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Show THE BLOOD MIRACLE OF A MARTYR. On September 19 feast of the Martyrs Januarius Janu-arius and Festus, the miracle of liquefaction, that ' is, the spontaneous change from a dried up or ; solid condition of blood to a liquid state, took place j , in the famous chapel of the Ireasury, in the great ; 1 . Cathedral of Naples, Italy. By the overwhelming . , majority of intelligent non-Catholics in our day, miracles are either completely discredited or re- garded as something belonging entirely to the past, and are consigned with many of the doctrines of the Catholic Church to the days of the foundation of the Christian religion or the "dark days" of i the Middle Ages. But any man, Catholic or non- Catholic, who happens to be in the southern por-, por-, tion of the Italian peninsula, about May or Sep tember when the miracle of the liquefaction of the blood of that glorious martyr and bishop, St. Januarius, takes place, must either believe that ; ' a miracle has occurred or that he is in the pres ence of the greatest end most adroit imposture of all times. How few there are beyond the citizens and iin-, iin-, mWiato neighbors of Naples who over give a thought to this wonderful manifestation of the presence of the almighty power of our Creator. And yet, year after year, as the centuries roll on, and everything else is changed or destroyed by the relentless tooth of time, the self-same miracle is daily repeated for eight days at two seasons of the year, in spring and autumn; the first occurring on May the fourth, the feast of the translation of the body of the martyr from Monte Vecchia to its present resting place at Naples; the second on September nineteenth, feast of his martyrdom, and during the octaves of these feasts. Briefly, here are the facts of the martyrdom of the Saint : During the ruthless persecutions which raged under the Roman Emperors Dioclesian and Maximian, Januarius was bishop of Benevento. By the order of one of the most cruel of the judges who administered the imperial will in Southern Italy, the bishop -was arrested and, refusing to abandon the religion of the Galilean, Christ, was condemned to be devoured by wild beasts. When flung to the tigers, the beasts crouched at his feet. He was then taken out of the arena and beheaded with many of his companions. The body of the martyr was removed secretly by some of the faithful faith-ful and buried in his little chapel at Benevento. It was then May the fourth, 4S7, translated to its present resting place at Naples, where it reposes in a triple case the outer one of which is corded and sealed in the crypt under the high altar of the Cathedral. After the Saint "was beheaded his blood was speugod from the ground by a devout woman and squeezed into two small glass bottles. In time it congealed, became solid in the phials or bottles, and it is the returning of this congealed blood, in May and September, which is called the miracle of the "Liquefaction." When the great English chemist, Sir Humphrey Humph-rey Davy, visited Naples in 1823, he was by special spe-cial courtesy seated in the sanctuary and permitted permit-ted by the Archbishop to examine the phials beforo the miracle occurred. He saw the congealed mass slowly returning to the liquid state. He also saw that the seals of the bottles were intact. Returning Return-ing to his hotel, he said to his companions: "Well, I do not know how it is done, but such an effect cannot follow from any known natural cause." A rather clever Agnostic friend of ours with whom we traveled from Genoa to Naples and together witnessed the miracle of the liquefaction, remarked re-marked to us in discussing what he was pleased to cell "the remarkable phenomenon'': "I can't see that there is any deceit or secret about the affair, for, considering the Italian character and my own experience with it, some one in the secret would have sold out years ago." |