Sanctuary of the Most Holy Miracle

Image: Wikimedia Commons

In 1247, a woman of Santarém, desperate over her husband's unfaithfulness, went to a sorceress who demanded as her fee a consecrated Host. The woman received Communion at the church of Saint Stephen, slipped the Host into her veil, and fled; before she reached home, the linen was stained with blood. Terrified, she hid the Host in a chest, and that night light streamed from it while the couple watched; they repented, confessed, and the bleeding Host was carried back in procession. In 1340, the wax vessel that held it was found broken, the Host enclosed instead in a crystal ampoule no one had made, and in that ampoule, within a silver monstrance, it remains visible above the altar to this day: one of the oldest Eucharistic miracles still venerated, in a church renamed for it, where Saint Francis Xavier came to pray before sailing for India. Today's date carries a second radiance: on October 13, 1917, some forty kilometers away at Fátima, seventy thousand people watched the sun dance, in the same small corner of Portugal where heaven has twice insisted on being taken seriously.