About Those Eucharistic Miracles

Why I care and why I doubt the data but not the Real Presence.

Oh my, there is so much of a story to tell here that I don’t know where to start. Once upon a time, I was a zygote…

Not there. But once upon a time, I was so much a non-believer that I didn’t care about belief. It was not in my lexicon. I opined. I thought. I knew. I calculated. I tested. I concluded. I saw with my eyes. But I could have replaced any of those words with “believe” without changing what I meant. The word was poetic fluff, and I preferred not to wax poetic when publishing in scientific journals.

As my story goes, I became Catholic. Photosynthesis got to me. I’ve written about it in Particles of Faith (excerpt) and given many talks. Me and the trees.

I want to address belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist and my detour into Eucharistic miracles. For those who don’t know, this is the belief that Christ is truly present under the species of bread and wine. During the consecration in Mass, the bread becomes the Body of Christ, and the wine becomes the Blood. This process is called “transubstantiation.” There is a substantial change but no corruption and generation.

I say “detour” into Eucharistic miracles because I only got involved when asked to prepare a talk and then invited to co-author a book. It turned out to be much more frustrating than simply summarizing the cases. Eucharistic miracles are those occasions when the consecrated bread (Body) begins to bleed or become cardiac heart tissue, or the consecrated wine (Blood) turns to human blood. These have been documented over the history of the Church. I have been critical of the scientific data because I do not think it supports all the claims of the miraculous.

Now, two new papers have been published in forensic science journals, and I am delighted at this development. I’ll tell you why, but first back to my story.

Open to What?

Converting to Catholicism demanded that I rethink everything I thought I knew. People say faith is like leaping off a cliff, and I suppose it was like that. I needed some courage to dive into a way of thinking and a way of life that was unknown to me. I had to re-evaluate what it meant to be Stacy Trasancos, alive in this world, and I had start doing a lot of things differently. Go to Mass. Say my prayers. Etc.

When you enter R.C.I.A. (which means the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults, or in normal words, classes to become Catholic), you learn the basic tenets of faith and are asked to grant intellectual assent to those truths. The classes only last about nine months, so I also studied dogmatic theology. In much the same way I trusted chemistry textbooks to become a chemist, I trusted Church teaching even though I did not understand all the reasons for some of its doctrines.

One of the hardest changes was to give up contraception and become “open to life.” For me that meant being pregnant with a baby, nursing a baby, or miscarrying a baby for the first ten years of being Catholic (pregnant ten times, only five born). I was faithful, but I was also hurting, confused, and angry. As it happens for so many women, being “open to life” meant being “open to death.” That’s a story for another time, but I share this part now for the sake of context.

As my life unrolled with many more challenges typical of raising a large family, my faith grew stronger not weaker. I learned to take one step at a time, and in doing so learned to trust God and trust myself to keep on trusting God and make better decisions. Faith was like walking into the light and away from confusion. I understood myself better, and though it was very hard at times, it was also exhilarating. I will never stop this journey until I die.

Enter the Eucharist

We say in Catholic teaching that the Eucharist is the “source and summit of the Christian life.” We all face death, but we hope for eternal life. Our life is all about practicing virtue and striving for Heaven.

I hope you can appreciate my perspective as a chemist, though. Imagine being a chemist and kneeling at Mass, staring at the priest when he holds up the Host (the communion wafer that becomes the Body) and the Chalice (holding the communion wine), and watching as it becomes the Body and Blood of Christ. The Catholic Church told me to, literally, take a knee (no problem), follow the rubrics (no problem), and stare at bread and wine knowing that the atoms and molecules that composed them went on doing their natural thing as if nothing had changed, yet believing in faith that the species become the Body and Blood of Christ.

If faith is the substance of things unseen (Hebrews 11:1), then that means faith is also the substance of things un-analyzable by mass spectroscopy or nuclear magnetic resonance. No elemental analysis would indicate that bread and wine changed from non-living stuff to the living God. No scientific test would prove that the Lord of the Universe, the Creator of all atoms and particles, was there under the appearances of those species. Right there. With us in every Mass. We believe this because we believe in Christ and trust that when He said, “This is my Body” and “This is my Blood,” then it is so. Period. This is a radical concept.

Converts can attest that it is not some philosophical trend or fashionable phase. Faith is a complete restructuring of life, full of fears, insecurities, joys, blessings, and hope centered on the simplest and deepest truth of faith.

And Now…Enter Eucharistic Miracles

Fast forward about ten years. I was asked to give a talk on Eucharistic miracles by my bishop, then Bishop of Tyler, Bishop Joseph Strickland. He thought it would be a boost to the faith of the people in the diocese to learn about the accounts of cardiac tissue and blood appearing on the consecrated species. I said “no” at first. How could I give a talk on scientific investigations if I had never seen any data? He told me to pray about it, so okay I did. “God, grant me the data.”

I searched the internet for investigative reports to no avail, except for the famous Linoli Report published in a scientific journal in the 1970s. I ordered the book, Eucharistic Miracles of the World, because it seemed a reliable source. It is a catalogue of over 160 miracles produced by the Real Presence Eucharistic Education and Adoration Association. The information on the multi-colored pages of the book are available online as printable posters. The display is called the Vatican International Exhibition of the Eucharistic Miracles of the World. I read the book and agreed to compile a talk. But I told my audiences that I was re-telling the stories in the book because, honestly, that’s all I was doing.

It troubled me because people were so happy with my talks. These are extraordinary claims—bleeding Hosts, wine turning to blood, Hosts turning to living cardiac tissue undergoing agony—and I expected a rigorous set of test results that would at least rule out natural causes so I could be confident about the stories I told. I found no such thing, just lots of conclusions with nothing to support them.

My prayer was answered when my Bishop Strickland visited his family in Sydney, Australia. He said a man just walked up to him outside a chapel—the lead investigator of the 1990s Buenos Aires miracles. He handed over a stack of books containing his commentary and some lab reports, saying that he wanted Bishop Strickland to have them. The bishop mailed them to me in Texas. Thus, it came to be that what I prayed for literally landed on my desk. “Thanks God.”

I was invited by Fr. George Elliott, a priest in our diocese, to co-author a book on the scripture, tradition, and science of the Real Presence, Behold, It Is I (published by TAN Books in 2021). I was to cover Eucharistic miracles. I thought it would give me a chance to dive deeper and surely find the data I had been missing. But when I looked at the books and spent a lot more money buying any resource that might have information, I was more frustrated than ever. No transparency. No methods or explanations and very little data. The conclusions did not follow. They were exaggerated and unsupported. One was flat out fraudulent. Yet popular Catholic personalities repeat them all the time.

I remember thinking, “Great! I get to be the jerk who points this out!”

It would be so much easier to go along with the stories. Here’s a chemist who became Catholic, and she says the science is solid! Hallelujah. But the science isn’t solid.

I could not in good conscience repeat stories knowing they were exaggerations. So, in Behold I explained why the data was inconclusive and urged the reader to put faith in Christ not scientists. Fr. Elliott, my co-author, and TAN Books agreed to publish my critical analysis with the assurance, “We are after truth, after all.”

But I took heat for it. People are 1) suspicious that I am biased, or 2) assume I doubt that miracles happen, or 3) accuse me of doubting the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. No! No! And no! I simply refuse to repeat stories when I know there is no data to support the claims. Catholics are supposed to show reverence for the Eucharist (obviously). It would be most irreverent of me to ‘use’ something so sacred to gain attention for myself. That’s a no-brainer, folks.

Enter Dr. Kelly Kearse

While researching for the book, however, I found the work of Dr. Kelly Kearse. He is an immunologist who trained at Johns Hopkins, worked as a principal investigator at the NIH’s cancer and immunology branch, and served as editor for a Methods in Molecular Biology textbook. He is a faithful Catholic who served as a Eucharistic Minister for over 20 years and now teaches science at Knoxville Catholic High School in Tennessee. (Spoiler: he’s the one who wrote the new forensic science papers. Keep reading…)

He was consulted about the Shroud of Turin and, much to my appreciation, urged caution with the interpretation of serological blood type analysis. You may have heard that the Shroud and the Eucharistic miracles all test as type AB, the rarest in the world (<5% of the population). I found his paper, “A Critical (Re)evaluation of the Shroud of Turin Blood Data,” at the Shroud of Turin website and cited him in Behold, explaining that old or contaminated samples can give false positives for AB blood type. This is just one example of what I mean when I say the data was inconclusive because natural causes were not sufficiently ruled out.

Now, he has published two new papers in forensic science journals.

In them, he not only raises even more concerns about the claims, but he also lays out a way to analyze the DNA across all samples to determine if they come from a single source. Think about it. If the ancient burial cloths (Shroud of Turin) and the blood from Eucharistic miracles are all from one body, that of Jesus Christ, then they would all have the same DNA. If it turns out that the DNA is all different (or not even there), then it calls into question all the alleged miracles.

Crisis Magazine published an article I wrote today. Let me give the links:

• My Crisis Magazine article is “Exaggerations and Eucharistic Miracles.”

• Kearse’s first paper, “The relics of Jesus and Eucharistic miracles: scientific analysis of shared AB blood type,” was published in November in the journal of Forensic Science, Medicine and Pathology.

• Kearse’s second paper, “Scientific Analysis of Eucharistic Miracles: Importance of a Standardization in Evaluation,” was published, also in November, in the journal of Forensic Science and Research.

If you are interested, please read these carefully. It is a lot of information, but to me it is a breath of fresh air. Kearse writes with admirable scientific clarity.

Doubting Data Not Christ

On this Substack, I write about writing, the backstory of what I publish elsewhere, so to speak. As I said at the beginning of this post: I don't really care about Eucharistic miracles, at least not as the basis of my faith. My faith is intact with or without them, and I know many Catholics feel the same way.

We are not obligated as Catholics to accept them as true. In cases where the bishops launched investigations and approved them for belief, Catholics may conclude that they are real, but we may also conclude they are not.

What I care about is reverence and truth for the Holy Eucharist.

While I completely believe that the Lord of the Universe could work a miracle anytime and anywhere, I am unconvinced that all of the claims of bleeding Hosts and divine DNA are true. I do not doubt Christ or God’s ability to work miracles. I doubt the scientific investigators who have not been transparent with their data. As I said in Behold, the data would not hold up in a court of law, much less a scientific journal. Kearse, on the other hand, not only published in two scientific journals, but he also published a protocol for further testing. So…let’s go!

This Series

I am going to work through the inaccuracies and exaggerations one at a time as an effort to raise awareness and hopefully stop the exaggerations that could mislead others. The project is called “Eucharistic Miracle Data Problems.”

Hopefully an investigation team will form and follow Dr. Kearse’s protocol so that all samples still available can be tested genetically. Then we will have much better data to decide about miracles. I hope you’ll follow along. Until next time…