BLOOD AMPOULE. — From the beginning of the 17th century, this expression and others like it have been used to denote those little glass phials or vessels, sometimes also of terracotta, tinged with a reddish colour, found in ancient tombs or more often embedded in the plaster used to seal loculi in the catacombs. For the excavators of holy bodies and also for many learned men of the 17th–19th centuries, they were considered the most authentic sign for distinguishing whether a tomb belonged to a martyr or to an ordinary faithful.
However, phials and vessels — a point now agreed upon by archaeologists — embedded in the walls or in the plaster of loculi could have had many other meanings, and in particular served as ornaments or to contain perfumes or as a mark of recognition when the tomb was without an inscription. Likewise, the reddish colour could generally have been produced by the oxidation of the material of the vessel itself or of its contents — perfumes, oily substances, etc. It is certain that in antiquity the faithful sometimes boldly collected the blood of martyrs to keep it with them or to place it with the remains of the victims, but there is no evidence that they used to distinguish the tomb of a martyr from that of a faithful by placing externally a phial or vessel containing their blood. Nor is there any record that the ancient investigators of the tombs of martyrs in the Roman cemeteries, from Damasus to the popes of the 9th century, ever recognised the sepulchre of a martyr by means of such a distinctive sign. This sign was devised, albeit in good faith, by the seekers of holy bodies at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries, who believed — and helped to spread the belief — that the underground cemeteries of Rome were inexhaustible mines of martyrs’ relics and therefore, even on slender evidence, came to believe and affirm that those vessels and phials, tinged with a reddish colour, clearly showed traces of human blood and hence of martyrs. The assertion was accepted, without too much scrutiny, by a good number of scholars of the time, who in their dissertations — not all commendable for learning — went so far as to establish the principle that the “cup of blood” should be considered the most authentic mark for recognising the tomb of a martyr.
This principle was soon accepted in practice and then officially sanctioned by the Sacred Congregation of Indulgences and Relics on 10 April 1668, which decreed that “a palm and a blood-tinged vessel should be held as the most certain signs [of martyrdom]” (cf. Decreta authentica S. R. Congregationis, II, Rome 1908, no. 3120).
The Protestants, of course, were from the outset the most determined opponents of the so-called blood ampoules; in the Catholic camp doubts about their contents and their probative value began to appear in the 17th century and continued to grow in the following centuries, especially after repeated observations that such ampoules were often found in tombs dating from the late 4th century, adorned with inscriptions that not only made no allusion to martyrdom but seemed to exclude II. The most authoritative Catholic authors who expressed themselves on this matter are Papebroch, Tillemont, Mabillon, Muratori and Marini.
In 1793 the abbot of S. Paolo, Giuseppe Giustino di Costanzo, put forward a new hypothesis, later taken up by Le Blant and partly also by De Rossi, according to which the ampoules would have contained not the blood of the Christian buried in the loculus but that of some martyr placed there as a guardian of the tomb of a faithful.
Following the translation from Rome to Amiens of the presumed martyr Aurelia Teodosia (1853), the Bollandist Fr Victor de Buck, at the suggestion of his superiors, published a study on the ampoules (De phialis rubricatis, quibus martyrum romanorum sepulcra dignosci dicuntur observationes V[ictoris] D[e] B[uck], Brussels 1855), printed in very few copies and not placed on sale. In it the author demonstrated that normally the ampoule could not in itself be a sign of martyrdom and, while admitting that it might contain true human blood — the value recognised by the Sacred Congregation in 1668 — he advanced the unlikely hypothesis that such ampoules generally contained remains of Eucharistic blood or, in any case, remains of the offering. The first effect of this learned study was to suspend, through the intervention of De Rossi who had obtained a copy, the extraction of holy bodies; the second was to provoke a new examination of the question by the Sacred Congregation of Rites. The studies collected in the report published by the Sacred Congregation were all substantially opposed to the practice; nevertheless, as it seems, through the personal action of Msgr Bartolini, secretary of the Congregation, it was replied on 27 November 1863 that there was “no reason to depart” from the decree of 1668 (Decreta authentica, II, Rome 1908, no. 3120).
Characteristic is the opinion of De Rossi, who, while in his writings always deliberately refrained from entering into the heart of the question and only expressed himself more freely in private conversations, here sets out fully the thesis that such ampoules cannot be a sure indication of a martyr’s tomb, especially since it cannot even be said that they generally contained human blood. It was also through his intervention that, despite the above-mentioned reply of the Sacred Congregation of Rites, the ecclesiastical authorities of Rome continued thereafter to forbid the extraction of holy bodies from the catacombs (cf. Acta Sanctae Sedis, 14 [1881], p. 39); indeed Pius X ordered that one of these bodies, extracted in the 18th century with the usual ampoule, be returned there.
To decide the question recourse has also been had, on various occasions over the last century, to chemical analysis, with results now positive, now negative; see most recently G. De Sanctis, in Rivista di Archeologia Cristiana, 8 (1931), pp. 7–13. In any case, even if the presence of blood elements and not merely of organic matter in an ampoule were proved, this would not constitute proof of the martyrdom of the person buried there, unless other positive elements concurred. Such blood, as Fr Costanzo believed, could at most be considered a relic of an unknown martyr placed there to protect the remains of a simple deceased.
Annales de sang, in DACL, I, cols. 1747–78, with extensive bibliography, and G. Ferretto, Note Storico bibliografiche di Archeologia cristiana, Vatican City 1942, pp. 248–68. A. Pietro Frutaz