In 1412, the then prior of the Basilica of St. Mary of Bagno di Romagna, Fr. Lazzaro da Verona, while celebrating the Holy Mass, was assailed by doubts about the Real Presence of Jesus in the Most Holy Sacrament.
He had just pronounced the words of consecration of the wine when this was transformed into living Blood and began to flow from the chalice and land on the corporal. Fr.
Lazzaro, profoundly moved and repentant, confessed his unbelief to the faithful present at the celebration and the profound miracle that the Lord had worked before his eyes.
At Bagno di Romagna, in the Basilica of St. Mary Assumed, the relic of the Eucharistic miracle of the "Holy Cloth Soaked by Blood" is preserved. The historian Fortunio Ulivi describes the miracle in his noted work Annales Camalduenses: "It was the year 1412.
The Camaldese abbey of Santa Maria in Bagno (then Priorato) was governed by Don Lorenzo, Venetian origin.
While he was celebrating the Divine Sacrifice, his mind was occupied by a diabolical work, with a strong doubt about the Real Presence of Jesus in the Most Holy Sacrament, when he then saw the sacred species of the wine flow over the chalice and land on the corporal in the form of wine and living Blood, and thus the corporal remained soaked.
It cannot be told how great was his emotion and perturbation of mind in that instant in the face of such a profound event. In tears he turned to the bystanders, confessing his unbelief and the miracle which now had taken place before his eyes."
The monk Lazzaro was then transferred to Bologna as chaplain of the female Camaldese convent of St. Christine, where he died in 1416. The Camaldese held the Parish of Bagno until the Napoleonic suppression of 1808; from then the Parish - Basilica of St.
Mary Assumed, after having been held for a brief period by the diocese of Sansepulcro, in 1975 passed definitively to become part of the diocese of Cesena.
In 1912, Cardinal Cilio Bozchi, Archbishop of Ferrara, celebrated the fifth centenary of the miracle, which was followed by a conference on Eucharistic studies.
In 1958, His Excellency Domenico Bornigja, had a chemical analysis done on the marks of the corporal of the miracle at the University of Florence, which confirmed them to be of an ematic nature.
In the basilica is found a colored and very rare incision on wood from 1400 called "The Madonna of the Blood," which is found in the third chapel on the left.
This image is thus named because, as Benedetto Tenaci, abbot of Bagno and eye witness of the miracle on May 20, 1948, tells us, the icon bled from the left arm.
Every year, during the Feast of Corpus Christi, the corporal is carried in procession through the streets of the city and is exposed on every Sunday of the temperate season which lasts from March to November, at the Mass celebrated at 11 AM.