The Lanciano Legend and the Black Magic claim that food
turned into Jesus literally
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 is non-existent.
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!