The Host of Betania

Betania is already a Marian shrine, approved locally in 1987. Four years later, on the night of 8 December 1991, the chaplain’s Host is said to have bled. The farm and the Host are two files. This page is the Host.

Father Luis Otty Ossa Aristizábal was celebrating the midnight Mass of the Immaculate Conception in the chapel of Finca Betania. He later said he had divided a large Host, consumed one part, and returned the rest to the paten. One fragment showed a red spot, and a red substance came from it as blood comes from a wound. He stopped. The fragment was kept.

Bishop Pío Bello Ricardo of Los Teques, who had already judged the apparitions, ordered the Host studied. The Augustinian Recollect Sisters, who now keep it, quote him in February 1992: there were reasons enough to admit the bleeding of the Host at Finca Betania as a miraculous fact. That sentence is their quotation of their bishop. This archive has not been shown a separately published decree that defines the origin as supernatural in the way a Lourdes cure is defined. The Acutis exhibition treats the case as recognised by that bishop. Both sentences can stand: a local bishop spoke, and Rome has not made Betania a second Lanciano.

Reports of the studies say the substance was human blood, and that it was not the priest’s. Type AB is often named, and then joined in popular telling to the Shroud and to Lanciano. A blood group is not a signature of God. It is common. It also does not by itself prove a fraud. The useful question is custody: who held the fragment from the paten to the slide. The sisters at Los Teques are the custodians the Venezuelan bishops have named. A photograph of the shrine is not a photograph of the Host, and this page does not borrow another miracle’s Host to fill the frame.

On 8 December 1991 a priest at Betania reported a bleeding Host; his bishop is said to have accepted the bleeding; the Faith does not rest on that night, and the apparition of 1987 is a different judgement.