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| Though His glory be obscured, our God will not abandon the place where He has chosen to dwell. |
Long long ago as a rookie seminarian just finished with first year in Rome, I went to Siena to learn Italian. Better late than never. For four weeks I lived with an Italian family, went to class five days a week, and learned how to deal with a heat wave when there is no air conditioning anywhere. I also came to love Siena.
In one of the third-string churches in town, I found a flyer at the entrance to a side chapel where a strange monstrance was enshrined. Reading it in my newly-improved Italian, I learned that all unprepared, I had discovered the Eucharistic Miracle of Siena.
It was the day before the Assumption in 1730, and some thieves had stolen a ciborium and the sacrament it contained from the Basilica of San Francesco. On the feast, the theft was discovered, and celebrations were cut off and replaced by prayers for the recovery of the sacrament. Some days later, the sacred hosts were found in the bottom of an alms box in another church. In solemn procession, they were returned to the Basilica. Fouled with dust, dirt, and cobwebs because of their hiding place, they were unfit for consumption. But a funny thing happened to those hosts: nothing. They remained intact and did not deteriorate at all. Years passed; the bishop put some new, unconsecrated hosts in identical circumstances, and after a short period found them rotten or eaten by worms, whereas the recovered hosts remained fresh. Decades and even centuries have passed, tests have been performed as technologies were developed, and the sacred hosts remain intact and fresh to this day.
Now, when you hear of a Eucharistic miracle, you likely think of a broken host that bleeds and takes on characteristics of human flesh, like Bolsena-Orvieto, or Santarem. Those are remarkable and dramatic and continue to hold up under scrutiny and skepticism over the centuries, to our own time. But the miracle of Siena is moving in a different way, at least for me.
What is remarkable here is that the sacred species did NOT change, not at all. It continues to resemble the simple bread as which it began, with only two ingredients, wheat flour and water. The marvel is what does not happen that ordinarily would happen to anything so constituted.
The thieves were clearly after the valuable ciborium, likely silver gilt, and probably managed to get some cash for it from an unscrupulous dealer. Its holy contents, however, the very body and blood, soul and divinity of our Lord, they threw away.
But the local church, the priests and people of Siena, prayed for the return of the Lord in His sacramental presence, and were rewarded with His safe return. Jesus in His Eucharistic presence is vulnerable; that is why we say He is ‘exposed’ for adoration and require that adorers be watchers for His safety even as He watch over them.
What God consecrates, He transforms permanently. What Jesus sanctifies, He does not abandon. The Sienese knew this and sacrificed their time and prayer on behalf of their suffering Savior, who then rewarded them with a manifestation of His abiding fidelity.
The Eucharist is unique among the seven sacraments of salvation in that it is the only one that you can place on a table and point toward, the only one that remains when every person leaves the room. The others occur in individual human beings, body and soul, where the work of His sanctifying grace is transforming. In some of the sacraments, Baptism and Holy Order, this change is permanent and irreversible. What God has sanctified at the request of the Church remains transformed; the change abides.
The life that God the Father has poured into you at Baptism, often at the request of your parents and always with the invocation of a sacred minister, remains holy and glorious. He will not revoke that grace even if the life so changed be left to languish in the dustbin; the glory of the Son in whom He is well pleased abides and will abide.
Similarly, configured to Jesus Christ the High Priest by Holy Order, human lives remain vulnerable to the vicissitudes of sin, their own and that of others. But even if the men so changed should forget that holiness, still their priesthood abides. And if the Church herself should cast them away, that sacred and sanctifying reality still abides, ready and waiting to be retrieved from the detritus and cleaned of cobwebs and clinging filth.
God does not forget His sanctified gifts. When the Church remembers and clamors for their restoration, He rewards that fidelity with an extraordinary manifestation of his own abiding and faithful presence, even and especially when the vessels be fragile.
Maybe a trip to Siena in 2030 to mark the tricentennial of nothing happening to the Eucharistic species that had been so carelessly cast aside would be a suitable pilgrimage and petition for the revelation of God’s fidelity in what man has smirched and squandered, and His own Church has left to rot. Better late than never.
Monsignor Smith
