Eucharistic Miracle of San Juan, Honduras, 2022.
The
news this week informs us of a newly recognized Eucharistic Miracle which
happened only last year. San Juan is an agricultural town of about 1000 persons in the
highlands of western Honduras, in the county (“department”) of Intibucá. The
area has natural beauties of waterfalls, creeks, cloud forests, canyons, and a
nearby biological preserve. The principal crop is coffee. In the San Juan
municipality lies the small community of El Espinal, which has about 60
families scattered along the “spine” of the mountains. In El Espinal is a small
Chapel of St. James the Apostle, but they have no regular priest.
At
the end of the service, Benítez asked those present if anyone had seen any
water leaking into the chapel or if they knew of anyone who had been in the
chapel before the service.
Reginaldo
Aguilar Benítez is a parish coordinator at the chapel, and one of the sworn
witnesses in the later investigation. He told “EWTN Noticias,” the Eternal Word
Television Network’s Spanish-language news program, “Several of us responded
that we had not seen any water leaking, and when he explained what had
happened, we asked him to show the corporal.”
Aguilar
later telephoned the priests at San Juan about what was found. The following
day, two priests came to El Espinal to investigate. Fr. Marvin Sotelo then put
the stained corporal in a plastic bag with a hermetic seal and took it back to
their rectory in San Juan. Two days later he gave it to Bishop Walter Guillén
Soto (Diocese of Gracias).
Bishop
Guillén told EWTN Noticias, “I’m not that prone to naively believing in things.
Logic makes us prudent in terms of believing things without [first] sifting
through them and without analyzing them.” He took notarized statements of the
witnesses, and then ordered testing to be done on the corporal. In October,
2022, two professors with expertise in chemistry and pharmacy, one also the
former head of the laboratory of the Police Directorate of Investigations,
began their analysis. They found the Blood was human, type AB, Rh positive.
This is the same type found on all Eucharistic Miracles which have been typed,
and on the Shroud of Turin. (According to the World Population Review portal in
Honduras, less than 2.5% of the population in Honduras has that blood type.)
The expert tests also ruled out that the pattern of the blood stains could have
been made artificially. The cloth also did not show any deterioration or
fungus.
Bishop Guillén then formally recognized the Eucharistic Miracle. He told EWTN Noticias that he doesn’t doubt its credibility. “I think that this extraordinary, visible, tangible, perceptible, verifiable sign of this manifestation of the Blood of the Lord in an obscure community, in the midst of the most extreme ruralness of our agricultural environment, says a lot at this time. It seems to me that this is an extreme sign of God who manifests Himself again, as He has done in the Holy Scriptures, in the history of salvation, by those simple ones whom Mary praises for their lowliness.” The bishop continued, “God loves the marginal, the hidden, the simple. In an obscure village, without any social relevance, far from the urban area, the Lord chooses to manifest Himself.”
Dibby Allan Green