I did not steal those relics

Just in case you are wondering, I have not recently been to Dublin, and no, I do not have the preserved heart of St Laurence O'Toole. Nor do I have the jawbone of St Brigid. Well, perhaps St Brigid's canines, but that is because someone's birthday is coming up this month.

At dinner the other night my sister read aloud this piece about a remarkable intersection of entrepreneurial creativity and gullibility (or piety?). Recognizing that there are thousands of people in this country who genuinely believe that they will be Raptured up to heaven this Saturday, May 21, who also have pets who will not be getting raptures, an inventive atheist saw an opportunity. He set up a service to adopt the pets-left-behind of the newly raptured. For payment in advance.

We all laughed excessively, and not a little because we knew that we would never do something so silly as agree to be raptured without our pets. Seriously, how gullible can you be?
I think I have an idea.
Didn’t I just travel Baltimore to look at relics & reliquaries, and don’t Catholics all over Europe risk life, limb and honor to go see Mary Magdalene’s tooth, and wash their scrofulous faces in St Winifred’s Holy Well, and pray to St Pantaleon’s foot to heal their bunions? Throughout the Middle Ages, and beyond, devout Christians, often extremely poor and desperate Christians who arguably had better things to do with their time, chose to risk their lives, their health, and their sanity in order to arrive at to some cathedral advertising the healing powers of their resident relics. And they paid real money to see or touch those relics.
They prayed to saints that never existed.
Today’s Lives of the Saints features St Venantius, whose cult is characterized as “fictitious history”. Which does not mean that the text refrains from describing his gruesome martyrdom (scourges, torches, asphyxiation, smashed teeth, thrown to lions, thrown from a cliff and decapitated.) Following the fictitious Venantius, we find St. Theodotus. His story,”with its reminiscences of a tale found in Herodotus, must be treated as a romance written by an author possessing rather more literary skill that we commonly find in such cases.” Which strikes me as a rather elegant way to say it is not true. This apocryphal tale tells us that Theodotus the innkeeper promised Fronto, the priest that if he, Fronto, built the church, he, Theodotus, would provide the relics. Later, after being appallingly tortured by the pagan powers, Theodotus was burned on a pyre. Fronto then plied the guards with liquor so that he could retrieve the body. He lay it across the back of his ass, set it free knowing it would go straight home. Fronto then built the church enshrining the innkeeper’s bones.

Of course, compared to the Rapture, all of the above is entirely plausible.

Travel is Broadening, Part 15

As if that (the Ursuline Chapel) wasn’t enough, from there we drove east along the coast of Beaupré to the Shrine of Ste Anne de Beaupré. CSB has never before visited a pilgrimage site, and I intended to remedy this lacuna in his experience. True, Ste-Anne-de-Beaupré basilica is huge, and there is a Cyclorama of Jerusalem, and the museum has many wax figure dioramas of Ste Anne’s life, and lots of gift stores selling holy medals, and not one single decent place to eat, but the truth is that all this was classic northern reticence when compared with the Latin and dramatic spectacle of pilgrims approaching the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe on their knees, from miles away.
Inside the vast basilica, in the Chapel of the Relic, I noted the reliquary in the shape of an arm, with a golden hand and a glass forearm encasing the sacred bone. I said to CSB that I wondered whose arm it was since there was no way it could be Ste Anne’s – she was Jesus’ grandmother for goodness sake so it seemed ridiculous to think her bones were saved.
Of course I was wrong.
And then in the gift shop, not only did I find a basilica snow globe, but at every cash register there were stacks of plastic bottles for 75¢ you could buy and then fill with holy water conveniently located at a spigot right inside the shop. CSB agreeably went to fill the bottle for me, and I made a small prayer of apology to his good Anglican and Episcopal forefathers who would have been horrified at such Papist and superstitious magical thinking.
Then we ate an inedible meal at the Café des Pelerins.
Roll over, ye puritan ancestors.

Translations

René Descartes, after Franz Hals.
I am reading Russell Shorto’s fascinating book , Descartes Bones: A Skeletal History of the Conflict Between Faith and Reason, in which the fate and travels and travails of the actual skull of Descartes become emblematic for the dialectic between Faith and Reason that informs much of western thought over the past 400 years. I am not giving the story away to say that Descartes – who died in 1640 and was originally buried in Sweden – did not have an a especially peaceful journey to his final (so far) resting place in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris (the skull that is, the body resides at Saint- Germain-des-Prés.).
It is of course interesting that the relics of the Father of Rationalism should have followed a path similar to that of so many early saints (as well as Abelard and Heloise who were moved and re-buried no less than 8 times, but neither of them were saints).
Saint Gudula, for instance. The high point of her life seems to have been a certain walk she took one evening with a lantern that went out and then miraculously re-lit itself when she prayed. Hence she is often portrayed with a lantern and a fiendish devil trying to blow it out.

By Bernard van Orley (1487-1541) or one of his followers. Saint Gudula is the one on the right, holding the lantern; the devil lurks behind her skirts.
Gudula was buried in 712 in Hamme, which is near Brussels. About a hundred years later, at Charlemagne’s behest - he was devoted to her - her body was moved to the Church of Saint Sauveur in Mozelle; sometime later the church’s name was changed to Saint Gudula. Next thing we know, around 978 the Normans (rough fellows) destroyed the church BUT the Duke of Lorraine managed to rescue Saint Gudula’s weary bones and translated them to the church of Saint Géry in Brussels. Not much later, in 1047, the relics were translated, again, to the church of Saint Michael and the name of the church was changed to Saint Gudule.
The church of Saint Michael and Gudula is still in Brussels. You can attend Mass there on a Sunday morning and there will be about 4 other people – of the elderly inclination – scattered about the vast nave.
I have no idea why or how Gudula’s skull got to Germany, but that’s where it is, in the church of Saint Hildegard in Elbingen.

Squirrrel stew and Maxellendis's bones

Daisy still has mange. But it must be improving, as in, the mites must be dying off because she is more herself. Her personality is returning to its alpha-ness. Daisy showed up with a dead squirrel dangling from her jaws this morning. Sometimes she gnaws on squirrels, sometimes she shares them with Bruno and sometimes she delivers them to me, as tribute.
And what do I do with a dead squirrel?
Little did I know. Until last week’s crossword puzzle when the clue was: Ingredient in Brunswick Stew. The answer? Squirrel. To make a batch of Brunswick Stew to feed a crowd, you will need 70 squirrels, cut up. You must also remove their furry tails, as these would cause gastric disturbances if ingested. You will also need lima beans and salt pork, two other ingredients I rarely cook with.

Given the average Dark Ages cuisine, Saint Maxellendis would presumably not have turned up her nose at squirrel stew. Au contraire.
Poor Maxellendis. There seems to be no end to the indignities she suffers. Back in the seventh century she strongly objected to her parents’ choice of a husband, one Harduin. She ran away and hid in a clothes chest. But, sadly, Harduin found her hiding place and killed her with his sword. At the moment of impact, he was struck blind. Maxellendis was duly buried in a nearby church “where she was the occasion of many marvels”. Meanwhile, Harduin repented his wickedness and when he fell to his knees before her coffin his sight was restored.
Since that time, Maxellendis’s relics – her skull and many bones – have been treasured and encased in reliquaries of gold and encrusted with gemstones, and duly displayed in the churches lucky enough to have such relics. Until about ten years ago when a gang of Romanian thieves broke into the Church of St. Martin in Le Cateau, Nord, France and stole a bejeweled monstrance in which Saint Maxellendis’s finger bone rested on a red silken pillow. It took two years for the crime to be solved, and it was in a Newark, NJ courtroom where the relic of Maxellendis was returned to its rightful owner. If there is such a thing.

A deplorable lack of restraint

In deference to lack of popular demand I restrained from writing about Saint Phocas the Gardener yesterday. But restraint has not prevailed.
And while my heart sinks as I contemplate the mendacious belligerence of the McCain/ Palin team and sinks further as I contemplate the US government bailing out (sans caveats or safeguards, God forfend!) corporate malfeasance, misgovernance and just plain greed, I can’t help but cling to the story of Saint Phocas the Gardener.

He lived just outside the gates of Sinope, in what is now northern Turkey, on the southern shores of the Black Sea. As Butler points out, Adam and Eve were the last gardeners to enjoy the fruits of the earth without labor. “Since their sin, the earth yields not its fruit but by the sweat of our brow. But still, no labor is more useful or necessary or more natural to man, and better adapted to maintain in him vigor of mind and health of body, than that of tillage; nor does any part of the universe rival the charms which a garden presents to our senses, by the fragrance of its flowers and the sweetness and variety of its fruits….” To which I might add: by the sweet honey and the meditative buzz of the honeybee.

Such was the happy life of Phocas, cultivating his garden, those many hundreds of years before Candide expressed it so well. But Phocas was denounced as a Christian and so one fine day two soldiers came to Sinope to execute him. Arriving too late to enter the town they stopped at the house by the gates, Phocas’s house. They told him their errand & asked where they might find this Phocas. Their host said he would find out and let them know in the morning.

That night, while the soldiers slept, Phocas went into his garden and dug his own grave, careful not to disrupt the roots of his many perfectly pruned fruit trees. In the morning he announced to the soldier that he was the very man they sought, showed them the ready grave, and declared that he was more than happy to be dispatched to a better world.
They were initially disconcerted by his composure, but soon recovered their deadly resolve, and chopped off his head. That is the story of Saint Phocas the Gardener, whose relics can be found in Antioch, Vienne, France and many other places. Don’t ask how they got there.

Just whose skull is it anyway?

Lest you think the veneration of relics is a thing of the past, allow me to disabuse you of that notion. Santa Barbara’s skull and femur just made a much-heralded appearance at St Augustine’s in Ossining. The bones did not come alone but were accompanied by no less than 18 prelates and potentates and ossuary guardians from Venice, where the skull and femur usually reside. Other body parts can be found in Cairo and Kiev.
Why St Barbara? On account of her pagan father being struck by lightning in retribution for the beheading of Barbara, she is the patron saint of firefighters and as anyone who has not been in a coma for the past seven years knows, on the anniversary of 9/11 we honor firefighters.
The story of Saint Barbara, as related in The Golden Legend, is yet another tale of a converted virgin defying her pagan father’s plans for her marriage. She was, of course, very beautiful and so her father, Dioscoros, kept her in a tower to prevent her from being seen. Then he went off on a journey and while he was away his workmen were constructing a bath-house according to his specifications. Barbara came down from her tower one day and had them add a third window to the bathhouse, to symbolize the Trinity (and hence proclaim her faith). When Dioscosos returned and discovered this architectural change, and the reason for it, he was furious and took Barbara to a judge to be condemned. Which she was. And her father volunteered to do the beheading himself. Which he did. Immediately after he was struck by lightning.

Depending upon which version you read, this martyrdom occurred in Rome, Antioch, Tuscany, Heliopolis, or Nicomedia. In the Middle Ages Barbara was especially popular as one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers called upon for succor in the time of the plague. Her patronage against fire and lightning led to more patronage, of gunners, canonnists, military architects and miners. There is even an honorary military society called the Order of Saint Barbara, based in Oklahoma.

Were it not for the relics it should not bother us that Saint Barbara probably never existed. According to Butler’s Lives of the Saints (as you must know by now, my source of all sources): “There is no evidence of any early local cultus which would rescue it from being classed in the category of pure romance.” And “it is quite certain that her legend is spurious.”

Which brings us to the question of that skull and femur: whose are they?