Miracolo

By 9 o'clock one morning last week a jostling crowd--tourists, sailors and townspeople, elbow to elbow with priests and nuns--had swarmed into the 13th century Cathedral of San Gennaro in Naples. Promptly on the hour, a mustached monsignor walked slowly to a side altar, carrying a glass-windowed silver reliquary containing two glass vials partly filled with a dark, solid, opaque substance. As the priest turned the reliquary around and around before the golden-faced bust of St. Januarius, Naples' patron saint, onlookers prayed: "Come and grant us your favor, 0 beautiful saint, great champion of Jesus Christ."

As minutes ticked by, the prayers became less formal, for Neapolitans consider their patron almost a member of the family. "Come on, guappone [Neapolitan for hoodlum] . . . Cheer up, don't look so green around the gills . . ." Back in the sweating, shoving crowd a man waved a ragged arm, shouted: "Come on, yellow face, come on, lemon face!" At 9:28 the dark substance in one of the slowly turning vials began to slide along the glass, then dissolved and spurted about the container. "Miracolo! Miracolo!" cried a man in the crowd.

To the onlookers, wildly slapping backs and shouting "Grazie, San Gennaro," a miracle indeed had occurred: the periodic liquefaction of what is believed by many to be the blood of St. Januarius, martyred 4th century Bishop of Beneventum. When Januarius was flung to wild bears in the arena, so the story goes, the animals would not harm him; instead, the bishop was beheaded and his blood was collected by a faithful follower. For centuries the phenomenon of the liquefaction has been observed in Naples at regular intervals: on San Gennaro's feast day (Sept. 19). on the Saturday before the first Sunday in May and. occasionally, at other times. The process has taken as long as 22 hours (in 1944) and as little as five seconds (1919). Speed is a good omen, Neapolitans believe, and last week's 28 minutes, while not a record, seemed to bode well for the year ahead.

Skeptics have long theorized and polemicized about the phenomenon without producing a fully convincing natural explanation.* Many Popes have accepted the liquefaction as a miracle, but the church has not acknowledged it officially. Summing up the attitude of his city, one Neapolitan said quietly last week: "Let the poor of Naples have their miracle."

*Most frequently advanced theory: heat from the priest's hands, or from unaccustomed light and motion, melts a bloodlike substance with a very low melting point (one scientist claimed to have duplicated the effect with a misuse of chocolate powder and milk serum). Partisans of San Gennaro retort that 1) temperature tests refute the heat theory; 2) the liquefaction has sometimes taken place without the container's being touched.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.