Bolsena and Orvieto

Everything in this section is told according to tradition. The oldest written form we know of comes from well after the event, as the next section explains.

In the summer of 1263 a priest from beyond the Alps was on pilgrimage to Rome. He is known as Peter of Prague. The Vatican's stamp office, in its text for the 750th anniversary, calls him a Bohemian. Paul VI, speaking in 1964, called him "a German priest, whom we will call Peter of Prague". The name itself comes from the later tradition.

He was troubled by doubt. The doubt is usually described as doubt about the real presence of Christ in the consecrated Host. The Vatican's text says that his doubts of faith had put his vocation in crisis, and that he went to Rome to quiet them. He prayed at the tomb of St Peter and found his faith strengthened.

On the way home he stopped at Bolsena, a small town on the eastern shore of the lake of the same name. He celebrated Mass in the church of St Christina, a young martyr honoured there. During the Mass, at the consecration or just after, blood began to come from the Host. It fell on the corporal, the square of white linen on which the Host and chalice rest, and on the stones of the altar.

The priest was deeply shaken. The tradition says he wrapped everything in the corporal and the sacred linens and left the church. When he had recovered, he went to nearby Orvieto, where Pope Urban IV was then living with his court, and told him what had happened.

The Pope sent a bishop to look into it. The Vatican's anniversary text names him as Bishop Giacomo. He brought the relics back to Orvieto. The tradition ends with a great scene: the Pope and his whole court go out to meet the procession, and thousands of the faithful fill the streets as the corporal is carried into the city.

Then, the story says, Urban IV gave the feast of Corpus Christi to the whole Church, and asked St Thomas Aquinas, who was then at Orvieto, to compose its prayers.

This is the part most retellings leave out. It matters, because it shows what we can and cannot say.

• 1264, the bull. Transiturus is the document nearest in time. It speaks of the Eucharist and of the new feast, and it refers discreetly to the mystical experiences of St Juliana, as Benedict XVI noted. It does not mention Bolsena.
• After 1317, a lost document. According to the art historian G. Freni, summarised by the reference guide Key to Umbria, the story emerged or re-emerged at Orvieto early in the fourteenth century, based on a document written after 1317. That document is now lost.
• 1337 to 1338, the enamels. The earliest surviving telling of the story in pictures is on the great reliquary made for the corporal at Orvieto.
• 1357 to 1364, the frescoes. The walls of the chapel in the cathedral show eight scenes of the miracle, with Latin explanations written in 1362.
• About 1563, a copy. The earliest surviving copy of the lost document dates from about this year.
• 1573 and 1601, the inscriptions. That copy lies behind an inscription of 1573 at Bolsena, which no longer survives, and four inscriptions of 1601 to 1602 still on the wall of the chapel at Orvieto.

So more than fifty years lie between the event and the first written account we know of, and about seventy before the first that we can still see. That does not show the event did not happen. Many true things were written down late. It does mean that the details of the story, such as the words of the priest and the scene of the meeting, cannot be checked.

The feast of Corpus Christi was already nearly twenty years old in Liège before anyone is said to have seen blood at Bolsena.

St Juliana of Cornillon was born near Liège, in present-day Belgium, in 1191 or 1192. As a girl of sixteen she had a vision, repeated many times: the full moon with one dark band across it. She came to understand that the moon was the life of the Church on earth, and that the dark band was a missing feast in honour of the Eucharist. She kept this to herself for years, then confided in two other women, one of whom was Blessed Eva, a recluse of Liège.

Bishop Robert of Thourotte of Liège, after some hesitation, accepted the proposal. In 1246 he ordered the feast for his diocese, to begin the next year. He died that October, and the canons of St Martin at Liège were the first to celebrate it. Juliana suffered much opposition in her later years and died at Fosses in 1258.

Here the two stories meet. Jacques Pantaléon, a Frenchman, had been archdeacon of Liège and had known the feast there. In 1261 he became Pope as Urban IV. Paul VI recalled this link when he spoke at Orvieto. The papal court had taken refuge at Orvieto, and from there, on 11 August 1264, Urban IV issued Transiturus, which ordered the feast for the whole Church on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday and attached indulgences to it.

He died on 2 October of the same year, and the feast spread slowly. Clement V ordered it again at the Council of Vienne in 1311. John XXII urged it, and Benedict XVI gives 1317 as the year it was re-established for the whole Church. From then on it took root everywhere, and with it the procession of the Blessed Sacrament.

The honest way to put it is this. The feast came from Liège, by way of a woman's prayer and a bishop's decision, and a Pope who knew them. Bolsena may have helped to move that Pope. The documents do not say that it did. Benedict XVI, telling the story in 2010, presents both Juliana and Bolsena as part of what led Urban IV to act.

We do not know where the corporal was kept in its first decades. Benedict XVI says that the Pope ordered it to be kept at Orvieto. It was probably venerated in the church of Santa Maria Prisca, and from about 1297 in the new cathedral. Clear records begin in the 1330s.

In 1338, under Bishop Beltramo Monaldeschi, a Dominican, the bishop, the archpriest and the canons commissioned a reliquary from the Sienese goldsmith Ugolino di Vieri and his companions. It is made of silver gilt and enamel, and its shape copies the front of the cathedral. Eight enamels tell the story of Bolsena. Others show the Passion and the early life of Christ. The earliest surviving reference to the Orvieto celebration also dates from 1338: a public holiday and a procession with the corporal in its reliquary.

Then the cathedral built a chapel for it, at the end of the left transept, in 1350 to 1356. Nicolò da Siena designed the marble tabernacle from 1358. Ugolino di Prete Ilario and his helpers painted the walls from 1357, and he signed his work on 8 June 1364. Lippo Memmi painted the Madonna dei Raccomandati that is also in the chapel, dated 1339 by one guide and probably before 1320 by another, an image of Our Lady sheltering the members of a confraternity.

The corporal stays in the tabernacle today, now in a lighter reliquary used for the yearly procession. The old reliquary of Ugolino di Vieri is shown near the entrance of the chapel.