Lanciano

This story is told according to tradition. No witness from that time wrote it down. It has no date more exact than "the eighth century", and the priest has no name.

Lanciano, the old Anxanum of the Frentani people, lies about 10 km inland from the Adriatic. In the small church of Saints Legontian and Domitian, a community of Basilian monks kept a monastery. Some writers place the event between 730 and 750, and link the monks' presence to the edict against images of the Byzantine emperor Leo III in 730, which drove many Greek monks into Italy. That is a guess by later writers, not a record.

A monk was celebrating Mass. He was troubled by doubt about the real presence of Jesus in the consecrated bread and wine. An old account, quoted in modern retellings, describes him as well versed in the learning of the world but ignorant in the things of God. As he said the words of consecration, the Host became flesh before him, and the wine became blood. The blood gathered into five clots of different shapes and sizes.

It happened before the people, the account says. The story adds that the archbishop ordered an inquiry and that a record was made. No such record survives. The flesh and the clots were kept, and the Basilian monks looked after them for centuries.

Here we have to be plain. Writers on both sides, the shrine's defenders and its critics, agree on the main point: there is no document from the time.

• Nothing from the 8th century. The Catholic cardiologist Franco Serafini, a strong defender of the relic, himself admits that there are "no reliable historical documents" for its origin.
• A lost parchment. A later writer, Fella, tells that about 1560 two Basilian monks passing through took away an old parchment in two languages that described the miracle, and that the friars knew its contents by heart. We know this only through a recent Catholic writer, Ethan Muse, and have not seen Fella's own text.
• 17 February 1574. Archbishop Gaspare Rodriguez inspected the relics. This is the first known report, some eight centuries after the date given.
• 1636. A marble inscription, still beside the old altar, records the inspection of 1574. It is the only source for the famous claim about the weights.

Muse also points to a line in the eleventh-century writer Guitmund of Aversa which he reads as a reference to the Lanciano tradition. We have not been able to confirm this, and it does not name the town in anything we have seen.

The critic Silvano Fuso of CICAP, an Italian society of sceptics, stresses that there is no source before 1574. Others note that the story is like those told of other places, such as Bolsena. This does not disprove the event. Long silence is common for that age. But it means the story rests on tradition.

An outline of this history was printed in L'Osservatore Romano on 23 April 1983, in a page edited by Gianfranco Grieco. Later guides agree with it on the main dates.

• Up to 1176. The Basilian monks.
• 1176 to 1252. Benedictine monks.
• From 1252. The Conventual Franciscans, by the wish of Bishop Landulf of Chieti and by a papal bull of 12 May 1252.
• 1258. The friars build the present church of St Francis over the old one. In the 1700s it is reworked from Romanesque-Gothic into Baroque.
• Up to 1636. The relics are in a chapel beside the high altar.
• 1636 to 1902. They are in a side altar of the nave, the Valsecca Chapel, with an iron safe and the inscription still to be seen there.
• 1713. The monstrance of Neapolitan silver is made. The blood stays in an ancient vessel of rock crystal.
• Napoleonic times to 1953. The suppression of the religious orders takes the friars away. In 1953 Archbishop Benigno Migliorini gives the care of the miracle back to them.
• 1902 to today. The present marble altar, raised by the people of the town.

These are the most often quoted tests of any Eucharistic relic, and many exaggerated things are said about them. So we give them from the records themselves. The two minutes (verbali), signed by the archbishop, his chancellor and the friars' secretary, are displayed at the shrine.

Who. The friars, urged by Archbishop Pacifico Perantoni of Lanciano and by their provincial, Father Bruno Luciani, decided on the study. They gave it to Professor Odoardo Linoli, who taught pathological anatomy and histology and clinical chemistry and microscopy, and who was head of the hospital laboratory at Arezzo. Some reports add that Rome authorised the study; the minutes do not say so, though a copy of the results was to be handed to Paul VI in a private audience.

18 November 1970. At 10.15 in the morning the archbishop broke the seals placed by Archbishop Petrarca in 1886. Three things in this first record are worth noticing:

• The glass case with the flesh was not airtight, and this explained the mould and other foreign bodies found inside it, as the microscope showed.
• Linoli himself, looking at the tissue, feared that the laboratory would find nothing useful, and thought it might be a tissue with nothing left to identify it.
• The five clots together weighed 15 grams and 505 milligrams, as in 1886. The old claim that any one clot weighs as much as all five together was tested and, in the words of the record, "did not occur", just as it had not in 1886.

Linoli took samples to his laboratory at Arezzo.

February 1971. Linoli gave microscope slides to Professor Ruggero Bertelli, a retired professor of human anatomy at the University of Siena. Bertelli's signed note says that the slides came from a fragment taken by Linoli himself, "according to his formal declaration". Bertelli judged the tissue to be striated muscle. He added that the cell nuclei and the cross-striations could not be seen, and that the way the fibres ran "would point" the diagnosis toward heart muscle. His words are careful, and they are his view of the slides he was given.

4 March 1971. In the church of St Francis, Linoli read his report before the archbishop, friars, clergy, the mayor, doctors and the public. Among those who spoke in the discussion was Professor Urbano Fanci, chief analyst at the Lanciano hospital. Linoli handed back the material he had used and the blood fragments he had not, and these were placed in the convent's archive.

Publication. O. Linoli, "Ricerche istologiche, immunologiche e biochimiche sulla carne e sul sangue del Miracolo Eucaristico di Lanciano (VIII sec.)", Quaderni Sclavo di Diagnostica, 1971, pages 661 to 674. It is listed in PubMed. We have not read the full paper; we report it from the shrine's records, Linoli's own later summary, and those who have read and discussed it.

1981. For the tenth anniversary, the friars asked Linoli to look again, using a tiny fragment left from the first study. He published a summary in L'Osservatore Romano on 23 April 1983.

• A single worker. Antonio Casolari has criticised the study as the work of one person with no independent panel, and says Bertelli was not present for the sampling or the making of the slides. Bertelli's own note fits that: he speaks of slides given to him.
• Methods of that age. Kearse and Ligaj, in the Journal of Forensic Science and Research (2024), call the study "commendable" as the first major scientific attempt of its kind. They also say its results cannot be taken as specific for human blood, and that the AB result is in doubt. Kelly Kearse is a Catholic himself and has served as a Eucharistic minister.
• No later dating. Luigi Garlaschelli of CICAP has asked for radiocarbon dating and modern controls. He says that the Church has not allowed further study. No radiocarbon date has been published. The tests of 1970 to 1971 cannot say how old the relics are.
• On the other side. Serafini, a cardiologist, calls Linoli's investigations "scientifically impeccable". Muse, writing in 2025, argues that the reactions were too quick and strong to be due to poor antisera.
• The test results in a sentence. One careful Catholic review describes Linoli's report as a detailed and cautious study, whose results by modern methods are inconclusive about what the samples are. That seems to us fair.

You may read that a commission of the World Health Organization, appointed in 1973, ran 500 tests over 15 months and confirmed Linoli's work, with results published at New York and Geneva in 1976. This was repeated in the Catholic press, and in 2005 a report of a talk by Linoli said so.

It should not be repeated. Kearse, Ligaj and others asked the WHO and the United Nations, who had no record of any such investigation. Serafini, who strongly defends the relic, then found the so-called report in a safe at Lanciano. He says it was a front and back page about Lanciano attached to hundreds of unrelated pages of tests on Egyptian mummies. He called it "a terrible fraud, a terrible hoax, very sad". We do not know who made it. The relic needs no such help, and the truth does not need it either.