The Miracle at Bolsena

By Tom Scorza

An Art History graduate student stumbles upon the love of her life and a long-lost manuscript at a medieval monastery outside Orvieto in Umbria. The manuscript records the memories of a monk, Brother Matteo, who in 1263as a thirteen-year-old foundling, with his Master, his Lady, and his brother, the gentle giant Giorgiobecame part of an unofficial investigation into the newly reported miracle in the ancient town of Bolsena. According to the report, when Father Peter of Bohemia said the words of consecration (This is My Body) at a pilgrims Mass, the communion host bled Christs Blood onto the altar cloth. In the course of their investigation, Matteo and his family are drawn into the political turmoil of the times, and Matteo learns that this world is, after all, a vale of tearsbut also a place of miracles. The Art History graduate student, who has translated and edited Brother Matteos A True History of the Miracle of Bolsena, invites her readers to go to present-day Orvieto to see the relics of the Miracle and the priceless works of art that commemorate itand, wherever they are, to remain open to lifes true miracles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 22, 2011
• ISBN: 9781450280419

Tom Scorza

Tom Scorza is a former college professor and a former federal prosecutor. He is the author of Lady Justice (iUniverse 2000) and the screenplay for the Cinemax/HBO movie, Justice (2000) (Backlash in DVD/ VHS formats). He lives in Chicago, where he practices law, writes, and wonders about miracles and related subjects.

Book preview

Contents

Editor’s Foreword

A Prayer

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII

XXIX

XXX

Editor’s Afterword

Author’s Acknowledgment

Endnotes

For Gina, Annie, Caroline,

Mia, Tyler, Charlie, Leo, Owen, Amelie, and Sadie—i nostri miracoli

So faith, hope, love remain, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

—1 Corinthians 13:13

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Photo No. 1: Raphael, The Mass at Bolsena (1511–14)

© Scala / Art Resource, NY

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Photo No. 2: The Cathedral of Orvieto (1290–1500)

© Scala / Art Resource, NY

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Photo No. 3: Fresco Cycle—The Host Bleeds (1357–64)

© Opera del Duomo di Orvieto

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Photo No. 4: Fresco Cycle—Bishop Giacomo Investigates (1357–64)

© Opera del Duomo di Orvieto

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Photo No. 5: The Reliquary of the Corporal (1337–38)

© Scala / Art Resource, NY

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Photo No. 6: Reliquary—The Bishop Takes the Corporal (1337–38)

© Opera del Duomo di Orvieto

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Photo No. 7: Fresco Cycle—The Pope Kneels Before the Host and the Corporal at the Rio Chiaro Bridge (1357–64)

© Opera del Duomo di Orvieto

Editor’s Foreword

Several years ago, deep into a damp and dreary autumn, I found myself in Umbria.

I was one of a handful of American and Canadian graduate students in Art History working out of Orvieto that gray semester on research projects destined to yield (let’s face it) the usual crop of mind-numbing doctoral dissertations. The season’s awful weather didn’t fit our lovely setting at all, but it sure matched our cheerless predicament: there we budding scholars were, strangers from rival universities, each of us a loose atom unto itself, each focused on an incredibly narrow topic of no benefit, use, or interest to mankind at large, and each plugging away to produce a pretentious tract that no one except some faculty advisers back home would ever read. Believe me, it was a melancholy fall.

The standard way of coping didn’t help and, at least for me, made matters a full notch worse. Three other All-But-Dissertation Ladies and I, self-selected from among the students staying in town the longest, formed a clique of sorts and fell into the habit of meeting regularly at a trattoria in the tourist zone for dinner. The thought was that we’d compare notes on the churches, museums, and other sites where we were working, and otherwise trade stories about our experiences around town and in the neighboring provinces. More often than not, however, what we did was torture one another mercilessly with the minutiae of every problem we came upon in the course of our separate endeavors. Our little dinner club, meant to be one of those comfortable arrangements that would provide temporary companionship without any threatening hint of real friendship, widely missed its modest mark and served only to increase the isolation and loneliness that I felt.

My loose tongue didn’t help matters any.

I’m too embarrassed to describe my dissertation project to you in detail, but I’ll admit I was planning to deconstruct (okay, now I’m blushing) a minor but beautiful pre-Renaissance Umbrian religious painting, unearthing what my professors would surely welcome as a strikingly early manifestation of the death of God and the shriveling of the human soul. Of course, that meant my thesis was essentially indistinguishable from everyone else’s, a sarcastic point I should’ve kept to myself but carelessly didn’t. My indiscretion in that regard joined frequent quips in which I poked fun more broadly at academia’s curious preference for cookie-cutter minds, and the net result was what I’ll go out on a limb and call a certain chill in my relations with the Grad School Girls.

I was also the odd-girl-out in a couple of other respects that usually loom large among women in general. True, like my three dining companions, I was once again free after a recent breakup with yet another sleep-over but uncommitted boyfriend, and I followed the common script by swearing I was ecstatically rid of the guy even as my every word betrayed how disillusioned I had become with the catch-and-release rituals of contemporary romance. Still, again, two things set me apart: I was a few years older than even the next oldest in the group, and I had much nicer legs than the lot of them.

It may be that my age (all of thirty-three!) was what gave me my critical distance from the whole graduate student thing, and perhaps that distance in turn made possible what has happened to my life since I discovered the remarkable, previously unknown manuscript I’m publishing in this book. However that may be, there’s no doubt my legs were the key to my making the discovery in the first place.

It was on one of the rare sunny days that November, seven weeks after my arrival in Italy, and sometime after I first felt the need to get away from my daily research grind. My father, bless him, had insisted that his three daughters learn to drive a stick-shift car, and so I was able to rent a cheap, tiny Fiat for an excursion into the hills and valleys outside Orvieto. Because I had no intention of visiting any church or other place where an appropriate dress issue might arise, I wore a long sleeve T-shirt over a denim miniskirt, which was in fact my shortest. Looking back on it, I like to imagine that God played a mischievous hand in my wardrobe selections that day. In any case, dressed as I was, and starting a little later than I had intended, I headed out alone on a drive into the countryside.

My ensuing reverie behind the wheel, induced by the longed-for sunshine, the day off, and the feeling of freedom on the winding and deserted roads, soon combined with my total lack of planning to get me hopelessly lost. I had a map in the car, but it was a map of all of Italy. What I needed was a detailed map of Umbria or, better, an even more detailed map of Terni province. A sense of direction also would’ve helped, but I didn’t have one of those either.

I drove around aimlessly for quite some time, to the point that I began taking a degree of rebellious pleasure in deliberately turning onto the less promising road whenever I had to choose between two. Eventually, in the early afternoon and after driving a good way up a particularly doubtful unpaved road, I came upon an open gate leading into what appeared, and soon proved, to be the remaining structures of a medieval monastery. There was a small sign on one of the gate posts identifying the Saint to whom the monastery was dedicated, but it was a Saint I had never heard of. The entire scene was almost preposterously picturesque.

I saw no one about, and guessing that the site had been abandoned long ago, I drove past the gate and parked at the perimeter of a stand of mature almond trees. I thought I’d enjoy the lunch I had packed, stretch a bit, and then proceed to ponder, in the oddly comforting solitude, what might be my best course of action.

But as I stepped out of the car, a man came out of the closest building, waved to me in a friendly manner, and walked quickly toward me.

He appeared to be sixty or perhaps a little younger, and he was wearing what I recalled as the traditional habit of the Benedictine Order: black hood and scapular over a black tunic girdled at the waist by a cloth belt, which was, however, ostentatiously white. His hood was down upon his shoulders, so I could see his tonsure, his closely trimmed beard, and his serenely happy face. I was definitely lost, but I was just as definitely being found by a monk from Central Casting.

Good day, he said in what clearly was his native Italian. We were not expecting a visitor.

Good day, Father, I replied in my best practiced Italian. I am visiting only because I am lost. I started out in Orvieto this morning, and I have to find my way back there sometime today. I introduced myself and held out my hand.

"Brother Paolo, he brightly announced as he shook my hand. I will make you a map to your salvation. But first, please come in and have some coffee."

He led me into a small building attached to the one he had exited, and I could tell immediately that we had entered the monastery’s refectory. There was a long oak dining table in the middle of the room, and I could see a stove and an oven through a glass inset on a swinging door at the room’s far end. An elaborate, shiny espresso machine dominated a bulky table to the side of the kitchen door, and Brother Paolo gestured in a courtly way that I should precede him over to it. I remember thinking that the Rule of Saint Benedict must’ve been amended to allow for a touch of opulence in the making of a good cup of coffee.

By the time Brother Paolo finished pressing out our two espressos and we sat down together at the dining table, I had learned that he was a lay Brother (distinguished by his white cloth belt) serving eight priests residing at the monastery. He said that he had been there ten years, that there had been twelve priests when he first arrived, and that those remaining were all over seventy years old. I didn’t catch the whole of another remark he made, but I gathered that he was uncertain whether the Benedictine Order would maintain the monastery if the number of monks there dwindled much further.

I told him I was from Chicago and that I was in the middle of a stay in Orvieto to do research in the history of Italian art. His eyes lit up, and I expected him to ask, as Italians often did, whether I knew his cousin who lived in New York or New Jersey. Instead, he excitedly asked, Would you like to see some of the illuminated manuscripts in our library, in the old infirmary?

Of course, there was no way I was going to pass up that invitation, so I copied Brother Paolo as he accelerated his way to the bottom of his cup. A few minutes later, after I was afforded a much appreciated stop in what Brother Paolo called with a wink "the Ladies’ restroom, we were out the side door of the refectory and heading toward the apparent front door of a small, free-standing building I hadn’t been able to see from where I had parked. As we stepped over the threshold into that building, Brother Paolo said, Please do not be alarmed by the noise. Luciano the carpenter is here, replacing some of our bookshelves."

The library we had entered consisted of one large room, with floor-to-ceiling shelves laden with books along its four walls and a set of well-stocked bookcases lined up in its interior space so as to form distinct areas and several aisles. There was a rectangular reading table in the center of the room, which on the whole was surprisingly airy and bright, the combined effect of two modern skylights and an array of strategically placed floor and table lamps. Every one of the lamps was switched on, I supposed for the sake of the aforementioned Luciano the carpenter, whom I could neither see nor hear. The room’s smell was distinctively old book, and its feel was decisively old world.

Please, Brother Paolo said just beyond the entranceway, reprising his gesture toward the espresso machine, look about as you wish. You will surely find something that will please you. I have some business to attend to. I will return with your map in time for you to make it safely back to Orvieto.

I barely finished responding, Are you sure it is okay? before Brother Paolo was out the door, which he quickly closed behind him.

Major geek that I was back then, I felt like a child suddenly dropped into Disneyland with all the attractions open and no other visitors in the park: so many illuminated manuscripts and so little time! Almost giddily, I threw myself into the unanticipated bounty of bookish delights, and in short order, I became as lost among Brother Paolo’s bookshelves as I had been on the road to Monasteryland.

About an hour later, perusing the holdings on one of the high perimeter shelves, I reached up and just managed to pull out a heavy volume bound in wood and trimmed in coarse leather. I opened the book to its center and found a dazzling vellum folio, and I decided to carry the volume over to a spot directly under one of the skylights so I could examine more closely the exquisite beauty of the page’s illumination, an Annunciation.

I walked with the book open in my hands, absorbed in the illumination and oblivious to everything else about me, and so crashed forcefully into Luciano the carpenter, who had already occupied the space under the skylight, his back to me, a ruler in one hand and a length of shelving in the other.

Simultaneously startled, we both gasped loudly. I stepped back, just stifling an outright scream. He turned around and smiled nervously. And the skylight played its allotted part.

Let me put it this way: Luciano turned out to be the most spectacularly handsome carpenter since the world began. And I’d put my money on Luciano in a beauty contest pitting him against all the handsome painters, plumbers, and brain surgeons who ever lived too.

Of course, I was totally flustered, and despite my prior unbounded confidence in my quickness of tongue, all I could manage in Italian was, I am sorry. You must be the carpenter.

To make matters worse, with crushing effect, Luciano blushed. Then he eked out, in quick Italian, "No, I am sorry. You must be the American woman."

That was it. That was the extent of our inaugural conversation. It really was that sublime.

I then did what my mother did the time she walked into my bedroom with a load of clean laundry and found me lounging in my pajamas on my bed with my hand languorously engaged between my legs in the fun adolescent activity I called puffing: I pretended nothing had happened and went about my business.

But I had to change destinations, so I carried my heavy volume over to the reading table, sat down, and pretended to lose myself in its pages once again. I glanced up furtively and caught glimpses of Luciano first as he measured and marked the board he was holding and then as he carried it off to where I couldn’t see him. Two or three minutes later, I heard some sawing and was relieved as it drowned out the sound of my pounding heart.

Then there was no more sawing and, worse, no Luciano. I could see the door Brother Paolo and I had entered, so I knew Luciano hadn’t left the building that way. Perhaps there was a side or back door out of the library building?

After briefly considering calling out, "Luciano, please come out here right now, where I can see you," I decided on the more lady-like option of taking a good look around as I returned the bound volume to its proper place on the shelves. I walked slowly and scanned the whole room as I did, but I saw no sign of Luciano. When, looking over my shoulder, I reached the spot where the volume belonged, I pivoted slightly, stretched distractedly up onto the tips of my toes, and strained, mightily but futilely, to insert the hefty thing back onto the shelf from which I had removed it.

It was then, with my short skirt relocated far north along my legs, that I spotted Luciano again. He was just down the wall aisle from me—and also down on all fours as he inserted a new bottom shelf into its place. He turned his head, looked up at me, smiled, and blushed again, which was a wholly unnecessary confirmation that my estimate of his angle of sight up my skirt was right on.

I certainly didn’t want to give unwelcome offense, though admittedly the fact that Luciano was Italian made the chance of that rather slim. But I also didn’t want to serve up any intentional titillation, at least not so prematurely. So I abandoned my effort to replace the book and pulled it back from the shelf. Collapsing myself to my normal height, I demurely pressed upon my skirt so that its hem reached at least a few inches down my legs. I turned again to Luciano, who was still looking, smiling, and blushing, and I smiled back as I gathered the manuscript to my chest with the forced aplomb of a high school girl trying to be cool while carrying her fat algebra textbook. With all the further coolness I could muster, I turned on my heels and headed back to the reading table.

Once I reached the table, I pulled out one of the chairs and placed the manuscript on its seat. I lifted the whole thing and marched proudly back to the section of shelves where the book belonged, expecting that Luciano would still be nearby—and really hoping that he would be gallant enough to offer to help me.

But once again, Luciano was nowhere to be seen.

Deflated, I placed the chair down and picked up the manuscript. Using the chair as a stool, I stepped up and replaced the book on its rightful shelf. It was when I looked down, preparing to step off the chair, that I saw it.

There, one shelf down, flat on its side and concealed behind the books lining the shelf, was a small, dusty, and plainly very old parchment volume unevenly bound in thick vellum. I can’t say why, but I immediately knew it was no ordinary book.

I reached in, plucked the volume out, and opened it as I sat down on the chair. Translating the neat Latin script on the opening page, I read:

A True History of the Miracle of Bolsena

By

God’s Servant,

Brother Matteo of San Giovanni

Monte Cassino, 1317

For an intellectual ferret like me, it was beyond exciting just to happen upon a hidden book apparently completed almost seven centuries ago at the famous Benedictine abbey at Monte Cassino. But what thrilled me even more was the subject matter announced by the book’s title: the thirteenth-century Eucharistic miracle in Bolsena, a small town dating from Etruscan times, located on the lake of the same name, within the historic Diocese of Orvieto, but just over Umbria’s modern border and into the Lazio region. I knew the subject well.

The miracle legend tells the story of a Bohemian priest, Peter of Prague, who stopped at Bolsena in 1263 late in the course of a long pilgrimage to the sepulchers of Saints Peter and Paul in Rome, where he hoped to find spiritual relief from his recurring doubts about the official doctrine of Transubstantiation. According to that Catholic Church teaching, the communion bread and wine, when duly consecrated by a priest at Mass, substantively become the Body and Blood of Christ, so that Christ is then present in the two Eucharistic species. Transubstantiation is thus more popularly known as the doctrine of the Real Presence.

As the story has it, Father Peter’s spiritual turmoil surfaced anew as he said Mass for a group of fellow pilgrims on an altar at the burial site of Santa Cristina—the gravesite was the focal point of the catacombs over which Bolsena had later built a Basilica in honor of the Saint, a fourth-century local martyr. Imploring Santa Cristina and Christ to strengthen his wavering faith, Father Peter raised the host and said the words of consecration (This is My Body). At that very moment, drops of blood seeped from the host and stained the altar cloth, a piece of liturgical linen called a corporal.

Father Peter interrupted his celebration of the Mass, secured the host and the corporal at the Basilica, and departed at once for the Papal residence in Orvieto, where he dutifully reported the miraculous event to Pope Urban IV and his Curia. His reportage complete, Father Peter disappears from the miracle legend at this point, and the story relates nothing further about him, just as it relates nothing about his life, beyond his doctrinal crisis and planned pilgrimage, before his fateful arrival in Bolsena.

Intrigued but cautious, the Pope ordered the Bishop of Orvieto, Giacomo, to lead an investigation into the matter. In due course, the Bishop made his way to Bolsena and conducted an inquiry at the scene of the ostensible miracle. Convinced by the evidence, Bishop Giacomo took possession of the host and the corporal and carried them in procession back to Orvieto, where he was greeted outside the city, at the bridge over the Rio Chiaro (the Clear Brook), by the Pope and a throng of local clergy and dignitaries.

Subsequently, after displaying the stained altar cloth to the assembled populace of Orvieto, Pope Urban had the host and the corporal deposited, within secure wooden chests at hand, at the city’s old Church of Santa Maria Prisca. On September 8, 1264, about a year after the miracle occurred, the Pope decreed the universal Feast of the Body of Christ ("Corpus Domini or Corpus Christi), the special hymns and prayers (or office") of which were composed, at the Pope’s direction, by no less a figure than the great Aristotelian commentator and Dominican theologian, Saint Thomas Aquinas.

Now, before you jump to conclusions, let me assure you that I wasn’t at that point in my life either a miracles buff or some kind of religious nut. Indeed, on religious matters in general, I’m sure I would’ve been ranked a grave disappointment by the nuns who taught me at my Catholic grammar and high schools in Chicago. My familiarity with the story of the miracle of Bolsena was in fact wholly professional. I had learned the legend a couple of years earlier, when I took an impromptu detour through my university library’s collection of Medieval and Renaissance Italian Art reference books, monographs, and photo reproductions.

What first caught my attention was a photo plate and accompanying description of Raphael’s fresco, The Mass at Bolsena, which he painted for Pope Julius II between 1511 and 1514 on a lunette in the Stanza of Heliodorus at the Vatican Museums. The fresco (see my Photo No. 1) depicts Father Peter—handsomely decked-out, flanked by altar boys, and observed by a cadre of incongruously fine and fit pilgrims—marveling at the bleeding host while, kneeling close by, Pope Julius himself, backed up by members of his Curia and Swiss Guard, bears witness with hands piously clasped.

Raphael obviously hadn’t intended to portray in a realistic way what had happened in Bolsena two-and-a-half centuries earlier, and I guessed that he had composed his fresco, at least in part, to flatter his Papal patron as a devoted guardian of Catholic doctrine. (There was even support in American popular culture for my surmise that the fresco was meant to please its stage-right star: Julius II, the warrior Pope, is the willful taskmaster who constantly pressures Michelangelo to complete the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the novel and film, The Agony and the Ecstasy.) But that made me wonder whether there were earlier, more historical artistic depictions of the miracle at Bolsena. It was when I let my curiosity continue on its way that I found the two works of art through which I learned the full miracle story, as I have recited it above.

First, I found a set of photos of, and a commentary upon, the fresco cycle painted between 1357 and 1364 by an Orvieto artist, Ugolino di Prete Ilario, on the right wall of the Chapel of the Corporal in the glorious Cathedral of Orvieto (the exterior of which is shown in my Photo No. 2). The frescoes depict the story of the miracle at Bolsena in seven you-are-there vignettes: the miraculous event during the pilgrims’ Mass at the Basilica of Santa Cristina; Father Peter’s report to the Pope; the Pope’s delegating Bishop Giacomo to investigate; the Bishop’s examination of the corporal upon the altar in Bolsena; the returning Bishop’s meeting with the Pope outside Orvieto; the Pope’s public display of the corporal in Orvieto; and Saint Thomas’ reading of his office. My Photo No. 3 shows the first episode, in which Father Peter and his fellow pilgrims are in awe as the host bleeds, and my Photo No. 4 shows the fourth episode, in which Bishop Giacomo examines the stained altar cloth at the scene of the miracle.

With a little more digging, I learned that there was an even earlier graphic depiction of the miracle legend. In a collection of essays and photo plates, I came upon the Orvieto Cathedral’s breathtaking Reliquary of the Corporal, which was commissioned by a successor to Giacomo as Bishop of Orvieto in 1337 and completed in 1338 by a master Sienese goldsmith and artist, Ugolino di Vieri. (See my Photo No. 5.)

The Reliquary’s Bishop sought not only a worthy permanent case in which the host and the corporal would be kept and protected, but also a unique vessel in which the relics could be publicly displayed and venerated—and Ugolino