Heart tissue or bacteria? A 'miracle' in Poland!

Eucharistic miracles are claimed far and wide in the Catholic church

Oh boy, here we go again. It seems our friend Serratia Marcesens has reared it's mouldy head again, this time in Sokolka, north east Poland. The religiously faithful flock would have us believe that when a priest clumsily dropped a host of holy communion onto the ground, afterward placing it in a special vessel with some water, that 24 hours later it turned into a piece of human heart tissue. Hmmm, interesting theory, you may think.

Well, it was a professor at Bialystok medical university who first claimed that the blessed wafer had made a genuine conversion. This was backed up by one of her colleagues. So even the hard-hearted non-believers started to wonder what the hell was going on. But for those of you who know church history, or bacteria, this was just another case of a common annoyance waiting to unfurl. Thankfully, a Polish biologist, Dr. Pawel Grzesiowski has come to the rescue of making this seemingly unusual event one of common sense.

“This bacteria does not require much – it needs moisture and a temperature not higher than 30 decrees Celsius,” claimed the director of the Contagious Diseases Unit at the National Medicines Institute.

Professor Lech Chyczewski, head of the blood unit at the Bialystok hospital, added that the professor (Maria Sobaniec-Lotowaska of the Bialystok Medical University) who made the human heart tissue claim “saw what she wanted to see. She is very religious....In order to rule out any doubts, it would have been necessary to carry out molecular and genetic testing.”



Well, that does it for me. The fungus is out of the bag and there ain't no looking back now. Whether the populous believe it or not is another thing.

Go into in your bathrooms or basements and have an honest look around for a pink, slimy substance. This is where Serratia Marcesens inhabits, feeding off sugary and starchy substances. It's a common problem and I bet my savings if the priest did the same thing with a whole bucket of hosts he'd have enough rot to make up a whole human heart.

The bacteria has been mistaken for a miracle numerous times before. The feast day Corpus Christi is based on a miracle declared by Pope Urban IV when ‘blood’ appeared on the Eurcharist in 1264.