San Genero’s blood has not liquefied and Naples fears a disaster: Maradona effect? | the Chronicle

The traditional ritual that takes place every year in the Cathedral of Naples, in which the priest shakes a reliquary containing the solid blood of the Neapolitan patron San Gennaro and because of the movement that it is liquefied, this time it did not happen and caused much concern among the faithful of this saint in the city of southern Italy.

The cult of San Gennaro began on December 16, 1631, when lava from the volcan vesuvius threatened to destroy the Neapolitan city. For this reason, distraught city dwellers confided in San Gennaro carrying in procession in the streets the bust of the saint which contained his skull and the relic of his blood. So the lava miraculously stopped on the outskirts of the city and was saved Naples.

For this religious historical event, every December 16, the Neapolitan Church remembers the patronage of San Gennaro in the capital of the Campania region, where the city where he also lived is located Diego Maradona.

On March 21, 2015, dad Francisco could dissolve the blood of San Gennaro, before a Bergoglio very excited and somewhat surprised at the naples cathedral. However, this did not happen with the visit of Benedict XVI in the capital of Campania on October 21, 2007, nor with San Juan Pablo II for three days at Naples in November 1990. Before Bergoglio, the blood of San Gennaro had melted just for the Blessed Pius IX in exile in Gaeta after the revolutionary uprisings of 1848 and the proclamation of the Roman Republic, according to Il Fatto Quotidiano.

According to the faithful, no blood liquefaction has a strong link with disastrous events such as wars, epidemics, in particular cholera, eruptions of Vesuvius and earthquakes like that of 1980 or, why not, with the death of the first idol of Naples before his San Gennaro, Diego Maradona, according to the comparison made by Gattuso, the coach of the team in which the Ten played: “Maradona was more popular than San Gennaro”.

The scientist who examined the Shroud of Turin, Luigi Baima Bollome Pier, also analyzed the blood of San Gennaro through a spectroscopy with an instrument equipped with a camera above the blood box, the Neapolitan client witnessed hemoglobin.

“This result does not prove with absolute certainty the presence of blood, but it leads reasonably to exclude that it is a question of a different nature. All of these findings converge on the conclusion that the history of San Gennaro is a precise historical reality “, he said.

On the other hand, in 1991, Franco Ramaccini, Sergio Della Sala and Luigi Garlaschelli, three researchers from University of Pavia, carried out an experiment published in the prestigious Nature magazine. At the base of his hypothesis was the concept in chemistry of “thixotropy”, that is to say, “the property of certain fluids, such as gelatin or honey, which tend to liquefy when stirred and solidify when standing”.

However, Baima ballome believes that liquefaction has nothing to do with the stirring process, neither with the ambient temperature, nor with where this phenomenon occurs, but rather with what is happening “Escapes any possible scientific explanation”.