A Miraculous Fungi
Years ago, I read about a “miracle” in Poland in which a consecrated communion wafer was supposedly turned into heart muscle. At the time what caught my eye was that there were a lot of specific details given of this “miracle”, including extensive quotes from the scientists that studied the material. This is not typical of miracle claims.
I searched through the internet for more details. I was still wondering what to make of it when my husband, who at the time was working on his Ph.D in experimental oncology, asked what I was up to. I summarized my findings:
“They say it must be human heart tissue because it’s long striated cells with single nuclei in the middle…”
“You mean like a fungus?”
“The expert says ‘the material sent for assessment indicates myocardial tissue, or at least, of all living tissues of the body, it resembles it most.’”
“That statement is absolutely true of fungus”
“And the fibres are interwoven with the cracker”
“OK that’s not even a characteristic of heart tissue, that’s only a characteristic of fungus!”
We both had a good laugh, and I moved on. I assumed that the Church would soon figure out their mistake and quietly move on as well.
Thus, I was quite surprised this week when I read new stories about a communion wafer turned to heart tissue in Poland that had been approved for veneration as a miracle by the Church. I found that concept rather confusing, because consecrated communion wafers are always venerated, because God has turned them into Jesus’s body through a miracle that can’t be seen or sensed in any way. So even if they agreed that science had proved it was just a mouldy cracker, it should still be worthy of veneration, because it would still be Jesus’s mouldy body, right?
Due to the similarities in the story I assumed that this was the same wafer I’d read about years ago. That turned out to be incorrect. There are actually two separate communion wafers, dropped on the floor of two separate Polish churches, set aside in a locked safe to dissolve in water, discovered to be red, pulled out of the water, placed on holy cloths, sent to pathologists for analysis, and determined to be heart tissue. That might seem like an absurd coincidence, but any consecrated wafer falling on the floor in any Catholic Church is set aside to be dissolved in water in a locked safe. The people checking on them believe the wafer is literally a dead body, have heard stories about them miraculously turning into literal body parts, and know that there is a huge financial benefit to a church possessing such a specimen. With that in mind, I’m surprised that analyzing mouldy crackers isn’t an official branch of pathology!
After a bit of reading I concluded that this wasn’t even a new story, nor did it have any particular reason to be in the news, and there is a lot less information publicly available about it. So I moved on. But this morning I saw an article about Carlo Acutis, a teenager who was obsessed with Eucharistic Miracles and set out to catalogue them all in a website before he died of leukemia. His beatification date was set recently. Now, I’m pretty sure this is just a coincidence, or more specifically the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. But, I know that many religious people would interpret this as a sign from God. And I’m told that if I stop ignoring those my life will be a lot better. And it was a rainy weekend anyway. So I decided to do a bit more research and put together a blog post.
I’m going to be going back and forth between the two events because they are so similar. I will refer to them by the city names. The first incident occurred in 2009 in Sokolka, while the second occurred in 2013 in Legnica.
A Macroscopic Look
First, let’s look at the pictures. The most common pictures are of the samples already removed from the water and the remainder of the wafer.
Legnica specimen
Those look like blood. They look even more like Serratia marecescens, a type of bacteria that likes to live on damp, starchy foods, and is generally the culprit in these miracles. From the colour to the slimy appearance, it seems like an exact match.
What they definitely do not look like is heart tissue. Heart tissue is muscle – essentially raw meat. It’s dull in colour, and not so slimy.
Could it be heart tissue coated in blood? First of all, the blood would wash off into the water. It would have to be a very stable blood clot to survive submerged for weeks. Secondly, although some reports mention blood on the Legnica specimen, the pathologists on the Sokolka specimen noted that “the mysterious material that appeared on the Host, in its entirety, constitutes myocardial tissue.”
There are also pictures of the Legnica specimen still in the water. The problem is that the various pictures do not appear to be the same specimen.
I guess it’s possible that those are two sides of the same cracker. But I think it’s more likely that one source got their pictures mixed up, particularly because the first image is labelled elsewhere on the internet as a specimen from Utah, which was confirmed to be Serratia.
The second image makes me wonder why anyone thought this was interesting at all. Nothing about that looks like any kind of human tissue to me. It’s more pink than red, and it has white fuzz on the outside. It looks like mould. The priests say they “noticed that over time the stain on the Host changed color from deep red to red brown“, and some other images do look more red, so maybe that’s just an early image. But what does that mean? Did the wafer mould first and then turn into heart tissue? Neither heart tissue nor blood is magenta with white fuzz.
The only reference to the appearance of the Sokolka specimen in water that I could find referred to “the partially dissolved Host with the blood colored substance on its interior”. This is interesting because it might indicate that the red colour was more on the inside than the outside, which is not a characteristic generally associated with Serratia. But it’s hard to tell exactly what they mean with no pictures, and I’m not sure how much weight to give it.
Are there microorganisms other than Serratia that could have that appearance? There are many other microorganisms that can have a blood red colour, but that depends more on their diet than the species. Generally, microorganisms turn red in the presence of a lot of iron. Interestingly, the pictures from Legnica seem to show the specimen in a scratched gold-plated container, which could potentially be a source of iron. However, that’s not really necessary. The CYA medium in the image below, which turned the culture blood red, contains only 3mg/L of iron. That’s easily within the range occurring in drinking water, especially in Poland where most of the raw water comes from ground water.
An Interesting Group of Experts
There are several quotes from the experts that studied the samples available on the internet. Unfortunately, most of them have no context. I remember reading an actual writeup regarding the Sokolka specimen when I first came across it, but I can’t find it now. The only paper I can find actually written by the scientists is this one.
It was written by the two pathologists who looked at the Sokolka specimen, as well as a physicist, a priest, and a mechanical engineering professor. That sounds like the setup for a bad joke. The keywords in the English abstract (“Eucharist; special theory of relativity; miracle”) make it sound like it might actually be a good joke. I wanted to read that article so badly that I briefly looked into Polish lessons, but I had to settle for Google Translate. This left many passages difficult to interpret, such as:
“It is difficult to talk about a miracle, for example when examining a sample taken from a bread upright in the market will be seen under a microscope sausage.”
I did manage to figure out what the theory of relativity has to do with some mouldy bread in Poland. The authors seem to be trying to get around an issue about Eucharistic miracles raised by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century – if the actual tissue from Jesus’s heart is appearing on a cracker in Poland, does that mean that Jesus is sitting up in Heaven with a hole in his heart? Basically, the authors are saying that due to the theory of relativity, an imaginary observer, in a space ship moving at a speed of 10km/s, at a distance of 60 million light years from Earth, would see Jesus’s crucifixion and the priest in modern Poland blessing the cracker as happening at the same time. Thus, the heart tissue can come from Jesus’s dead body, before he was resurrected. I’m not going to bother analyzing this argument because I don’t see the point of it – if it’s a miracle can’t the tissue just time-travel? You’re already invoking magic!
The paper did include some details of their study of the sample, which I will go through in the next section, along with the quotes available from other sources.
Microscopy
Both samples were observed under microscopes. Unfortunately, no microscopy images seem to be available for either specimen. Thus, we have to rely on the writings and quotes from the scientists.
The Legnica sample was analyzed using fluorescence microscopy (dye unspecified). The Sokolka sample was stained with Mayer’s hematoxylin and eosin pink (H&E) and viewed under an optical microscope and a transmission electron microscope.
Both samples were described as looking like fragmented cross-striated muscle. Some typical quotes are below:
- “[T]issue fragments containing fragmented parts of cross-striated muscle” (Legnica)
- “We have identified myocardial fibres, typical of myocardial tissue with alterations that often appear during the agony.” (Legnica)
- “The sample sent for evaluation looks like myocardial tissue. In our opinion, of all the tissues of living organisms this is the one that resembles it the most.” (Sokolka)
- “In the histopathological image, the fragments (of the Host) were found containing the fragmented parts of the cross striated muscle. It is most similar to the heart muscle. Tests also determined the tissue to be of human origin, and found that it bore signs of distress.” (Sokolka)
- “This sample is cardiac muscle-just before death. It is in agony caused by great stress. This is proved by the presentation of a very strong phenomenon of segmentation or damage to myocardial fibers at the site of the intercalated disks, which does not occur after death. Such changes can be observed only in living tissues. They show evidence of rapid spasms of the heart muscle in the period just before death.” (Sokolka)
Short of outright fraud, this rules out the possibility of bacteria. I don’t think you could find a pathologist deluded enough to sincerely confuse Serratia, or any similar bacteria, with heart tissue, after looking at it under a microscope. Serratia are small and rod-shaped.
Myocardial tissue is striated – it consists of long strands of cells, bundled together. Do any microorganisms consist of long stands of cells? Yes. Fungi, oomycetes and actinobacteria grow in long, filamentous structures called hypha. They would not normally occur in bundles as dense or orderly as muscle tissue, but note how many times the quotes above refer to “fragments”, “segmentation” and “damage”. Do you get the impression the strands might not be as dense or orderly as the researchers would typically expect of heart tissue?
Let’s look at the specific characteristics from the Sokolka relativity paper that led the authors to conclude they were looking at heart tissue:
Damage to myocardial fibers at the site of the intercalated discs constituting morphologically and functionally complex structures, characteristic of heart muscle. The damage was visible as numerous small cracks, as if cut with a knife.
Intercalated disks are disks that divide the cells within a strand of muscle. The Sokolka paper is indicating that these disks are abnormal in the sample cells. They refer to a few studies that indicate that during heart failure the shape of the intercalated disks changes. This one is easiest to access because it’s in English. That paper describes these changes as folds, but the Sokolka paper describes them as “numerous small cracks, as it cut with a knife.”
The equivalent to intercalated disks in a microorganism would be septa, which divide the hyphae into individual cells. Not all filamentous microorganisms have septa, so this eliminates oomycetes and actinobacteria as possibilities, as well as some fungi. Most fungi that do have septa have perforated septa, which allow ribosomes and mitochondria to flow between cells. Perforated… like perhaps they were cut by a knife…
The central arrangement of cell nuclei in the fibers, which is characteristic of heart muscle.
This is undoubtedly the primary reason they came to the conclusion it was heart muscle as opposed to any other striated muscle. Most human muscles have multiple nuclei on the periphery of the cells. However, most fungi have nuclei in the center of the fibers. Bacteria have no nuclei at all, so this further rules them out as a possibility.
Some fibers have also been observed that may correspond to contraction nodes. However, the outlines of the inserts and bunches were visible as delicate myofibrils.
I’m having trouble with the translation in this section, but I think they’re trying to explain finding some really thin delicate stands. Which could be myofibrils, but are also a really common characteristic of fungus.
In natural conditions, a communion wafer put into water will dissolve quickly. In this case it did not.
I don’t think this has anything to do with heart muscle. They are probably attributing it to the miracle. But it also makes sense if there was atypical biota in the water.
The tissue that appeared on the Host formed an inseparable structure with a delicate seam remaining on the perimeter. The penetration was so intricate that it could not have been done artificially.
Again, this has nothing to do with heart tissue. Intricately penetrating food to form an inseparable structure is what fungus does best.
So basically I cannot find any recorded microscope observations that rule out fungi, and a lot of the observations are actually more consistent with fungi than with heart tissue. In fact, the observations allow me to narrow it down to specifically septate fungi. What does that include? Neurospora crassa, commonly known as red bread mould, is an obvious candidate. Aspergillus versicolor is another.
Living tissue?
Another interesting claim for the Sokolka specimen was that the heart tissue was alive. Specifically, “The heart was alive, just before death. The sample analyzed was not from a dead person. The person was alive.”
I’m not clear exactly what they based that on, but it’s presumably because the cells were alive – mould lives quite well on soggy crackers. Heart cells, on the other hand, do not. I suppose you can assume that they were miraculously kept alive. But for how long? The time between the tissue appearing on the cracker and it being declared still alive by the scientists was almost 3 months. If it was still alive then, is it still alive now? If not, what stopped the miracle? How does this work with the theory of relativity angle? For an observer on the event horizon of a black hole, the moment of Jesus’s death would last forever, therefore, even though Jesus was situated at a particular location in space-time that was definitely not a black hole, and the cracker is in a different location in space-time that is also not a black hole, the heart tissue on the cracker can persist to live on the cracker for months, even though Jesus died in hours? Even if that worked from a scientific standpoint, how would it work theologically? If Jesus’s dying heart still lives on a napkin in Poland, has he not yet died for our sins?
More interestingly, living heart tissue has a very obvious characteristic that distinguishes it from other tissues – it beats. Inherently. Even a single, isolated cell will pulsate.
So will little blobs of cardiomyoctyes grown from stem cells in culture. You can have arrythmias in the heart that make the beating uncoordinated so that the heart as a whole doesn’t beat effectively – that’s what defibrillators fix. But in general, the individual cells are either beating or dead. Theoretically there might be some conditions that could stop a heart cell from beating without immediately killing it (like bathing it in a potassium solution). It wouldn’t survive for long, but no heart cells on a cracker would. But none of those conditions would naturally exist on a cracker in water. So if the cells were alive and not beating, God must have artificially stopped them from beating. Why would God go to the trouble of stopping the heart cells from beating in a miracle that was supposed to be a message to us? Wouldn’t that be deliberately making the message unclear?
Definitely Human?
I have seen several sites claiming that the tissue from both samples is known to be human and from no other organism. I’m not clear how they came to that conclusion. For the Legnica specimen, this statement is given:
“The Wrocław Forensic Medicine Institute immediately excluded the presence of bacteria or fungi as a cause for the Host turning red.” [1](L)
However, there are no details about the process used. There are several references to DNA and genetics, however there are no quotes from geneticists, no description of the tests used, and the meaning of the quotes is mystifying. Typical quotes include:
- “A fragment of the DNA sequence was found, but to tell whose DNA it could be, it still needs further research,”
- “The genetic researchers indicate the human origin of the tissue.”
- We have not tested the blood found on the Host, we only know that human DNA was found.”
The book He is Alive goes further, stating about the Legnica specimen:
“Human blood, type AB, human DNA, but no genetic profile. Human tissue / heart muscle, white blood cells addressing an injury indicating the man was beaten severely, yet for the white blood cells to exist, there must be a living body, a living heart.”
This sentence is not presented as a quote, nor attributed to any source. Therefore, I assume they are the words of the book’s author, John S Carpenter, a psychiatric therapist, who does not even claim to have seen the specimen. What he based these claims on is a mystery. Furthermore, the Legnica section of his book is only a bit over a page long and includes a misattributed image. There are also questionable details given in the Sokolka section, like the study being based on a 1cm2 sized sample, when the entire specimen appears to be smaller than that. Therefore, I am generally dismissing this source as unreliable.
The Sokolka paper on relativity states that “tests also determined the tissue to be of human origin.” With all of the details given for the other tests in this paper, I would expect these tests to be described, but they are not.
Human heart tissue looks like all other mammalian heart tissue. I cannot come up with any way to tell human heart tissue from chimpanzee heart tissue without looking at the DNA. Various sources indicate that they could not get a DNA sequence, yet still imply the DNA showed that the sample was human. The only way I can think of to do that would be to count the chromosomes, which wouldn’t conclusively prove it was human, but it would eliminate most other possibilities. But heart tissue doesn’t divide, and thus the DNA doesn’t condense, so this would not be possible.
If the DNA was sequenced, I don’t know how you could possibly confirm that the DNA was from the sample as opposed to the various sources of contamination. Remember, the wafer fell on the dirty floor of the church, was picked up, placed into the water the priests use to wash their fingers, and multiple people have stood over the sample examining it. If there weren’t at least some human skin cells in the sample it would be a miracle!
Conclusion
Is it realistic to think that all of these experts were fooled by fungus? Well, for one thing, I’m not confident they went to the right experts. Neither sample was submitted to a microbiologist. The experts consulted were pathologists and cardiologists, who work with human tissue. For the Sokolka samples, the narratives seem to imply that these researchers were told it was human before they began their analysis. And for the Legnica specimen, one of the two scientists was blinded to the source of the sample when he did his analysis. Normally blinding would be a good thing, because it wouldn’t push him toward answers compatible with his faith. However, when you hand an expert a sample and ask what it is, he’s naturally going to start with things he sees most often. That means expecting human tissues, not the organisms likely to be found on decaying bread.
Also, note the statements from the University of Bialystok where the Sokolka research was conducted:
“We didn’t do it as a university – said Chyczewski and added that the research was conducted illegally, “quietly”, off the official route.”
“Chyczewski wrote that he did not undermine the diagnosis of his colleagues, although ‘they are characterized by their emotional approach to faith’”
That university and others have offered to conduct detailed tissue research, but the Archbishop has refused.
After a thorough search I can’t find any details about any analysis that would rule out the possibility of fungus in any of those samples. If the experts in fact ruled out this possibility, I would love to learn how they did that. Even if the Church is not allowing future study on the samples because they now believe them to be the body of Jesus (again, weren’t they always?) that doesn’t explain why they aren’t releasing the information they already have. For example, microscopy photos were taken of both samples. I’m rather puzzled why they aren’t available online. If the Church was really confident that this was a miracle you would think they’d want all the public attention they could get. Lacking that information, I’m assuming it’s just mould.
Hi could you help me get to the bottom of another supposed Eucharist miracle.
Sorry for the delayed response. Most of the comments I get are spam. If you send me details I will take a look. But honestly what caught my attention about this one was that there was so much documentation publicly available. That’s really unusual. In most cases it’s almost impossible to find anything detailed enough to comment on.
Finally I have found a good article on eucharistic miracles. Thank you so much for your work it is much appreciated.
Thanks
Kerri,
Thank you so much for this post. As a person who has left Catholicism, but has ocd fears over miracles, your post was incredibly helpful. Have you looked into the data at all that the Buenos Aires “miracles” had? Some similar descriptors of heart tissue, distressed, fused to the bread, etc.
Can you comment on this at all?
https://youtu.be/bd16tBRbLXw
If I remember correctly this one was really poorly documented. Most are. But I will take a look.
Interesting. I’m going to try to get a copy of Ron Tesoriero’s book because it looks like might actually have some clearer images of the microscope slides in it. The story is sounding very similar. The actual pictures look so much like rotting food I’m surprised it even got analyzed, complete with black bits and white fuzz. They’re so bad that almost every article I can find on google substitutes in a picture of two wafers with what is obviously Serratia, which I assume is because that actually looks like blood and this looks rotten. They took the samples straight to a pathologist, so in their choice of expert they are pre-presuming it’s human tissue. They handed him a slide, already prepared and stained with H&E, with absolutely no context. Of course he’s going to assume it’s human tissue. The human tissue that looks most like fungi is heart tissue, and spores look a lot like white blood cells, at least at the magnification they show on the video. Except of course they live outside the body and don’t dissolve in water.
The other claim that’s interesting is that he didn’t know Dr. Zugibe’s religious beliefs beforehand. He became famous for The Cross and the Shroud: A Medical Examiner Investigates the Crucifixion in 1981, a full 18 years earlier. I can’t find exactly what year he officially started working for the Vatican, but I’m pretty sure it was before this. If they actually picked a random medical examiner and got this guy, that’s the real miracle!
The other interesting thing is that Pope Francis was so heavily involved in this for years, and yet after becoming Pope has made no attempts to authenticate or make it official. That suggests to me he may have reason to doubt it.
Thank you for the reply! Sounds like a similar situation to these polish “miracles” the white blood cell comment is what made me puzzled and a little concerned, but if spores look similar that explains the pathologist again being confused. Tesoriero uses Robert Lawrence quite a bit as well for other miracle claims so I wonder if some doctors Tesoriero uses are just a bit more credulous on purpose.
I’m sorry, what do you mean by the outside the body comment? Just that you’d expect them to be on a piece of fungus?
Additionally, from the images you’ve seen from Ron’s video, could this be something that is a fungus?
I have the images from his book, and I’m quite sure they aren’t white blood cells. The nuclei do not have the shapes you would expect for white blood cells. The only thing they have in common with white blood cells is that they were small cells in the vicinity of what he thought was heart tissue. My husband (who’s undergrad was in microbiology but his doctorate and post-doc work haven’t involved fungi) agrees. A friend who’s a mycologist and her friend who works with heart tissue have agreed to look at it. So I’ll have an actual expert opinion eventually.
You have no idea how amazing this is. I have been agonizing over this purported miracle for months. Would a parasitologist have any knowledge on this? Supposedly Tesoriero got the consult of one of those too.
I don’t see the relevance. Do you have a link to where he said that? There’s nothing about that in anything I’ve found.
Sorry it won’t let me respond to your message for whatever reason, but it’s stated in websites that Ron went to Walker prior to Zugibe and said it’s human tissue. It’s debated here, but unlike the post I found the professor retired in the 2000’s actually.
https://christianity.stackexchange.com/questions/40960/where-can-i-find-official-documents-of-buenos-aires-eucharistic-miracle
This link refers to one of the supposed comments Walker made
I kind of wonder if this Walker incident is in Ron’s book but I don’t want to pay money to a person who seem like a snake oil salesman
I bought the book. Don’t bother, there’s less information in it than in the video. The only thing it has is microscope images clear enough to examine. The text is useless. Walker is in it, but not in relation to Buenos Aries, in a different section about a bleeding statue, which Tesoriero investigated in 1996. I’m not clear why he would want a parasitologist for that either, but Tesoriero got his degree at the University of Sydney, so it might have been a personal contact and the only doctor he could get to talk to him at the time. It sounds like that’s the first place he took this one as well. But he said it was skin cells, and Zugibe said it was heart, and he didn’t want it to sound like it was ambiguous so he edited Walker out of the story.
I’ve actually seen a few references to 5 doctors, and I have been wondering what the others said. So far I only count Walker, Linoli, Zugibe, and the guy who failed to find human DNA. But the stories aren’t very consistent, so I don’t know if 5 is a real number. He could have been shopping around for a while.
Sorry, apparently I bought the wrong book. I bought Reason to Believe first, but there is much more info in Unseen. When I read the description I thought Unseen was just his evolution nonsense, so I bought the other one. But then I saw an interview with him where he said there was a lot more info in Unseen, so now I have both. I haven’t read Unseen yet, but searching for Walker I found “The microscopic slides were then examined by Australian scientists, Dr Peter Ellis, a senior lecturer in Forensic Medicine at Sydney University, and Dr Thomas Loy of Queensland University. Both supported the interpretation of Dr Lawrence: that the material appeared to be skin tissue. However another scientist, Dr John Walker of Sydney University had a different opinion. He said that the material looked like muscle tissue, not skin. Professor Odoardo Linoli in Italy shared this conclusion but was more specific. He was of the view that the sample possibly contained muscle from the heart.”
That is the only hit for Walker in the book. But there is a lot more information. Unfortunately there are no better pictures. I have a lot of notes from the first book (and a few rabbit holes I dove down) but I’m hoping the additional info in this book will alleviate some of my confusion. I will post a summary when I finish. But this is another entire book and I’m working full time, so it will probably be months before I get my thoughts together. If you have any specific questions about the book in the meantime let me know and I can search.
OK. I was hoping that we’d have like one of those images where half of people see one thing and half of people see something else. The experts who are primed to expect human tissue would see cardiomyocytes, the experts primed to expect rotting food would say fungi. That’s definitely not what I got. The one expert in heart tissue said her gut instinct was heart tissue surrounded by inflammation, and most of the mycologists said it didn’t particularly look like fungi to them, except for one that said it looked “yeasty”. Every single person commented on the poor slide preparation and the poor quality of the photos, so no one is willing to give a definite answer, but it’s sounding like I’m probably wrong. I will write up a full post with everything I found and some pictures to show you what I was looking at when I have some time. If it is heart tissue, I’m guessing someone just swapped out the slide at some point after it was prepared. Human heart tissue from heart attack victims is not nearly as difficult to come by as he implies, anyone can buy a slide online for about $8 these days. Back then you could probably get it from a catalog in a science supply shop, or from a friend at a university or hospital.
I can’t comment on string via mobile apparently, but that is disappointing to hear. I was hoping this was a case of mis identified tissue, and makes me a bit more frightened now. They mention usually how it’s connected to the host in a way you couldn’t connect it without basically a miracle, I wonder if that’s specifically the thing that actually grew on the host rather than the sample? Did they say anything about the sample having host ok it? I’m sorry, this just terribly freightens me and I suppose rationally they probably swapped slides to dupe experts, but the miracle possibility is not great
I’m disappointed too.
The images do not show anything that anyone is interpreting as the host. The cells we can see are not intertwined with anything, including each other. If that is shown somewhere else in this slide or another slide, he chose not to show that part in the book or video, which seems like an odd choice. Also, looking at the picture of the overall tissue, which part would be the host? The white fuzzy bits he points to and calls the remains of the host don’t look solid enough to be intertwined with anything. And they are not even in contact with the red part, and the sample for analysis is supposed to be exclusively from the red part. I also haven’t seen the claim that it’s intertwined with the host attributed to any of the experts. So I’ve basically been dismissing that claim in this case.
To be honest I’m also not completely convinced – and certainly no one is definitively telling me it couldn’t be anything but heart tissue. But I’m definitely an amateur and I have access to experts, and their opinions were not encouraging. This isn’t a standard preparation for mycologists, normally they would culture the sample, let the spores grow and then put a sample from that living culture on the slide. There is no reason to look at dead cells from fungi. These slides have the remains of some dead cells (the necrotic heart tissue) and a whole lot of living spores (the white blood cells). It would be the remains of a years old culture that ran out of food within a week. (3-8 years old depending on depending on when the slide was prepared, I haven’t been able to find that information). The normal way to analyze this would be to culture the sample and see if anything grows. That was not done, because it was assumed to be a miracle from the beginning, and they didn’t bother to rule out other possibilities.
Presuming the slide was a purchased slide from a university of magazine, I imagine the “white blood cells” would actually be blood cells? Rather than spores.
Presumably. But you can’t really tell much about the white blood cells. The picture that shows the “white blood cells” is a photo taken of an old CRT screen, so there are scanning lines across it. There are clearly dark patches of hematoxylin stain, which stains DNA, which means the cell nuclei. The nuclei are intact, which means they’re living cells. They don’t appear to have much cellular material outside the nucleus (although some seem to have more than you’d expect for white blood cells). For human cells that’s consistent with white blood cells, and they’re near the damaged heart tissue so that’s where people are expecting to see white blood cells. But there’s really not much beyond that to suggest they are. If they were white blood cells at that magnification you should easily be able to see the characteristic nuclei of the cells and identify what type of white blood cell each is (neutrophil, eosinophil, basophil, lymphocyte, monocyte). But in this image you can’t. The nuclei are undifferentiated blobs, like you’d expect if they were spores. That’s what made me say they’re not white blood cells. But the people I’m talking to think that might just be an artifact of the really terrible staining job and the poor lighting. They also seem too large relative to the width of the cardiomyocytes, but with no scale bars no one wants to read to much into that.
The terrible staining job makes me think the slide wasn’t purchased. That wouldn’t have made it past quality control most places. It’s more likely to be a discarded slide from a student or someone without a lot of experience. But either way it wouldn’t be difficult to acquire.
Speaking of the DNA, I don’t know if you’ve read his explanation that they couldn’t get a DNA sequence because Jesus didn’t have DNA? The DNA is there, we can literally see it. In theory it could be degraded enough that it can’t be sequenced. But it would be hard to reconcile that with an argument that the white blood cells have been miraculously preserved. Why would a miracle preserve the cells enough in water so that the cells appear fresh on a microscope but allow the DNA to degrade so much you can’t even get a partial sequence?
I guess what’s yours theory on what this is and how they did it? A slide someone poorly made and gave them with some spores on it? Did the experts have any thoughts?
I haven’t heard anything back from any experts since they were told what it was. But the one that thought it was heart tissue was assuming that the “spores” really are white blood cells and they just look odd because the slide is poorly prepared, the lighting is bad and the image quality is low.
Honestly, I have an Amazon shopping cart full of communion wafers because I still think if I seed enough of them and let them sit for 3 years at least one will look like this. But I acknowledge that’s mostly my emotional attachment to my pet theory. I don’t think you should lend too much credence to the opinion of a random engineer with a disused blog on the internet.
Also, the more I read of Ron Tesoriero’s book the more likely fraud seems. Fraud is the most likely explanation for nearly every other case in his book, and he repeatedly leaves so many opportunities for fraud open that he’s clearly either in on it or unbelievably gullible. Even if he’s just gullible, it was Catalina Rivas’ prediction that this was a real Eucharistic Miracle that got him involved in the first place. She’s used fraud for every other one of her predictions, including acts of slight of hand in front of Tesoriero. And there are so many examples of Tesoriero leaving objects he’s supposedly investigating alone with people likely to tamper with them that slight of hand probably wouldn’t even be necessary. And that’s just one example of a suspicious character, he’s in contact with many. And I’m not ruling his direct involvement out either.
Also wouldn’t Ron’s theory essentially mean Jesus was actually a woman…? No X chromosomes due to the virgin birth is his theory I know, but that would go against the “fully man” thing.
Ron has worked with a Ricardo Castanon on these cases, if you look him up he may not actually even be a doctor, but I think the most likely situation is these guys may both be in on it. There was 90’s miracle show Castanon did with Wilesee that I think Skeptical Inquirer commented on talking about how they use faux skepticism and basically buy in right away. I tend to think Ron is complicit in this. Why else would he write a book with tbe information needed, and not share actual data and peer review, ya know?
Wow this was a really indepth approach to this case. I am very impressed.
Thank you.
Amazing article but I have a question about this quote “ Another very interesting event observed consists in that the substance found on the corporal, although slightly changed after being removed from the water (it had simply dried) a couple of years ago, it did not change its appearance despite having been neither stabilized nor preserved at a particular temperature. “This signifies that if the miracle were due to a bacterium, the material would have disintegrated, crumbled and would have changed appearance. Any microbial culture, even placed on the cleanest possible material, after a single week appears completely different” added Professor Sulkowski”(https://www.deepertruthcatholics.com/single-post/2020/02/06/the-guardian-angel-eucharistic-miracle-sokolka-poland-2008) Does this mean it can’t be bacteria or is this info blantently false
Hi Seth. I’ve had trouble finding an absolute answer on that one. Even experts don’t spend much time looking at dead micro organisms because there are almost always living spores you can use to grow a new colony. So there’s never really any reason to study dead ones. From personal experience I can tell you that mummified mould on a mummified orange peel found at the back of a friend’s junior high locker looks dried out but recognizable. If mould on a wall in your home dries out and dies the appearance doesn’t change much, you’re still going to have to do a lot of scrubbing to get rid of the appearance of mould (as well as killing the spores). So I don’t think it’s true that any microbial culture will crumble or appear completely different. With a colony of single celled organisms, like bacteria, it intuitively makes more sense that it would crumble when it dries out, because there’s nothing holding the cells together. But in blood itself the colour comes from red blood cells, and those are separate living cells within the blood that die when it dries out. And that certainly doesn’t mean that blood can’t make a stain on a cloth. However, most bacteria that decompose food transition to a dormant, resilient spore form when conditions are bad, including when they dry out. That could change the appearance. But the Serratia samples you can buy online (https://store.schoolspecialty.com/OA_HTML/ibeCCtpItmDspRte.jsp?item=35379&minisite=10206 for example), which are usually freeze dried and ground, seem to still have the strong red colour. I actually have a colony of what I’m pretty sure is Serratia growing in my bathroom sink, and I have some unconsecrated communion wafers I’m trying to grow it on. If I succeed I’ll try drying it out and see what happens.
But I don’t think it would be possible to confuse bacteria with heart tissue under a microscope. If they are microorganisms, they would have to be multicellular. I think those are less likely to disintegrate. I’ll try to experiment with that too.
I see!Huge thank you for the reply!
I see!Huge thank you for the reply!
Hi Seth,
I finally have an answer for you on whether it would disintegrate. At 6 months after drying out it’s still red and quite solid. See details here. https://skeptasmic.com/would-bacteria-disintegrate-or-crumble/
what do you think of the alleged mircle at tixtla?
Video may be of interest. I’m not sure what to make of 3/4 having “white blood cells but no dna profile” , but interesting a confirmed miracle was debunked
https://youtu.be/mWmdXqIhjSs
Did you find a rebuttal to the 3/4 with white blood cells? This video creates me huge anguishes because they found white cell after such a long time.
Hey!I found a better translation on that part you were struggling with and I wanted to know if it poses a problem.It says: “Some signs that can correspond to nodes of
the contractions have been observed on the section of
several fibers. Instead, during the analysis with the electronic microscope,the outlines of the communicating junctions and the thin filaments of the myofibrils were visible”
I believe the myofibril stuff was already explained but what about the “communicating junctions”
OK, that helps. “Communicating junction” is another term for “gap junction” which are connections between animal cells. In the heart they are in the intercalated discs. Fungi have pores that serve a similar function. There are differences, but if they’re saying they could only see the outline I’m not sure if they could tell. I wish I could find images.
Thank you for the response
http://www.therealpresence.org/eucharst/mir/english_pdf/Sokolka2.pdf
This has an image in it. Maybe that’s what you’re looking for?
Thanks. I do have that PDF linked above, I’m not sure if I missed the image or if I just ignored it because I’m not sure what that image is. It’s definitely not SEM, it’s light microscope. But the light microscope slides for Sokolka were supposed to be H&E stained, which would be red and blue. This image is a dark blue-green, but I’m not sure if that’s an actual stain, or if it’s a black and white image that’s been scanned? But the cytoplasm looks way too dark for even a black and white photo of an H&E stain. Then there are all these dots and vertical lines and blurred bits that might be artifacts from digital image compression, or a file that’s been printed and scanned too many times. Anyway, neither my husband nor I can make anything out in that image.
That is a stock heart tissue image. I found a purple version of it online while reverse image searching it awhile back
Interesting. So it’s not even of the sample.
I have one more question about the poorly translated section again.
I read that “ Along the length of some of the fibers we also found patterns consistent with node contractions. Closer electron-microscopic examination revealed outlines of the insertion points and delicate micro-fibrillar networks”
What are “insertion points” “contraction nodes” and how did they find them in fungi?
And does the wording “delicate micro-fibrillar networks” pose any problems(Are fungi myofibrils in networks?)
This is very accurate. Actually Eucharistic Miracles of Legnica and Sokolka weren’t fungus or Serratia Marcens. They didn’t find anything about that. Eucharistic miracles Legnica was tested in the university of Breslavia and Scezzin. Mirosław Parafiniuk tested the miracle of Legnica without knowing the origin of the tissue and determined that it was human. God exist unfortunately for you skeptics.
I looked into this quite extensively and I didn’t find any documentation of any test to rule out fungi. They ruled out bacteria based on what they saw through the microscope, however after experimenting at home I don’t think there’s any way to rule out bacteria that way. If I do exactly what they did with a rotting wafer where I know the red colour is from Serratia, I can’t see the bacteria either. Because where there’s Serratia, there are other microorganisms, which are much larger (and look much more like human cells). So even when I know with 100% certainty the colour is from bacteria, I don’t see the bacteria, I see the fungi. You can’t see the bacteria unless you isolate them and view at high magnification, and that would require culturing it, which they did not even attempt to do, because they were assuming it was human tissue. Trying to culture it would be the most effective, non-destructive way to test this, and it’s honestly unbelievable that no one has tried it on any of these samples. But that’s because it’s the first thing that any expert would do if you brought them a wet flour wafer and asked why it turned red. Every single one of these stories starts with them assuming it’s human tissue, taking it to experts on human tissue without telling them the source, and never bothering to rule out the obvious.
So this post isn’t very accurate. The reason of the eucharistic miracles Legnica find myocardial tissue in the host. In the host weren’t any bacteria or fungos.
The links dosen’t works
Sorry about that. I’ll take a look next weekend.
Hi. The only broken links I found were the link and picture from Exploring the Invisible. That site seems to have been taken down. That’s not really surprising, it was a private non-monitized blog like this one, and web hosting is getting expensive. Is that what you were looking for? It was just a mycologist that had grown Serratia on an unconsecrated communion wafer, which I’ve done several times myself now. Do you need any more information?
I’m not sure if you would still be interested but I happened upon the Legnica report written by the scientists themselves. It has a few pictures https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EbRu2I3z9NTLq88YekCmpLZlwZhdZ1gK/view
Wow, those pictures are just random cellular debris. Remind me to post some pictures of what a regular mouldy wafer looks like, you basically get that every time.
But that report seems very incomplete. It starts with conclusions, it refers to “the block” with no context, it skips from figure 1 to figure 3, and it says genetic testing was completed and then just ends with no comment on what they found. Very odd. Makes me think it’s not the original.