June 18, 2017
EXTERNAL SOLEMNITY OF CORPUS DOMINI
[Actual solemnity was on Thursday, June 15]
At left: Two processions - Pius XII leading a Corpus Domini procession; and at Orvieto, site of a famous Eucharistic miracle. Third from right, the Eucharist portrayed in flowers on a street in Bolsena, another Eucharistic miracle site.
Across Italy, Corpus Domini is generally the occasion for the so-called 'infiorata', when the townsfolk decorate the main streets with huge tapestries or mosaics made up of fresh flowers depicting the subject of the feast.
]Basilica di San Francesco, Siena; right, the ciborium containing the Miraculous Hosts.
To mark the Solemnity of Corpus Domini today, Antonio Socci has re-posted something he wrote in 2014 to commemorate the anniversary
of the Eucharistic miracle of Siena which dates to 1730. Socci is Sienese himself.
I claim a minor personal relationship to Siena, where I spent six months in 1986 to acquire an advanced certificate in the Italian language
from the then Centro per Stranieri which has since become the Universita per Stranieri di Siena (Unistrasi). During the second part of that
advanced course, our classes were held in the cloisters adjoining the Basilica di San Francesco, so for three months, I began my day with
a visit to the church where the Miraculous Hosts are kept in the Tabernacle. The Basilica is on a small hill just outside the walls that
surround the historical center of Siena and a 15-minute walk from where I lived.
That and the fact that the family with whom I resided in Siena lived four blocks away from the Shrine of Caterina di Siena, including the
house where she was was born and raised, and that the station where I had to take the bus when I took weekend trips to places in Tuscany
not reachable by train, is right across the piazza from the Basilica di San Domenico, begun around the same time as the Basilica di San
Francesco (and also known as Basilica Cateriniana because her head and a thumb are venerated in its Capella di Santa Caterina – it’s a long
story but most of the saint’s remains are in Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, where she died, while one foot is in Venice) added greatly
to my memories of that time as one of the happiest and most fruitful in my life.
At Holy Innocents today, although Corpus Domini was celebrated in the Extraordinary Form last Thursday, we observed today ‘the External
Solemnity of Corpus Domini’, complete with Eucharistic procession within the church after Mass.
The 230 Hosts of Siena
that light the world
Translated from
June 18, 2017
(Originally posted Sept. 28, 2014)
Everything took place in private on September 10, 2014. But the important news leaked through anyway, though it was largely unreported, and that is what we are reporting here.
One hundred years since the last analysis was done, it was confirmed that the Sacred Hosts kept in the Basilica di San Francesco in Siena since 1730 continue to be miraculously intact, against every natural law.
The container itself contained growths of fungus and bacteria, but none of the Hosts was affected. It is an inexplicable phenomenon because by their composition (made from ground wheat), the Hosts would have been perishable after a certain time, certainly highly vulnerable to microorganisms and fungi. But it seems that natural law does not apply to the 233 miraculous Hosts kept in the Siena basilica.
Many decades ago, an Archbishop of Siena, Tiberio Borghese, undertook a sort of test control: He sealed up some unconsecrated hosts in a container, and ten years later, a scientific committee opened the container and found only decomposed fragments and worms. This is, in fact, the natural history of organic matter – it becomes corrupted and decomposes.
And yet these consecrated Hosts in the Basilica of St. Francis in Siena, birthplace and home of St. Caterina of Siena, have been exempt from the inexorable laws of physics and chemistry. The miraculous hosts provide a wonderful concurrence in Siena of the two patrons of Italy, Francis and Catherine.
[The Basilica of San Francesco was a church begun by Franciscan monks in 1228, two years after St. Francis died, and completed in 1255. It was later enlarged in the 14th-15th centuries and the original Romanesque edifice was converted into Gothic. The current interior looks rather simple after a fire in 1655 and a restoration in 1885-1892, when many of the Baroque altars were demolished. The current neo-Gothic façade, flanked the 1763 campanile, dates to the early 20th century ].
In the various confirmed Eucharistic miracles, most of them taking place in Italy, usually the Hosts are transformed to flesh (heart muscle) and blood. But in Siena, the miracle is that the Hosts themselves have defined time and natural laws, as proof of the permanent presence of He who i9s Lord of history and of eternity.
The great T.S. Eliot wrote about human existence as ‘the point of intersection of the timeless and time”. Another poet, Eugenio Montale
[1896-1981, Nobel Prize for Literature, 1975], in his secular quest for salvation sought "the threshold" leading out of the jail of everyday life, "the knot in the net" of existence, "the link that does not hold" in the chain of worldly events. And here, in the miraculous Hosts of Siena, we see the sign of the great threshold that opens up time to eternity.
It all began in 1730. It was August 14, eve of the Assumption. All the citizens of Siena were in the Cathedral (Duomo) of Siena for the First Vespers and the offering of a votive candle to the Mother of God. That is why some thieves were able to enter the Basilica of San Francesco and steal the ciborium full of consecrated Hosts. It was a shock to the city. Prayers and processions were offered in reparation for the sacrilege. Perhaps the thieves themselves experienced remorse. Three days later, on August 17, the Hosts were ‘returned’ – left in an almsbox of the nearby Shrine to Santa Maria di Provenzano.
The city celebrated. Solemn processions and acts of adoration took place in all the parishes, repeatedly. It was decided that the Hosts, though consecrated, would not be distributed but kept in their own ciborium in the tabernacle of the Basilica of St. Francis. Eventually, it became clear that with time, the Hosts had not undergone any alteration. Devoutly conserved, they remained incorrupt through the years and decades. The faithful started to think this was a miracle.
Because all throughout, the Hosts were obviously subject to organic decomposition, exposed to atmospheric agents as well as contact with different containers and with gloved hands during the periodic counts made, not to mention unavoidable movements of the containers. And yet, everytime they were examined periodically, they remained “fresh, intact, physically uncorrupted, pure, and with no signs of beginning decomposition.”
In 1914, almost two centuries later, it was decided to subject a sample of particles to scientific analysis. The final report said: “The Sacred Hosts of Siena are a classic example of perfect conservation of unleavened bread consecrated in 1730, and constitute a singular phenomenon that is palpitating in its reality of defying the natural law governing perishable organic matter. This is a unique case in the annals of science”.
In subsequenTt decades, the Hosts were transferred several times to other containers. In fact, there was another attempt to steal the Hosts in 1951. But the miracle continues. Danish writer…Joergensen, who later converted to Catholicism, called this “one of the greatest wonders of Christ on earth”.
About 20 years ago, I found myself accompanying then Cardinal Ratzinger to the Basilica of San Francesco, and I remember well his amazement and great emotion while contemplating the miraculous Hosts.
John Paul II, when he visited Siena on Sept. 14, 1980, spent some time in adoration before the Hosts, murmuring afterwards: “It is the Presence!”
Indeed, what characterizes this Eucharistic miracle in Siena is its continuity in time, a sign that clearly makes evident the permanence of Christ’s presence in the consecrated Host. It is the supernatural and extraordinary confirmation of a truth that Catholicism proclaims.
Don Divo Barsotti
[1914-2006, monk, writer and founder of the Comunita degli Figli di Dio] wrote: “Some Protestant confessions do not deny the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, but they deny that the Presence if permanent, that Jesus is only present at the moment when the Host is given and received…And this is one substantial difference in the Eucharistic doctrine of Catholicism and that of the Protestants: the Church has always taught that Christ is permanently present in the Eucharist”.
[Which stems from Catholic belief that bread and wine are actually trans-substantiated into the Body and Blood of Christ at Consecration – and therefore, a consecrated Host is the Body and Blood of Christ, not merely a representation.]
In recent decades, Protestant thinking has infiltrated into the Catholic Church. Already in 1965, Paul VI, in his encyclical
Mysterium fidei, warned against the false doctrines on the Eucharist that had been circulating in the Church.
One of this was precisely that Christ was no longer present in consecrated Hosts that are undistributed at Mass, an idea promptly taken up by Catho-progressivists fixated only on the horizontal dimension of the Mass. An idea that is most wrong! That is why the Council of Trent insisted on encouraging Eucharistic Adoration even outside of liturgy.
As Cardinal Avery Dulles pointed out,
Mysterium fidei spoke clearly and definitively of “ the need to keep the Most Blessed Sacrament in a place of honor in the church”, and for pastors “to expose the Blessed Sacrament regularly for solemn adoration and in Eucharistic processions”.
John Paul II also sought to promote Eucharistic devotion outside Mass because it is “of inestimable value for the life of the Church”. He himself spent much time in Eucharistic adoration, and it is said that many of his best intuitions arose during such moments of prayer.
Benedict XVI was likewise a devotee of Eucharistic adoration, and during his Pontificate, many Catholic rediscovered the beauty and richness of this devotion.
[Most notably, in 2005, in Cologne, he introduced Eucharistic Adoration and Benediction as the main feature of the massive youth rally held on the eve of the concluding Mass for the quadrennial World Youth Day celebration, and at other youth gatherings during his apostolic visits abroad, most notably in London and Prague. These events, characterized by a great hush, even if there were a million present as in Cologne, Sydney and Madrid, were always the most memorable events on these occasions, and even TV commentators knew better than to intrude on that silence.]
But although Eucharistic Adoration has always been part of Church Magisterium, a kind of parallel and abusive ‘magisterium’ has sown its weeds. And it seems the errors of the 1960s have come back when, as Cardinal Dulles wrote, “the faithful are being told by teachers, preachers and the so-called avant-garde, that the purpose of the Blessed Sacrament is to be received in communion, not to be adored, as if the two purposes were mutually exclusive”.
A direct result of that idea is that in many Catholic churches, the tabernacle that houses the Most Blessed Sacrament is no longer the central, most noble and most important feature in the house of God, but has been relegated to a storage room or even not found in the church at all.
And yet it is the Tabernacle with its perpetual lamp that characterizes a Catholic Church. Edith Stein, the German Jewish philosopher who became St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, said she converted to Catholicism because, after having visited many Protestant churches, she entered a Catholic Church and realized that “Here, there is a Presence”. She became a Carmelite nun and was later killed in Auschwitz.
The weekly parish bulletin at Holy Innocents features a Fatima-related story during this centenary year, and today the story is about a miracle I had not heard about before...
A Fatima miracle in Hiroshima
At 2:45 a.m. on August 6, 1945, a B29 bomber dparted from the island of Tinian in the Pacific Ocean to drop the first atomic bomb on Japan. At 8:15 a.m., the bomb exploded eight blocks away from the Jesuit church of Our Lady’s Assumption in Hiroshima.
A group of Jesuits were in the church, but they survived the catastrophe and the radiation that killed thousands in the following months had no effect on them. Experts were amazed that the priests had survived. Physicians who treated them after the disaster warned them that the radiation they received would produce serious lacerations as well as internal disease and an early death. But none of that happened.
One of them, Fr. Hubert Schiffer later recalled that horrible day. He said that having already celebrated hisdaily Mass, he was about to eat breakfast when there was a blinding flash of light followed by an incredible explosion. He was taken up and violently thrown about in the air – like a leaf in a gust of wind, he said. He would next open his eyes on the ground, and upon seeing the absolute devastation around him, he was shocked to realize that, although wounded, he would survive.
Perhaps even more miraculous than surviving the initial blast was that none of the Jesuits suffered any after-effects from the radiation. Fr. Schiffer himself lived another 33 years and both wrote and spoke about his experience in Hiroshima.
The group of priests firmly believed they were protected by God and the Blessed Virgin Mary due to their devotion to the message of Fatima. “We were living the message of Fatima and we prayed the Rosary every day”.
I gather Fr. Schiffer and his fellow Jesuits saved by this miracle were, in the 1940s, far from the 'obligatory' inculturation of Catholicism into local Japanese worship practices that Fr. Adolfo Nicolas (the one who preceded Abascal Sosa as Jesuit Superior-General and was only marginally less outrageous in his statements) advocated after spending more than two decades as a missionary in Japan after World War II.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 19/06/2017 23:44]