The Eucharistic Miracle of Lanciano

An 8th-century host and wine reported to have become human flesh and blood, examined scientifically in 1971.

The Eucharistic Miracle of Lanciano is among the oldest and best known of the reported Eucharistic miracles of the Catholic Church, often described as the first on record. According to the tradition it occurred in the city of Lanciano, in the Abruzzo region of Italy, around the 8th century, and the relics it left behind are still venerated there today.

What happened

A Basilian monk was celebrating Mass at the monastery of St. Longinus, troubled by doubts about the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. As he pronounced the words of consecration, the host is said to have visibly changed into living flesh and the wine into blood, which soon coagulated into five globules of differing shapes and sizes. Because no contemporary record survives, even the monk's name is unknown; the earliest written accounts date from the later medieval period. The relics were preserved through the centuries and today rest in the Church of San Francesco in Lanciano, displayed in a silver and glass reliquary made in Naples in 1713.

The scientific findings

In 1971 the relics were subjected to scientific examination led by Dr. Odoardo Linoli, a professor of anatomy, histology, and pathology, assisted by Dr. Ruggero Bertelli. The reported findings were striking:

The flesh is human cardiac tissue, identified as a cross-section of the wall of a heart (myocardium), complete with its characteristic structures.
Both the flesh and the blood are human, and both share the same blood type, AB.
The blood was said to contain the proteins and minerals of normal fresh blood, in roughly the proportions found in a living body.
No trace of preservatives or artificial agents was found, which is notable given the material's age and its centuries of unprotected exposure.

These claims are widely repeated in Catholic literature and were summarized in later studies. It is worth being clear about what such analysis can and cannot show. Science can describe what the preserved material is today; it cannot reach back to witness the alleged change at the altar, and a miracle, as a singular act of God, is not the sort of thing one could stage again in a laboratory. The honest questions here are narrower ones: whether the relics are authentic and whether the examinations were sound.

Some historians do note the gap between the alleged 8th-century event and its first surviving written record. But the gap is easy to overstate, and it cuts less than it first appears. The documented history is itself very old: a formal notarial record survives from 1574, and the relics have been continuously housed, inventoried, and publicly venerated at Lanciano for centuries since, well before anyone could have known what a microscope would one day find in them. For a later forgery to account for the relic, someone in the medieval or early-modern period would have had to fashion a fragment of real human heart muscle and real human blood, leave no trace of the preservatives such a fraud would require, and then submit it, unknowingly, to a histology that would only exist four hundred years later. That the substances answer to a modern laboratory at all is part of what a believer weighs. The findings are reported here as what the tradition holds and the examiners stated, which a believer may rightly take as a sign.

How the Church regards it

Lanciano predates the modern canonical processes for judging alleged miracles, so it is venerated by long tradition rather than by a formal modern decree. Pilgrims and popes have honored the relics for centuries; Pope John Paul II recalled venerating them as a cardinal. The Church does not require belief in any particular reported miracle; such events are offered as aids to faith, not as articles of it.

Why it matters

Whatever one concludes about the physical relics, the account illustrates the doctrine it points to: the Catholic belief that, at the consecration, the bread and wine truly become the Body and Blood of Christ. It is telling that the tradition remembers the miracle as an answer to a priest's doubt about that very teaching. The miracle is a sign pointing to the doctrine, not the basis for it.