Sokolka, Poland
On October 12, 2008, at the church dedicated to Saint Anthony of Sokółka, the Holy Mass of 8:30 AM is celebrated by a young vicar, Filip Zdrodowski. During Communion, unknowingly, a Host falls from the hands of one of the priests. The priest picked it up and placed it in a vessel filled with water, in the tabernacle. After Mass, the vessel containing the host was placed in a safe present in the sacristy.
On October 19, 2008, after opening the safe one could clearly see a red stain on the Host that had fallen, which with the naked eye immediately gave the impression of being a bloodstain.
On October 29, 2008, the vessel containing the Host was transferred to the tabernacle of the chapel of the rectory. The next day the Host was removed from the water contained in the vessel and placed on a corporal inside the tabernacle.
In January of 2009 the Curia of Białystok asked two eminent specialists in pathologoical anatomy of the Medical University of Białystok, Professor Maria Elżbieta Sobaniec-Łotowska and Professor Stanisław Sulkowski, to analyze the samples of the bloodstained Host.
The two scientists of conducted their own independent investigations. Professor Sulkowski, did not even know that the sample which he was examining came from a Host. For her part, Professor Sobaniec-Łotowska, was initially convinced that she was examining a blood clot. In the report that they ultimately issued, however, they stated that, “the material analyzed is composed in all respects of cardiac muscular tissue”.
They also found the phenomenon of segmentation, namely damage to the fibers of the tissue of the cardiac muscle in the section where communicating junctions [structures characteristic of the cardiac muscle] are found, and the phenomenon of fragmentation. Such damages are visible in the form of numerous small lesions. These alterations can be observed only in fibers that were not necrotic, that is alive, and show signs of the fast spasms of the cardiac muscle typical of the extreme phase preceding death.
The professors discovered also other unexplainable elements. “The Host remained in water for a long time and it remained in the corporal for an even longer period of time. The tissue that appeared on the Host would therefore have had to undergo the process of autolysis, namely the process of self-destruction by the action of the intracellular enzymes; in the material analyzed there were not however observed traces of these alterations!”
Moreover, the cardiac tissue was found joined to remnants of the consecrated Host in an inseparable manner. The fragments which composed the Host were tightly interconnected to the fibers of the human tissue; they penetrated each other, as if a fragment of “bread” had suddenly transformed itself in “body”. It is not possible to manipulate an event of this type. No one, absolutely no one, would have been able to do it. To Professor Sobaniec-Łotowska, this fact was of especially notable importance.
A consecrated Host had changed to heart tissue, showing signs of stress just prior to death. But it had changed only in part. It was part Host, part heart tissue. And it had not deteriorated as it should have. This particular Eucharistic miracle contained not simply one extraordinary feature, but four.
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/Sokolka1.pdf;
http://www.therealpresence.org/eucharst/mir/english_pdf/Sokolka2.pdf; http://www.therealpresence.org/eucharst/mir/english_pdf/Sokolka3.pdf.