A miracle has occurred!

Last year Rio’s iconic Christ statue lost its  right thumb tip to a lightning strike.  Father Joseph of the Archdiocese of Rio, the church responsible for managing the statue, said then that repairs could  be made using a stock of the same stone originally used to build the statue.  What Father Jo could not have anticipated was that the original stone would be found and declared a relic!

He did not know that a meteorite or pebble had broken a window that night and landed on a table alongside Archbishop Poli, Pope Francis successor as head of the Church in Argentina.  The Archbishop kept the pebble as “something from God.”

Pope Francis’s replacement in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was made  Cardinal Mario Aurelio Poli.  The Pope’s closest friend among priests in Argentina, thanked his friend and asked the Pope what he thought of the lightning and mentioned the pebble.  They decided, just for fun, to have the pebble checked by a geologist at  Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina “Santa María de los Buenos Aires.”  The answer was amazing .. the pebble was Jesus thumb, or at least made of the same rock as the statue and showing the effects of a lightning strike!  Even more amazing the pebble had red material on it that appeared to be blood.

Then more surprises came!  Small miracles, according to Cardinal Poli, kept occurring … a long missing missive reappeared, a nun with cancer was spontaneously cured, a poor gardner prayed to the pebble and won the lottery!  Cardinal Poli had the University analyze the red material on pebble for DNA … they identified it as “rojos de la sangre.”  Even more surprising, a sequence analysis showed the blood to be Jewish and to have the markers for a Jewish priest, the so called “Cohen” gene.  While the scientists said they could not prove that this was the blood of Jesus, Professor Mario Benviste said “¡Es un milagro que la sangre podría sobrevivir el relámpago y podríamos recuperar el ADN!!.” (It is a miracle that blood survived lighting so we could recover DNA!!) he thought ”

The pontifical court has declared the pebble a relic!