By Fr. Paul Robinson, SSPX

Why are there Eucharistic miracles in the Novus Ordo?

To answer this question, we must first recall that miracles are often used by God for the purpose of assisting faith. When we are eyewitnesses of a divine act above nature, we more easily believe in a supernatural reality that is hidden from our eyes. St. Augustine expresses this wonderfully when he comments on Our Lord’s multiplication of the loaves and fishes as follows:

“The miracles performed by our Lord Jesus Christ are indeed divine works, and incite the human mind to rise to the apprehension of God from the things that are seen. But inasmuch as He is not such a substance as may be seen with the eyes, and His miracles in the government of the whole world and the administration of the universal creation are, by their familiar constancy, slightly regarded, so that almost no man deigns to consider the wonderful and stupendous works of God exhibited in every grain of seed; He has, agreeably to His mercy, reserved to Himself certain works, beyond the usual course and order of nature, which He should perform on fit occasion, that they, by whom His daily works are lightly esteemed, might be struck with astonishment at beholding, not indeed greater, but uncommon works.”

Because the normal “miracles” of the workings of nature are too familiar for many to lift them up to God, God makes for there to be extraordinary occurrences that astonish us and make it easier for us to believe in Him. St. Augustine continues:

“In this miracle, then, there is that brought near to the senses, whereby the mind should be roused to attention, there is exhibited to the eyes, whereon the understanding should be exercised, that we might admire the invisible God through His visible works; and being raised to faith and purged by faith, we might desire to behold Him even invisibly, whom invisible we came to know by the things that are visible.”¹

Ever since Our Lord first announced the mystery of the Holy Eucharist to the world, there have been many who have said, “This saying is hard, and who can hear it?” (Jn. 6:61). This refusal to believe in the Eucharist caused Our Lord to describe Judas as a “devil” (Jn. 6:71). The fact that millions in the Western world have been led to deny the Real Presence by Protestantism has arguably been a major cause of the decline of our civilization in the past 500 years.

St. Thomas explains in his Summa that one of the reasons we can think that God chose to institute the Blessed Sacrament was for the perfection of our faith. Normally, in acts of faith, we believe in God’s unseen divinity through the external signs of that divinity that are given to us. In the Eucharist, we must additionally believe in the presence of Our Lord’s humanity, which is now hidden under the appearances of bread and wine, and we only have Our Lord’s word for this: “The presence of Christ’s true body and blood in this sacrament cannot be detected by sense, nor understanding, but by faith alone, which rests upon Divine authority. Hence, on Lk. 22:19: ‘This is My body which shall be delivered up for you,’ Cyril says: ‘Doubt not whether this be true; but take rather the Saviour’s words with faith; for since He is the Truth, He lieth not.’”²

St. Thomas expresses this poetically in the Adoro Te Devote when he says:

In Cruce latebat sola Deitas,
At hic latet simul et Humanitas,
Ambo tamen credens atque confitens…

Only the divinity was hidden from us on the Cross, but here in the Eucharist the humanity of Our Lord is also hidden. Yet I believe that both are present.

This is, indeed, a more perfect act of faith.

The bottom line is that, on the one hand, the Eucharist requires from us, in some respects, the greatest act of faith and, on the other, God often works miracles in order to sustain our faith. The result is that it has often pleased God to work Eucharistic miracles throughout the Church’s history precisely in those situations when there has been a lack of faith in the Real Presence.

In her book Eucharistic Miracles, Joan Carroll Cruz recounts thirty-six distinct miracles involving the Blessed Sacrament. She summarizes these miracles in the preface of the book by saying the following:

“[God’s] children … have not always appreciated this [Eucharistic] presence and, as painful as it is to consider, many have abused the gift by receiving it unworthily, by doubting the Real Presence of God in the sacred Host, or by treating the Sacrament with indifference. For these reasons the Saviour has seen fit at times to prove his presence by performing Eucharistic miracles of various kinds.”³

This is true of the first known Eucharistic miracle, which famously took place in Lanciano, Italy, around 750 AD. A Basilian monk was struggling with doubts about the Real Presence. One day, while he was celebrating Mass, the Host turned into human flesh and blood when he pronounced the words of consecration. This miraculous host has not decayed in the past 1,275 years and was scientifically examined in 1970s. It was confirmed to consist of human flesh that belongs to the wall of the heart and contains human blood of type AB.

What happened in this first known Eucharistic miracle is a characteristic of many of those miracles that have happened since: they are worked in contexts where there is a lack of belief in the Real Presence and so for the purpose of assisting that belief.

What does this mean for our present times? Well, since 1970, the “ordinary form” of the Mass has been a Protestantized liturgy that purposely devalues the Real Presence of Our Lord. So many of the external gestures done by the priest to manifest faith in that Presence in the traditional Mass—genuflections, signs of the Cross, and special attention to the particles, for example—are absent in the New Mass. So many of practices showing respect to Our Lord in the reception of the Eucharist—kneeling, on the tongue, only administered by a priest, in an atmosphere of silence—are also gone.

Such is the devaluation of the Real Presence in the modern Mass that it almost seems to foster disbelief that Our Lord is truly there. There was a famous 2019 Pew study done on Eucharistic belief that shocked the US Catholic world.⁴ In it, only 31% of Catholics said that the bread and wine in the Eucharist become the Body and Blood of Jesus, while 69% said they thought it was just a symbol of Jesus. While the results of that study have been questioned⁵, there is no doubt that there is a crisis in Eucharistic faith today.

It is surely for this reason that there have been a number of authenticated Eucharistic miracles in the Novus Ordo world.

Perhaps the most famous of these miracles is one that occurred at a parish in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1996, when Pope Francis was the ordinary of the diocese. After a Novus Ordo Mass, Fr. Alejandro Pezet was cleaning up the church when he discovered that someone had left a host on a radiator. He picked up the host and put it in a dish of water, as the rubrics prescribe, for the host to dissolve. Two days later, he noticed that the host had blotches on it that looked like blood.

Bishop Jorge Bergoglio initially asked that the host be photograph and then, three years later, when the host maintained the appearance of bloody flesh, he asked that it be sent to New York to be analyzed. Dr. Frederick Zugibe, who had earlier written a book on the Shroud⁶, examined the host without knowing what it was. He was amazed to find that the cells of the flesh were alive and that the flesh was in an inflamed state, as if the person was in a state of trauma. The miraculous host exhibited the same characteristics as the host in Lanciano.

A similar miracle occurred in Tixtla, Mexico, in October, 2006; in Sokółka, Poland, in October, 2008; in Legnica, Poland, on Christmas, 2013. A year ago, the Vatican recognized a miracle that occurred in Vilakkannur, India, wherein Our Lord’s face appeared on a host in November, 2013.

On the one hand, these miracles confirm, contrary to the position of the sedevacantists, that Novus Ordo ordinations and Novus Ordo Masses are certainly not universally invalid. On the other hand, we see the mercy of God, Who wants to strengthen the faith of Catholics in the Real Presence, in a context where the Holy Eucharist is often treated with disrespect.

Endnotes

1 https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1701024.htm This passage is taken from St. Augustine’s commentary on the Gospel of St. John, tractatus 24. It appears in the breviary reading for Matins on Laetare Sunday in the 1962 breviary.

² III, q. 75, a. 1.

³ Cruz, Joan Carroll. Eucharistic Miracles: And Eucharistic Phenomena in the Lives of the Saints” (Tan Books, 1991), p. ix.

⁴ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/08/05/transubstantiation-eucharist-u-s-catholics/

⁵ https://www.ewtnnews.com/world/us/new-study-suggests-more-than-two-thirds-of-catholics-believe-the-eucharist-is-truly-jesus

⁶ The Cross and the Shroud: A Medical Inquiry into the Crucifixion. See https://archive.org/details/crossshroudmedic0000zugi