"We have gathered here," Corrado Cardinal Ursi told the crowd in Naples' cathedral, "not to watch a show, but to witness a miracle." This year, on the late-September feast of San Gennaro (St. Januarius), the miracle came off so smoothly that no one even had to shout the traditional insults of "big stinker" or "green face" at the saint to make his blood boil. It took only 40 minutes of prayer by the cardinal and the local populace for the dark crystalline substance—venerated as the 4th century martyr's blood—to liquefy in its hermetically sealed glass vial, as it has several times...
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