Let’s start with the worst of the worst. These incidents are not fun to write about, and researching them tends to give me nightmares, but I don’t want to be accused of turning a blind eye to genocide to focus on the amusing stories of science done badly, so buckle up.

We’ll begin with Brussels, 1370. Nothing on the Eucharistic Miracles of the World (EMW) webpage would give you any idea that this incident is better known as the Brussels massacre, in which several Jewish people were put to death and the remainder of the Jewish community was banished from Brussels. The EMW webpage notes “this miracle was celebrated up until some decades ago”, but fails to explain why. I’m not even sure whether this is a reference to 1870 when Pope Pius IX stopped the festival after noting that the documents supporting it had been falsified, or to 1968, when, according to a plaque at the Cathedral “in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council, the authorities of the archdiocese of Mechelen-Brussels, in the light of historical research on this subject, drew attention to the tendentious character of these accusations and to the legendary nature of the ‘miracle’” The Cathedral’s website had this statement and several paragraphs on what they referred to as the “so called miracle”, however the page was taken down some time in the last year.

Now, I assume that if the Cathedral is installing plaques stating that the “authorities of the archdiocese” are calling the miracle claims “tendentious” and “legendary”, then that implies that this miracle is not currently approved by the Bishop. However, there is a lot of contradictory information out there, and as with all of these “Eucharistic Miracles” it seems that the only way to verify whether the case is or was recognized by the Church is to figure out which Archdiocese is responsible and write to them individually, which is a pretty significant undertaking. So I am assuming that this, and the other cases that follow, are not approved by the Church, even though Reverend Burke wrote in his forward to the Eucharistic Miracles of the World book that all of the cases in the book are approved.

The Brussels Massacre is a case of what historians refer to as “desecration of the host libel”, and, as “libel” implies, these are generally regarded as untrue accusations put forward for the purpose of defaming someone, typically but not exclusively Jewish people. They are related to “blood libel” in which Jewish people were accused of kidnapping, torturing and killing Jewish children, but with two notable advantages for the accuser:

  1. The punishment for desecrating a wafer was often worse, as it was considered deicide, which was worse than homicide.
  2. It’s a lot easier to get a hold of a piece of unleavened bread than a dead child.

These accusations were generally brought forth by people with a grudge and supported by little to no evidence.

Historians generally agree that the first actual case was in the 1240s in Beelitz, Germany, which is not on the EMW list, but the first big case was in Paris in 1290 (which is on the list). While the EMW sanitizes these tales so that they cannot be recognized as the vile antisemetic propaganda they were, in the contemporary accounts the excessive cruelty is very much emphasized, and in some cases even exaggerated. In Paris 1290, the historical record shows only a single Jewish man was burned at the stake (although the tale was later brought up to justify expelling the Jewish people from France entirely). But the artwork inspired by the story, which includes stained glass windows and elaborately carved alterpieces, his fictional young children are often added to the pyre. Plays enacted centuries after the supposed event included bringing Jewish people on stage to be beaten and disgraced, showing that this was about hatred of the Jewish people as a whole, not one particular individual.

The legend of Poznan 1399, which is also on the EMW list, describes 13 Jewish people being tortured and slowly roasted to death. Note that detail, slowly. Thankfully, it seems that this legend, like many on the EMW list, was made up in its entirety decades after the supposed events. While some of these events did result in real people being executed, others were just made up after the fact to spread prejudice. There are no contemporary records of the miracle claims or the execution at all. Krakow 1345 is also described on the church’s website as being entirely legendary.

Other documented cases of host desecration libel found on the EMW site are Santarem 1266 (shown as 1247 on the website but correct on the PDF) and Dijon 1430. Interestingly, the EMW page says that the monstrance was thought to be empty when purchased, and stabbed by mistake, while documents kept with the monstrance record:

“A Jew has mutilated the

Host of the holy sacrament

By striking ten blows and more,

And making it bleed abundantly.”

So even if the EMW account does not describe a wafer being stolen, it may still be a case of host desecration libel.

Not every incident of host desecration libel is on the Eucharistic Miracles of the World list, which would actually be significantly longer if instead of “Eucharistic Miracle” they had searched for massacres of Jewish people. For example, do any of these stories sound familiar?

  1. In Pulkau in 1338 a stolen communion wafer was found outside a man’s house, covered in blood. It was taken to the local parish, and people who worshipped it said it performed miracles.
  2. In Segovia in 1410, a man stole a communion host from a local church. He tried to throw the wafer in a saucepan of boiling water, but it stayed suspended in the air above the saucepan. Then there was an earthquake and the wafer flew away through a hole in the wall to the monastery.
  3. In 1298 in Rottingen a stolen wafer transformed into a living child Jesus, who cried so loudly that people outside the house heard and the local priest pronounced it a miracle.

Many of these are better documented than many on the list. Of course 70 people were burned at the stake in Pulkau, the Jewish leaders were killed and the synagogue was confiscated in Segovia, and the Rindfleisch Massacres that followed the Rottingen story destroyed 146 communities and the death toll estimates range from 3,000 and 100,000. But if you take out those details and focus on the miracle part, they sound great. Heck, if you count every bloody wafer Rindfleisch claimed he found as he went door to door murdering people, that alone would probably double the length of the list!

Why were these not included while other massacres were? Obviously I have no way of knowing the answer, but I suspect it’s because most of these stories came from the Rhine Valley in Germany, where some authors say in the middle ages nearly every parish had a bloody miracle wafer on display for pilgrims to worship. But anti-Semitism is illegal in Germany, so it’s a lot harder to find contemporary sources portraying these incidents in a positive light.

And shouldn’t that be a global standard? It is despicable to see people celebrating the stories that inspired these massacres as miracles in 2025.

If you honestly still believe these stories are genuine miracles, please explain this pattern to me. Why do most of the Eucharistic Miracle claims occur after 1215, when the doctrine of Transubstantiation was affirmed by the Fourth Council of the Lateran, and start to die off with the Protestant Reformation?

The association would be even more stark if you considered the year the miracle claim was first documented instead of the year it supposedly occurred, as some of these stories were made up centuries later. If these miracles are legitimate, it would appear that God was most interested in demonstrating the reality of transubstantiation in the years that doubting it would get you the death penalty. Why focus all of those miracles in that short time period when they would be used to inspire genocidal hatred?

Because even in the cases that weren’t host desecration libel, the celebration was still coloured by the association between Eucharistic Miracles and anti-Semitism. For example, Bolsena 1264 seems like an innocent story in itself, but the walls of the shrine are decorated with gory images from other host desecration libel cases. I would actually be surprised to find that any of these claimed Eucharistic Miracles in the Middle Ages were not used justify antisemitism. Any reminder that the wafer was the body and blood of Jesus was immediately seen as a reminder that it needed to be protected from the Jewish people – by driving them out of town, by preventing them from leaving their homes on Sundays, or, in extreme cases, by setting up a huge bonfire on the left and a priest on the right and forcing them to choose between Baptism and death.

If the purpose of a Eucharistic Miracle is to emphasize the Real Presence in the Eucharist, why repeat this message so often when it was so likely to be misunderstood? Not earlier, when the Church’s teaching on the Real Presence was less clear. Not during the Reformation, when people were actively debating the Real Presence. But specifically in the time period where the message people were most likely to take out of the miracle was one of murderous hatred. It’s hard to measure if these claimed miracles resulted in any significant increase in belief in the Real Presence given that no one dared publicly doubt it. But the increase in anti-Semitism is demonstrable. Why would an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevelent God do that?

If you can judge a miracle by its fruits, can’t we dismiss most of these on that basis? At very least the ones that resulted in murder. But if I was Catholic I would also be looking for some very solid evidence for the rest of these, knowing how much harm they caused. And frankly, solid evidence is not what you’re going to find for anything in this time period.

References:

  • https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/host-desecration-of
  • Harrison, F. C. 1924. The “miraculous” microorganism. Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada. 18:1–17.
  • HSIA, R. P.-C. (1988). The Myth of Ritual Murder: Jews and Magic in Reformation Germany. Yale University Press.