The Basilica of St Francis

The Eucharistic Miracle

The evening of 14 August 1730, the Friars Minor of the convent of San Francesco placed 351 consecrated Hosts in a ciborium and then, as they did every year, closed the church and went to the cathedral, together with all the townspeople, for Vespers on the eve of the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, protectress of Siena. When they returned home, the friars found a terrible surprise: the ciborium with the Hosts had been stolen. The news immediately spread through the city, and 15 August, always a joyous day, was characterized by profound worry about the fate of the Hosts. The people were so intensely affected by the event that they decided not to run the Palio the next day.
The next few days were marked by an extenuating search. On 17 August, in the church of Santa Maria in Provenzano, a priest by chance knelt to pray next to the alms box and glimpsed something white inside it; curious, he asked if he could open the box and inside, to everyone’s great joy, were the Hosts.
The city felt that a great burden had been lifted. A procession was organized to take the Hosts back to the Basilica of San Francesco. The friars did not want to destroy them because they had been consecrated, but they could not use them either, since they had been in a dusty box in contact with money. They thus decided to let nature take its course and to wait for the Hosts to disintegrate by themselves. Since then, 280 years have passed and the Hosts, subjected on various occasions to scientific analyses, are miraculously unchanged.
In 1980, Pope John Paul II, during a visit to Siena, chose to spend some time in contemplation of the Hosts. In front of them, he stated, “It is the Presence,” thus affirming that in those little discs of unleavened bread was manifested the Eucharistic miracle of the presence of the Body of Christ. Even now it is still possible to observe the Miracle of the Eucharist in the Basilica of Saint Francis, in winter in the left transept and in summer in the right one.