OUR LADY OF THE KING'S BLOOD

Day 351: April 29

Our Lady of the Kind's Blood, Vigezzo Valley, Verbania, Italy

An hour before sunset a certain Giovanni Zucono (later nicknamed "Zuccone") together with his friend Comolo played the "piodella" on the square in front of the village church, dedicated to St Maurizio. The game consisted of placing a coin for each player on a wooden or stone compass (the "magician"). Conversely, whoever by hitting the "magician" with the piodella (a round stone splinter) "managed to scatter the coins around making those closest to the "piodella" his own, won.

The Zuccone, already known for his furious character, was a loser that evening, "we don't know how much money, but enough to unleash in him the anger and irrationality that hides in each of us when we feel persecuted by bad luck." He took it out on the quiet image of Our Lady that was there a few steps under the portico of the church, painted on the façade, to the right of the entrance door and which seemed not to deal with the misadventures of Zuccone.

Blinded by anger, he threw the "piodella" against the image and stroke it on the forehead. "Poltron," comrade Comolo reproached him, "you have taken to the Virgin Mary!" The Zuccone came to his senses and seized by remorse, knelt before Our Lady and asked for forgiveness.

Then, both seized by a feeling of fear; they fled, even before the prodigious signs that were about to manifest themselves on her sacrilegious image, Our Lady had already performed the first miracle in the heart of her attacker. In the night, around 11 a.m., first Giovanni di Minola di Re and then Antonio Ardicio di Craveggia, passing in front of the church, noticed an unusual glow under the portico as if there were a lit candle. They too, seized by fear, quickly moved away.

Before dawn the sacristan Stephen of Gisla, as he prepared to open the church for the bells of the Ave Maria, found a woman dressed in white kneeling in front of the image; he thought he saw one of his neighbors and greeted her without receiving an answer; but he did not notice what was happening on the fresco. She left the church almost immediately and no longer found the woman. It was an old man named Bartolomeo who first discovered the prodigious event.

In the devout gesture of touching the image of Our Lady and kissing her hand, he realized with amazement that it was wet with blood. He looked at Our Lady and saw that a trickle of blood came out of the wound of her head. He ran to call the rector of the church, Don Giacomo. The bells rang and the news spread from house to house, from village to village.

People rushed and crowded under the portico of the church with their eyes fixed on the bloody image, imploring aloud: "Mercy, mercy." "It seemed that the earth was shaking." Throughout the day and the following night many people remained at the site of the miracle to pray with lit candles in their hands.

After midnight the stream of blood grew and dripped to the ground, giving off a sweet scent "impossible to describe." On the floor, the blood was dabbed with "white diapers" which the parish priest then collected in a tablecloth and placed in a chalice.

The effusion of blood lasted about twenty days until May 18 intermittently and less and less abundantly as from a wound that gradually heals. At each emission of blood, the event was announced with the sound of bells; at the call, the people flocked "by day and by night."

After the miracle, the image of Our Lady was protected, building a chapel around it. It was built by demolishing the portico of the parish church and extending the latter towards the façade. Thus the church expanded, but remained divided into two sections by the wall of the ancient façade, against which the altar of Our Lady of Blood was leaning. A portico was built in front of the chapel of Our Lady. Later the chapel was extended.

The painter of Our Lady of the King'd Blood (Madonna del Sangue di Re) is anonymous as he did not leave his signature either on this fresco or on other works he painted with the same characteristics both in Ossola and outside. In 1875 a pilgrimage church dedicated to Our Lady of King's Blood was built in St Paul's Epp (Tyrol); near Geneva in a chapel in Perlj Our Lady of the Blood was reproduced in a large stained glass window by Alexandre Cingria; as well as on the wooden door of the tabernacle of the church of Semsales in a polychrome sculpture, the work of Marcel Feuillat. In Hungary there are two shrines dedicated to Our Lady of the Blood: one in Budapest and the other in Gorcsonj.

St Justin Russolillo Writes...

"Behold the Mother of God comes! She comes as the ever Virgin blessed because she is the Mother of God! She comes as the ever Virgin blessed because she is our mother through Jesus."

(Justin Russolillo, Devotional, Vocationist Editions, Pianura, 2009, p. 196)