The Lanciano Legend

In the eighth century, a priest-monk of the Basilian order began to suspect that the doctrine of bread and wine becoming the body and blood of Jesus was absurd.

 

He said Mass in the Church of St Legontian in the town of Lanciano, Italy.

 

He said the words, "This is my body," and the communion bread changed into literal flesh. He then said the words, "This is my blood", and the wine in the chalice turned into real blood.

 

Later these items were put into a shrine. They still exist today so we are told. They look like mummified tissue. So we are being asked to believe that Jesus could turn bread into actual human flesh and wine into his actual blood and then let them decay? Mummification is a form of decay remember.

 

The miracle did not involve actual cannibalism. Unlike the miracle of 1374 in St Peter's Church, Middleburg, there was no blood or flesh in anybody's mouth. In the case of the Middleburg miracle, a dissolute man had taken the communion wafer on his tongue the wafer turned into human flesh and oozed blood. He took the disgusting mess out of his mouth and blood spurted out and plastered the communion rail and the floor. The Church accepted this miracle as real. The remains of the flesh are in the care of the Augustinian Fathers in Louvain. In the Eucharistic Miracle of Fiecht, Austria, of 1310, the wine turned into boiling blood and the priest drank some of the repulsive aperitif and the rest was preserved in a monstrance created in 1719. If the miracles are supernatural then they clearly endorse cannibalism. The Lanciano one didn't do that directly but in the context of similar miracles it implicitly did.

 

The Catholic Church talks about the Eucharistic Miracle of Lanciano. As with the Turin Shroud, there are a lot of lies told and assumptions made to make this seem to have been a true miracle. And biased science is employed for good measure. The Catholic Church like the cosmetic companies seeks and gets scientific backing that is a travesty of science and commonsense.

 

Is the legend true? Is it a real miracle?

 

The Provenance of the Alleged Miracle

 

Who is the monk? Does he have a name?

 

There is no direct testimony.

 

There is no testimony that the monk's story was backed up by worshippers.

 

When we go back, the earliest account we have of the miracle is an inscription that dates from 1631 that tells us the story. It cannot be proved that the miracle happened in the 8th century. There is no half-decent evidence never mind proof!

 

It would be strange if God wanted us to believe in the resurrection of Jesus because of eyewitness accounts and then does a miracle to impress us such as the reported miracle of Lanciano and makes no effort to keep some accounts for us.

 

The best the Catholics can say to this is, "Who are you to say what God should or shouldn't do?" That could be said then to a person who claims to have had a vision that the Virgin Mary has fallen from Heaven and become the new Devil!