Holy Eucharistic Mystery of Saint John of the Abbesses
Count Vifredo, in the year 887, founded a monastery in the Catalan Pyrenees, around which the population that today is called “San Juan de las Abadesas” soon gathered, in the province of Gerona and the diocese of Vic, on the shores of of the river Ter, in Spain.
In 1251, a wooden sculptural group was built for the monastery church, representing the descent from the Cross: it was made up of the images of Jesus and his Mother, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, with Saint John, the beloved disciple, and the two thieves. . The sculptures, which survived the 1936 war, are endowed with great feeling and emotion. The head, above all, of Jesus, is of an imposing beauty. And in her forehead the artist ordered a cavity of about six centimeters in diameter to be opened in order to place the Holy Eucharist inside. And so it was done, depositing a consecrated Host divided into three fractions.
The fact is that the memory of that Host hidden in the head of the Crucifix had been erased by the fifteenth century.
But in 1426, when renewing the painting of the images and observing that the Crucifix had a silver plate on its forehead, they found inside a small white linen cloth, and, wrapped in it, the Host consecrated in 1251 completely incorrupt. which since then is venerated right there until today with the name of “Santísimo Misterio de San Juan de las Abadesses”.
(Eucharistic Wonders, PM Traval, SJ).
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