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Eucharistic Miracles are instances where consecrated bread and wine no longer appear as bread and wine. The veil of ordinary appearances is lifted, and we see, in a way our eyes of faith already trust, the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Risen Lord, Jesus Christ. Though tradition assures us that these species are not the particular body and blood of our Blessed Lord, His presence remains, and not as a result of the miraculous intervention, but still by the words of consecration.
These miracles confront our doubt and our skepticism, they assuage our demand for scientific proof, they realign our attention to what is ordinarily miraculous, and remind us how merciful our God is to those of us who fail to take Him at His Word: “This is my Body…I will be with you always, until the end of the age.”
The CFO of the ministry which is gracious enough to employ me, Live Vertical, tells a poignant story about his experience at Lanciano, Italy. After an all-day excursion through holy sites in Assisi, Luke and his group finally arrive at Lanciano, right as the doors are closing, and find themselves face-to-face with the clotted Blood of our Blessed Lord.
Luke took his time gazing at the Miracle, a miracle that he had shared many times over to students and adults. His hungry and exhausted son wanted to find the nearest cafe and made this more or less known to his father. Luke, visibly moved to tears by the encounter with the Miracle, in a moment of frustration, did his best to impart to his 19-year-old son the significance of the moment. A significance to which his son responded, “Dad, I don’t know why you are so excited…we receive Jesus in the Eucharist at every Mass. I’m hungry, let’s go eat.”
I think of when Jesus heals the blind man with saliva-mud, having to reapply for the full effect. Eucharistic Miracles seem to be an inverse of this divine intervention. The veil which descends during the consecration fades, and what is sacramentally and truly present is made uniquely visible: the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus Christ. The miracle of consecration, then, is the true miracle, more miraculous than what our overstimulated human senses perceive to be miracles in these “Eucharistic Miracles.”
And yet, how seldom do we allow our sense of the divine to ascend to the forefront of our perception and be reminded of just how consequential this reality is? How often do we miss the ordinarily miraculous moments we encounter at least every single week?
In The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton recounts his time spent in Cazals, France, where the “disposition of everything around [him]…, the streets which all pointed inward to the center of town,” forced him to be “at least virtually conscious of the Church,” which contained “that Sacrament…the Christ living in our midst, and sacrificed by us, and for us and with us, in the clean and perpetual Sacrifice…Who holds our world together, and keeps us all from being poured headlong and immediately into the pit of our eternal destruction.”
“Oh, what a thing it is,” Merton exclaims, “to live in a place…where all the day long your eyes must turn, again and again, to the House that hides the Sacramental Christ…where several times each morning, under those high arches on the altar over the relics of the martyr, took place that tremendous, secret and obvious immolation, so secret that it will never be thoroughly understood by a created intellect, and yet so obvious that its very obviousness blinds us by excess of clarity: the unbloody Sacrifice of God under the species of bread and wine.”
Though Merton admittedly was not aware of this at the time, the landscape itself communicated this ultimate reality, which is entirely possible to miss despite how the world may or may not be configured around us. Commonplace, obvious, and ordinary, yet the very thing that holds our world together and keeps us from existential destruction, permits us to dwell in the same realm, to pass by without a second thought, to risk or even commit indifference, irreverence…
It’s the humility of the sacrament that levels me. These moments of descending into the bread and the wine on altars throughout the centuries are dwarfed by the eternity Our Lord spends in glory.
In essence, this transformation doesn’t cost anything, so why be so amazed? What does it cost God to substitute the substance of common food and drink for a moment while remaining omnipotent, while remaining in glory, not at all affected by this momentary transformation?
What we find when the veil is torn is the assurance that this transformation is indeed not momentary, that He remains.
It was inevitable that God would become man as a result of our fallen state, on account of our brokenness and His loving kindness (cf. On the Incarnation § 6-10). But as to why He remains, this is where our reason fails. Why does the bread from heaven have to be Himself? Why does He remain and continue to be our source of life?
If we forgo the dramatic faith Our Lord calls us to in favor of human deduction, these questions will never be answered. This is theology born in the light of revealed reality, not the kind that tries to generate reality from our own reasoning. We begin with what Our Lord says and theologize in the wake. No amount of Biblical study, moral reasoning or otherwise could in essence produce the doctrine which surrounds the Holy Eucharist. Only what Our Lord says satisfies.
Our work is to “believe.” Belief is not blind; it is the cure for blindness. Without it, we cannot see properly. Without faith, we cannot move forward into what we can’t yet know. It is the key which unlocks the mystery of it all.
And this is what is revealed: inexplicably, not only does the Lord come to really dwell in what appears to be bread and wine, but He remains there. Furthermore, His remaining is by all means ordinary. Each and every operating Church, Chapel, and Oratory ordinarily contains a Tabernacle in which the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus Christ ordinarily resides under a perfectly ordinary miracle which is performed at every perfectly ordinary Mass.
Not only does it seem impossible or impossibly complex to the naked eye of faith, to the worldly world of worldly people, it seems entirely unnecessary.
One might ask, “taking for granted that God exists, why then would He not only become a human being, provide us with incredible moral teaching and wisdom, free us from sin and death by dying a horrible death on the Cross, rise from the dead proving the victory, ascend into heaven and take His rightful place with the Father, and then choose to literally remain with His people, not as a person who can be in every place at once, but under the guise of simple bread and wine?”
The faithful bask in the radiance of this reality. Freed from an endless cycle of skepticism, a Catholic receives the work of Christ’s redemption through believing, and is free to enjoy the riches to which he is heir, which he did not earn or even request, and, without an amount of humility, would otherwise be refused on account of its inexplicable proportion.
For God, however, we are worth it—you are worth it—to remain. As St. Carlo Acutis framed the purpose of each Eucharistic Miracle he presented, these events “direct our attention to look beyond the appearances of bread and wine, and to the hidden reality of the True Presence of Our Lord.”
Eucharistic Miracles are reminders of what it is we place our faith in, what is ordinarily miraculous, what transcends feeble human reason, and stuns skepticism: the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar.
Photo by Jacob Bentzinger on Unsplash
