The Guardian Angel: Two Eucharistic Miracles Witnessed By St. Peter Damien and St. Ligouri II

What a joy to have those words spoken to us, and I challenge myself and each of you, to pray for a Zeal to lead others to Jesus in the Eucharist that can only happen in the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. To Jesus through Mary, GregoryMary

Two Eucharistic Miracles, St. Peter Damien, and St. Ligouri at Scala, both in Italy and both saints and doctors of the church

A sorceress asked a woman to bring her a consecrated Host. The woman went to Mass and during Communion she managed to hide a Host in her handkerchief. The priest noticed what happened and ran after the woman and ordered her to show him what she was hiding. The woman opened the handkerchief, and to their surprise they saw that half of the stolen Particle had been transformed into Flesh and the other half looked like the Host.

In his Opuscul. XXXIV; Patrol. Lat., tom. CXLV. col. 573, St. Peter Damian, a Doctor of the Church, describes an important Eucharistic miracle of which he was a direct witness. We present the Italian translation of the episode as the Saint himself describes it: “This is a Eucharistic event of great importance. It took place in 1050.

Giving in to a horrible temptation, a woman was about to take the Eucharistic Bread home to use the Sacred Species for sorcery. But a priest noticed what she had done and ran after her, taking away from her the Host she had sacrilegiously stolen. Then he unfolded the white linen cloth in which the sacred Host had been wrapped and found that the Host had been transformed in such a way that Half had become visibly the Body of Christ, while the other Half preserved the normal look of a Host. With such a clear testimony, God wanted to win over unbelievers and heretics who refused to accept the Real Presence of the Eucharistic mystery: in one half of the consecrated bread the Body of Christ was visible, while in the other the natural form, thus highlighting the reality of the sacramental transubstantiation taking place at the Consecration.”

SCALA ITALY, 1732 In 1732 for more than three consecutive months there appeared signs of our Lord’s Passion in the consecrated Hosts. This marvelous event took place during exposition of the Most Holy Sacrament in the monastery of the Most Holy Redeemer of Scala in the presence of numerous testimonies, among whom was St. Alphonsus Maria Liguori, the great Doctor of the Church. Venerable Maria Celeste Crostarosa Interior of the monastery church Monstrance of the miracle Monastery of the Most Holy Redeemer, Scala The venerable Sister Maria Celeste Crostarosa founded the Monastery of the Most Holy Redeemer together with St. Alphonsus Maria Liguori. Every Thursday the Most Blessed Sacrament was exposed in the monastery for public adoration. From September 11, 1732, for three consecutive months, during the solemn exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, the signs of the Passion of Christ appeared in the Host contained in the monstrance.

All this can be confirmed not only by the nuns and the people but also by Bishop Santoro of Scala and by the Bishop of Castellamare. The apparition occurred also in the presence of St. Alphonsus Maria Liguori. Bishop Santoro wrote a letter to Bishop Simonetti, Apostolic Nuncio of Naples, in which he described all the details related to the visions that took place in the Sacred Host that had been exposed. In turn, the Nuncio forwarded the letter to Cardinal Barbieri, then Secretary of State.

The goal of the New Evangelization is, as Pope John Paul II explains in the Encyclical Letter Ecclesia de Eucharistia, “to rekindle” our loving wonder before the Holy Eucharist, the great Mystery of Faith. Let us read again his words to us:

I would like to rekindle this Eucharistic “amazement” by the present Encyclical Letter, in continuity with the Jubilee heritage which I have left to the Church in the Apostolic Letter Novo millennio ineunte and its Marian crowning, Rosarium Virginis Mariae. To contemplate the Face of Christ, and to contemplate it with Mary, is the “program” which I have set before the Church at the dawn of the Third Millennium, summoning her to put out into the deep on the sea of history with the enthusiasm of the New Evangelization. To contemplate Christ involves being able to recognize Him wherever He manifests Himself, in His many forms of presence, but above all in the living sacrament of His Body and His Blood. The Church draws her life from Christ in the Eucharist; by Him she is fed and by him she is enlightened (Ecclesia de Eucharistia, n. 6).

The Holy Eucharist is the source at which Christ’s life is nourished within us with the incomparable food which is His Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. The Holy Eucharist is the highest expression of our life in Christ, for it unites us sacramentally to Christ in the Sacrifice of the Cross, which is made always new in the celebration of the Holy Mass.

In the last years of his pontificate, our late and beloved Pontiff directed his attention, above all else, to teaching us about the Holy Eucharist, and to restoring the discipline by which the Holy Mass is celebrated, and the Holy Eucharist is reposed in the tabernacle and worshiped outside of the Holy Mass. In the final year of his service as Vicar of Christ, he called us to observe the Year of the Eucharist (October 2004 to October 2005). The Year of the Eucharist began with the International Eucharistic Congress, held at Guadalajara in Mexico, and concluded with the Ordinary Assembly of the Synod Bishops, “The Eucharist: Source and Summit of the Life and the Mission of the Church,” at which Pope John Paul II’s successor, Pope Benedict XVI, presided.

As we carry forward the work of the New Evangelization, the Eucharistic Mystery is the source of our direction and strength. At the same time, the deeper knowledge and love of the Holy Eucharist, born of our loving wonder and “amazement” at the mystery of God’s love for us in His Son, Jesus Christ, is our goal. To assist us in reawakening and deepening our love of the Holy Eucharist, The Real Presence Eucharistic Education and Adoration Association, an apostolate founded by the late Father John A. Hardon, S.J., tireless apostle and catechist of the Eucharist, has worked with the Pontifical Academy Cultorum Martyrum (founded to promote and deepen the veneration of the Holy Martyrs), to present, in English, the story of 126 miracles associated with faith in and worship of the Most Blessed Sacrament. Each of the miracles is venerated at a shrine, all of which have been approved by the Diocesan Bishop and some of which have the approval of the Holy See. Cooperating with the Pontifical Academy, the Real Presence Eucharistic Education and Adoration Association has made available in English the Vatican International Exhibit, The Eucharistic Miracles of the World.

The miracles presented in the Vatican International Exhibit, like all miracles, are gifts from God “to witness to some truth or to testify to someone’s sanctity” (Father John A. Hardon, S.J., Modern Catholic Dictionary, p. 352). It should not surprise us that God has granted so many miracles to deepen our knowledge and love of His greatest gift to us, the gift of the Body and Blood of His only-begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, as the Heavenly Food of our earthly pilgrimage and the Medicine of eternal life.

The Eucharistic Miracles of the World provides a wonderful service to the work of the New Evangelization. The popular devotion associated with each miracle is a most worthy vehicle of the New Evangelization. As Pope Paul VI taught us, in his Magna Carta on the New Evangelization, the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii nuntiandi, “On Evangelization in the Modern World” (December 8, 1975), popular piety, “if it is well oriented, above all by a pedagogy of evangelization,” offers a great good to the life of the Church. Describing the fruits of popular piety, Pope Paul VI observed:

It manifests a thirst for God which only the simple and poor can know. It makes people capable of generosity and sacrifice even to the point of heroism, when it is a question of manifesting belief. It involves an acute awareness of profound attributes of God: fatherhood, providence, loving and constant presence. It engenders interior attitudes rarely observed to the same degree elsewhere:

patience, the sense of the Cross in daily life, detachment, openness to others, devotion (Evangelii nuntiandi, n. 48d).

The piety and devotion surrounding the Eucharistic miracles down the Christian centuries has borne its richest fruit in the total love of our Lord Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament and in the readiness to give one’s life for love of our Eucharistic Lord. The devout study of the Eucharistic miracles inspires in us a deeper awareness and more ardent love of our Lord’s Real Presence with us in the Holy Eucharist.