An account of a eucharistic miracle in Buenos Aires, involving Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio — now Pope Francis — has been published in a Polish-based magazine.
The article says a priest in the commercial centre of Buenos Aires was finishing distributing Communion at Mass in 1996 when a woman told him she had found a discarded host on a candleholder at the back of the church.
The priest placed the host in a container of water and put it in the tabernacle. A week later he discovered that the host had turned into a bloody substance.
According to the 2010 article by Father M. Piotrowski in Love One Another magazine, the priest informed Cardinal Bergoglio, who had the host professionally photographed.
For several years the host remained in secret in the tabernacle, then the cardinal decided to have it scientifically analysed in New York by a team of scientists who did not know its origin.
One of the scientists, Dr Frederic Zugiba, a cardiologist and forensic pathologist, determined that the substance was a fragment of heart muscle containing human DNA.
He said the presence of a large number of white blood cells indicated that the heart was alive when the sample was taken.
“What is more,” he said, “these white blood cells had penetrated the tissue, which further indicates that the heart had been under severe stress, as if the owner had been beaten severely about the chest.”
The tests were witnessed by two Australians, journalist Mike Willesee and lawyer Ron Tesoriero.
Willesee, formerly a leading television journalist, had been brought back to his Catholic faith through filming a woman with stigmata and documenting Eucharistic miracles.
When Willesee told Dr Zugiba that the analysed sample came from a consecrated host, the doctor said: “How and why a consecrated host would change its character and become living human flesh and blood will remain an inexplicable mystery to science — a mystery totally beyond her competence.”
Sources:
Milagro Eucaristico Buenos Aires Argentina (YouTube video)
The Conversion of Mike Willesee (ABC Compass)