Posted on 11/03/2003 7:55:23 PM PST by narses
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QUESTION OF THE WEEK: WHY DO CLAIMS OF EUCHARISTIC MIRACLES GO UNINVESTIGATED?
It seems mysterious, why there are so many reports of Eucharistic miracles and yet so few of them -- virtually none -- made public. There's hardly a region of the U.S. where one has not occurred in the last 15 years, but also not one that has achieved formal ecclesiastic recognition. One example: a Michigan priest named Father Mark A. McQuesten claimed that over the course of a week a Host turned to actual flesh -- as in the famous miracle at Lanciano, Italy. There are other cases of bleeding Hosts or Hosts with miraculous images in Connecticut, Arizona, New Jersey, Texas, New York, and other states.
Through history, there have been dozens of such miracles. To us, most mysterious is a report that in 1995, a Eucharistic minister opened the tabernacle at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in Methuen, Massachusetts, and spotted blood on a Host. According to a report, the Host was then sent to a laboratory for analysis. The mystery: where is the Host now? What happened to it? If it is true, why is there so little known about it?
We tried to track this down, but are informed that the parish is no longer a functioning one -- eliminated due to lack of priests and attendance, which sort of adds to the mysterious nature of the alleged phenomenon in the first place. A bleeding Host in a soon-to-be closed church in a diocese about to be torn asunder by scandal! "I checked our diocesan archives, and there was no official investigation of this by the diocese, nor by the Marist Fathers, who were in charge of the church at the time," Father Brian Mahoney, director of the Office for Worship in the Boston archdiocese, informs us. "It's a church that has been suppressed for no reason other than the numbers." He further relates that Father Andrew Gosselin, who was pastor at the time, had heard something "along that line," that there were "some claims made," but that the priest knows very little about it, and that the priest who was most directly involved has since passed on. "There's no official stand on this," says Father Mahoney in conclusion.
Why there was not an investigation is baffling, since such occurrences, before our time, have been rare -- and merited full Church inquiry. Historically, a bleeding or otherwise miraculous Host has been cause for full-scale veneration. Is this another example of a Church that has veered from its mystical roots? Or was it all just a rumor, a bogus miracle, to start with? Claims one correspondent: "A small sample of the crusted blood was sent to the California Laboratory of Forensic Sciences. After several preliminary tests confirmed the presence of blood on August 30, 1995, a crossover electrophoresis was conducted on the sample which unequivocally identified the reddish substance as human blood."
We will be investigating this further. Why would a Host bleed? Another answer may be found in a reported revelation. "The Sacred Heart of my Divine Son is being offended grievously, especially in the Holy Eucharist," the Blessed Mother allegedly told a victim soul in 19th-century Europe. In 1879 she reportedly said that the Sacred Heart was especially wounded by indifference and ungratefulness -- certainly characteristics of our time.
Such messages may also be conveyed with a statue of St. Padre Pio that allegedly has been bleeding in a home in northern California and has been tested by a laboratory and found to be human blood -- with an effort underway now to see if it matches the blood of the saint himself, who left gloves smeared with his stigmatic blood behind.
[resources: Eucharistic Miracles]
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True enough. But it doesn't necessarily follow that the man who has seen a miracle isn't blessed. God performed these miracles for a reason, perhaps so that skeptics might be converted. Many scientists who have studied the Shroud have converted, for example.
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