By Andrew Dalton
In 1347, a woman (let’s call her Leticia) walked into St. Stephen’s Church to commit a horrible sin, and she knew it.
Despite her attempts to win back her faithless husband, he kept falling further away. Desperate and dying inside, she finally consulted a witch.
Is life nowadays so different? How many women try to get attention by manipulating nature to obtain the perfect look? How many disillusioned men seek escapisms from their ordinary lives, groping for joy in illicit pleasure?
It’s not that we want to do evil. We’re just hungry.
Weighed down by so much brokenness, true peace, healing and satisfaction seem unattainable. We’re desperately hungry, and the enemy of our souls knows it.
So once the witch had listened to Leticia’s burdens, she immediately promised a solution: “Go to church and take one of those wafers from the priest. Bring it to me, and I can help you.”
We Catholics struggle to give credence to our own teachings, while the enemy has no trouble believing that Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist. In his deep faith, Satan takes advantage of Christ’s vulnerability in the Blessed Sacrament in order to offend him.
Leticia nervously prepared to receive Holy Communion.
“The Body of Christ.”
She received the Eucharist in her mouth, but then surreptitiously spit Christ out into her handkerchief. She made for the door discretely but didn’t go unnoticed very long.
“Ma’am, ma’am! Are you okay? You’re bleeding!”
Seeing the blood pool in her handkerchief, Leticia let out a wild cry and raced for the door and through the streets all the way home. Slamming her door shut, she bolted for the wooden chest and locked her Prisoner inside. Collapsing in a corner, she wept and wept.
Long hours would pass before her husband came home, and so there she sat, wallowing in her misery.
What a liar Satan is! What false promises he makes! Leticia had sought peace; sin had entangled her in a first-class fiasco. To accompany her solitude, fear and distress, now she had the burden of her own guilt besides.
At her husband’s home-coming, Leticia did what most of us would do in such a situation. Nothing.
She kept silence. As did the God who had been thrown away, buried in a basket.
How great is our God! What powerful proofs he gives us that he is a friend and a lover, not a tyrant or a judge. He comes to us softly in our brokenness, in our darkest night.
Around midnight, a mysterious light emanating from the wooden chest woke Leticia and her husband. In their ordinary home, they beheld the Lord’s glory and together fell to their knees.
“Lord, have mercy! Christ, have mercy!” Leticia cried.
“What is it? What has happened? Tell me,” her husband begged patiently.
Leticia unveiled the host and her fears to her husband. She explained what drove her to desecrate the Eucharist. With penitent hearts, they remained in the Lord’s presence that night. The next morning, they told the parish priest everything, and news of the miracle spread.
To this day, you can that miraculous host if you go to Portugal, to the little town of Santarem, to the Church of St. Stephen.
We may be hungry, but God is hungrier! He yearns to be our food. He earnestly desires to satisfy our needs. He longs to fill our hearts with joy. He wants to forge a worldwide family in the tightest bonds of unity, and if we let him be the source of our life and communion, he will.
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