This is a skeptical Website, where empirical arguments in support of supernatural claims are subjected to heavy scrutiny. The subject of today’s post is Eucharistic miracles, which if true would violate the laws of chemistry. I happened to attend a Catholic Mass last Saturday evening. It was in a cathedral, but I won’t say exactly where it was, as I wish to respect the privacy of those who attended. I was sitting at the back of the church, which is where bad Catholics like myself tend to sit. At this time in the liturgical year, the Mass readings focus heavily on the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist: that when the priest celebrating Mass says the words of consecration over the bread and wine (“This is my body … This is the chalice of my blood…” – full text here), the bread and wine, while remaining unchanged in their outward appearance and their empirical properties, are actually transformed into Jesus Christ’s body and blood, which spiritually nourishes those members of the Church who receive the Eucharist worthily, and who believe it to be the body and blood of Christ (which they confess when they say “Amen” at Holy Communion). The priest celebrating the Mass which I attended had a fervent faith in the Eucharist, and he said he wanted his parishioners to say their Amens more enthusiastically when receiving Communion, so during his sermon, he attempted to inspire faith in his audience by talking about Eucharistic miracles, of which (he said) there were 107 that had been officially certified by the Church as worthy of belief by Catholics (although I should point out that they are in no way obliged to believe in them). Naturally, the priest didn’t have time to discuss them all, so he proceeded to focus on the best-known one: the miracle of Lanciano, said to have taken place in the eighth century as a sign given to a Catholic priest-monk who was having doubts about the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

What was remarkable about this miracle was that the bread and wine didn’t maintain their outward appearance during the celebration of the Mass. Instead, they had visibly changed into human flesh and blood, which had been in recent years been authenticated by scientists. What’s more, the blood type was AB, the same as the blood type found on the Shroud of Turin. I’m sure that many of the people listening to the sermon would have found this miracle story extremely impressive. Naturally, I said nothing, but I could not help thinking that religious faith should not be supported by bad arguments. Unbeknownst to the good priest who was giving the sermon, the three best-known eucharistic miracles had already been debunked by Dr. Stacy Trasancos, a devout Catholic chemist with a Master’s degree in theology, who is also a mother of seven and a grandmother of six.

One common myth regarding the miracle of Lanciano is that it was authenticated by the World Health Organization. For example, the Catholic Website therealpresence.org in its description of the miracle of Lanciano, declares (bolding and links are mine – VJT):

In 1970, the Archbishop of Lanciano and the Provincial Superior of the Conventual Franciscans at Abruzzo, with Rome’s approval, requested Dr. Edward Linoli, director of the hospital in Arezzo and professor of anatomy, histology, chemistry, and clinical microscopy, to perform a thorough scientific examination on the relics of the miracle which had occurred twelve centuries earlier. On March 4, 1971, the professor presented a detailed report of the various studies carried out… This report was published in The Sclavo Notebooks in Diagnostics (Collection #3, 1971) and aroused great interest in the scientific world. Also, in 1973, the chief Advisory Board of the World Health Organization appointed a scientific commission to corroborate Linoli’s findings. Their work lasted 15 months and included 500 tests. It was verified that the fragments taken from Lanciano could in no way be likened to embalmed tissue. As to the nature of the fragment of flesh, the commission declared it to be living tissue because it responded rapidly to all the clinical reactions distinctive of living beings. Their reply fully corroborated Professor Linoli’s conclusions. In the extract summarizing the scientific work of the Medical Commission of the WHO and the UN, published in Dec. 1976 in New York and Geneva, declared that science, aware of its limits, has come to a halt, face to face with the impossibility of giving an explanation.

Other highly credulous accounts of the alleged WHO investigation can be found here and here. Interestingly, Catholic apologist Matt Nelson repeats the same claim in an article here, which cites a report from zenit.org, but if you scroll through the comments on Nelson’s article, the very last one quotes from a letter signed by WHO archivist Reynald Erard, the final paragraph of which reads as follows:

So we are not sure how this story started about WHO’s involvement, but other than many citing the https://zenit.org/articles/physician-tells-of-eucharistic-miracle-of-lanciano/, we have found nothing else that supports any connection between WHO – the Eucharistic Miracle of Lanciano.

Best regards,

Reynald Erard

WHO Records and Archives

Dr. Stacy Trasancos, who is a trained scientist, does an excellent job of shooting down the myth about the WHO investigating the miracle of Lanciano in the seven-minute video clip below (which is actually an excerpt from a longer interview with Catholic apologist Gary Michuta):

But there’s more. Readers can listen to the entire interview between Dr. Trasancos and Catholic apologist Gary Michuta here. Long story short: Dr. Trasancos was invited by a bishop to write the third and part of a book titled, Behold, It is I: Scripture, Tradition, and Science on the Real Presence, defending the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist, in which she was supposed to present the scientific evidence for Eucharistic miracles. She decided to focus on three well-known Eucharistic miracles: the eighth-century miracle of Lanciano, the thirteenth-century miracle of Bolsena, and the 1996 Buenos Aires miracle (see here, here and here). Being a very thorough person, Dr. Trasancos requested to examine the original scientific reports, which she was eventually able to obtain. She had hoped to uncover authenticating evidence for these three miracles, but she was disappointed to find that in all three cases, the evidence was unconvincing. She felt compelled to admit as much in the section of the book which she authored.

Gary Michuta’s interview with Dr. Trasancos is made up of three parts. Part 1, which deals with the miracle of Lanciano, starts at 14:44 and continues until 27:58, when there’s a commercial break. In this part, Dr. Trasancos debunks the myth that the World Health Organization tested samples of the flesh and blood from the Lanciano miracle.

Part 2, which starts at 30:38 and continues until 42:58, deals with the Buenos Aires eucharistic miracle of 1996 (see here, here and here) and the Lanciano miracle (starting at 40:16). Dr. Trasancos debunks the apologetic claim that the flesh and blood violate the law of the conservation of mass – a claim based on a single experiment performed in (wait for it) 1574! Other researchers failed to replicate this finding.

Part 3, which starts at 45:45 and continues until 58:53, deals with Dr. Odoardo [Edward] Linoli’s testing of the Lanciano biological samples in 1970 (documented and photographed in meticulous detail here, on pages 22 to 40, and summarized here), and with the thirteenth-century miracle of Bolsena (starting at 51:12).

Three miracles for which the evidence is wanting

To cut a long story short: with regard to the Lanciano miracle, Dr. Trasancos (who has read Dr. Edward Linoli’s original report in its entirety) points out that Dr. Linoli wasn’t trying to prove anything, because he already believed in the miracle. Nevertheless, he conducted his testing carefully and impartially, using controls, and he observed some experimental results that were the same as those he observed for human flesh and blood. (Dr. Linoli did not perform genetic testing back in 1970, but he performed histological testing for glucose, thin layer chromatography tests and electrophoresis tests.) He concluded in his 1971 report that the tests he performed were consistent with the Lanciano samples being flesh and blood because they exhibited some of the same characteristics as the human flesh and blood he used as controls, and he added that the tissue taken from the Lanciano sample which he examined through the microscope looked like cardiac tissue, but he also acknowledged that these tests did not prove the occurrence of a miracle, and that in any case, there was no way to establish that the samples he was testing dated from the eighth century, as the oldest reports of the miracle claimed. (By the way, the earliest reports were written eight centuries after the alleged miracle itself. How’s that for good documentation?)

As for the thirteenth-century miracle of Bolsena (described here), which is said to have occurred in the year 1263, when Urban IV was pope, it’s highly doubtful that it even happened in the first place, as contemporary records make no mention of it. The first reports of it in the literature do not occur until seven decades later.

Dr. Trasancos was particularly scathing in her criticisms of the unscientific way in which the 1996 Buenos Aires eucharistic miracle was investigated. The sample of the host wasn’t subjected to a blind test: the forensic pathologist was someone the Church authorities had worked with before, when investigating miracles, and his lab work was televised and made into a documentary. Surprisingly, the Buenos Aires parish where the mysterious events happened doesn’t call it a miracle or even an alleged miracle, but merely a sign.

But what about the matching AB blood type?

Apologists may object that it is still highly coincidental that the Shroud of Turin and the Lanciano blood pellets both agree on Jesus’ blood type being type AB, the rarest of the four human blood types. Catholic science teacher and Shroud skeptic Hugh Farey debunks this argument in the video below, which discusses the Shroud of Turin and another Christian relic, the Sudarium of Oviedo, both of which are alleged to contain blood type AB:

In brief: first of all, blood type AB is nowhere near as rare as generally believed (in fact, its frequency is up to 11% in some countries); second, the tests used to determine the blood type for the Shroud of Turin didn’t examine antigens, but antibodies, and blood type AB is unique in having no antibodies in its plasma; and third, plant samples such as rose petals can sometimes produce false positive results, so scientists need to make sure at the outset that what they are testing is indeed human blood. Hugh Farey is inclined to think there is real blood on the Shroud of Turin, but as he points out, the original Spanish report on the Sudarium of Oviedo makes it clear that sample contamination may explain the result observed, so we cannot be sure it contains any blood at all, let alone type AB blood.

As for the Lanciano samples: back in 1970, Dr. Odoardo Linoli was not able to test them genetically. Today, scientists can do that. Only when they have properly ascertained that the five pellets are indeed human blood can testing of their blood type proceed. Until then, miracle proponents should be leery of making tendentious claims.

I’d like to conclude by saying that apologists for Eucharistic miracles really need to pull their socks up, and present more rigorous evidence for their claims.

A final reflection on blood types

Come to think of it, if Jesus was (as most Christians believe) born of a virgin, then why would he have had a blood type of AB anyway? Isn’t that the blood type you’d least expect, as it suggests he had one parent with type A blood and one parent with type B blood?

Another “proof” that the Shroud of Turin is authentic?

Meanwhile, Cameron Bertuzzi of Capturing Christianity has just produced a video citing a 2022 scientific study (which seems to have remained unnoticed by the American press until this week, when a report about the study suddenly appeared in Newsweek) arguing that the Shroud of Turin could be as old as 2,000 years, on the basis of a new dating technique called WAXS that the authors first proposed as a method of dating ancient linen threads in 2019. To his credit, Bertuzzi points out that the 2,000-year-old date is only possible if the Shroud was kept in a cool, humid environment during its first 1,300 years, which on the face of it seems highly unlikely. At any rate, here is Bertuzzi’s 13-minute video clip, which is sensationalistically titled, “New Scientific Proof that the Shroud is Authentic”:

Readers who would like to hear a more balanced discussion should listen to Dr. Dan McClellan’s three-minute review of the 2022 study here: .

Last, one of the authors of the 2022 study cited above has a history of propounding questionable theories about the shroud:

In March 2013, Giulio Fanti, professor of mechanical and thermal measurement at the University of Padua conducted a battery of experiments on various threads that he believes were cut from the shroud during the 1988 carbon-14 dating, and concluded that they dated from 300 BC to 400 AD, potentially placing the Shroud within the lifetime of Jesus of Nazareth.^[48] Because of the manner in which Fanti obtained the shroud fibers, many are dubious about his findings. The shroud’s official custodian, Archbishop Cesare Nosiglia of Turin, told Vatican Insider: “As there is no degree of safety on the authenticity of the materials on which these experiments were carried out [on] the shroud cloth, the shroud’s custodians cannot recognize any serious value to the results of these alleged experiments.”^[49][50]

What do readers think? Comment is welcome.