In 1597 a member of a band of Morisco bandits who had been sacking churches around Alcalá de Henares came to confession at the Jesuit church of the Colegio Máximo and handed the confessor, Father Juárez, twenty-four consecrated hosts that he had stolen. The Jesuits did not consume them: priests had lately been poisoned in Murcia and Segovia, and no one could be sure what the hosts had been exposed to. They sealed them instead in a silver box and left them to decay naturally, as bread does.
Eleven years later, in 1608, the box was opened and the hosts were found perfectly intact. The provincial, Father Luis de la Palma, then ordered a test: the consecrated hosts were placed in a damp wine cellar alongside unconsecrated ones. The ordinary hosts rotted; the consecrated ones did not. After examination by the royal physician García Carrera and by theologians, the ecclesiastical authorities declared the miracle in 1619, and in 1620 King Philip III and the royal family came to Alcalá for a solemn procession. A chapel of the Santas Formas was built beside the Jesuit church, its vault painted by Juan Vicente Ribera in 1699; a manuscript account by Cristóbal de Castro, written around 1600, survives in the Jesuit archive.
After the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 the hosts passed to the Magistral church, today the cathedral of the Holy Child Martyrs Justus and Pastor. On 21 July 1936, at the outbreak of the Civil War, the Magistral was set on fire; the priests hid the Santas Formas before they were killed, and despite repeated searches of the church and its crypt the hosts have never been found. What remains is the chapel, the painted vault, the documents, and a Eucharistic memory that Alcalá keeps as its own.
A note on the record: this catalogue once carried a 'Madrid 1597' entry describing a Christ Child seen in the monstrance during a Forty Hours' Devotion under Philip II. No source documents such an event — the plague of those years reached Madrid only in 1599, after Philip II's death — and the entry has been replaced by the documented miracle of Alcalá, twenty miles up the road, which the Vatican exhibition lists under 1597.