March 15, 1345:  A Fire Cannot Burn Or Damage A Dutch Eucharistic Host In Amsterdam

          Some Christian miracles occur on the big stage, and some on the small.  But some of those that are on the 'small' stage become very widely known and impactful in their area of occurrence.

     Today, the city of Amsterdam in the Netherlands (the world's tallest people living in the world's lowest-elevation non-island nation, some say!) is not so famous for Christian piety.  But the 'Dutch' are a truly marvelous people that have mighty accomplishments and a stubbornly feisty reputation for telling it how it is.  They are unfortunately more widely mentioned for the laxness of their drug laws I think.  But they have been a quite Christian nation at times, and America's Pilgrims fled to the Netherlands (Holland) to escape persecution from the English in England before finally deciding to emigrate to dangerous North America to enjoy even greater religious freedom for their faith.   So the Netherlands have been a Christian refuge at times, and God bless them for it. 

     Before the Reformation the Dutch were Catholic like nearly all of Christian Europe.  It was during these days that a famous miracle occurred.  A sick man named Ysbrand Dommer in the city of Amsterdam in 1345 realized that he might die and told his family that he wanted to take communion (to eat a purposefully blessed piece of bread that Christians call the 'body of Christ' once it has been blessed) because his health situation seemed pretty grim and his future perhaps brief. 

     A Priest came and offered the sick man a communion host, as the piece of bread is called, which he swallowed.  But the family warned the Priest that the man vomited up everything.  The Priest instructed them that if the host was vomited up there was guidance for that situation about how to treat 'the body of Christ' respectfully in such an instance...they were to place the holy communion wafer into the fire in the fire place.

     The man, Ysbrand, could not keep the food down as the family feared, and he soon vomited it back up so they set it into the flames of the family fireplace. 

     The next day a woman cleaning out the ashes of the fireplace found the wafer of bread setting on the fireplace grating in the ashes, unharmed, clean, and emitting light.  Startled, she took a clean cloth, grabbed the wafer, and placed it on the cloth in a small locked box and took it home to show her husband.  Upon hearing her story he was quite curious and asked to examine it.  She gave him the box and he took the lid off and attempted to grab the wafer off of the cloth to examine it more closely, but it 'resisted' his attempts to handle it, clinging tightly to the cloth by some strange power.  They understood this to mean that it was holy and not to be handled by common hands.

     A Priest was summoned, and the bread allowed itself to be lifted out of the box by the hands of the Priest, so he placed it in a special carrier box called a 'pyx' which is made for the exact job of carrying a blessed wafer to the sick for instance, and such assignments as that...a holy way to transport the holy communion wafer which is held to be the body of our Lord.   He transported it to a nearby church. 

An example of a pyx.

     It ended up being found back in the locked box which the cleaning lady had originally placed it in.  It 'wanted to stay there' they decided. 

     Because a fair number of people had seen these miraculous things, the house in which the sick man had lived became a place of pilgrimage and by 15 years later had become somewhat widely famous and visited by the sick hoping for cures.  One successful pilgrim was Archduke Maximilian who later became the Holy Roman Emperor.  His malady was cured.  In gratitude he built a beautiful 'holy room' to contain the venerated bread.  Eventually the holy room holding the bread was inside of a church that was built there.   It was famous throughout Amsterdam and even widely in all of Holland and somewhat beyond.  A place you could go for a possible miracle! 

     In the late 1500's, during the unfortunately violent conflicts between Protestants and Catholics,  the Protestants gained the upper hand over the Catholics in Holland and that church was torn down.  This holy relic was lost.  But even today there is a local ceremony every year, called the Stille Omgang (silent procession), commemorating this 1345 A.D. Amsterdam miracle of the Eucharist at a church in Amsterdam nearest to where the church with the 'holy room' holding this Eucharist once stood.  And there is a pillar outside of the original church's location on the sidewalk.

     The commemorative column for this miracle, on an Amsterdam sidewalk.

     It is an interesting Dutch miracle and strengthened many in their faith back then and even today.  God gives signs and proofs to His disciples here and there, in this time and the other as He sees fit.

     The Catholic Church has apparently substantiated over 100 Eucharistic miracles over the centuries, in a wide variety of locations.

     Here is a link to a site where you can read about it in more detail.  http://www.therealpresence.org/eucharst/mir/holland.html