The Miracle Of Bolsena And Orvieto

The Story As It Has Been Handed Down

A priest was making his way to Rome on pilgrimage and stopped at Bolsena, on the lake north of Viterbo. Tradition names him Peter of Prague and remembers him as a man who kept his faith and his doubts in the same heart: he believed what the Church taught about the Eucharist, and he could not make himself feel it was true.

He said Mass in the church of Santa Cristina, over the tomb of the young martyr Christina. As he spoke the words of consecration, blood began to seep from the host, running over his hands and down onto the altar and the corporal. The story has him trying to hide it first, and then giving up, breaking off the Mass, and asking to be taken to Orvieto where the pope was staying.

Something worth knowing before you go further: the priest's name does not appear in any document until after 1317, and the earliest copy of that document we still have was made around 1563. Whatever happened at Bolsena, the story as we tell it took shape a long time afterwards.

Corpus Christi: The Part Everyone Gets Wrong

The popular version runs like this. Urban IV heard about the bleeding corporal, was so moved that he instituted the feast of Corpus Christi for the whole Church, and commissioned Thomas Aquinas to write the liturgy for it. It is a wonderful story. The trouble is that the documents do not support it, and the objections come mostly from Catholic scholarship rather than from anyone hostile to the faith.

Start with the feast itself. It did not begin at Bolsena. It began at Liège, in what is now Belgium, where a nun named Juliana of Liège spent forty years campaigning for a feast of the body of Christ after visions that started in 1208. Her bishop, Robert de Thourotte, ordered the feast for his diocese in 1246, seventeen years before the events at Bolsena. And the man who was Archdeacon of Liège under that bishop, who knew the feast at first hand in the place it was invented, was Jacques Pantaléon. He became Pope Urban IV.

Now the bull. Urban IV issued Transiturus de hoc mundo at Orvieto on 11 August 1264, extending Corpus Christi to the universal Church. The text survives. It never mentions Bolsena. A pope supposedly acting because of a miracle wrote the document establishing the feast and said nothing about it.

Nor did anyone around him. Thierricus Vallicoloris wrote a life of Urban IV in verse, described his stay at Orvieto in detail, and discussed both the pope's devotion at Mass and his institution of Corpus Christi. He never alludes to a miracle at Bolsena either. The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, hardly a skeptical publication, reaches the blunt conclusion that the miracle of Bolsena "is not supported by strong historical evidence, and its tradition is not altogether consistent".

There is a last detail that undoes the story from the other end. Urban IV died on 2 October 1264, seven weeks after the bull, and the feast he had established quietly lapsed. Corpus Christi only took hold across the Church when Clement V revived it at the Council of Vienne in 1311. The feast came from Liège and from Juliana. Bolsena attached itself to the feast later, at Orvieto, and it is that later attachment which produced the art, the cathedral and the cult of the relic.

Thomas Aquinas At Orvieto

One thread of the traditional account holds up well. Thomas Aquinas really was at Orvieto, teaching at the Dominican priory from September 1261 while the papal court was in the town, and scholars broadly accept that he wrote the office for Corpus Christi at Urban IV's request. The hymns are his: Lauda Sion, the sequence sung at Mass, and Pange lingua, whose final two stanzas the Church still sings as the Tantum ergo at benediction.

What does not hold up is the claim that he wrote them because of Bolsena, which inherits every problem above. You may also see it said that Urban IV sent Aquinas and Bonaventure together to investigate the miracle. No scholarship supports Bonaventure's involvement, and Carlo's own exhibition panel does not claim it either.

What You Can See Today

The relics were divided, and they are still divided. The corporal went to Orvieto. The blood-stained altar stones stayed at Bolsena, where they are shown in the Chapel of the Miracle in the Basilica of Santa Cristina, rebuilt on a circular plan in 1693, set into a gilded frame made in 1940.

Orvieto Cathedral is the more famous half. Its foundation stone was laid on 13 November 1290 by Pope Nicholas IV, and Lorenzo Maitani's great striped façade followed from 1309. The Chapel of the Corporal was built between 1350 and 1356, and Ugolino di Prete Ilario frescoed it with eight scenes of the miracle, finished by 1364. The reliquary made for the cloth is a silver-gilt and enamel panel about 139cm tall, made by the Sienese goldsmith Ugolino di Vieri and his workshop in 1337 and 1338, and first carried in procession on Corpus Domini in 1338.

That reliquary carries a quiet significance most visitors miss. Its enamelled scenes are the oldest surviving record of the miracle in any form. The earliest witness we have to what happened at Bolsena in 1263 is a luxury art object made about seventy-five years later.

The chapel is free to enter for prayer during cathedral hours. The corporal itself is exposed only at Christmas and Epiphany, between Easter and Pentecost, at Corpus Christi and at the Assumption, so time your visit if seeing it matters to you. Sources disagree about exactly where the Ugolino di Vieri reliquary now sits, since some of the cathedral's treasures have moved to the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, so check with the cathedral before you travel.

Raphael Painted It On A Vatican Wall

Between 1512 and 1514 Raphael painted The Mass at Bolsena in the Stanza di Eliodoro in the Apostolic Palace, and you can still stand in front of it. The priest kneels at the altar, astonished. The congregation presses in from the left.

Look to the right and you will find Pope Julius II kneeling in the scene, a living pope inserted into an event that was two hundred and fifty years old when the fresco was painted. It is a neat illustration of what had happened to the story by then. Bolsena had become something the papacy could use, and the iconography we inherit begins with the goldsmiths of the 1330s rather than with anything written in 1263.

Carlo Acutis And Bolsena

Bolsena has its panel in Carlo's exhibition of Eucharistic miracles, and the panel tells the traditional story: the doubting priest, the blood on the hands, the emissaries sent by the pope, and the feast of Corpus Christi following from it.

Carlo built that catalogue as a boy, from the devotional sources available to him, and it reproduces them faithfully. It was never meant to be a work of historical criticism. Reading his panel beside the documents is not a way of catching him out. It is a way of doing what he was actually trying to get people to do, which was to take the Eucharist seriously enough to go and look.

What The Church Asks You To Believe

We could find no formal canonical approval of the Bolsena miracle by Urban IV or by anyone since. Popes have venerated the relic, built a chapel for it and paid for its reliquary, and none of that amounts to a juridical decree. In 1344, eighty years after the event, Clement VI managed only the phrase propter miraculum aliquod, meaning "on account of some miracle".

As with every Eucharistic miracle, this is private revelation, and no Catholic is obliged to believe a word of it. The real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is the Church's teaching, and it stands whether or not a host ever bled at Bolsena. That freedom is worth holding onto, because it means you can weigh the evidence without anything being at stake for your faith.