Saint Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin was an indigenous Mexican who reported an apparition of the Virgin Mary as Our Lady of Guadalupe in 1531. He had a significant impact on the spread of the Catholic faith within Mexico. According to Juan Diego, he returned home that night to his uncle Juan Bernardino’s house, and discovered him seriously ill. The next morning December 12, Juan Diego decided not to meet with the Lady, but to find a priest who could administer the last rites to his dying uncle. When he tried to skirt around Tepeyac hill, the Lady intercepted him, assured him his uncle would not die, and asked him to climb the hill and gather the flowers he found there. It was December, when normally nothing blooms in the cold. There he found roses from a Spanish region
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A Marian apparition is an event in which the Virgin Mary is believed to have supernaturally appeared to one or more persons regardless of their religious faith. They are often given names based on the town in which they were reported, or on the sobriquet which was given to Mary on the occasion of the apparition. They have been interpreted in psychological terms as pareidolia, and in religious terms as theophanies. Probably the most famous of these apparitions were the visions of St Bernadette at Lourdes (related item 6 on this list), and three children in Fatima (related item 1 on this list). In both cases, the people involved said that the Virgin Mary gave them predictions of future events and preached prayer and penance. The famous case of Our Lady of Zeitoun took place in Zeitoun, Cairo
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Incorruptibility is the name given to the situation in which a dead person does not decay after death. The orthodox church consider it essential in considering a person for canonization as a saint, and the Roman Catholic Church consider it as sign of sainthood but not a necessity. Additionally, the Catholic Church believes that a body is not deemed incorruptible if it has undergone an embalming process or other means of preserving the dead, or if it has become stiff, as do all normal corpses, even when the best preservation techniques are used. Incorruptible saints remain completely flexible, as if they were only sleeping. Incorruptible bodies are often said to have the Odour of Sanctity, exuding a sweet aroma.
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The Miracle of the Sun is an alleged miraculous event witnessed by as many as 100,000 people on 13 October 1917 in the Cova da Iria fields near Fátima, Portugal. Those in attendance had assembled to observe what the Portuguese secular newspapers had been ridiculing for months as the absurd claim of three shepherd children that a miracle was going to occur at high-noon in the Cova da Iria on October 13, 1917.
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In the city of Lanciano, Italy, around A.D. 700, a Basilian monk and priest was assigned to celebrate the Eucharistic sacrifice in the Latin Rite in the small Church of St.Legontian. Usually celebrating in the Greek Rite and using leavened bread and having been taught that unleavened bread was invalid matter for the Holy Sacrifice he was disturbed to be constrained to use unleavened bread and had trouble believing that the miracle of transubtantiation would take place with unleavened bread. During the Mass, when he said the words of consecration, he saw the bread change into live flesh and the wine change into live blood, which coagulated into five globules, irregular and differing in shape and size.
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