Sometime around the year 750, in a small church in Lanciano, Italy, a monk broke the bread.

He was a Basilian monk, and according to the tradition, he had been struggling with doubt. The central claim of his faith was that the bread and wine of the Eucharist became the body and blood of Christ during consecration. He was not sure he believed it. He performed the Mass anyway.

What happened next was recorded by the monks of his order. As he spoke the words of consecration, the bread in his hands changed. It became flesh. The wine in the chalice thickened and darkened and became blood. The monk, the congregation, and the attending clergy all witnessed the transformation. The flesh and the blood were placed in a reliquary and preserved.

They are still there. Nearly thirteen hundred years later, in the Church of San Francesco in Lanciano, you can walk in and look at them.

For most of those centuries, the relic was a matter of faith, not science. Pilgrims came. The Church recorded the tradition. Nobody tested it. Then, in 1970, the Archbishop of Lanciano asked a question that most Church authorities would have preferred to leave unasked: what would modern science say?

He commissioned Dr. Odoardo Linoli, a professor of anatomy and pathological histology at the Hospital of Arezzo, to examine the specimens. Linoli was not a theologian. He was a pathologist. He ran the tests.

His findings, published in 1971, were specific. The flesh was human tissue. Not just any tissue: cardiac muscle, from the myocardium, consistent with the wall of the left ventricle of a human heart. The blood was real human blood, type AB. No preservative chemicals were detected. No embalming agents. No mummification treatment of any kind. The protein fractionation of the blood sample matched the profile of blood that had been freshly drawn.

The tissue had been sitting in a reliquary, without any known preservation method, for over twelve hundred years.

In 1981, Linoli conducted a second examination using more advanced techniques. He confirmed the original findings. His results have never been retracted. No peer-reviewed study has contradicted his identification of the tissue as human cardiac muscle.

There are exactly two positions you can take. Either a piece of bread from the eighth century became a section of human heart, and has remained preserved without any known mechanism for over a millennium. Or the relic was placed there by human hands at some point in the last thirteen centuries, and the absence of preservatives is itself unexplained.

The Church calls it a miracle. Science has identified the tissue but not explained its origin. The flesh is still on the altar. You can go and see it.

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