OUR LADY OF THE BLOOD

Day 252: January 19

Our Lady of the Blood (1498) and the Eucharistic Miracle (1412),

Bagno di Romagna, Forli', Italy



In Bagno di Romagna, in the Basilica of Our Lady of the Assuption, there is a wood engraving from the 1400's called Our Lady of the Blood (Madonna del Sangue) and the Relic of the Eucharistic Miracle of the Holy Linen soaked in Blood.

It is a rare woodcut in colored folio (53 x 50 cm, impression 37.5 x 34.5 cm), probably from the years 1470/1480, from the Ferrara area, by an anonymous author, representing the Virgin and Child holding the terrestrial globe or ekumenikòn, inside which there is a synthetic but precise image of the Ravenna basilica of St Apollinare in Classe. It retains much of the original color, given to the background.

The effigy once placed in a house in Bagno, in the night between 19 and 20 January 1498 for a singular miracle extinguished the hatred and discord that reigned among the inhabitants of Bagno and which were often the cause of bloodshed. While praying before the Image of Mary Most Holy, the two sons of a certain Deaiuti saw a trickle of blood flow from the left arm of the Image. Seeing the blood flowing, they asked each other for forgiveness, crying out for peace and friendship.

The historian Fortunio describes the Miracle in his well-known work Annales Camaldulenses as follows: "It was the year 1412. The Camaldolese Abbey of Santa Maria in Bagno (now a Priory) was governed by Don Lazzaro, of Venetian origin. While he was celebrating the Mass one day, his mind was occupied, by diabolical work, with a strong doubt about the real presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament; when behold, he saw the Sacred Species of wine boil, pouring out of the chalice and spreading over the Corporal in the form of living and throbbing blood, and so the Corporal was drenched.

It is not to say what emotion he had and what disturbance of mind seized him at that moment, in the face of such an amazing event. Weeping, he turned to the bystanders, confessing the nourished incredulity and the Prodigy that had then been performed under his gaze."

The monk Lazarus was later transferred to Bologna, as chaplain of the Camaldolese female monastery of St Cristina, where he died in 1416. The Camaldolese with alternating vicissitudes took care of the Parish of Bagno, until the Napoleonic suppression of 1808; since then the Parish – Basilica of Santa Maria Assunta, after being governed for a short period by the diocese of Sansepolcro, in 1975 became definitively part of the diocese of Cesena.

In 1912 Cardinal Giulio Boschi, Archbishop of Ferrara, celebrated the fifth centenary of the Miracle, which was followed by a convention of Eucharistic studies. In 1958, H.E. Domenico Bornigia, followed up with a clinical analysis on the spots of the Corporal of the Miracle by the University of Florence, which he confirmed to be of a blood nature.


St Justin Russolillo Writes...

"Thinking of you for all eternity, with the Son in His Divine Bosom, the Eternal Father proclaims, also of you, to the whole world: "This is my beloved daughter, on whom my favor rests"."

(Justin Russolillo, Spirit of Prayer, trans. Louis Caputo, Vocationist Fathers, Newark, 1996, p. 154)

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