The Miracle of the Mildew

It was an ordinary Monday morning like any other. Hollis had been up since 4 AM and was eating oatmeal in her room, Lindsay’s slumber was impossible to disturb, and Megan and I sat sipping coffee at the kitchen table, discussing life’s most amusing problems.

But this particular Monday morning it was necessary to mix business with pleasure. Megan is the sacristan for the house; essentially, her job is to set up for Mass and then make sure Jesus doesn’t get flushed down the sewer afterwards. That sounds a little strange at first, (after all, who would ever want to throw Jesus in the sewer?) until you consider that every particle of the Eucharist is Jesus in the flesh and one has to be careful when purifying the sacred vessels. Some churches have sacrariums which are sinks that empty not into the sewer system but directly into the ground. Our chapel has no such thing. No, Megan’s sacrarium is an orange mixing bowl.

The ritual goes as follows: Mass at the Red House ends, we all file out of the chapel one by one (because there’s no room for anything else), and Megan stays back to purify the sacred vessels. The chalice is rinsed out and emptied into the orange bowl and the corporal and purificators are allowed to soak. They sit there for an indefinite period of time until all the particles from the Sacred Host are dissolved. At that point Megan removes the corporal from the mixing bowl, sets it on a towel to dry and dumps the rest of the water on the front lawn so any particles that are left return to the ground, not to the sewer…

This particular week, that indefinite period of time was a bit more indefinite than usual. It was cold out (it was February) and emptying the mixing bowl meant venturing out into the snow. And so the corporal incubated in that mixing bowl from Tuesday Mass, through Friday, through Saturday, well into Monday…On Monday Megan remembered that Jesus must have felt pretty cold too when He was dying naked for her on that cross, and so over coffee she started the process of removing the corporal from the holy orange mixing bowl.

As I sat sipping my coffee, musing on higher things like what I’d have for dinner, my thoughts were rudely interrupted: “JOE! What does this look like to you?!” Megan pushed the bowl over to me and pointed to the corporal. I looked. Blood red dots were scattered all over one side of the corporal. “I can’t be sure, but it looks like blood to me.” And it did. It looked like the particles from the sacred host had fallen on the corporal and turned to blood.

To be clear, we didn’t get this idea from nowhere. Eucharistic miracles, where the Eucharist not only is the body and blood of Christ but also looks like the body and blood of Christ, are not unheard of in the Catholic Church. Just a few years ago, a nun in Sokolka, Poland left a consecrated host which had fallen on the floor to dissolve in an ablution cup (a small cup of water.) When she returned later to empty it out, she found that a distinctive red spot had formed on the host. Scientists were later able to confirm that it was tissue from the heart muscle. It looked like we might be dealing with a similar phenomenon.

At this point Megan and I were running around excitedly thinking we had witnessed a miracle. “What do we do?! Can we take the corporal out of the bowl? Is that sacrilegious? How do we know it’s blood? What do we do?! What do we do?!” And so Megan set to looking up biological properties of blood while I went upstairs to the chapel to ask Jesus what He thought of this whole business.

An hour later we started to calm down and decided we needed an extra pair of eyes on this. So we took a picture and sent it to Fr. Marvin. “Hi…so I was soaking a corporal and this happened…What do you make of it? Joe and I were curious…” Of course this was the understatement of the century. We weren’t just curious; we were looking for ecclesiastical approbation to begin the veneration of the Holy Corporal of Beacon, New York. The two of us paced around the room wondering what our fearless leader would say. When Megan’s phone went off with a text message, I jumped a foot. The text read:

“Haha, it’s mildew. LOL.”

And so we learned our lesson well, that when one leaves a piece of cloth in a bowl of water for a week, mildew happens…

Admittedly, there was a period of time when I still held out hope that a miracle might have occurred in the Red House. As the corporal dried out, I kept an eye on the red spots to see what would happen. When they started disappearing as the corporal dried, I had to admit it probably was mildew. Nevertheless, a few spots still remain and to this day we hang the corporal proudly in our cubicles in memory of the ever famous, “Miracle of the Mildew.”