Blessed Carlo Acutis had conceived and created a beautiful traveling exhibition on Eucharistic Miracles. This exhibition continues to travel throughout Italy and the world; all the Eucharistic miracles featured in the exhibition have been compiled in the book Eucharistic Miracles in the World, from which this text is taken.
At Offida (AP), the Church of Sant'Agostino preserves the relics of the Eucharistic miracle that took place in 1273, in which the host changed into bleeding flesh.
There are numerous documents describing the miracle, including an authenticated copy of a thirteenth-century parchment written by the notary Giovanni Battista Doria in 1788.
There are also numerous papal bulls, beginning with that of Boniface VIII (1295) and continuing through that of Sixtus V (1585), interventions by Roman Congregations, episcopal decrees, municipal statutes, votive offerings, plaques, frescoes, and testimonies from eminent historians, including Antinori and Fella.
In 1273, in Lanciano, a woman named Ricciarella, hoping to regain the affection of her husband, Giacomo Stasio, followed a sorceress's advice and approached Communion to steal a consecrated host. When she returned home, she placed it on the fire on a roof tile, intending to pulverize it and then put it in her husband's food. Instead, the host changed into bleeding flesh. Terrified by what had happened, Ricciarella wrapped the tile and the bleeding host in a linen cloth, which she then buried in a hole beneath the manure in her husband's stable. Strange events followed inside the stable: every time Giacomo's mare entered it, she knelt facing the place where the miraculous host had been buried, leading Giacomo to think that his wife had cast a spell on the animal.
Seven years later, overcome with remorse, Ricciarella confessed her horrible sacrilege to the prior of the Augustinian convent in Lanciano at the time, Giacomo Diotallevi, a native of Offida. As the oldest chronicles recount, the tearful woman began shouting to the priest: «I have killed God! I have killed God!». When the priest went to the site, he found the bundle containing the relics intact; they were later given to his fellow citizens.
To preserve the sacred host, the people of Offida had a cross-shaped reliquary made. As an ancient chronicle recounts, Friar Michele and a fellow friar were sent to Venice to a goldsmith. Upon arriving in that city, they made the goldsmith swear an oath of fidelity «that he would not reveal to anyone what he was about to see and place inside the cross. Afterward, the goldsmith reached for the pyx containing the miraculous host, but, suddenly stricken with fever, exclaimed: “What have you brought me, my brother friar?”.
The religious man then asked him whether he was in mortal sin. When the goldsmith answered yes, he made his confession before the same friar and, once the fever had disappeared, took the pyx without any danger, removed the host from it, and enclosed it together with the sacred wood in the same cross, with a crystal cover above it, as can clearly be seen.” The reliquaries of the copper vessel and the bloodstained cloth, along with the cross containing the miraculous host, are displayed in the Church of Saint Augustine in Offida. Ricciarella’s house in Lanciano, on the other hand, was transformed into a small chapel. In 1973, the seventh centenary of the miracle was celebrated, and every year, on May 3, the citizens of Offida celebrate the anniversary of the prodigy.
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