¶1out of Philly. This is the Reluctant Theologian Podcast. I am your host, Dr. R.T. Mullins from the University of Lucerne.
¶2So the internet has been ablaze right now talking about so-called Catholic vindicatory miracles like some heart tissue appearing in the Eucharist. I've been surprised by the over-the-top confidence that some have in these miracle stories, so I decided to get Dr. Stacey Tresenkos on to chat about her book on Eucharistic miracles. If you'd like to support the show, you can donate money to my Patreon account or my Ko-fi account. Any donation amount helps me out in so many ways.
¶3My student loan provider greatly appreciates all the support that people have already offered. If you've got questions or topics you'd like to hear in the show, you can message me at rtmullins.com. Ready or not, here's Stacey and I chatting about Eucharistic miracles. Enjoy. All right, so today I have with me Dr.
¶4Stacey Tresenkos. So Stacey, can you just tell the audience a bit about yourself, like who you are, some of your academic credentials, where do you teach, just some quick facts to help the audience get acquainted with you. Okay, thanks for having me on. My background is in chemistry. I was a senior research chemist at DuPont, and then I decided to do this radical thing and leave my job and stay home with my children.
¶5And I, during that time, I was having a lot of changes in my life, and I became Catholic then. And when I became Catholic, after being a chemist and devoted to atomic theory, I wanted to understand this question of dogma. I wanted to understand what the Catholic Church means when it talks about dogma and doctrine and legitimate opinion and where the boundaries are. So I pursued a master's degree in dogmatic theology from Holy Apostles College and Seminary back in 2010. That was the only way I could both study theology and change diapers and fill sippy cups 24-7 simultaneously.
¶6So it was one of the few online master's degree programs in the United States at the time. So I did that because I was curious. And then when I graduated from there, I started teaching chemistry classes at Holy Apostles. And I also became interested in the work of Father Stanley Yockey, who was a Benedictine priest and physicist. I was fascinated by the way he integrated disciplines.
¶7I became fascinated with Thomas Aquinas for the same reason. But I started following Father Stanley Yockey's work. I wrote my master's thesis on him. And then because of that, I ended up teaching at Seton Hall, where he was a distinguished professor of physics in their Catholic studies program as well. So after leaving DuPont, staying home to raise kids, studying theology, I find myself teaching for two Catholic institutions while I'm still at home, taking care of my children.
¶8And this was way before COVID. So it was back when online teaching wasn't very popular, but I found a way to make it work. And I felt very fortunate to be able to do that. Nice, nice. Now, I don't typically do this on the show, because most of my audience, they're just normal people who are interested in diverse perspectives.
¶9But and a lot of them, like they're used to academics having academic disagreements and discussions on philosophy and theology. But you and I both know this episode, it's going to get a certain kind of internet Catholic apologist crowd that's going to just like rage listen to the episode. Because like, that's a it's apparently a healthy thing to do. So anyway, can you just can you please tell the audience a little bit more about your own Catholic faith? And again, I don't normally do this.
¶10But I just know that some of the people are going to angrily listen to this. They want to dismiss you as a hack, some sort of like far left liberal Catholic. I just want you to explain to the audience that you're like, you're a normal Catholic, just some normie mcnormster from normal Texas, you know? Okay, well, great. I live in hideaway Texas.
¶11So that's about as rural and normal as you can get. I'm a wife and a mom of seven. The seven children are my proudest accomplishment. I'm a devout Catholic, we go to mass every every holy day of obligation and on the weekends and during the week and pray the rosary. My conversion, though, was pretty intense myself.
¶12It was 20 years ago. But I remember as a chemist coming into the Catholic Church, asking a priest during RCIA, as it was called at the time, if I was really supposed to stare at the bread and wine during mass, and just accept that it becomes the body and blood of Christ transubstantiation. While I know that at the atomic level, nothing changed. And the priest just looks at me and smiles and he's like, yes, that's right. And I'm like, that is crazy.
¶13But that was another reason, like I said, that I set out to study dogmatic theology. It's a fascinating exercise in logic, as you know, Ryan. And I realized later then that it took me a long time to get to philosophy. But I realized about 10 years later, that to really understand theology, so I went from science to theology, I needed to fill in the middle with philosophy, I consider myself a Thomist. And discipline integration has become very important in my work.
¶14So I finished a second master's in philosophy, systematic philosophy, again, the rigor, the systematic stuff. And I'm now entering the third year as a doctoral candidate with Dr. Gavin Kerr at St. Patrick's Pontifical University in Ireland. So my life is pretty normal.
¶15I like my life very much. Now that my kids are almost grown, the youngest is 15. I spend a lot of time in Budapest teaching about Father Yaki's work, because that's where he was Hungarian. I spend a lot of time in Connecticut as the associate dean of online learning at Holy Apostles now. So this dean role is a new thing for me as of this year.
¶16And I spend a lot of time in Ireland working on my dissertation on the metaphysics of elemental being, coming back around to what elements even are. So other than that, I'm hiding in my home office here in Texas. And I also want your audience to know that I drive a Mustang GT premium six speed transmission, which is my dream car. I love it. I love it.
¶17All right. So we've got a Thomas on the show. It's been a little while since I've had one on. So this is great. And then some of the audience, you guys are going to know Gavin, because we had done a dialogue ages ago.
¶18So this is really good stuff here. But now let's get to like the intellectual stuff. Okay. So you've written several books on science and Catholic theology with different Catholic publishing companies. And so there's a lot of cool stuff you're up to.
¶19I also really appreciate that you said you're like, I've been doing the science and theology thing. And then I kind of realized I was missing the philosophy because that's usually what's missing in the science religion dialogue. So really like this stuff you're up to. But today, what we're going to do is we're going to focus on the so-called Catholic vindicatory miracles. And so there's this argument that has been going around again in certain internet apologetic spaces saying that certain miracles uniquely vindicate the Catholic church.
¶20So can you tell us just a little bit about this argument? And then also, if you could quickly identify some of the particular miracle cases that the argument relies on. Yes. And I'll be very quick here just so we can move on. But the current apologetic definition that I have gathered from reading different YouTube or watching YouTubes and reading articles, the definition of vindicatory miracle is that it is a sign that evinces intent to authenticate a specifically Catholic doctrine.
¶21So this is not something I had ever heard. It's not a phrase that the church uses. It's something they've come up with to say these miracles authenticate Catholic doctrine and use them as apologetic tools to convince people to believe the truth of the Catholic faith. The alleged supernatural phenomena, so I'm not going to call them miracles, I'm going to call them what the church calls them in the norms, the alleged supernatural phenomena, because it kind of takes the punch out when you call them that. Sure.
¶22Alleged supernatural phenomena that they rely on are Fatima Lords, the Lanciano Eucharistic Miracle, Buenos Aires, which is the one I am most familiar with. And there are others, and there will always be others. So they're all grouped into this category called alleged supernatural phenomena. Okay. Now, so you take issue with the, like, the very idea of this Catholic vindicatory miracle argument.
¶23And so you had this recent Substack article, and you said that this argument from vindicatory miracles, it seems to go against the norms of the Catholic Church. And then you mentioned the dicastery for the doctrine of faith. So for the audience here, because only some of the people are Catholic, the rest are all over the place. So just tell us, like, what exactly this dicastery is, and then if you could tell us about some of these norms. And in particular, I'm really interested in this one norm called Nihil Obstat.
¶24So if you could explain that. Yes, great. And I love that you have a broad audience. That's wonderful. The dicastery for the doctrine of faith, I call it the DDF for short, it's the Vatican office that assists the pope in safeguarding Catholic doctrine.
¶25Among its tasks are to oversee the church's discernment of alleged supernatural phenomena. It was formally called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. So we used to abbreviate it CDF. Before that, the Holy Office. But its name has now been changed to the dicastery for the doctrine of faith.
¶26Its core function, again, is to promote and safeguard the doctrine of faith and morals throughout the Catholic Church. In the past, so do you want me to get into the Nihil Obstat? So they issued norms in 2024, very recently in church time. That's like a blink. So they issued these norms.
¶27And they say in the norms, the prefect, he wrote the introduction himself, that in the past, some bishops wanted to declare an event supernatural. So just try to imagine the situation. Before the norms in 2024, there had been some norms in the 70s that came out. And the rule was, that if there is an alleged supernatural event, it is adjudicated by the local bishop. The bishop decides whether to conduct an investigation, convenes the team, and rules on it, even to the point of declaring it supernatural.
¶28Before the day of the internet, that was localized. It changed with global communication, of course. But he also lists several reasons that it confused the faithful, because even locally, you would have a bishop decades later, a predecessor, a successor, change the ruling that a predecessor had declared. So maybe there's some medical explanation or some natural explanation that comes to light, another bishop changes. That left the faithful confused.
¶29In the day, the faithful of the people, of the bishop who said, this is a supernatural event locally in our diocese, the people took that to mean they were bound by obligation to believe it. And then the next bishop comes along and reverses it. So it was causing confusion. You can see why that would not be a wise thing to do. But it was that way in the church up until 2024.
¶30The new norms said, look, you're not going to, we're not going to adjudicate this at the local level because of, I think, because of cases like Buenos Aires, they got carried away. They got ahead of themselves. The investigators took over, made a name for themselves and started promoting this worldwide as you have to believe this. Yeah, you're free not to believe it, but you'd be, you'd be imprudent not to believe it. So it started running away too fast.
¶31So the, the DDF said, we're not even going to declare them supernatural or not anymore. They're, and I think that's wise. At first I was scratching my head, but I think it's wise because really with a lot of these cases, think about the Eucharistic miracles or Fatima, how would you ever even use science or history to prove that absolutely true? Like, I think they just recognized it's not possible to prove it to the, the certainty, the extent that the church would ever say it's binding on the faithful. Given that, let's not declare it supernatural.
¶32The most they will declare is the nihil obstet, which is Latin for nothing stands in the way. So what they look at now is something they totally can adjudicate. They look at the story, the narrative. Is there anything here that is contrary to the faith or morals? They're guarding that.
¶33Remember, is there anything here contrary to that? And if there's not, they say, you may have a devotion to this. You may believe these to be truly miracles. You may decide for yourself that they are supernatural events, that the alleged event is truly there. That includes like St.
¶34Padre Pio, stigmata, anything post-apostolic that's not part of the deposit of faith, even the miracles of canonization. So the canonization we must accept, but the healings leading up to it, you don't even have to agree with that. And a lot of times the investigations aren't released anyway. So you can't decide whether to agree with it or not. I mean, and for someone like me, okay, fine.
¶35I'm fine with that. So the nihil obstet also, I think, was wise because when it says to the people who do have devotions, the church said, acknowledged that the Holy Spirit may be acting in the midst of an experience for someone, that this truly may be a motive of credibility for someone personally. And if you are being led by the Holy Spirit through St. Padre Pio, stigmata, or lords, or the Eucharistic miracles, fine. That's fine.
¶36I mean, it's a freedom that we're granted. And specifically quotes John, I think it was Pope Benedict XVI. These phenomenon are a help which is proffered, but its use is not obligatory. That's citing actually verbum domini and the congregation of the faith from the message of Fatima with Pope St. John Paul II back in 2000.
¶37So the church has long supported this anyway. It's really just clarifying we're not going to do the local supernatural authentication anymore. It sounds very cautious, which kind of leads into my next question for you. So like I did a previous episode where I just read through like chunks of your article. And, and one of the things that, that I pressed to the audience is that these official Catholic teachings, they're just way more cautious about the miracle claims than what a lot of these internet Catholic apologists are saying.
¶38And that, I mean, that was something that really struck me. Like, I mean, just that teaching from the Catholic church, like we're not going to declare that any of these post-biblical or these post-apostolic miracles have this divine origin. I mean, that's just, so different from the conclusion of the argument from Vindicatory Catholic Miracles. So there's, I guess there's raised a couple of questions in my mind that I've got for you at the moment is just why, why are the Catholic church norms? Like, why are they so cautious here?
¶39Like, what are the harms that the Catholic church is worried about? Um, coercion to use a very strong word. I mean, I felt that myself. Um, um, like I said, in the past there was confusions. Um, not only did the bishops reverse decisions in the 1978 norms that also left to led to cases where, um, they were open for decades.
¶40Bishops waited to declare an event of supernatural origin and the faithful were just left wondering about it. So there was no closure since about 1950. There have been a handful of cases that were formally closed that way. And the reports started to multiply in the diocese over the years. And it just became unmanageable.
¶41Some bishops then spoke as if the faithful had to accept some facts as true. Again, confusion. To end the deadlock, the DDF proposed that discernment, um, closed not with a declaration of supernatural or divine origin, but with this nihil obstat, nothing stands in the way because they're weighing the spiritual fruits and finding no serious problem there. But they have in the norms, very strong language for something, for a document like this. It is strong language saying that the bishops also need to be on the lookout and guard against misuses of these alleged supernatural phenomenon.
¶42The misuses are for personal gain or for profit or for even pushing it as true on other Catholics. Um, and you know, anything that is personal gain and for the one that sticks in my mind the most is sectarian division. So if you have groups forming saying this, these, if you are being a prudent person, you would conclude that these events are truly supernatural. Therefore, if you don't agree that these events are supernatural, you're imprudent. And if you're imprudent, you're not following the faith and the movement of the Holy Spirit.
¶43They're basically saying they're binding. But if you tell them they're saying they're binding, they say, no, that's not what we said, but it is what's being communicated. That is what people are hearing that they, you know, if you have any sense at all, you would agree that these miracles really happened. And I have been told that multiple times because people are trying to convince me that I don't know what I'm talking about when it comes to chemistry. Right.
¶44And that's one thing I do know. Yeah. And I do know about dogma too. So, um, it's turning this, this thing where you have one group of internet apologists coming along saying vindicatory miracles, this vindicates Catholic doctrine. These provide better proof of the Catholic faith of the resurrection than, than even the apostolic miracles from the time of Christ, because those were so long ago, we don't have scientific data.
¶45It's another way of saying science has all the answers and we're trying to fight against scientism today. So, um, I think what's happening with the vindicatory miracle crowd right now, it's the latest example of what the norms were warning against. And so I said what I said about the norms because a, they're not being included in the conversation and B, there are a lot of people watching the conversation who do feel coerced. I've talked to some who have left the faith because of it and they're not popular, so they're not getting as much attention, but, um, it, I, I sense that it's doing some harm to people looking on. And I happen to be very familiar with these norms.
¶46And I just wanted to make sure they're part of the conversation. I don't bring them to the table as an authority myself. I do know Catholic doctrine. I've studied it for a large part of my life and I take it very seriously. The authority here is the DDF and the last three popes that are quoted in those documents.
¶47So those are the authorities. Yeah, no, cause that was, that was something that really struck me about this entire conversation was when I saw your Substack article, I'm like, you're just quoting the official norms here and then seeing certain people go, Oh, I didn't know that. That's really interesting. And that are people just losing their minds. And I'm like, you're just quoting the official teaching, which, which I know from personal experience, what it's like to just quote people and people get angry at it.
¶48And I'm like, sorry, uh, what do you want from me? Uh, but so, so yeah, so I think the norms are very, they seem like they're put in place for a reason as really appreciate that. And I'm really glad we got to talk about some of those. Now I want to get into some of the specifics of some of the Eucharistic miracles in a minute. Um, but, but there's something else I want to talk about first.
¶49So when, when I'm going back to your Substack article, uh, there was another part of it that really, really hit me hard. So since my early twenties, I've had a lot of Catholic apologists tell me that I need to submit my reason to the authority of the Catholic church. And then I, my own theology is regularly criticized, uh, because I, I, so apparently I think I can use my God given rationality to explore like all these big questions. Um, but in your article though, there was, I, I, when I think I noticed this actually a few different articles that you wrote, you kept going back, uh, I kept going on about this intellectual freedom you had to rationally investigate these Eucharistic miracles. So I really appreciate if you could tell the audience a bit about the freedom that you were given.
¶50And, and the reason I think this is important is because there's a lot of younger audiences that are listening and they're being bombarded with a lot of this bullying, a lot of this coercion, a lot of these slogans from the certain groups. And so I think it's going to be very important for them to just hear more about just like really normal, generic, you know, nothing really controversial sort of Catholicism. Yes. Thank you for asking that question. This is why I spoke back up.
¶51I actually, miracles are not my life's work. I'm, I'm trying to finish a dissertation and serve as Dean and watch my kids grow up. And I have a lot of other things going on, but I, I did write a coauthor, a book on Eucharistic miracles and I'll say more about that in a minute. But the reason I spoke back up recently was because the norms are being left out of the conversation. Um, the freedom around alleged supernatural phenomena, um, have always been clear to me.
¶52I said, I've been Catholic for 20 years. I never personally made too much of Fatima or Lords or even the Eucharistic miracles. It just, what I had other devotions, um, to St. Thomas Aquinas, to other saints. I prayed the rosary.
¶53I did, um, St. Louis de Montfort, uh, total consecration to Mary. So I'm, I'm living my Catholic life. I worked for a bishop for a while and my bishop asked me, say, you're a scientist. Could you prepare talks on Eucharistic miracles to present to people in our diocese?
¶54I think that would really help their faith. And I told my bishop, no, I actually said, I really don't want to do this. I don't, I don't really want to dive into these because I can already kind of, that's why I think a lot of people stay away from that because it does get a bit crazy in that room. So I actually told them no. And then my husband said, you really shouldn't tell your bishop.
¶55No, um, you're a convert and all of it. You, you probably should listen to what he's saying. And so I'm like, all right, I'll do it. So I did it. I, I ordered all the books that were popular and I read about Eucharistic miracles.
¶56And I gave a few, I gave, I gave more than a few, I gave 20 talks around the diocese where I just repeated the narratives. And I told my bishop that I'm not comfortable doing this, but I'm repeating the narratives. I don't have time to dig into these, but I'll do it anyway. Well, that led to being asked to coauthor a book on, um, scripture, tradition, and science on the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. So I was writing the science part and that meant I had to dive into these claims.
¶57I had 10 cases lined up that I was going to cover. I could not get through three of them because when I started trying to dig up the scientific reports for these extraordinary claims, extraordinary claims, there was nothing there. It was dead end after dead end after contradiction, after wild claim with no backing. And I really, I, I really had a bad, bad feeling about it. So I told the publisher, I'm going to write, I'm going to write what I'm seeing.
¶58Like here, here's my conclusion. The data is all inconclusive. I didn't want to be ugly. I didn't want to be critical. I just said, look, I find the data inconclusive and I cannot write.
¶59Let me just back up here. Yeah. I would have loved to be a, I mean, it would have been very good for my popularity to be a Catholic chemist convert who opened to life, had seven kids, studied theology, studied philosophy. If I could come out as a chemist and say, they're true and I support it. Like I could have been, that could have been my life's work.
¶60Oh yeah. I said, no, I'm not going to do that because I don't believe it. There's not the data here to support it. So I said, it's all inconclusive. Anyway, my Bishop and the Catholic publisher, it was Tan Books.
¶61They said, okay, you write what you see because the real presence of Christ doesn't rely on these miracles anyway. And we're Catholics. We're not afraid of truth. And so I was free to write that. Father Yaki, I'll just say, he has a book.
¶62He has a book called God and the Son at Fatima from 1999. He also thinks there's a natural explanation. He says that most, the miracle there is that so many people gathered to honor Mary on that day. And that, that's never been controversial in the church. So here's a celebrated priest and physicist that, that won the Templeton prize.
¶63You know, he's, he's said that many years ago. So it just has never been a thing. Anyway, we have the freedom to do that. It has never been the way the cat, the apologists are promoting it now. I have never understood that to be the case.
¶64And the norms support me on that. That, cause this is what, this is what baffled me when I was younger is I kept getting hit with all these slogans and I'm like, I'm reading a lot of Catholic theology because I'm just reading lots of theology in general. And I'm not, I'm not hearing any of this from this crowd. I'm only hearing it from like certain groups. So I, I don't know, I just, I always found it really odd.
¶65Um, but so, so let's, let's get into some of these, uh, Eucharistic miracle claims. So like you mentioned, you, you were looking into quite a few of them, uh, to write some of your books here. Um, but I want to focus on, on the one from Buenos Aires. So you said, um, that there are, okay. So there's like four major claims about this particular Eucharistic miracle at Buenos Aires.
¶66So just tell us what the alleged story is here. Get us going. Yes. In this case, the claim is that a host was found in the church and it began to grow a red substance. They, they found it in the church, uh, told the priest, uh, per the norms for dealing with situations like that, the, the host was put into water in a tabernacle, left to dissolve where, um, if it was consecrated, consecrated, there would, there would no longer be the real presence of Christ.
¶67And then it's put down the drain in the sacristy, which goes straight to the ground. It's pure, um, that was done. And then they saw a red substance growing on it. There were three cases, 1992, four and six, the 96 year is the one that most people talk about. This red substance was growing on the host.
¶68They stored it in a test tube and water for three years before these investigators ask the archbishop who was, uh, Archbishop Bergoglio at the time, who's, who was then later Pope Francis. They asked him if they could start the investigation. He agreed and they sent it to forensic analysis and some, um, microscopy testing and the conclusions summarizing them are that the host became heart tissue, that the tissue was still alive at the time they made the microscope slides, that the heart tissue shows that the heart was suffering and that the DNA is of divine origin because it lacks paternal DNA. So on the surface that, I mean, that is an extraordinary claim. You have this host that is suffering heart tissue that somehow remained alive even after being stored in water for three years.
¶69And it has this divine DNA. I mean, it feels like you're touching the real body of Christ, you know, like this, it's very moving. Um, but I criticized that because when I went to look for this, um, I criticized the lack of data for the extraordinary claims. And I don't, I don't mean that I'm having extremely high standards. I'm saying the standards for ordinary publishing, I have a patent on something called nano bubble pack from chemistry work.
¶70And, um, the standards I had to produce just to publish that, um, in science journal were far, far more rigorous than what anything was offered that caused this divine DNA and still living heart tissue. So I was very frustrated because I would have been the first person to stand up and say, everybody needs to hear about this, but I couldn't because there, there, there is no data there to support it. Yeah. So now as a Catholic though, there's certain rules that you have to follow when you're doing an investigation like this, like what are, what are some of those rules? Well, let me just give a big view of scientific reporting from my own experiences and what my professors back in the day taught me.
¶71One of my research projects in graduate school was the development of this three-dimensional porous network with pores in the 10 nanometer scale diameter. Um, that's what was called nano bubble pack. Not only did our team have to give the full details of the preparation procedure, like what instruments did we use? What glassware did we use? What monomers did we use?
¶72How much of them did we use? What were the temperature pressure conditions for the monomers? How did we prepare the silica spheres that we used as a mold? Um, what were the polymerization conditions? How do we isolate the final product?
¶73I mean, it's kind of like giving a recipe, but much more detailed. Yeah. Not only did we have to do that, we had to detail the analytical procedures. How do we know that we produced this, these three-dimensional porous networks. We had to describe the instruments we used, name the settings that we used on the instruments, name the reagents we use, the dyes, the concentrations, the software that was used.
¶74And we had to use various techniques to collectively induce our claim. So we couldn't just use one or two techniques and get a data result that, that jives with what we're hoping for, because trust me, you're tempted to, and then publish a paper. But in the peer review process and the journal, and I published in science, which is one of the biggest scientific journals in the world. Um, to be able to do that, you have to have different techniques, all converging on the claim that you're making. So I had to do surface area analysis, absorption techniques, elemental analysis, transmission, and scanning electron microscope, and give all the details for how that was done.
¶75I had to repeat the experiment. I had to show what the controls were. I had to make a convincing case just for something like nano bubble pack. And so to make an extraordinary, so that's the standard in science. Like you can't publish a scientific journal article unless you have that stuff.
¶76They'll send it back to you in peer review, and you'll be asked to do more experiments. Um, to make an extraordinary claim like this, maybe they don't have all the materials, but if you're going to make that, that extraordinary claim, find the instrumentation that you need, do the best test, and be absolutely transparent with the records and the practices that you've used. Have the utmost integrity out of, if nothing else, out of respect for your peers in the world who are going to read this and be moved by it, and out of respect for the Holy Eucharist itself. If you're going to do something like that, complete transparency, and that includes complete viable chain of custody records, none of that was given. So, okay.
¶77So when it comes to this Buenos Aires case, like you want to say these rules just were not followed at all? No. No. Okay. I mean, that's, I mean, that is, I can see why that would be really disheartening when you're, when you're first like jumping into this project, you're just like, okay, I'm a scientist.
¶78Let me, you want me to scientifically look at some stuff? All right, cool. And then you're coming across all these cases, like you said earlier, it's just dead end after dead end. I, that must have been really frustrating is my guess. It was very frustrating.
¶79Um, my husband knows all about it because I, I went through this time writing that book. I had to write the book and I knew what I was writing and what I was going to say was not going to be popular. Um, and, and I was very glad that the publisher said, write what you have to say anyway. And my third part of the book sort of took on a life of its own, but the good thing, what I'm really proud about in that book is, and it's called behold it as I, um, scripture tradition and science on the real presence with father George Elliot here in my diocese. What I really like about what happened in that book is father Elliot gives a beautiful defense from scripture and tradition of the proofs for our belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
¶80That's really where the certainty is. He gives a beautiful defense of that. And then you get to part three where Trusankos is saying the data is inconclusive y'all. Um, but what I say is, look, it's okay. Don't put your faith on trial.
¶81If, if your faith depends on these Eucharistic miracle cases being true, maybe you need to examine your faith and, and pray for faith in the scripture and tradition that we have. Let the science point you back to where our real certainty is. So I, I ended the book that way and I'm happy with it and I stand behind it to this day. Um, and that's, that's my foray into the Eucharistic miracle issue. That's pretty much all the work I've done on miracles.
¶82I mean, I'm tempted to say amen, but I don't come from a charismatic background. So you can say amen. Well, I mean, I guess I could. So I want to look at the, a little bit, the data a little bit more here though. So, so the claim around the Buenos Aires thing was that there was like these different tests that were done on the Eucharistic host to look for the DNA.
¶83Uh, so what were the results of these tests and then why exactly were you not happy with the way that was handled? Okay. And, and you might, if you need to cut me off, just feel free to do so. Cause it, I, the science is never easy to explain. If you ask a scientist to talk about science, you'll never shut her up.
¶84But yeah, I'm married to a biologist. Okay. So you totally know about that. It's a, but I mean, just, I, I did detail it. I have several articles on my substack where I went into a little more detail because people ask me to.
¶85Oh yeah. And so I'll just give you the, the main issue that I had with Buenos Aires. There's a lot more to it. Yeah. And we can go get a look at the book.
¶86You mentioned, mention the name of the book again for a second. Yeah. Uh, it's called Behold It Is I. And that's, that's a quote from scripture. Behold It Is I, scripture, tradition, and science on the real presence by Tan Books.
¶87And I also want to point you to, um, my good friend, Carrie, who has a substack called Skeptasmic. Okay. She, she's, I've been, I've known her for over a year as well as several other, um, atheists and agnostics who have taken an interest in this particular case. She has done some fantastic work on poking at the, she's married to a biologist as well. And she's done some fantastic work.
¶88She's even been to Buenos Aires to the church and seen these, um, these, uh, alleged supernatural phenomena samples that are there. So I, I refer you to her. She just published a response to Joe Smith, um, 18 minutes on the Buenos Aires case in his video conversion video. She published a very long response to that, but let me, let me tell you where I was back when I wrote the book. They do something called an orthotolidine test.
¶89So the forensic analysis, um, they took the Brown relic of particles to a forensic lab. So what you do in a forensic lab is one of the first things they do is this orthotolidine test, which analyzes the presence of glucose and glucose is in biological samples. So the forensic lab is already set up to analyze things like blood and urine, biological samples. So if you have a sample and you just want to confirm that it is biological, you do the orthotolidine test and they did that test and that test was negative. So the explanation for that as well, the sample is very old.
¶90Maybe whatever glucose was there, wasn't there anymore. So, so, so they're just testing, is this biological? And the result was no. Yeah. Fresh blood would give a positive test.
¶91So they usually do that test on blood, but it's not a test for blood as a test for glucose and it was negative, but the explanation was, well, the sample was old. Okay. Um, the next thing they did was a quanta blot method. So quanta blot is a, uh, polymerase chain reaction, um, short tandem repeat test. It's a DNA test.
¶92It's the DNA test you get if you spit in a test tube for 23 and me or something like that. Um, they, it's, it's the same type of test. There's a special, so they take the sample and there's a special solvent that will dissolve the DNA if there is any and separate it from the other material. So it isolates the DNA in the sample in question. Um, and this, they use this in like DNA testing for court cases, forensics.
¶93The quanta blot method works by chemically immobilizing the extracted DNA to a nylon membrane, and then they add a molecular probe specific to primate DNA. So they isolate the DNA. It sticks to this membrane, and then it has a probe on it that makes it, that interacts with light. So it makes it visible. So you can literally, these are field tests.
¶94You, they're not that sophisticated, but you can tell with a sample if it's got primate DNA, because if you put it in the quanta blot method, it'll dissolve the DNA, stick it to this probe and put the, the dye on it so that you can see it. So they do this. Um, it's convenient because you can see right away. If you've got primate DNA, they only take a few hours to do, and they are specific down to like 0.15 nanograms to 10 nanograms of human or primate DNA. So back in the 1996 and in the 1900s, the forensic lab only says that some, some substance was in the extractant, but not enough for the DNA test.
¶95So they did dissolve something, but it wasn't even enough in the 0.15 to 10 nanogram range to register a constant concentration. At that point, they would usually just say the orthotolidine test and the quanta blot show that we don't have any DNA here for a genetic analysis. Um, okay. So there's that for a second. So, cause I'm following this.
¶96So the first test is just to see, is this biological? And then the second one is like, is it primate DNA? Not like, not necessarily specifically human DNA, but just, just primate. So we're in the neighborhood at least. So the first one comes back saying that's not biological.
¶97And then the second one's like, yeah, we don't, we don't, we don't see any primate DNA in here. Is it, am I understanding this right? Right. There's nothing, there's nothing. They're, they're not seeing anything.
¶98And in a typical case, this would just be no fresh biological material, no quantifiable human DNA, but the investigators specifically requested that the PCR, STR, the polymerase chain reaction DNA tests be done anyway. And so in their reports, um, they claim that they went ahead and did this test. The lab notes that there does seem to be some high molecular weight DNA of non-human origin. Okay. Well, what, where would that DNA maybe be coming from?
¶99It can be coming from the wheat and the bread. It could be coming from microorganisms that grew on it since then, since the three years it started. Um, so they, the report says there's high molecular weight DNA of non-human origin. Um, and then they just give this report a summary of the DNA PCR typing results. And they have all these loci that are specific to human genes.
¶100And every single one of them, I have a picture of it on my sub stack. Every single one of them has an NR in the block and an NR stands for no result. Oh, okay. There's no result. There's no human DNA there.
¶101So that's it. There's literally nothing there, but instead of saying, and you can see this in their talks, I've linked to them. Instead of saying there doesn't seem to be anything there, they conclude that it's miraculous because since Jesus didn't have a biological father, there wouldn't be any DNA show up. So the fact that there was high molecular DNA, but no human specific or primate specific genes, that is proof of a miracle. Right.
¶102Okay. So we had three tests. First one, is it biological? And you're like, no. Second one, is it primate DNA?
¶103No. Third one, well, there's, there's nothing human about it. Um, and it could, and it couldn't add, and whatever that DNA could be, I mean, it could come from anything. Um, cause it could be like plants or yeast or weed or whatever. Uh, a lot of, there's a lot of options on the table, but this group was like, oh, okay.
¶104Well that, well, I mean, cause we know that there's a virgin birth here. So it must be the divine DNA sort of like, I mean, yeah, yeah, that's a right. Okay. Yeah. Okay.
¶105So, yeah. So I just, on that basis alone, but since then, I mean, Dr. Kelly Kearse did some controls where he put unconsecrated hosts in the same conditions. And he found that bacterial and fungal DNA were abundant, um, which would show up as non-human DNA. So he, he did that same experiment and found a possible source.
¶106It's a natural explanation that hasn't been ruled out. Um, and then the samples went on from there into some microscopy that leads into Dr. Zugeby. But I mean, for me looking at this, I could, I can't even express to you how frustrated I was when I read these lab reports and that was it. I mean, I'm looking at it and I'm like, there's nothing, there's nothing here, but yet they're concluding that it's divine in origin.
¶107It, it just, it rattled everything in me as a chemist to, to look at something like that. I really still don't understand how they could say that. That, I mean, cause when I, when my wife was asking me to explain some of these cases to her, I mean, that was the exactly where she went. She's like, what were the lab results? What were they, what, what tests were they doing?
¶108What, you know, when she wanted to, all the questions that you just laid out, uh, like that you just brought up that there was all the stuff she was asking. So I can already see like why a lot of scientists are going to go, you want me to infer what from this? This is, this is remarkable. Uh, and then me as a theologian looking at this going, I don't understand how I'm supposed to get to this conclusion that they want to, they want to make from everything you're laying out here. This sounds, doesn't sound very good.
¶109Um, but let's get onto, you mentioned Dr. Zagubi. Um, so there's this video of him where he's like looking into this microscope and he's declaring it's, it's heart tissue and, and that the heart tissue, it looks like it underwent a very traumatic event about three days before the investigation. So like, so you can, you know, it's like, I don't even see like where this is supposed to be going. Like what's, what's your problem with, with, with this claim here?
¶110Well, again, you have to get really into the weeds and I'm going to point back to Skeptasmic's article because she has dug into a lot of things here. I've been talking with her for a long time. And whenever I tried to write an article on my Substack, I tried not to make it long and detailed. I just tried to give the highlights, um, because there's a lot, and I don't have time to get into all of the details of it anyway, but there are some things in that whole situation that doesn't line up. So what you hear, what I encountered first, when I started studying this is you have Dr.
¶111Zagubi from New York. So they take the samples all the way from Buenos Aires up to New York to his lab. And they ask him to look at it. So he is a faithful Catholic. He had written a book on the cross in the shroud, a medical examiner investigates the crucifixion.
¶112Um, he had used his forensic knowledge as a chief medical examiner in New York for three decades, where he had done over 10,000 autopsies and specifically was a specialist in the heart. They take it to him and he's looking at the sample while the investigators are recording. And he's describing how the sample is, was still alive the time the microscope was made. There are white blood cells that, um, that, uh, that presence of those white blood cells is indicative of great suffering or trauma at the time of death. And he identifies it from the left ventricle, which is the part of the heart that pumps oxygen out to the whole body.
¶113So it just, it sounds amazing. Um, and the video looks good. Like in my first talks on this, I showed that clip of the video and moved people to tears, which really upset me because I thought I'm not comfortable with this. So I started digging into it and that's how I met Carrie at Skeptasmic and some other guys. And it turns out that, um, the video is heavily edited.
¶114There are, and you know how it is when you edit a video, if you're going to be transparent, you need to give the whole video. So it's edited. The images they show where it looks like you're seeing what he's seeing through the microscope are not what he was looking at through the microscope. They're, they're images from somewhere else, um, from another screen that another, uh, I think Professor Lawrence was looking at. Um, but there's, there's just not full disclosure there.
¶115And I did, excuse me, I did make contact with his daughter who told me that the family was pretty upset about it because they didn't, the investigators didn't really say much about his interview until right before he died. Um, and they felt like when the investigators showed up at the house that there was, he was troubled because there wasn't a clear chain of custody on the forensic package. Like you expect in legal cases, he was troubled by that. He didn't know what he was looking at. He didn't know why he was being asked to look at it.
¶116Um, he gave his opinion, assuming it was heart tissue. And she said, it looked like they were teaching slides from like a biology class. So, um, she said the family very much felt like he was exploited. So I don't know that's hearsay. I don't know.
¶117That's just kind of where I put my hands up. And I'm like, I, I am not, I'm definitely not going to promote this to people as a reason to believe in the real presence of Christ. I'm definitely not going to talk about it that way. Um, I left it like this on my sub stack. We need answers.
¶118The men who conducted the investigation are still alive. I called on them to answer these questions, give us the data, give us the video, answer questions that people have about what it all means, and they won't. So that that's where I left it. That's a, that's an interesting place to leave it. I mean, those are this feeling, they feel like questions that should be easily answered, but, um, yeah.
¶119Okay. Well, I guess we'll just have to leave their silence right there. Uh, so I guess I got a sort of personal question then. So you're doing these investigations, you can cover a lot of dirt on all these cases. Did this shake your, your faith as a Catholic?
¶120Of course not. It didn't. And I'm very clear on why, because, um, that this is what the church teaches. I have to be very careful here because I, you know, I don't, I don't want to criticize anybody else, but our faith is not supposed to be grounded in these alleged supernatural phenomena. It, there helps.
¶121Okay. But they're not the whole thing. It did not shake my faith at all because I very much saw it as not having faith in the men who are promoting these stories. That's the only thing I lost faith in. I lost faith in what they were saying.
¶122I don't trust them. I would like them to answer questions. My faith in Christ was never dependent on any of these things. My faith, I did not come into the faith as a believing Catholic because of Lords or Fatima or Eucharistic miracles. Um, even as a scientist, I think it would require a lot of scientific evidence for that to have been the reason that even as a scientist, I was already fully aware that science does not have all the answers to life's most pressing questions, that there is something beyond science.
¶123So the last thing I'm going to do is look to science when I get here to shore up my faith, because it was never grounded in those things. Anyway, I don't find them to be helps in my faith. Um, so I don't use them as devotions. I don't have a problem with other people who do. I have a problem with other people who find them to be good devotions, who also insist that other people have to agree with them as well, because that, that causes that sectarian spirit.
¶124But I, it did not shake my faith at all. And I really would like to see the conversation right now with all these new converts go in that direction to what it means. This is where the theological chops come in. What does it even mean to have faith? When we say that faith is certain, what are we talking about?
¶125Because that's something that I think, um, in our age of science that we're living in. Um, we've become too dependent on our senses, too dependent on what we can see and touch and not really in touch with what it means to take that leap of faith, to grant intellectual assent and of your, of your will to the truths of faith, to decide, I believe that's the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, even though I know the Adams aren't doing anything unusual, um, to, to, for that level of faith, you really have to get your head around it. And the last thing I want to say on that is I've raised seven kids now. And like many people who've walked through life as long as I have, there is suffering in life. There is suffering.
¶126And if your faith is based on these little miracles, there are going to be times in your life when you're going to beg God for a miracle too, and it might not come. And it's going to leave you with a crisis of faith because your faith wasn't grounded in something more deep than that. And that's one of the things I worry about. And I don't worry to the point of actually trying to force anybody. I'm offering it as something to think about because everybody's got to find their own way through life.
¶127But, uh, you know, I have, I have friends with children who are suffering from cancer and may not live. I have friends who have lost children in tragedy, lost spouses, lost people they love. As you get older, you see people all around you lose their parents. And, you know, there are going to be times when you wish there would be a miracle and it doesn't always come. Rarely does it come.
¶128And so you can't put your faith on the little miracles. You need to put it in the miracles of Christ with a positive faith. I'll definitely say amen to that one. Cause, um, yeah, that's, it's a worry I've had when I've, when I see these conversations pop up, uh, and they always come in like waves and different fashion trends, but I am often going, what are you really putting your faith in? Is it really Jesus or is it something else?
¶129And is it something else that's not reliable at all? And that's, that's a worry. Cause I've seen it. Yeah. I've seen people lose their faith over this sort of thing.
¶130So to kind of wrap up this episode though, um, in closing, like, what would you say to some of my younger audience that, you know, they're hearing this really strong rhetoric from these internet Catholic apologists? They're not as old as I am. So they're not, they haven't been around long enough to hear it before. So they've not encountered it before. And so, I mean, some of these guys, like there's just, there's just bullying people with this argument from Catholic vindicatory miracles, and they're trying to use it as a trump card to defeat like all objections to Catholicism.
¶131What would your advice or maybe like your caution be, uh, for people who are being confronted with this? I would say, um, to turn inward and to pray. And I know like for someone very scientific, that sounds like a cop-out, but the Holy Spirit will be at work in you if you pray. And when I say grant assent of the intellect and will, it's when you say yes to God. It's when you, like I did with the Eucharist, I said, yes, I believe.
¶132I don't fully understand it, but I'm going to commit my life to understanding it. And I'm going to do what my faith demands of me. I had to change a lot of things in my life. I had to rethink everything I thought I knew. And now I'm studying philosophy, go figure.
¶133But I mean, you, the greatest blessings of my life have come when I followed hard truths, when I took a minute to pray and I said, you know, God, you got to show me what's going on here because I'm not sure. But take, take a moment to really ask yourself what it means for you to have faith. And read, I strongly suggest. So another reason I love dogmatics is because when the church puts out a document, it is so carefully and so well written. Go read the norms from 2024 because that will affirm you in your faith.
¶134It will affirm, if you have a devotion to Fatima, go for it. There is no problem there. That's fine. If you don't, that's also fine. But if you go read the language of the church itself, don't take me as the authority, take the church, go and read what the church says.
¶135And there are references in there. This is where the scholarship comes in. It's really fun. It'll reference you back to the last three popes, to popes before them, to Vatican Council One. And you can see how the church is thinking.
¶136So what we mean when we say think with the church is that read the 2024 norms on this issue, understand what they are trying to say. And if you want to dig deeper, look up the references, and you'll see how a little bit of what I explained, how it's an evolution over time, not changing what is the truth, but clarifying what the truth is so that we are guarded in our faith and morals. I find that really beautiful. Learning to study dogmatics was one of the best things I ever did besides learning to study philosophy. So I recommend that.
¶137All right. Well, Stacey, thank you so much for being on the show today. This has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. Thank you. Thank you, Brian.
¶138And there you have it, another episode of the Reluctant Theologian Podcast. Stay tuned for more episodes on philosophical theology.