A New Appreciation for the Eucharist
Diane Comishen, from North York in Ontario, Canada, had an endoscopy performed. She had been suffering from great pain in her stomach. The diagnosis was a severe gastric ulcer. She was scheduled for more tests, and then possibly surgery.
Within the next several days, she learned of a healing Mass to be performed by a visiting priest. She attended. After she received Communion, she went to the foot of the altar and was prayed over, as were others who were there with various illnesses.
She was in church for three hours, but the healing service took only twenty minutes. The rest of the time was for the Mass itself, prayer and adoration of the Blessed Sacrament.
The whole experience gave her an appreciation for the Eucharist that was deeper and more profound than she ever had, even though she had been going to Mass daily before this.
A few days later, another endoscopy was performed. The doctor was incredulous. He declared that it was, “impossible,” but that the ulcer had vanished. There was no sign of it left.
Source: Proctor, Sr. Patricia, OSC, 201 Inspirational Stories of the Eucharist (Spokane, Washington, The Franciscan Monastery of St. Clare, 2004) p. 261-62.
The Miracle Chapel
St. Peter Julian Eymard founded the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament in Paris in 1856. In 1858, this small society moved to a small chapel, where the Eucharist was exposed for worship. Fr. Eymard soon had a name for it, the ”miracle chapel,” so called because of the many miracles that took place before the Real Presence.
Source: Lord, Bob and Penny, This is My Body, This is My Blood, Miracles of the Eucharist, Book II (Publisher: Journeys of Faith, 1994) p. 225.
Tixtla, Mexico
It was October 21, 2006, at the Parish of Saint Martin of Tours, in Tixtla, Mexico. The pastor, Father Leopoldo Roque, had invited Father Raymundo Reyna Esteban to lead a spiritual retreat for his parishioners. As Father Leopoldo and another priest were distributing Communion, assisted by a religious sister who was to the left of Father Raymundo, this latter one turns towards him with the “pix” containing the Sacred Particles, looking at Father with eyes filled with tears, an incident that immediately attracted the attention of the celebrant: the Host that she had taken to give Communion to a lady parishioner had begun to effuse a reddish substance.
The Bishop of the place, Most Reverend Alejo Zavala Castro, then convened a Theological Commission of investigation and, in October 2009, he invited Doctor Ricardo Castañón Gómez, to take on the leadership of the program of scientific research whose purpose was in fact that of verifying the said event.
October 12, 2013, H.E. Most Rev. Alejo Zavala Castro, Bishop of the Diocese of Chilpancingo-Chilapa, announced through a Pastoral Letter the recognition of the Eucharistic Miracle.
Source: “The Eucharistic Miracles of the World,” a Vatican international exhibition, as reported by The Real Presence Eucharistic Education and Adoration and Association, http://www.therealpresence.org/eucharst/mir/english_pdf/Tixtla1.pdf.
Therese Neumann
Therese Neumann (1898-1962) was a German mystic and stigmatist. Various priests and prelates witnessed her reception of Communion in an extraordinary manner. The Host would appear on her tongue without the priest actually placing it there. This occurred on numerous occasions.
Source: Cruz, Caroll, Eucharistic Miracles (Charlotte, North Carolina, Tan Books, 2010) p.264.
The Light, the Face, the Peace
Lawrence Chlebik from McAlester, Oklahoma had just become a Eucharistic minister. He had a problem, however. He wondered how he could be a true minister of the Eucharist when he himself still had doubts about the Real Presence.
One Sunday, he was called to be a Eucharistic minister. He prayed very hard for Jesus to show him how He could be there in a little white host while He was still everywhere else in the world.
He was up in the sanctuary when the priest consecrated the Host. As the priest held It above the chalice, he saw a light come from the chalice and envelop the Host. Then he saw the profile of Jesus in the Host. He stared at it, not believing his eyes. He remembers that a strong feeling of peace then came over him.
After that, his doubts were gone.
Source: Proctor, Sr. Patricia, OSC, 201 Inspirational Stories of the Eucharist (Spokane, Washington, The Franciscan Monastery of St. Clare, 2004) p. 76.
Mother Marie Adele Garnier
Mother Marie Adela Garnier was born on August 15, 1838, in Grancey-le-Chateau, in northeastern France.
Early in her life, she had a vision of Jesus in a Host given to her during Communion, which affected her for the rest of her life. In 1885, while engaged at a church in Montmarte, she established perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament there. In 1898, she founded Adorers of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Montmarte, an order of nuns dedicated to perpetual adoration.
In 1901, the Law of Associations created certain repressions that spurred her to move the order to England. They settled in London, at Tyburn. It was there, in the 16th and 17th centuries that 105 priests, religious and laypeople were executed for being Catholic during the Protestant Reformation.
Toward the end of her life, in 1923, she had another impactful vision in the Eucharist, this one of the living heart of Jesus. In June of 1924, she passed from this life.
Last year, the Church agreed to open the Cause for her canonization.
A biography of her spiritual life was published several years earlier, in 2012. It was in that book that an account was given of yet another vision with the Eucharist. This one came from a letter she had written herself, to Fr. Charles Sauve. She related the following:
“At the moment in which the priest took a particle of the Holy Host and put it into the chalice I raised my eyes to adore and to contemplate the holy particle…The fingers of the priest held not a white particle but a particle of striking red, the colour of blood and luminous at the same time … The fingers of the priest were red on the right of the particle, as from a blood stain that seemed still wet.”
She describes the Host as “striking red” and “luminous at the same time,” signifying perhaps, both the sacrifice of the Cross and the resurrection that followed, all in one vision of His Being.
Source: “Nun who Witnessed Eucharistic Miracles on Path to Sainthood,” Rezac, Mary, Catholic News Agency, October 14, 2016,
http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/nun-who-witnessed-multiple-eucharistic-miracles-on-path-to-sainthood-66333/; and “Vatican Opens Cause of Nun who Saw Host turn Blood-Red, Caldwell, Simon, Catholic Herald, October 3, 2016, http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2016/10/03/vatican-opens-cause-of-nun-who-saw-host-turn-blood-red/.
Anne Costa
Anne Costa, from Baldwinsville, New York, had been raised Catholic. As a child she used to even pretend she was at Mass using a cracker and grape juice.
Like so many in recent times, by the time she went to college, she fell away from the Church. She began to consult a minister for a New Age church who practiced psychic channeling. She began to take classes on divination and psychic healing, and got introduced to occult rituals that, as she assessed it later, amounted to witchcraft.
She then became engaged and decided to be married in the Catholic Church. She took all the necessary preparatory steps but, along the way, mentioned to no one her involvement with the New Age Church.
The day of her wedding arrived. The ceremony was being held in the very church she had attended as she was growing up and, as she walked down the aisle, she was seized with a “profound restlessness” that only subsided once the consecration had occurred.
During the early years of her marriage, she continued with the New Age church and got more and more entangled in occult practices. Many times, she went back to Mass, but would experience a severe uneasiness, the same as she had felt on her wedding day, that she could not go through with a reception of the Eucharist, but would literally run out of the church each time, in tears.
She and her husband then battled with infertility. In her efforts to have a child with her husband, she suffered through three operations and a miscarriage before finally becoming pregnant in 1995.
At the same time, she was advancing in her New Age church. She was about to begin taking classes to be a leader in the church. She was sitting in an occult class one day when she was “filled with an overwhelming urge” to return to the Catholic Church. The “incredible force of conviction” within her was so strong that it left her feeling afraid. She says that, “there was no confusion about the message my heart received. My soul and the soul of my unborn infant child were in jeopardy.”
That Sunday, she went back to Mass. She was eight months pregnant, “alone and confused.” She ended up returning to the Church wholeheartedly that day. She became an almost daily receiver of the Blessed Sacrament and learned to appreciate again the truth of the Eucharist that she first experienced as a child.
Source: Proctor, Sr. Patricia, OSC, 201 Inspirational Stories of the Eucharist (Spokane, Washington, The Franciscan Monastery of St. Clare, 2004) p. 10-12.
St. Arey
St. Arey, who died in 604 A.D., was the Bishop of Gap, a diocese in modern-day France. Probus was a contemporary, who was also his biographer. Probus often visited the church at night to find St. Arey in prayer before the tabernacle. Often, he found the church bathed in a heavenly light and St. Arey lifted high into the air.
Source: Cruz, Caroll, Eucharistic Miracles (Charlotte, North Carolina, Tan Books, 2010) p.290.
Pezilla-la-Riviere
The years 1792 to 1800 were hard ones for Catholics in France. The “little terror” took place in 1792. The “great terror” occurred between 1793 and 1794. They were part of an effort to “dechristianize” the country. Priests and bishops were actively hunted down and either exiled or killed, many by the guillotine, churches were closed, statues smashed, crucifixes were broken, relics burned and worship forbidden.
In the little town of Pezilla-la-Riviere, Fr. Jacques Perone was reluctant to slip over the border into Spain, but he was finally persuaded to do so when the situation became urgent. On his journey out of France, he suddenly remembered something. He had left several Hosts in the tabernacle of his church. He imagined the sacrilege that would be performed when they were discovered.
Fortunately, they were not immediately discovered. Several months later, a new mayor was elected. The prior one had been quite hostile to the church. The new one, Jean Banafos was a faithful Catholic. When asked, he allowed the church to be opened and the Hosts retrieved.
There were five of them, one large and four small. He actually took the large one himself, placed in a wooden box, locked with a key and placed under the floor of his house. The four were given to Rosa Llorens. She placed them in a glass cup with a lid, which she put inside a red silk purse and kept in her house.
After seven years, the persecution ended. Fr. Perone made his way back from Spain. The Hosts were located and their receptacles opened. All expected to find only dust, as unconsecrated hosts can be expected to decompose in about six months. All five, however, were as white as the day the were hidden.
A special monstrance was built to house all five Hosts and they became the reason for pilgrims and tourists to find their way to the little town. In 1893, a new church and a new monstrance were built to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the miracle.
In 1930, a new tabernacle was built to better protect the Hosts and they were moved. From this point, the Hosts decomposed in a normal manner. The Lord had determined to leave for reasons only He knows.
Source: Lord, Bob and Penny, This is My Body, This is My Blood, Miracles of the Eucharist, Book II (Publisher: Journeys of Faith, 1994) p. 191-98.
The Pulsating Eucharist
Robert Benson was at St. Margaret Mary Church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It was a Friday night. There was to be a Mass, Benediction and Eucharistic Adoration. It was the early 1990s. At some point, he lost track of things taking place around him and does not even remember the O Salutaris, the hymn used during a Benediction to open a period of adoration. He also does not remember how everyone had left.
What he does remember is the Eucharist, getting bigger, with circles of light emanating from It and then radiating out into the church and right past him. This pulsating and dispersal of these circles of light continued for quite some time.
The next day, still not knowing whether he could be sure of what he had perceived, he chanced to pick up a flyer about a Medjugorje conference that was soon to be held at Notre Dame. In a short description about one of the speakers, the flyer indicated that he was to speak on a pulsating Eucharist experience he had encountered. In his case, the waves of light could be felt to physically push him as they rushed past.
Robert had his corroboration.