Moreover, the heart showed dynamic activity (alive) at the moment when you brought me the sample. ‘Why?’ Because we found some intact white blood cells and white blood cells are transported only by the blood and thus if white blood cells are here, it is because at the moment in which you brought me the sample it was pulsating.

Different types of white cells can exist outside the body from hours to days. Dr. Zugibe examined the tissue 8 years after the event took place! Jesus has performed miracles like this over the last 2,000 years to help us strengthen our faith and help us believe. Thank you Jesus for nourishing our souls with the bread that gives eternal life.

“The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.” — 1 Corinthians 10:16-18

For more information on Eucharistic Miracles please see this website, The Eucharistic Miracles of the World, created by Carlos Acutis, Servant of God.