Santa Maria Parish in Buenos Aires claims to have been the site of four1 Eucharistic Miracles between 1992 and 1996. Why so many in this one place?

I went to the church to try to find out. One idea commonly proposed is that Eucharistic Miracles occur when someone is doubting the real presence in the Eucharist. However, my husband and I both went to morning mass at Santa Maria, and I assure you we both doubted as hard as anyone has ever doubted, and yet there were no miracles observed. So, I think we can consider that hypothesis eliminated.

Is there something else that makes this place special? At first glance it seemed like a pretty ordinary church.

At second glance it appeared booby trapped to trip me up – one of my reasons for attending RCIA class last year was to make sure I wasn’t being unintentionally disrespectful when visiting churches in Latin America, and within minutes of entering I felt like I was failing a pop quiz. The holy water font was empty (presumably to control dengue; the church also doesn’t allow any vases of cut flowers to eliminate standing water). I genuflected toward the altar, then realized there was no tabernacle, and remembered I should have just bowed toward the… but there was no crucifix either. Do you bow to the baby Jesus? Or that Jesus head in the circle? Or to the little crucifix on the left2?

There was a large crucifix on the right, but it was halfway down the church.

No one else seemed to be doing any bowing, so I knelt, silently recited a quick prayer, and then sat and started getting my bearings.

The floorplan is surprisingly rectangular. The only protrusion is the adoration chapel which was added in 2006 to house the miracle specimens. That juts out into the courtyard, which is surrounded by other buildings that appeared to be administrative. I was of course very familiar with the miracle stories before arriving, and I had an image in my head of dark corners with dusty candlesticks where a hidden wafer was found. It was hard to imagine where that could happen in this smooth, well-lit church. I later confirmed that it was somewhere along this side aisle.

There are divisions along the wall with the stations of the cross along the top and relics, images or statues of different saints and prayers to them, and of course donation boxes. But they’re hardly recessed. It’s awkward to even pray in front of them without blocking the aisle.

Padre Pio’s alcove with his relic.

It would be difficult to miss that this is the eucharistic miracle church. I noticed a sign outside before even entering the church, information about the twice a month presentations was on the notification screen, and there is a large display in front of the adoration chapel, in the middle of the aisle, and a holder for brochures.

There is also a lot of Carlo Acutis, one of the alcoves is dedicated to him (it contains a bit of his finger bone) and the Youth Group is named after him.

The little shop sold keychains and whatnot with his image on them.

The adoration chapel is where the missing tabernacle was located.

It also contains a monstrance with a regular consecrated wafer (when adoration is on), with a safe behind it containing everything from the claimed miracles except for the 1992 wafer, which is in it’s own enclosure to the left. It is illuminated from behind, and has a door that is closed when adoration isn’t on. Naturally, the “miracle” has its own donation box.

The image below shows the adoration chapel, outside of adoration hours. The square on the left with the loaves and fish is the cover for the 1992 communion wafer. To it’s left is a donation box labelled “offerings for the Eucharistic Sign” in Spanish. In the middle is a monstrance which holds a regular wafer during adoration hours. Behind it, the square in the brick is the outline of the safe that holds all of the other objects associated with the claimed miracles. On the right is a mosaic of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

To the right is a picture of Pope Francis and a book asking people to record their testimonies.

A woman, who appeared (and sounded) very sick was lying on some blankets in the alcove to the right of the alter, which includes a display of the Virgin of Lujan. She was clearly camping out at the church waiting for a miracle instead of going to the hospital, which felt straight out of the Middle Ages.

The pews would hold about 200 people. About 50 were present for the Friday morning mass, and about 20 of them were together in some kind of pilgrimage group. It was the 3rd Friday, when they do talks on the Eucharistic Miracles, but I didn’t recognize many people from the morning mass at the talk. Most people that were there for the talk went to the evening mass immediately before the talk, which had about 40 people. I didn’t realize that the evening mass was right before the talk, so we showed up awkwardly 15 minutes before the talk, in the middle of the evening mass.

Mass started. We were seated about ¾ of the way back, and the noise coming in from the street was loud enough to make it difficult to hear. That, combined with my weak Spanish, made it difficult to understand what was going on. In general the brick church has significant problems with noise isolation, we also had issues with the youth group playing in the courtyard drowning out the speakers in the evening talk. Mass was short, they started about 10 minutes late but still finished about half an hour after the official start time.

When it came time for communion, I went up with my arms crossed over my chest like I was taught in RCIA. I learned that this is not a Universal symbol, and had to shake my head and search my brain for the words in Spanish. Eventually the Priest shrugged and made the sign of the cross over me. (As far as fitting in goes, those RCIA classes definitely did more harm than good).

Not many people kneeled to receive the wafer, but I think a lot were receiving on the tongue standing (it was hard to tell from the back of the line). The priest was tall enough and the average height of the parishoners was short enough to make this not too awkward. A few people rushed out right after receiving, but most stayed and prayed after mass. The group went together into the adoration chapel and made a bunch of noise, we were outside so I missed what exactly happened. After that they sang loudly, then went over to the little alcove with Mary and a relic from Padre Pio and started reciting some rosary-based prayer. There were no “Our Father”s or “Hail Mary”s, so it wasn’t a standard Dominican Rosary, but beyond that my Spanish isn’t good enough to say.

And that was it. I didn’t see anything particularly special.

1This depends on how you count. The parish says four because it was four separate events. Franco Serafini counts 5 because 5 separate objects were bloody. Three is also an option because they occurred in 3 separate years, 1992, 1994 and 1996.

2Google says you bow to the altar, which makes more sense because there are often several crucifixes in a church. It really frustrates me that I went to classes every week for a full year to learn this stuff when I would have been better off Googling.