[ad_1]
San Gennaro it disappoints the Neapolitans, faithful and curious around the world. In the end there was not the last miracle of the year, the one planned on December 16 in memory of a prodigious event that saved Naples of the consequences of a violent eruption of Vesuvio. On this date of 1631, in fact, the lava threatened to destroy the Neapolitan city. The panicked Neapolitans entrusted themselves to San Gennaro carrying the bust of the saint that contained his skull and the relic of the blood in procession through the streets. The lava miraculously stopped at the edge of the city and Naples was saved. From this event, tradition has it that on December 16 of each year the Neapolitan Church remembers the patronage of San Gennaro in the capital of Campania.
Without a doubt, it is the least known of the three miracles that occur every year. The first falls on the Saturday before the first Sunday in May in memory of the translation of the remains of the saint ofMartian agro what if Montevergine in Naples and in the next seven days. The second appointment, undoubtedly the best known in the world, is September 19, the liturgical feast of San Gennaro and the martyrdom. Again the blood melts in the next seven days. However, the miracle rarely occurs on December 16. Liquefaction also occurs on other dates and especially on visits to illustrious religious figures, even non-Catholics. On March 21, 2015 it melted into the hands of a very excited and somewhat surprised French Pope in the cathedral of Naples. This was not the case with Benedict XVI on a visit to the capital of Campania on October 21, 2007, neither with Saint John Paul II for three days in Naples in November 1990. Before Bergoglio, San Gennaro’s blood had melted just from the Blessed Pius IX in exile in Gaeta after the revolutionary uprisings of 1848 and the proclamation of the Roman Republic.
Do not liquefy the blood and its connection with dire events come war, epidemic, especially cholera, Vesuvius eruptions and earthquakes like that of 1980, it has always been linked to the miracles of May and September. Never to December, an event long snubbed even by the Cardinal Archbishops of Naples and relegated to a much smaller celebration in the Treasury Chapel of San Gennaro and not in the majestic landscape of Duomo Napolitano, as happens in September, or in the basilica of santa chiara at the end of a long and characteristic procession, as happens instead in May.
The first miracle dates back to August 17, 1389. In 1988, the then Archbishop of Naples, the Cardinal Michele Giordano, wanted to see clearly and asked the scientist from Turin who had studied the Shroud for a long time, Pier Luigi Baima Bollome, to examine the blood of San Gennaro. The scientist made one spectroscopy with an instrument equipped with a chamber in the reliquary of the blood of the Neapolitan patron in the fluid state of which the presence of hemoglobin and its degradation products. “This result – affirmed Baima Bollone – does not prove with absolute certainty the presence of blood, but it reasonably leads to rule out that it is a question of a different nature. All these findings converge to the conclusion that the history of San Gennaro is a precise historical reality ”.
The scientist also highlighted that “it must be taken into account that, with an average of 17 liquefactions per year, from 1389 to today there have been about 10,000 in places, under environmental conditions and in very different cultural climates ”. Baima Bollone specified that there does not seem to be a constant fluidization point of the contents of the ampoule since the melting occurs in an environment in which the temperature varies from 30 degrees in hot months to 5-6 degrees in winter. There is not even a relationship between temperature, the rate of change of state, which is very different from one liquefaction to another, and the degree of fluidization that results without a rule. In fact, in some cases the molten liquid flows like water, while in others it is pasty, viscous and almost rubbery. Sometimes it contains a so-called “balloon”, a portion of substance that is not completely liquefied. The black color also varies, turning dark red, sometimes bright red, and other times yellowish red. The volume also changes and appears to double, often with foaming. Finally, the weight changes with an excursion of up to thirty grams, in some cases even with an inverse relationship with respect to the volume variations. “All this – explained Baima Bollome – escapes any possible scientific explanation.”
For a long time those, even among scientists, who have alleged the falsity of the miracle of San Gennaro have explained this event by claiming that the liquefaction is caused by repeated oscillations of the box containing blood. The lack of dissolution, in this case as in previous years, shows that this thesis is absolutely false. The oscillation of the box, in fact, does not trigger the liquefaction of the blood. In recent years, both in May and September, when the safe containing the reliquary with the relic was opened, the blood was already completely dissolved without having been subjected to any movement.
[ad_2]
