Pints With Aquinas - Scientific EVIDENCE for Eucharistic Miracles? w/ Fr. Terry Donahue

Episode Date: December 29, 2020

I'll be chatting with Fr. Terry Donahue about the scientific proof we may have for Eucharistic miracles. I will be taking questions 🙋 from Super Chatters and Patrons (ask here, Patrons: https://www.patreon.com/posts/questio...) SPONSORS  EL Investments: https://www.elinvestments.net/pints  Exodus 90: https://exodus90.com/mattfradd/  Hallow: http://hallow.app/mattfradd  STRIVE: https://www.strive21.com/ GIVING Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mattfradd This show (and all the plans we have in store) wouldn't be possible without you. I can't thank those of you who support me enough. Seriously! Thanks for essentially being a co-producer coproducer of the show. LINKS Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/matt-fradd FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ SOCIAL Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd Twitter: https://twitter.com/mattfradd Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd MY BOOKS Does God Exist: https://www.amazon.com/Does-God-Exist-Socratic-Dialogue-ebook/dp/B081ZGYJW3/ref=sr_1_9?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586377974&sr=8-9 Marian Consecration With Aquinas: https://www.amazon.com/Marian-Consecration-Aquinas-Growing-Closer-ebook/dp/B083XRQMTF/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=fradd&qid=1586379026&sr=8-4 The Porn Myth: https://www.ignatius.com/The-Porn-Myth-P1985.aspx CONTACT Book me to speak: https://www.mattfradd.com/speakerrequestform

G'day and welcome to Pints with Aquinas. My name is Matt Fradd and it's lovely to have you. If you are new to the channel, do us a favor and click subscribe and then that bell button. That way you won't miss all of the fantastic content we're pumping out weekly for your spiritual benefit and enjoyment, hopefully. Today I'll be interviewing Father Terry Donoghue about Eucharistic miracles. And provided all of the technology works well, because we've already had a couple of glitches, I think it's going to be an amazing show. So buckle up. Before we get into the show, I want to say thank you to Exodus 90. And I want to let you know about who they are. Exodus 90 is this great aesthetical program for men who want to take their spiritual life to the next level. Everyone will be starting

on January 4th of this year. And so you want to go check them out if you're at all interested in doing it. I did it last year and it was very difficult. I'll be honest. You've got to give up things like alcohol and snacks in between meals. You've got to pray for an hour a day. You meet with your brotherhood once a week. It's a powerful way to take your spiritual life to the next level. It really is. I highly recommend it. So if you go to exodus90.com slash Matt Fradd, there's a little page where you can put in your information, like email, and I'll send you more info about it if you're at least open to doing it. It's a 90-day Catholic spiritual exercise for men.

exodus90.com slash Matt Fradd. That's exodus90.com slash Matt Fradd. That's Exodus90.com slash Matt Fradd. Father Terry, lovely to have you on the show. It's great to be here, Matt. For those of our viewers who aren't familiar with you, tell us a bit about yourself. Well, I'm a Catholic priest, a member of the Companions of the Cross, a community that started in Ottawa, Canada. I've got a strong background in science and technology. I studied computer science at MIT back in the 80s and then was a computer programmer working in Silicon Valley for about five years, and then I discerned a call to the priesthood, and I've been doing a lot of formation of laypeople and seminarians over the past 20 years as a priest. Very good.

And today we're going to be talking about Eucharistic miracles in particular. Maybe for those who are watching this channel who have absolutely no idea what the Eucharist is, or much less what a Eucharistic miracle is, maybe just kind of let us know what we're going to be talking about today. Sure. I mean, I'll start with maybe what normally happens at Mass, and then maybe I'll define what a Eucharistic miracle is according to Catholic teaching. So the Catholic faith teaches that during the consecration at Mass, the bread of the Eucharistic host, kind of a host shaped like this usually, the substance of that bread is completely transformed into the body of Christ. And the substance of the wine that's in the chalice is transformed into the blood of Christ.

But the appearance of the bread and the wine remain. And we call this change in the substance transubstantiation. Trans means change and substance. What something is changes while the appearance, what it maybe looks like or feels like or tastes like, that all remains the same. I like to say even under a scanning electron microscope, it will look the same. So transubstantiation is a supernatural act. It's something that's beyond nature. It's something that only God can do. So Christ is doing this through the ministry of the priest. But it's not technically a miracle when this happens because there's no change in the appearance. It's beyond the grasp of the senses. So a miracle in the strict sense of the term is an act that God does that is observable in some

way. It's under the grasp of the senses is one phrase in the Catholic encyclopedia definition of miracle. So we can look at examples of this. Christ performed miraculous healings. So you have the leper being healed, paralytics, the blind being able to see, the lame walking, even raising the dead like Jairus' daughter or Lazarus. So there are the miraculous healings of Jesus, and then there's also the dominion over the forces of nature. So here, Jesus is walking on water. He's multiplying loaves and fishes. He changes water into wine and calms the storms, things like this, which are also all observable, right? These are signs of Jesus's power. And it led people to believe that he was the Messiah. He was kind of checking off all the

list of things the Messiah ought to be doing. And beyond that, that Jesus was God. So some of the miracles that he worked are really demonstrations of divine power. And this is what leads us to, you know, what a miracle is. You can see it happening or you can hear it happening. So a Eucharistic miracle must happen, therefore, after transubstantiation. So after there's a change in the substance, there's this additional supernatural act that changes the appearance of the Eucharist into something other than bread and wine. So actually, St. Thomas Aquinas, since we're on Pints with Aquinas, we've got him a few times. It changes the appearance of the Eucharist into something other than bread and wine. So actually, St. Thomas Aquinas, since we're on pints with Aquinas,

we got him a few times. He wrote this in the Summa Theologica, Part 3, Question 76. It sometimes happens that such apparition comes about not merely by a change wrought in the beholders, in other words, not just something people saw, like an internal vision, but by an appearance which really exists outwardly. It is beheld by everyone under such an appearance, and it remains so, not for an hour,

but for a considerable time. While the dimensions remain the same as before, there is a miraculous change wrought in the other, what he calls accidents, which would be the appearance, the shape, the color, so that flesh or blood or even a child is seen. So that section of the Summa, he's actually describing what we would consider a Eucharistic miracle.

There you go. I never actually read that part before. That's cool. He recognized that. I can even teach you something about Aquinas. Oh, believe me, many people can teach me many things about Aquinas. All right, fantastic. Well, did you want to continue or should we? Did you have more to say? Well, I think that defines it pretty well. I guess the next question is, what is the role of Eucharistic miracles in the Catholic faith? Yeah, go ahead.

I'm sorry. We're going to obviously approach this topic a lot from the science perspective. I'm looking forward to getting into specific Eucharistic miracles. But I had a question maybe having to do with faith, and that is what's the role and value of Eucharistic miracles in the Catholic faith? Right. So Catholic belief about the Eucharist is not based on Eucharistic miracles, right? We believe that Jesus is present in the Eucharist because Jesus taught that in Scripture, and it was handed on through apostolic tradition. And, you know, we have the magisterium of the Catholic Church that gives us this teaching, and then we receive it by faith. So a good scripture for this is Romans 10, 17. Faith

comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes by the preaching of Christ. So we're not going to have any new public revelation before Jesus comes back again. Right. So that we have the teachings of the church. Sometimes it's called the deposit of faith. And that includes what we believe about the Eucharist. So what this means is Eucharistic miracles are not part of the deposit of faith. Yeah. Explain what that means and why and what about public revelation being binding and not private sort of revelation or private miracles. Right. So there's a distinction between public revelation and private revelation.

Public revelation is that which was given by Jesus and the apostles in a public way to everyone. And that the role of the church is to preserve that teaching and interpret it and then pass it on down through the ages. And so that's what we're required to believe. And there's different levels of teaching. Some things are infallible, like dogmas or definitive teachings. Some things are open to, you know, are just ordinary teachings. So, you know, there's possibility for that to change in a significant way.

But the bottom line is that that, and only that, is what Catholics are obliged to believe. So to make this clear, there's no Catholic right now that has to believe any particular alleged Eucharistic miracle. So you could be a good Catholic,

standing with the church, good sitting in the church, and be like, I don't see enough evidence to believe any of these things, and that would be okay. Exactly. That is absolutely true. You are free to make up your own mind in every individual case of a Eucharistic miracle, and you could reject them all and be a canonized saint someday. How can maybe – can this be problematic for the faith? I could see somebody maybe obsessing over Eucharistic miracles or making that basically the be-all and end-all. I don't know.

Is there any way it can be problematic or is it only helpful? Well, maybe before I talk about the problems, maybe I can talk about the value of it, because we haven't kind of gotten it yet. So, you know, miracles give us evidence that the supernatural is real. So St. Augustine actually writes miracles work by Jesus are divine works and they raise the human mind above the visible things that we can see to understanding what is divine, things that we can't see. So kind of a demonstration of this supernatural order. So today, there's a common worldview called naturalism, okay? There's different versions of it, but the strongest version of it, hard naturalism, says that the natural order is everything that there is. There's nothing supernatural at all. There's just the physical laws, there's the initial conditions of the universe, and you just kind of

wind it forward, and you can sort of predict, at least probabilistically, everything that could happen. And it's just particles in motion. Now, this gets paired up with something called scientism, which is a worldview where science is then all powerful because the empirical sciences can measure everything. So it's the only tool that you need to resolve every question that's important. Now, I have a strong background in science. I'm really pro-science, pro-scientific method. But this hard, eliminative naturalism that we're talking about here, and this view that, you know, all of the things that we can see are just the natural world, that's all that there is. Well, that is really a distortion of science.

That's not what science teaches. You can't conclude. That's a philosophical presupposition, right? It's a worldview that happens before science. And in fact, this worldview of hard materialism and naturalism eliminates personal identity. You don't really exist. You know, that's just kind of a construct that we made societally, right? There's no dignity of the human person in that worldview. There's no moral value or agency. And it even eliminates any motive or purpose for doing science in the first place. Like if you ask a scientist,

do you think it's good to do science? And they say yes of course it is and they'll talk about it for 20 minutes but then you say well aha you just done philosophy there you think that science has value and so well no no no well which is it right is science valuable or not and if science is valuable then why it's really hard to ground science, the pursuit of truth through science, with hard naturalism. Yeah, okay. So one of the benefits of these Eucharistic miracles is it would disprove naturalism if they're authentic. That's right. It's a sign that the natural order is not all that there is. So Pope John Paul II actually wrote a little book about this called Wonders and Signs.

And he says that, you know, this miracles can show us that there must be more than this, that there's more to existence, that we're made for God, and that God gives the natural order this transcendent meaning, a meaning beyond nature. Because sometimes nature, even though it's good and science reveals a lot about it, and I love the natural order, the natural order can also distract us and become an obsession. Like St. Augustine says this in his confessions. He says, created things held me back far from you. Those things that have no being, were they not in you? So he sees this contradiction, like all these created things were made by God, but somehow they

can keep us from God if we focus only on them. And then in his confessions, he described how the supernatural order like broke through for him. You called, you shouted, you broke through my deafness, you flared, you blazed, like you banished my blindness. I tasted you and I hunger and thirst for more. That's the supernatural order breaking in to the natural order. Now, for Augustine, that happened in this interior experience of conversion. But in a miracle, it happens in an exterior way that's visible to the senses. So that's really powerful, I think. And in the case of Eucharistic miracles, it focuses in even more. I want to get to how it is the church investigates whether or not an alleged Eucharistic miracle is authentic.

But I would imagine here many people might stop you and say, OK, before you even get to that, you should realize that all different religions or many religions have accounts of the miraculous weird stuff happening. You know, it's kind of a way to kind of dismiss the evidence before it's been put forth. So what's your kind of response to that? Sure. Well, I think it's absolutely true that there's miracle claims in most religions, any that has like a theistic view where God can intervene in the world. So I've looked into these. In fact, behind me on my shelf here, I have a set of books about miracles in non-Christian religions, right? Because I was like, okay, I need to not just look at the Christian view. And my experience is that looking at these miracles, they have some similarities to what we might call legends

or kind of the pious legends about the saints that you might read. Okay. I'm not really sure whether that actually happened or not. They are often not very well sourced or accredited. And there really isn't a lot of hard science backing them up or critical evaluation of them is what I found. What's interesting, though, is that. Sorry to cut you off. What's interesting, too, though, is even if all this objection would show is that God does not only perform miracles in a Christian context. I mean, but but if if if miracles in other religions do exist,

that's certainly not proof of naturalism. So if anything, it gets you one step closer to the Christian world. It would mean that God is generous with kind of doing these wonder-working signs even outside the bounds of Christianity or Catholicism. And I certainly think that that does happen. But there is a danger with focusing on these miracles, just to get back to that briefly, that they can be viewed as like they can puff us up with pride if God's working miracles through me. But, you know, Matthew 7, Jesus says, you know, people will come at the judgment and say, did we not do wonders in your name? And he says, depart from me, you evildoers, right?

So we should be really careful not to think just because I have some gift like healing or something like that, that I'm a saint. And the other danger, I think, is that we can become too credulous if we're just accepting every miracle story that comes along without any, we can end up believing false things or just illusions. And this is where I'd like to highlight the value of a healthy skepticism, right? So I like skeptics. I'm a skeptic. If there are any skeptics out there who are watching right now who feel left out of the church somehow, we want to like welcome you with your hard-nosed pursuit of the truth and you know with your evidence-based reasoning not in spite of it like we need that in the catholic church because you

know we we need to uh avoid these illegitimate claims and like get rid of them i mean how much fake news is that are out there these days right If you're not skeptical about what you're hearing and seeing, even claims or reports, well, then you're going to be ill-informed, right? And we need to ask these really good questions. And skeptics are great at asking questions, right? They're not afraid to ask stuff, but it's like a five-year-old, right? Why, why, why? Prove it, you know, or like St. Thomas Aquinas, right right he asked all these questions in the summa so I think that's the the can avoid these dangers skepticism alone isn't enough to like get it all the truth you need to you know find some answers not just ask endless questions right but we want to have an open mind and then we want to as G G.K. Chesterton said, like open your mouth to eat, you shut it on something that's solid, right?

Yeah, an open mouth is – what does he say? An open mind is like an open mouth, good for closing in on something that's solid, yeah. That's what it's for, and that's how our minds should be working when we have this healthy skepticism, but an openness to things that are extreme possibilities, right? Like miracles are rare. I can see that it would be like a really bad idea for the church to authenticate a miracle that it's not certain about, or at least morally certain about, because it makes you look really bad if the thing's been disproved. So I imagine the church has a pretty thorough way of investigating these things that might surprise some people, but I suppose that would be my next

question. How does the church investigate Eucharistic miracles? Sure. I mean, of course, in the history of the church, the method of investigation has grown with the times. But even in the 1500s, there's the Lambertini criterion, which were set up for evaluating healing miracles. And basically, those criteria have been updated throughout the history of the church. In fact, one professor in Kingston University, I guess it was, wrote a book called Medical Miracles. It's back here on my shelf somewhere, where she looked into the process. She actually got access into the Vatican archives of the Congregation for Causes of the Saints, and she was going through all of these things.

And she concluded that the criteria have been updated throughout history to take into account the best science of the time. And that really surprised me. I wasn't expecting that. She's not a Catholic. She's not a theist, you know. But here's the process as it is now, just for miracles in general. So the local bishop is the one to launch an investigation into anything happening in his diocese. And he has the authority to declare something a miracle.

So he normally appoints a team of experts to gather the data and study the records and the events. And this includes theological experts and medical or scientific experts. So you have molecular biologists sometimes, cardiologists, experts in tissues or blood in the case of Eucharistic miracles. And in most cases, they observe it over a period of time. They could take it to a laboratory for microscopic analysis or testing of blood and tissues. And then they're trying to find a natural explanation. Essentially, the methodology is that the church presumes that there's a natural explanation at the beginning.

Most situations appearing to be extraordinary actually turn out to be something that's the result of a natural cause. The general principle of investigation is that you prefer the simpler explanation over the more complex one. And St. Thomas Aquinas does the same thing, right, in his Summa, that, you know, what can be accounted for by a few principles, don't, you know, don't assume it's been caused by a complex set of principles. Don't assume it's been caused by a complex set of principles. So that's basically, after this study by the panel of experts, they give a report to the bishop, and then the bishop has to make a decision. And I want to give examples in this presentation of positive ones and negative ones, like things that were declared miracles and things that weren't. Well, I want to get to a specific example in just one second, but I wanted to ask you,

first of all, when you say the Church is doing these investigations, they're, I guess, hiring molecular biologists, etc., who's actually doing this? I mean, the Pope's not doing this. I presume a bishop isn't doing it. I mean, maybe he starts the inquiry, but is there some, like who in the organization of the Catholic Church actually conducts these investigations? Right. Well, the theological experts are usually priests of that diocese or area. But in the case of the scientific and medical experts, it varies a lot. For instance, in Lourdes, they have both a team that's more local to examine people who claim to have a healing, and then they have an international medical commission,

which is all over the world. And they pick certain experts from this standing team based on what the healing is about and what kind of diagnosis is involved and so on. But in the case of Eucharistic miracles, it's going to be people that the local bishop can find who are willing to do this type of work. Oftentimes they're Catholic, but in the case of Lourdes, they're non-Catholics and non-believers on the panels as well. It just depends on the diocese. Okay. All right. Well, let's focus in now on one alleged Eucharistic miracle. This is one I

actually saw with my own eyes, whether it's miraculous or not, I saw what was claimed to be in the year 2000 in Rome, I believe, and this was in Lanziano, Italy. So I want to ask you what exactly is said to have happened there and how has it been investigated scientifically? And maybe I'll throw up the image of this host, Father. Actually, before you do the host, why don't you show that the epitaph, the 1636 epitaph, because that actually is a primary source material right here. So it's on the screen. People can see it right now. I mean, it's in Latin, I guess.

That's right. So, or, yeah, it might be actually in, I'm not sure if it's Latin or Italian, but I translated it into English. I'm just going to read a pretty accurate English translation just straight up. So what they're seeing on the screen from 1636 translated into English. Okay, who wrote this and what is it? It's a stone slab that's in the church in Lanciano, Italy,

where this miracle is reported to have happened. So this is what it says. Around the year of our Lord 700 in this church, at that time under the title of St. Ligonziano of the monks of St. Basil, a priest monk doubted whether the consecrated host truly was the body of our Savior and the wine was his blood. He celebrated mass, said the words of consecration, and he saw the host made flesh, and he saw the wine made blood. Everything was shown to those nearby and then to all the people, and the flesh is still whole and the blood is unequally divided into five parts you can see it today in the same way in this chapel so and then it gives his name and the

and the date okay so it's a pretty short kind of pithy description of the events it has some other things in it you know that i skipped over but we'll get into those things in the analysis. Now, you might hear that and think, well, this is just another one of those pious stories, and they have some relic that of dubious origin, you know, we don't know where this came from exactly. So it's pretty easy to dismiss it if that's all you had, right? But there is a provenance of this thing, at least dating back into the 1500s. And now if you actually look at what it is that was preserved, you can put up that image. Yep. And see, this is it. And this is a high resolution photograph from actually a poster that I have right here that I got. from actually a poster that I have right here that I got.

I asked the monks from Lanciano there to send me the poster, and I scanned it in. It has some lines in it that are a little bit weird because I had to scan it in multiple parts. It's such a big image. So this is allegedly the same host that was referred to in that document you just read a moment ago. That's right. This is allegedly 1,300 years old. Okay.

Yeah, maybe 1,270 or so. And is that – Around 50 AD is when we think that this event happened. OK. So it's very visible today. It's on display in a kind of a reliquary with the the droplets of coagulated blood that have dried in another reliquary underneath it. So you can see the color there and so that's that's the that's sort of the initial part of the the claim is that that this happened and they preserved it and it hasn't

degraded over all of this time okay but now we need the science? Because all we have up till now is just a story, right? So the scientific investigation was done in 1970, the first one, by Dr. Eduardo Linoli, who is a professor of anatomy and pathological histology, so problems with tissues. And he also has a degree in chemistry and clinical microscopy. So he's good with microscopic photographs and zooming in on things. Right. And there was another professor who kind of checked his work and assisted him in 1970 and 71. And so he took a series of microscopic photographs. And unfortunately, I don't have good color versions of these to show you. There are certain books you can get that have some reproductions of them.

And then he performed various tests for the presence of blood, different levels of proteins that are found in blood. And he published his results in 1971. And it's actually in, you know, a scientific journal that doesn't exist anymore, but it went out of business. It wasn't a peer-reviewed journal per se, but it was published in an accredited journal, we can say at least that. And so I can just give you his findings, the summary of them. So the first thing he discovered was that the flesh is real flesh. Remind me again what year he did these experiments or investigations, sorry. 1970.

Okay, gotcha. So continue, yeah. Yeah. So the flesh is real flesh. The blood is real flesh, the blood is real blood, and there are ways of determining the species or the likely species of flesh and blood, and he determined them to be human. And the microscopic photography indicated that the flesh consisted of muscular tissue of the heart, because heart tissue has very specific configuration of the fibrils, the way they kind of interleave together in different parts of the heart. We'll get into that maybe a little bit later for another Eucharistic miracle. So he was able to identify different, even different types of heart tissue based on how the striations of the fibers, essentially. I don't want to go into all the technical details, but the other thing he said was that the blood contained other minerals or chlorides and phosphorus, magnesium, just different trace elements.

But there was no evidence of a preservative. So no evidence of, you know, something that would easily explain why it hadn't just degraded, especially given that it wasn't in some hermetically sealed container or anything like that for century after century. So his conclusion about that was that that in itself was an extraordinary phenomenon. He didn't have an easy explanation for that. Now, there is natural mummification, so tissues can dry up and last for a while. And if you exhume bodies, it doesn't necessarily mean that, oh, it's a incorrupt miracle or something if we you know the body is preserved uh but um you know 1300 years is

is a very long time under varying conditions as well so he found that striking another thing he said was that he looked at how thin the slice of tissue was. And he did not think that that could be made except by anatomic dissection, you know, by something, a modern instrument. Like if someone tried to, he was trying to think, if someone tried to hoax this in medieval times, right, and they got a hold of some cadaver and they decided to take a heart out, you know, and use that to create a hoax miracle, they just wouldn't be able to hoax this. Or it would be at least this doctor could not see how to hoax it in medieval times. So that was, you know, kind of the major findings that he had. And he published those. Did another study in 80 and 81 to kind of go into more detail, like trying to find out the blood type was another thing he was trying to find out. And his conclusion was that it was blood type AB.

So a rare blood type, only about 5% of the population has it. It does happen to be more common in the Middle East. But that was his conclusion about the blood typing. conclusion about the blood typing. Were investigations done by other doctors or just this one goer? Because it would seem to be a little more credible if you had multiple doctors examining this alleged miracle and coming up with the same results. Certainly. Well, the results were double-checked, and I don't know the details about how they were double checked by another professor, Professor Ruggiero. So there are documents that show, you know, this kind of double checking Ruggiero Bertelli of the University of Siena.

But it's a little tricky to know how independent those two examinations were because some of the documents say he was assisted by him. So I don't know the details about that in this case. But this is a valid kind of, you know, pushback by skeptics is that, well, why don't they let, you know, lots of doctors investigate this, you know, frequently. Now, the problem is that there's a little bit of maybe a sense of if this is a holy thing, you know, do we want to just keep on sending it out to different scientists every month or every year or whenever anyone requests? So I can understand that there's this kind of, you know, picking and choosing, just like the shroud doesn't get put out for scientific testing every year, right? Is what we're looking at the Eucharist, because this would seem to not be the Eucharist. If the Eucharist is the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ whole and entire,

and this seems to be a sliver of a heart, it would seem like this is not that. What's the answer to that? Yeah, well, it's a little bit undefined, I think, in Catholic theology, because transubstantiation, our theology of that says that the presence of Christ remains as long as the accidents or appearance of bread and wine remain. That's right, yeah. If you take that strictly then this is not the Eucharist. As soon as this miracle happens and I guess that's one valid Catholic opinion about it. But it's also possible that God would preserve the substance as the body of Christ. And the reason, I'm saying

Aquinas even talks about this, the reason for changing into flesh or into blood in the appearance in a Eucharistic miracle is the symbolism, right? Is that it's showing us that what we believe by faith is confirmed by this appearance. It's kind of trying to validate that. And I think we just have to leave the details of exactly how this works in terms of substance and accident stuff. No, yeah, that's fair enough. That's a different question. I mean, if this is a legitimate miracle, it would seem to show that the supernatural exists. And since this was done in such a Catholic context, it would seem to lend support for Catholicism. That's right.

Yeah, there's a push with Eucharistic miracles in particular towards many Catholics will say, well, hey, this validates our view of the Eucharist versus even other Protestant views of the Eucharist. Although, you know, there are Protestants who really do believe in the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist versus even other Protestant views of the Eucharist. Although, you know, there are Protestants who really do believe in the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. So this is not just a Catholic thing, let's put it that way. Yeah, no, for sure. Okay, yeah, that's really fascinating. Man, oh man, oh man. I mean, you brought it up a moment ago, and I saw somebody ask a question

about this, like if this is the Eucharist, isn't it rather sacrilegious to subject it to these different tests? Yeah, well, you know, I guess there'd be different opinions on that. Certainly the way that these tests are conducted is very reverent. opinions on that. Certainly the way that these tests are conducted is very reverent. This may be why for Eucharistic miracles, Catholic scientists are preferred because they kind of understand what it is that they're doing, you know, at least potentially. Or it could be viewed as a relic, right? Just put in a reliquary, you know, so that's a valid well the other thing that comes to mind though is like if this is a legitimate miracle it is for our benefit

it is so that at least the priest and presumably others since it has existed this long is for our spiritual benefit so that we can actually believe in the real presence of the Eucharist and so I suppose in that sense subjecting it to tests doesn't seem like contrary to what God would have its purpose be.

That's right, and the tradition of the Church has been to do examinations and investigations according to the best science of the day. Yeah. And have microscopic analysis. And also saying that you shouldn't experiment on it presumes that it is what some people have claimed that it is, and that's exactly what the church isn't doing, and which is, you know, which is why she does subject it to these tests. Yeah, we're not going to talk about that detail, but I think it's a sign of the church wanting

to reach out to people who are scientific in mindset. You know, this is an area where science and faith intersect. There's a few other areas, you know, but this is one big one. Here's an objection I could see somebody making having just heard about this. I could see them saying, okay, so this was a hoax that was perpetrated in the 700s. Is that when you said? Yeah, around 750, we think. Okay, so it was a hoax, and they've kept it up for a while.

Maybe it even got lost for a while because it was never the Eucharist. It was just a piece of flesh that somebody cut up and put together. And then relatively recently, somebody has replaced it with a different piece of flesh that has dried. And so it's actually not as old as some Catholics would claim that it is. Okay. The investigation by Dr. Linoli kind of makes that really unlikely or next to impossible. If you actually look at that big photograph that we put up of the host, you can see the little holes around the edge of the host where it was actually pinned to a board. And if you try to guess the age of this host, you would say it's not something that someone created, you know,

20, 30, 40 years ago. And it has very distinctive character to it that, you know, people were observing this, they would take it out of the reliquary periodically every so many years, and they would, you know, they were weighing things and they were doing it, you know, for someone to like sneak in a new version in the 1950s or something is just really. I find that kind of like one of these extreme possibilities. Theoretically possible, but this is why I would hesitate to use Eucharistic miracles towards someone who might be really an ardent atheist, let's say. Because for them, the possibility of miracles is vanishingly small because they have an a priori position against the supernatural. Fair enough. So you don't begin with this. I don't think you begin with this. This is not, I would not recommend it. I think this has value in terms of evidence for someone who is either a

theist or is at least open to, yeah, there's some chance, some good chance that God exists and he might intervene in the world. Right. And then, then we can kind of eliminate some of these really extreme possibilities of hoaxes that I think are so low probability events. Well, here's another objection. It would seem that the middle of this supposed host has rotted out. If this was really a supernatural miracle, why did God decide that some of it should rot and some of it remain? Yeah, well, there's two possible explanations for that. One is that, you know, we do know that the flesh has degraded over time. Like it's, you know, it's dried up, it's changed in its appearance over time.

And that's just the way it is. And I don't think that means it can't be a miracle definitively. be a miracle, definitively. Secondly, Dr. Linoli, in one of his later findings in 81, he sees it as like that opening is actually part of one of the ventricles of the heart. In other words, it's a ring around, you know, if you take a cross section of the heart, depending on how you do that, it would be, it would have a hole in the center. I don't know what to personally, but that's another theory that you could advance about the shape of it. But there's lots of other claims that people will make about the launch out of a miracle, just so you're aware, that aren't really backed up by this kind of-

Good. What are those? What are those exaggerated claims that some Catholics make about this miracle? I think we need to avoid these because, you know, if we keep repeating some of the ones I'm about to describe, it can turn people off because they're, you know, especially skeptics and scientists. So the first one is the claim about a World Health Organization document that was you know, that there were Italian, there were doctors who carried out 500 examinations of the Lanciano flesh over 15 months, and they confirmed everything that Professor Linoli discovered in 71. And that, you know, it was part of the World Health Organization

Medical Commission in 1976. And you can even find a scan of the cover page of it online. And I found this like, whoa. But there was an Italian cardiologist, his name is Dr. Franco Serafini, who actually was, he thought that this document didn't really pass the smell test. He knows how hard it is to do a test and to do 500 tests is just ridiculous. Right. So he said, I want to see this document for myself. And he went to lunch. I know he talked to the friars there. He got access to the safe where this actual document is. And after a couple of minutes of flipping through the document, he realized that it was a terrible hoax, that the content of this document does have hundreds of pages of tests,

but they're on Egyptian mummies, they're on all these other things. None of the tests have anything to do with the launch. And some hoaxer added a first page to that and a last page and then like presented it at some point to the monk Lanciano and, you know, in the 70s and trying to help the miracle along. Hey, it's confirmed by the World Health Organization. So Dr. Serafini, who knows what it is, I mean, he has a scientific background to, you know, I guess they just hadn't really looked at it closely. He asked the friars, like, don't use this document in your publications or in your museum or like this is a hoax. And they're like, OK, thank you. Right. So this shows the importance of tracking down primary sources. If you don't have the document in your hands, I would hesitate to use it in apologetics. A friend of a friend of a friend is just not good enough for this kind of scientific work. It really isn't.

What do you think the best naturalistic explanation is of this alleged miracle in Lanciano, Italy? explanation is of this alleged miracle in Lanciano, Italy? I think for Lanciano, you would have to push back on the findings of Dr. Linoli and say, like, here's some pushback from actual skeptics, right? They would say, look, there were multiple tests for blood that were done. Many of those tests came back negative for the presence of blood. And other tests, like more refined ones maybe, came back positive. So maybe the one or two tests that came back positive were actually the wrong tests, or were invalid, and it actually isn't blood, right? I think you could also try to push back on, is it really heart tissue, right? Because that is really hard to explain. I don't think a medieval hoaxer is going

to say, hey, I think I'm going to choose heart tissue. And as we'll see, there are other Eucharistic miracles that involve heart tissue. And it's like, what are the odds that everyone is going to pick, you know, all the hoaxes are going to agree on something, right? Or that the blood type is AB or the odds that everyone's going to agree on that 5% chance times 5% chance times 5% chance. So, um, you need to, the best explanation from a natural point of view would be to reject those findings, uh, based on, you know, uh, know, this is from bias or whatever, and that there was some kind of medieval hoax and maybe there was a way of cutting some tissue that's really thin, because it really does need to be a tissue of some kind. I don't know, I'm just kind of...

No, that's good. No, I think that's right. That would be what I'd, that's what you'd want to do. I don't know. That's good. No, I think that's right. That's what you'd want to do. You'd want to kind of say, well, this doctor just got it wrong and then come up with different reasons as to why that might be the case. Let's take a look at a more recent example of a Eucharistic miracle or alleged one. Sokolka.

Is that how I pronounce it in Poland in 2008? That's right. What happened there? Well, around October in 2008 at St. Anthony of Padua Parish, one of the consecrated hosts fell to the ground during the Mass. So the priest took it. It was soiled in some way, so that means you wouldn't normally consume it. soiled in some way, so that means you wouldn't normally consume it. So you would then place it, the procedure is to place it into a receptacle of water, like an ablution bowl, to allow it to dissolve, right? Because once the presence, once the appearance of bread no longer remains, then it's no longer the body of Christ. So then it's possible to dispose of that after it's no longer

the appearance of bread, no longer the body of Christ. You place it into, you know, the ground or something like that. But you have to wait for that to happen. So he had the sacristan put it into a locked safe. And a week later, the sacristan came back, opened the safe and noticed the strong smell of bread and that the host had not dissolved. This is in the water, correct? Should I throw that photo up? Yeah, bring up that photo. You can see. Actually, that photo is not what she saw, because what happened then was there was a bloody substance in the center that looked like kind of flesh in the middle of the circular host.

substance in the center that looked like kind of flesh in the middle of the circular host. She called the priest, who called the bishop, and then they waited and observed to see if it would change anymore for like a month or two. And in January, the very center of that host placed it on a corporal or a purificator. And that's the image that you're seeing right now. Well, I was actually showing the one in the water the water right then but no that's this is the one in the this is for seven not uh okay i just threw the number number seven up this is the one in the what's it called in that cloth that's right it's it's a corporal or purificator so if you look at the very bottom of that image, if you have it up there, you see a red plus or cross or red. That is on every purificator or, you know, corporal that there's like a certain place where there's a plus, a cross, a plus sign cross. So that is just red thread. Okay. But then this central piece from the host was placed onto the corporate and it just kind of dried there.

And so on the upper left hand section of that, you see kind of a yellowish gray portion. That's bread. and then this part that's red that's in the middle, they add that scent to two experts, independent microscopic examination of the tissues, it's heart tissue. And the flesh, this flesh heart tissue at the center, and the bread on the side there are interpenetrated. Like they're connected in a way that the scientists could not explain. They tried to think

of how they would cause this to happen themselves scientifically, and they really just were at a loss for an explanation. I think I've gotten a little confused because of the different photos. You were saying that the priest put it in a bowl of water. Is that correct? That's right. And there's no picture of that. Okay, that's fine. And okay, that's for something else. That's fine. He puts that in a safe? For a week. For a week. And then the priest looks at it a week later, says it's not dissolving, but there's a red spot.

Right. That red spot is what you now see on that corporal. And only that part was cut out. It was removed because the rest of it was still bread. Yep. And that has not changed since then. That hasn't changed. So what you're seeing in that photo with the bread mingled with the heart tissue in an inexplicable way is like that today?

That's right. Okay. At least they weren't able to come up with an explanation. And this happened in 2008? That's right. This is very, very recent. And it's actually not the only Eucharistic miracle that's happened with some similar characteristics in Poland. There's another one in 2013 that we don't really have time to talk about. a number of different things, but, you know, that maybe we can move to next. But, you know, there were some responses to this one in Poland. Some other blood specialist said the professor saw what she wanted to see.

She's very religious, right? So lots of attacks of the credibility of scientists sort of precisely because they're Catholic or they believe in God or they're religious. And I think this claim of, let's say, bias, of course, Catholic scientists have biases. Atheist scientists have biases. Everybody has a bias. We can't avoid biases, right? That's just a fact. Everyone has one. But it's possible to counteract the influence of biases by doing objective tests and and trying to remove yourself from, you know, the equation of just my opinion. Right. And that's what was done in these cases. So I think just knee jerk response of, well, she's biased. Well, you know, that's... Which bias lines up with the truth is what we want to know. Yeah, I don't think that's sufficient to debunk this or something like that, right? So he wanted molecular and genetic testing done, for example.

Yeah, this miracle in Sokolka, I mean, just initially doesn't seem as impressive as the one from Lansiano just because the one from Lansiano is so much more ancient and apparently has existed for this amount of time. Do you tend to believe that this was a Eucharistic miracle that took place in 2008? Well, I haven't studied this one as much. Only in the past, you know, few months did I really look at this seriously. So I'm a little more up in the air about this one. But let me describe to you something I just found while researching for this talk. So this is kind of hot off the press's news, okay? So there's a cardiologist from Bologna,

Italy. His name is Dr. Franco Serafini. And five years ago, he was looking at all this evidence for Eucharistic miracles. He thought it was important, but he was frustrated because everywhere he went on the Internet, he couldn't find a book. He couldn't find a reliable Internet page. devotional language and not really much hard science that was accessible, right, and detailed, except for, you know, the paper by Dr. Linoli that I was quoting from. That was just about it. But he had heard about all these recent things about, you know, miracles that happened recently. So he started to search for original documents, you know, so he could, he contacted witnesses, You know, so he could he contacted witnesses. He went to five different places in Argentina and Poland and Lanciano. And he basically. Did research for a number of years and then.

So let me tell you what what he concluded. So this is a fresh look at the evidence from a cardiologist. He said, first of all, the heart tissue in all of these miracles exhibited some similar properties. So it's first Lanciano, this one that we just looked at, Sokolka, there's another one, Lignekia, I think it's pronounced, and a couple others in Argentina. He said they all had, the heart tissue had signs of being under stress. So he was looking at the findings about like there are white blood cells that will go into the tissue and infiltrate the tissue of the heart when it's under stress. And the fibers of the heart will start to break down when the heart is under stress. And so they actually identify this when they look at someone who had a heart attack, right? A myocardial infarction, right? So, you know, they can actually say this person suffered some kind of traumatic event

So, you know, they can actually say this person suffered some kind of traumatic event that led to death. Right. You know, three or four different countries. And this led him to the conclusion that, like, this is really hard to explain if you're saying, oh, all of these are hoaxes. Right. Because, you know. It kind of points to collusion among the hoaxers in, you know, spanning, you know, all these different places and times and circumstances. It just it makes it very difficult. These commonalities difficult to explain. Also, the common blood type, all of these different blood types, blood type to AB. And this is a rare thing. And if they were medieval artifacts or counterfeiters, they would not likely guess the same blood type four times in a row, let's say, or five times in a row. Now, some skeptics will say all old blood degrades and it types as AB.

I've heard that said about the shroud, which also types as AB, the blood on the shroud. But that's really debatable, scientifically speaking. Sometimes blood will type AB when it's really old, but it depends on how you do the blood type. There's forward and reverse blood typing. There's lots of technical details. So it is not the case that it's simply, oh, all old blood types AB. All right. Well, we've looked at two specific alleged Eucharistic miracles, both of which there seems to be some evidence for. Can you give us some examples of alleged Eucharistic miracles that the church

said, actually, there's a natural explanation for this? Sure. There's one actually in the United States in 2015, and you can bring up the number eight there. Yeah, sorry. I accidentally put that up before, but here it is again. So this, okay, so this was not from Poland. I accidentally put that up before, but here it is again. So this was not from Poland. I accidentally put that up. Forgive me. From Utah in November of 2015 in Kearns, Utah, a host was returned to a priest after mass. And in a similar way, he placed it in an ablution bowl, a vessel of water for it to dissolve away. But then later on, some people saw the host still floating there and it appeared to be bleeding. So this sounds very similar

to Sokolka. But then the diocese took the host and had a committee examine it with all the experts. And here was their conclusion. A thorough investigation has concluded that the host

did not bleed. The change in the appearance in the host was due to red bread mold. What? Neurofibrocrasa. How bizarre. Exposed of in an irreverent manner

as is required. So what you're seeing in that picture is red bread mold. It's a very well-known type of mold. There are other bacteria, Serratia marcescens, which also has this kind of red look so that, you know, that can happen with bread too, if it just kind of gets old and moldy. That's never happened to me. I've never seen red bread mold. I didn't realize that was a thing.

Yeah. So you need to know and do your science. Unfortunately, in this case, the hype and the news about it spread faster than the scientific investigation, right? People are kind of like spreading news. And so there are reports of places that, oh, maybe there's a Eucharistic miracle in Utah. But then, you know, a few weeks later, no, there wasn't. This is what happened. Now, just so you know, this particular type of mold was explicitly tested for in the other miracles that I'm describing. The bishop said, test for this, right? Because, you know, this is a very common thing that you need to rule out. So the church is well aware of these molds.

The church is well aware of these molds. It'd be interesting how many Catholics in this parish in Utah are still convinced that this was a miracle. Well, this is the value of having a magisterium that can make declarations about contested matters, right? Is that, you know, we need to follow the guidance of the magisterium, first of all, on, you know, the deposit of faith, things that we're required to believe, but also we should look for guidance about these prudential judgments. I mean, obviously, the church can be wrong when declaring something a miracle, right? It's not infallible, right? But when the church says, condemns something, says this is not authentic, I really think we need to follow that and not just, you know, kind of fight with the bishop to

try to prop up whether it's a revelation, whether it's a miracle, right? Because that's what this sober look with scientific experts and theologians is for. Yeah, yeah. What's this final photo that you sent me of this priest? Should I throw that up? Yeah, please do. This is another interesting one that I ran into myself. This has never been declared a miracle.

It hasn't really been investigated, I don't think, by a bishop. But, you know, this is a video that was thrown up on YouTube and people start commenting on it in the comments. So this is the, you know, social media derived miracle, question mark. So in 1999, there was a mass at Lourdes, France, where lots of bishops there. It was broadcast live on TV. And there were two very large hosts on the patent. And it's not just the size one that's like this for normal mass. It's one that's like this, the mega host. And there were two of them placed on the patent and, you know, flat down on it. And then at the moment of the apoclesis if you actually find this video um you know you can

search for it on youtube uh i can give you a link for it do that and i'll put it in the description below that'd be awesome yeah that at the moment of the apoclesis when the priest stretched out their hands invoking the holy spirit suddenly the host popped up and elevated and appears to float above the pattern. So if you see on the bottom picture there, you see how the host is not... Oh, I see. So you've got two photos here. I thought that was just one.

One is the before and one is the after zoomed in. Okay, so for those who are watching, check that out. At the very bottom of that photo, you can see the Eucharist is raising up. So the green investment underneath the host on the left-hand side there. Yeah, I got you. You know what? I thought that—now I see it's two photos.

When I first threw it up, I thought that was the color of the altar cloth, but that's his vestment zoomed in. Okay. That's zoomed in, okay. How far did the Eucharistic host go up? Go up? It floated about maybe a half inch or two-thirds of an inch off of the pattern. And when you watch this, it's actually fairly striking. It's a very low-resolution video from the 1990s, right? SD quality.

So you can't quite make out what's going on if you don't zoom in it looks super um striking like wow this is something supernatural but when i saw this i i immediately had a thought as to what was going on as soon as i saw it i said i think i know what's going on. And it doesn't involve trickery or a hoax or anything. I'm familiar with this large type of host. And I know from experience that sometimes, because of uneven drying or whatever of the bread, they actually warp.

They become almost like bowl-shaped or slightly saucer-shaped in one direction or another. And if you actually press those onto a pattern, they'll kind of take the shape of the pattern. So you have two of those hosts with a slightly concave shape rather than the purely flat one. And then at that moment of the epiclesis, it just happened that the warp of the bottom one flipped from being down to being up. And so you end up with the bottom host supporting the top host, which is still curved in the opposite direction. So it's like two bowls balancing on a point. And if you watch the video, you can actually see the wobble. The top post wobbles slightly upon this balance point as if the weight is supported only in the

middle because the weight is being supported only in the middle. And that's if you look, zoom in or put your nose to the screen right now and you can see the curve. Yes. right now and you can see the curve yeah the bottom end like a bowl shape you see the green color on the left edge or right edge or whatever but you don't see it in the very center yes because the two at that point and i posted a youtube comment saying all of this oh i'm sure you were loved. You know, but you see, unfortunately, if we're too credulous or too quick to believe, that's a miracle, right? Without kind of doing the hard-nosed, skeptical kind of analysis, then we can see what we want to believe, right? what we want to believe, right? Everyone has what's called confirmation bias. And so I come back to this thing that we're talking to skeptics. We have to, we need people in the church who are willing to do this kind of hard-nosed research and, you know, be able to say, hey, we've looked at this scientifically and really evaluated it.

Okay, that is fascinating. Hey, Father Terry, what I would love to do now is go to questions, if that's okay with you. So for those who are watching in the live chat, do us a favor. If you're enjoying this video, please click that thumbs up button. And if you think other people should see it, it would really help us if you would share this video on Facebook or Twitter, just to kind of get the word out. Because I don't think Google is necessarily committed to promoting the Eucharistic miracles within the Catholic Church, but you might be. And so do us a favor and share this.

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help you to invest with character. Securities offered through Securities America Inc., member FINRA, SIPC, Ethos Logos Investments, and Securities America are separate entities. So let's now take some questions from our wonderful super chatters here. We have a question from Peter Saliba. He says,

Thank you, Matt and Father Terry, for this great interview. How do we know that churches didn't fake Eucharistic miracles to get more people to visit? I mean, some of these people are coming in late to the interview and so may not have heard some of your answers before. So maybe if you could sum that up there. Yeah, well, first I want to acknowledge that as a valid skeptical pushback. Because there are a lot of fake relics that were created and hoaxed.

I've studied this, you know, especially in the Middle Ages, you know, you get more people, more pilgrims to your church. And I've analyzed some, I won't get into all the details, but some that are still thought to be authentic now that I don't think they are. So, yes, we should do that kind of hard-nosed investigation of the possibility of a hoax. So there is some motivation to hoax things for maybe economic gain, but you also have to look at the difficulty of perpetrating the hoax in different times and seasons. We talked about the Lanciano miracle being made of a very thin slice of what is heart tissue. And if you accept that evidence, then it becomes exceedingly

difficult to explain how a medieval hoaxer would hoax it and the idea of swapping it in we also talked about that as being very the properties of this tissue and its age and condition make it very difficult to swap in a replica how do you even get access to you know making that and you know reproducing it in order to fake a scientific test that you don't even know was going to happen in 1970. Like, it just seems, you know, very arbitrary. It's kind of like a just-so story to explain the particular evidence that we have. And furthermore, you have these corroborating data from the science behind the heart tissue, the striatitions of the

muscle fibers, all of the things that I was getting into earlier that are replicated in multiple locations and times. So hoaxers would have to, it's hard to explain that without hoaxers to, uh, it's hard to explain that without hoaxers collaborating. Right. So I don't, uh, I don't think the hoax explanation makes as much sense as the scientific, uh, determinations were somehow wrong, right. That we should double check those. Like I, if I were to, if I'm going to be a skeptic, I think the hoax hoax explanation is actually for these particular miracles, not in general, but for these five that we've talked about, is the most unlikely explanation. for accepting something to be miraculous, you don't have to say there are no other possible explanations. Just because something is possible, it doesn't mean it's probable. Isn't that right? Yes, and I think that all of this is evidentiary apologetics.

It's supposed to give some evidence towards, and you really need a cumulative uh kind of analysis in order to do evidential based reasoning right just like the scientific method looks for things like repeatability things like multiple independent sources of information so you know i think information. So, you know, I think things like what Dr. Serafini is doing, looking at patterns he sees in multiple miracles that all have been tested with modern scientific analysis, and then looking at the commonalities, it's a good evidence-based approach. All right. It can have its flaws, but it's the right approach. Thank you.

John Paul Gies asks, as I understand Father Chad Rippinger, Eucharistic miracles are the body and or blood of Christ, but are analogous, maybe he means aren't, but are analogous to when Christ sheds his hair or skin cells in his earthly life, since these are not whole and glorified body. Yeah, well, one thing we can say definitively is that, you know, the appearance of these Eucharistic miracles is not to be identified with the appearance of Christ's glorified body in heaven. That's a full stop statement. And that's true of the appearance of the Eucharist in every situation. St. Thomas Aquinas says that the accidents do not adhere, the appearance does not adhere to the body of Christ that is the substance, that they're suspended accidents. And this was

confirmed in the Council of Trent. So whatever appearances, you know, the Eucharist has just normally after transubstantiation, as well as any appearances after one of these Eucharistic miracles, in no case is it what Jesus looks like in his body in heaven. So I think that's all we need to say about that. So why does God, if these are authentic miracles, why does God choose these different appearances? You know, I think that in some ways is a little above my pay grade. I just don't know, to analyze that. It seems very specific. But I do think that in all of these cases, the symbolism of flesh and blood and the symbolism of heart tissue and even the symbolism of distressed heart tissue is, you know, what does this mean?

Here's a good question from Mango Bango, who asks, as a Protestant, how can I know that this isn't a demonic miracle to trick Catholics? Well, a demonic miracle, yeah, demonic preternatural activity, there's a bit of a distinction between a miracle, which only God can do, and something that demons or angelic beings can do. So at least in Catholic understanding, there are some things that even demons can't fake, right? Now, I don't know if this falls under that category. That's, again, another speculative thing. that you have to look at the claims of the Catholic Church from the perspective of history and from the perspective of Scripture and the early church and try to identify

where is the church that Christ founded, right. That really has to be your fundamental question. And if you're struggling with that question or you think that the Catholic Church, for whatever reasons, is kind of demonic already, you know, that that it's, you know, like the jack chick tracks of like very extreme anti-Catholic apologetics claims, the horror of Babylon or so on, then I don't think I'm going to show you a Eucharistic miracle to try to convince you otherwise, right? I think we have to look at other arguments in that case. So I just don't think that there's an argument to be, I can't refute that, you know, if that's what the person thinks, a priori. Right, and it cuts both ways, because you could say that of every miracle, to disprove whatever faith that person happens to be a part of or trying to promote. So if you want to reject Eucharistic miracles, but you want to accept other miracles, then the same could be said.

Well, how do you know that this isn't supernatural, but not from the divine? It's a difficult question to answer, I would think. Yeah, and I think that we need to... I can't exclude every possibility with evidence. It's very difficult to rule out what could an angel do. I don't know. It's hard for me to formulate an argument just off the top of my head. But I appreciate that this is not the slam dunk.

To answer the question that the video title has, scientific proof of Eucharistic miracle, I would say no, we don't have a scientific proof of the Eucharist and Catholic teaching. Because, first of all, empirical sciences are always provisional at some level. There's always open to new evidence coming in. So we can't make this absolute proof like a mathematical or logical proof. It's evidentiary. And so what I would say is we have scientific evidence for the Catholic teaching on the Eucharist. And people need to look at it, and they need to evaluate it. One thing is that the book, Dr. Serafini, I mentioned,

the book you wrote over looking at these five miracles, it's actually published in Italian, Cardiologio Visita Gesù, a cardiologist visits Jesus is what it's called. And it's in the process of being translated into English. So I wish I had an English copy. I ordered an Italian copy, but, you know, amazon.it rejected my rush shipping from Europe, you know, with COVID and everything else I got. But anyway, like, get a hold of, if you want to really evaluate this, I say you need to look at it. Look at the evidence. Yeah. That way forward. Next question comes from Andrew Gowler.

He says, what do you make of the argument that there's no evidence that the flesh was bred prior to any of these discoveries except verbal testimony? discoveries except verbal testimony well i i think you do have evidence in sukulka because you have this interweaving of what is clearly bred if you do scientific analysis of it with what at least in this instance appears to be like according to the two independent examinations to be independent examinations to be human flesh. So there, and that's the only one that I know of that kind of has, or not the only one, but that's one that we talked about today that actually has this kind of transformation happening over time. Now, that doesn't mean that it's a slam dunk, but again, it's certainly, it's not no evidence,

it's something. Yeah, yeah. Corey Cook says, in testing the blood and muscle of the heart, with no earthly father of Jesus, shouldn't there be a missing Y chromosome? Should be an easy to test, he says. Should be easy to test. Okay, well.

First of all, I'm not sure why there ought to be a missing Y chromosome just because he doesn't have an earthly father. Yeah, I understand the question, but I would dispute the idea that it should be easy to test. Like, I don't know if this guy has tried DNA testing something that's 1,300 years old. It's actually pretty difficult. How many people do you need? And, you know, I won't get into all the scientific details, but I can assure I can assure you that that's not a slam dunk, uh, you know, just do it off the cuff. It's, that's a challenging task and it may not be possible. DNA degrades over time. Uh, and you know, the way that the tissue has changed over time,

you know, indicates and the blood as well indicates that. And the size of a sample you might need is larger in some cases. Now, the testing is more modern now than it was in 71, so I'll grant that. And, you know, I'm actually totally in favor of testing of various types. You know, I would love to, you know, suggest some tests, just like this person is doing. So, so, but I would hesitate to say that it's easy to test for these things for various reasons. And I think that Dr. Serafini also is proposing different tests as well. And DNA testing is certainly one of them. It isn't totally clear, like it's not an article of faith as to exactly what DNA testing should result in the case of Jesus.

Also, as I mentioned before, the accidents, the appearance of this is not the glorified body of Jesus Christ in heaven. So it doesn't have to match the DNA of Jesus. You know, if they all did match in a DNA typing, well, that would be truly extraordinary. But there's also DNA contamination, right? It's much easier to have DNA contamination than to have, you know, mistyping of the whole tissue as human or not. The more detailed the tests get, you know, the more careful you have to be about things like that. We've mentioned a few Eucharistic miracles. How many are we looking at that seem credible, roughly? Eucharistic miracles. How many are we looking at that seem credible, roughly?

Yeah, well, there's a book that I have over in the other room here, which was a list of Eucharistic miracles that was compiled by a recently declared blessed Arlo or Arculus. I've seen the photo of him. uh arlo or arqueous i've seen the photo of him but yes either i guess he died at age maybe 15. as a teenager he got uh uh interested in eucharistic miracles and he made a huge website and did lots of research about and he has about 120 maybe 130 in his book and on his website um which is translated into multiple languages so So you can, I think it's miracolo.it or something like that. So, but the problem is that a large number of those have not been scientifically analyzed. Like some of them were declared miracles quite a while ago. So the ones that I'm bringing up and the five that were brought up

in Dr. Serafini's book, I can give you the list of those. The ones I would suggest checking out, Lanciano, a miracle in Buenos Aires in Argentina, and Tixla, Mexico in 2006, Sokolkopokind in 2008, Legnica, Poland, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that right, in 2013.

So the cardiologist who wrote this book, those were his five go-tos. But there are other ones that have had scientific analysis done. But I don't, you know, so there might be another maybe five to ten, let's say, where we could, you know, do more, you know, kind of try to look for patterns. But I don't think that as much investigation was done of the others. Fair enough. Well, Hey, thank you so much for being on the show for sharing all of that with us. Really appreciate it. Um, maybe tell us, I mean, I was going to, I'm not sure if you have a website, do you father Terry or if your, if your writings are found anywhere?

I don't have a website. Some people have encouraged me to, I don't know, start a YouTube channel or do something, but I do. We do have the Companions of the Cross website has some things. So that's companionscross.org.

So be of the companions, plural, cross, dot O-R-G. And if, I don't know, if you just type in my name, Father Terry Donahue, into YouTube, you'll find some teachings that I've given on a TV show from about 10 or 12 years ago. Some things on baptism in the Holy Spirit or about different aspects of the spiritual life or different things like that. But I hope to, you know, talk about some of these other things, especially, you know, about the intersection between faith and science. That's kind of my... Yeah, look, you need to do it. Please do it. Let me know if you need any help setting up a YouTube

studio account, anything like that. We need your voice in the fray here. So I would just highly encourage you to do that. There you go. I thought that's worth it. Well, just a big thank you to everybody who has been here watching the show. Thank you so much. Please do us a favor and click that thumbs up button, subscribe to the channel and share it. That would really help the channel. Also, I want to let you know that in the beginning of the new year, we are starting a new five-part video series on salvation history over at patreon.com slash mattfradd with Dr. Andrew Swofford. It'll be a five-part video series in which Dr. Andrew Swofford will also be dialoguing with y'all in the comment section. So if you're a patron already, please don't miss this. It's going to be released weekly.

I'm really excited to go through it and understand the big picture of salvation history. If you are not yet a patron, there's just another reason to consider doing it. Go over to patreon.com slash Matt Fradd, patreon.com slash Matt Fradd. Thanks so much.