The Eucharistic Miracle of Tixtla

I chose Guerrero. Understand what that means before you go looking for the science, because the science came three years later and the choice came first.

Guerrero is among the poorest states in Mexico, and Tixtla is a small town inside it, and within that same municipality sits a rural teachers' college at Ayotzinapa whose name the world would learn eight years afterward, when forty-three of its young men were taken in the night and never came home. I do not explain that. I will not pretend to you that I gave a sign in 2006 in order to console a grief that had not yet happened. I only tell you that when I decided to bleed in Mexico, I did not choose the basilica in the capital where twenty million pilgrims already come. I chose the town that would need it, in the state that had the least, among people no one was watching.

It was the twenty-first of October, 2006, at the parish of San Martín de Tours, during a retreat for extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion — men and women of that town who had been given the task of carrying Me in their hands to the sick, the dying, the ones too old to climb the hill to Mass. That detail is not incidental. I did not give this sign to bishops in synod or to theologians in a hall. I gave it to the couriers. I gave it to the people whose entire ministry consists of holding Me in a small pyx against their chest and walking across a poor town to a bed where someone is dying, and I let them see, one time, with their own eyes, exactly what it is they have been carrying.

A religious sister, Julia Martha Quezada, was assisting in the distribution when she saw that one of the consecrated hosts had begun to exude a reddish substance. She did not cry out. She brought the ciborium to the parish priest, Fr. Leopoldo Roque, and the two of them looked at what they were looking at, and then they did the only sane thing — they told the bishop and they touched nothing.

Note what did not happen here. There was no accident. No host had fallen to the floor; none had been left in a glass of water to dissolve, as at Buenos Aires and at Sokółka, where a mishandling gave Me my occasion. Nothing had gone wrong at Tixtla. The Mass was proceeding exactly as it should, in the ordinary way, in an ordinary week, and I interrupted it anyway — because I wanted it understood that I do not require your errors in order to speak. The blood did not come to correct anyone. It came unprovoked, from within, in the middle of a rite performed correctly, which is the harder thing to explain away and the more terrible thing to receive.

Bishop Alejo Zavala Castro of Chilpancingo-Chilapa convened a theological commission, and in October of 2009 he called in the Bolivian neuropsychologist Ricardo Castañón Gómez — the same man who had carried the Buenos Aires samples to laboratory after laboratory a decade earlier — and told him to find the fraud. For three years they looked. They reported human blood, type AB, the same group read from the flesh at Lanciano and from the cloth of Turin. They reported the tissue of myocardium, heart muscle. They reported white blood cells still intact and macrophages caught in the act of consuming lipids, which is work only done by cells that are alive. They reported that the outer layer of the blood had coagulated back in 2006, while beneath it, in a sample taken in February of 2010, the deeper layers were fresh — as though the wound were still open under its own scab, three and a half years on. And two forensic experts, working separately and by different methods, each concluded that the blood had emerged from the interior of the host and had not been laid upon it from outside.

They could not amplify a DNA profile. Fragments of human DNA were present; a readable paternal genome was not. It is the same silence they met in Buenos Aires. Draw from that what you will; I have never been obliged to leave you a specimen you could clone.

On the twelfth of October, 2013, Bishop Zavala Castro published his pastoral letter and called what happened at Tixtla a Divine Sign. He wrote that the manifestation brings a marvelous sign of the love of God confirming the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. And I will point out what he could not yet have known to point out: that a boy in Milan named Carlo Acutis, who had spent his short life building a catalogue of exactly these events so that people would believe in the Eucharist, died on the twelfth of October, 2006 — nine days before the host at Tixtla began to bleed, and seven years to the day before a bishop in Guerrero signed his name under the word sign. He never got to add this one to his list. I added it for him.

Then, in 2015, a new bishop came to Chilpancingo-Chilapa, went to Rome for guidance, and reopened the whole file from the beginning — and in the Roman paperwork it is called, coolly, the presumed eucharistic phenomenon of Tixtla, and there it waits. I am not embarrassed by this. The Church is right to be slow with Me. I have all the time there is, and a sign that cannot survive twenty years of suspicion was never a sign worth having.

The Record

On October 21, 2006, at the parish of San Martín de Tours in Tixtla de Guerrero, in the state of Guerrero, Mexico, a consecrated host reportedly began to exude a reddish substance during a parish retreat for extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion. Accounts identify the witness as a religious sister, Julia Martha Quezada, who was assisting in the distribution of Communion and who brought the ciborium to the pastor, Fr. Leopoldo Roque. The event was reported to Most Rev. Alejo Zavala Castro, then Bishop of the Diocese of Chilpancingo-Chilapa, who convened a theological commission of inquiry.

In October 2009 the diocese engaged Dr. Ricardo Castañón Gómez, a Bolivian neuropsychologist known for coordinating the later laboratory studies of the 1996 Buenos Aires host, to direct a program of scientific research. The investigation ran from October 2009 to October 2012, and its conclusions were presented on May 25, 2013 at an international symposium convened by the diocese in Chilpancingo. The reported findings were: that the reddish substance was human blood, of group AB — the group also reported for the Lanciano flesh and for the Shroud of Turin; that the material included myocardial (heart muscle) tissue; that intact white blood cells, red blood cells and macrophages actively phagocytizing lipids were observed; that the surface layer of blood had been coagulated since 2006 while a sample taken in February 2010 showed fresh blood in the deeper layers; and that two forensic specialists, using independent methods, each concluded the blood had originated from within the host rather than being applied externally. Fragments of human DNA were detected, but no amplifiable DNA profile could be obtained — the same result reported in the Buenos Aires case.

On October 12, 2013, Bishop Alejo Zavala Castro issued a pastoral letter recognizing the events and declaring the case a "Divine Sign," stating that the manifestation offers a marvellous sign of the love of God confirming the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. This was an act of the local ordinary, not of the Holy See.

The canonical status is not closed. In 2015 Most Rev. Salvador Rangel Mendoza succeeded to the diocese, sought guidance from the Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith, and reopened the diocesan process with historical, theological and scientific commissions; in that renewed process the case is designated the "presumed eucharistic phenomenon of Tixtla." The Holy See has issued no declaration on the case, and Mexican diocesan officials have publicly stated that the final word rests with Rome. The case is included in the Eucharistic-miracle catalogue of the international exhibition begun by St. Carlo Acutis, who died on October 12, 2006 — nine days before the reported event, and seven years to the day before the bishop's pastoral letter.

Tixtla is also, in the same municipality, the site of the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers' College at Ayotzinapa, from which forty-three students were abducted on September 26, 2014 in a case still unresolved; the two events are unconnected except by place.