I haven’t done a deep dive into Tixtla and I’m probably not going to, because there simply isn’t enough information available. But I keep hearing that Ricardo Castanon-Gomez’s book Cronica de un Milagro Eucharistico has all of the information anyone could ever want to scientifically verify a Eucharistic Miracle in the 19 scientific studies in it’s Appendices. So I’m just going to show you how ridiculous that claim is.

Anexo I contains a 1 page letter from the Bishop giving Dr. Castanon permission to study the sample on October 26, 2009. This is not a scientific study.

Anexo II is a two page letter from the priest describing the events when the bloody wafer was found. Again, not a scientific study.

Anexo IIIa is a single page from a report from Corporativo Medical Legal. It has observations in a numbered list, with only numbers 2-7 on this page. The first sentence translates to  “The control sample showed immediate loss of its structure as soon as it came into contact with histopathology reagents.” Which is not how anyone would begin a report, so obviously pages are missing.

Anexo IIIb and IIIc are two pages regarding a blood type test from Gene-Ex.

Anexo IV is reports from PatMed. IVa is page 1 of 3, IVb is page 2 of 3, and IVc is…page 4 of 7?  It also has a different sample number and a different date!

Anexo V is another page from Corporativo Medical Legal. It begins “thus it has been demonstrated” and refers to the “previous image”, so this isn’t the first page either.

Anexo VIa is page 2 of 3 from PatMed again, just in case you thought he was cutting pages out of these reports to reduce printing costs. It’s identical to the copy in IVb except for the highlighting.

Anexo VIb is page 1 of 3 from Patmed, again identical to IVa.

Anexo VIc is page 2 of 7 from the other Patmed report..

Anexo VII is the same page from Corporativo Medical Legal as IIIa, but the cropping is different, so you can see the page number is page 11. It doesn’t say how many pages are in the document.

Anexo VIII is an IQB DNA test, that appears to only be one page.

Anexo VIII is a blood detection study from a cotton swab dated August 8, 2007. Remember that Castanon didn’t have the Tixtla sample until 2009, and there was no cotton swab mentioned, so this is clearly not even from Tixtla. Similarly, Anexo IX(a and b), X and XI all predate Tixtla.

Anexo XII is a page with no lab letterhead regarding patient “Juan Host”, which I would say is their most clever pseudonym for blinding yet, if the specimen site didn’t say “communion host fragments”, so this clearly wasn’t blinded. It is numbered page 1, and doesn’t give a total number of pages.

Anexo XIII is that same page 11 from Corporativo Medical Legal. Yes, this is the 3rd copy.

Anexo XIVa is page 3 of 4 of yet another document on a different sample number from PatMed.

Anexo XIVb is a 3rd copy of page 2 of 3 of the Patmed document.

Anexo IV is a report by Grupo Internacional Para La Paz, which Dr. Castanon was president of. It refers to attached images, which I’m sure we’ll find on the next page…oops, no, the next page is Dr. Sasot’s reports on the Buenos Aires sample! I assume that’s supposed to be Anexo XVI, but it’s unlabelled.

Anexo XVII is some quotes from Dr. Zugibe on Buenos Aires, and XVIII and XIX are his reports on that sample. And that’s it!

Of the 32 total pages in the Appendices, 12 are unrelated to Tixtla, and 5 are duplicates. That leaves only 15 relevant, unique pages, only 12 of which are actually lab reports. And those are random excerpts with no context, making them essentially unreadable.

The table below shows the unique 10 documents in the Appendices, in order by date. The columns are the pages I assume each had based on the page numbering available.  The cells contain the numbers of the Anexos the page is in (I used arabic numerals instead of Roman numerals to save space). Blank cells indicate pages not included, Xs indicate I have no reason to indicate the page exists (I made the table width for the longest document).

 DatePage 1Page 2Page 3Page 4Page 5Page 6Page 7Page 8Page 9Page 10Page 11?
Letter from bishopOctober 26, 20091 X X X X X X X X X X X
Letter from PriestNovember 9, 200922 X X X X X X X X X X
Grupo Internacional Para La PazFebruary 19, 20101 X X X X X X X X X X X
Gene-ExOctober 11, 20103b3c X X X X X X X XX  X
Unlabelled, WCS-11-05241June 29, 201112 X X X X X X X XX  X X
PatMed RH-2496-11July 28, 2011  14A  X X X X X X X X
PatMed RH-1799-11October 17, 20114A 6B4B 6A 14B  X X X X XX  X X X
PatMed RH-1664-12June 7, 2012 6C   4C    X X X X X
Corporativo Medico LegalUnknown          3A 7 135
IQBNovember 9, 20121 X X X X X X X X X X X

From this, you can see that we have at least 18 missing pages! At least 60% of the lab reports in the appendices are missing, and what is there is unreadable with no context.

And on top of that, all of this is published by the same author as the Forensic Analytical report in Buenos Aires, which appears to have been edited. So I don’t have much trust that these pages are unaltered.

So no, this is not “everything I could ever ask for”. It is not remotely adequate to evaluate the claims presented. Years ago I actually got my husband to drip blood on some wafers, intending to see if the claims that the blood could only have come from inside the wafer were adequate. But those wafers sat in a drawer for years, because there is no methodology or reasoning presented here, that’s all presumably in the pages that have been cut out. All that’s in the appendices on that subject is a bullet point from a conclusion. I can’t understand how they reached their conclusions, let alone test them.

This is not excellent documentation of a miracle. This is a confusing, self-published nightmare.