Relic thefts

The heart of St. Laurence O'Toole (Lorcán Ua Tuathail in Gaelic), preserved since the 12th c., was stolen from Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin over the weekend. The heart-shaped wooden box containing the relic (1st image, more photos here and here) was removed by prying open the iron-barred case bolted to the wall. "The vergers realized it was gone when they opened the cathedral at 9:30am on Saturday morning. It was definitely there the evening before. They also noticed that there were 2 peace candles lit on the Trinity Altar. It's all very strange. Somebody must have hid in the cathedral overnight on Friday and slipped out first thing on Saturday morning....Nobody has ever attempted to steal the heart in the past; it was just there and it never crossed my mind that it might be stolen. It has no monetary value but we have loads of silver. It's the last thing we thought would be stolen. St Laurence O'Toole is the patron saint of the capital. His heart was our link with the past. It's an artefact, a relic and has particular meaning to Christ Church," said Rev. Dermot Dunne, Dean of Christ Church (2nd image, video here). The thief apparently used strong shears to cut into the cage, but there is only speculation as to why. Added security will now be added, although the doors were already protected with alarms and security cameras. Police are studying the footage in an attempt to find the burglar, while Rev. Dunne is pleading for the relic's return: "I am appealing to whoever did this to hand it back; it's a desecration of a holy place. I'll take it back without any questions asked, we just want it back."

This is the 3rd such theft in Ireland in recent months. In October 2011, 3 relics of the true cross were taken from Holy Cross Abbey near Cashel in Co. Tipperary. A gang of 3 men snatched one of the pieces in its 12th c. monstrance (photo here) and forcibly opened a display cabinet to remove the other 2 in their cruciform container (3rd image). Devastated at the loss, parish priest Fr. Tom Breen was elated when the relics were recovered in January. And just 2 days before the parishioners of St. Brigid’s Church in Killester, north Dublin, were due to celebrate the feast day of their patroness last month, her reliquary was swiped by a thief operating alone at midday. The shrine (4th image), which had been bolted to the altar and was worth an estimated $13,000, usually housed part of the cheekbone of St. Brigid, who died early in the 6th Century, was not in the shrine at the time. “We had just had the reliquary cleaned, so luckily the relic wasn’t in it at the time. It was renovated and quite shiny and in fact that might have been what drew the person to it,” said parish priest Monsignor Alex Stenson.

St. Vitalis

I couldn't find an image of the right St. Vitalis. Turns out there are 6, most of them martyrs:

• Saint Vitalis of Milan (1st or 2nd c.)
• Saint Vitalis (3rd-4th c.)
• Saint Vitalis (4th c.)
• Saint Vitalis of Gaza (6th-7th c.)
• Saint Vitalis of Savigny (11th c.)
• Saint Vitalis of Assisi (14th c.)

St. Vitalis of Gaza (pictured above) ministered to prostitutes and was killed by a jealous man who misinterpreted his visit to a local brothel. St. Vitalis of Assisi (1295 –1370) was not martyred, but is honored as the patron saint of those suffering from diseases of the genitals. This St. Vitalis did not suffer the chopping block, but will soon face the auction block. His decapitated and skeletonized head will be sold to the highest bidder by Matthews Auction Rooms of Co. Meath, Ireland, next Sunday. "It is strange and it is macabre but it is very interesting object," said Mr Matthews. The relic has been in the possession of a family in Co. Louth. How it ended up in Ireland is unclear, although it may have been acquired in the 19th c. by an Anglo-Irish couple on a "grand tour" of Europe. The head is housed in an ornate Queen Anne case and is expected to fetch between €800 and €1,200.

St. Catherine of Siena

My friend Sue will be surprised to know what I found blogworthy about the book on the plague that she loaned me. While it is full of the history and horrors of the medieval pandemic, what I came away with is the fact that patron saint of Italy St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) went months without having a bowel movement!

As I found out, Catherine had learned the power of fasting from her older sister. Practicing it after Bonaventura died in childbirth, 16-year-old Catherine dissuaded her parents from their wish that she marry her brother-in-law. She took Dominican vows, but lived at home with her family, giving much of their food to the poor rather than eating it herself. Catherine's idol was Mary Magdalen, who is said to have fasted for 33 years. Over the years - during which she traveled, advocated papal reform, and corresponded with Pope Gregory XI - Catherine ate less and less. She took Holy Communion daily, finding no nourishment in earthly food. Her sisters and confessor found her extreme fasting unhealthy and ordered her to eat, but Catherine described her inability to eat as an illness which caused her to throw up what she swallowed and suffer severe stomach pains.

We look back on the female ascetics of the Middle Ages who starved themselves in the name of God as suffering from anorexia mirabilis, the Latin term for a miraculous lack of appetite. Contemporary Italian scholars reason in Catherine's case:
To yield to food was to yield to sin, to deceive God, to lose all the power that she had laboriously garnered, erasing the sense of identity gained from the victory over her opposition to family regulation. It is of little matter, then, if she did not feel understood by her opponents (in the medieval time compared to ours). Indeed, incomprehension provided the stimulus to go on. The challenge continued to provide a way for her to confirm her true sense of identity. In doing so she won more than mere Holiness, but as well became Doctor of the Church and Patron of Italy and Europe.

As if her infrequent pooping were not miraculous enough, Catherine also saw visions and experienced stigmata (note the wounds on her hands in the 1st image). But she saved perhaps her best miracle for last. When she died in Rome, the people of Siena wanted to bury Catherine in her hometown. They had to settle for her head, which they smuggled in a bag. Stopped by the guards, they prayed to Catherine to protect them. When the guards looked in the bag, it contained hundreds of rose petals! Her head rematerialized when they reached Siena, and it was enshrined in a reliquary in the Church of San Dominico, where it can still be seen today (2nd image).

Relics of John Paul II

The Vatican has confirmed that the organ donor card signed by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger in the 1970s - long before he became Pope Benedict - is now invalid. After a pope dies, his body belongs to the entire church and must be buried intact. If he were to be made a saint, those organs would be relics, which would be awkward if they were located in other bodies, living or dead.

The Venerable Pope John Paul II (1920-2005), born Karol Józef Wojtyła, passed the first hurdle of sainthood when it was announced this month that he will be beatified in May 2011. Pope John Paul II died on April 2nd, 2005, of septic shock and cardiocirculatory collapse. was funeralized on April 8th (scroll down here for photo of his lovely cypress casket), and was interred in the grottoes under St. Peter's Basilica. Since his beatification, the Pope's remains have been moved into the main body of the basilica (photo and webcam here). In September 2007, the Vicariate of Rome began offering pieces of a cassock worn by the Pope as holy relics in exchange for donations. Recently, it was announced that a vial of his blood drawn for medical tests shortly before his death was retained by Stanislaw Cardinal Dziwisz, Archbishop of Krakow, and will be encased in crystal and built into the altar of a Polish church that is opening in May of this year. But, as my friend Sue asks, what of the bone that was removed during his 1994 hip replacement?

Le sang d'un roi

"The blood of a king." That's why this otherwise artful gourd takes on a more sinister character. It was a pivotal moment in French history, a few years after the revolution had begun. The monarchy had been abolished and the king was stripped of his title by the Republican government. He had been arrested and imprisoned for high treason, and a reprieve had been voted down. So on the morning of January 21, 1793, Louis XVI (1754-1793) was executed before a large crowd. His spiritual advisor, English priest Henry Essex Edgeworth, accompanied him and described what he heard and saw:

"He was proceeding, when a man on horseback, in the national uniform, and with a ferocious cry, ordered the drums to beat. Many voices were at the same time heard encouraging the executioners. They seemed reanimated themselves, in seizing with violence the most virtuous of Kings, they dragged him under the axe of the guillotine, which with one stroke severed his head from his body. All this passed in a moment. The youngest of the guards, who seemed about eighteen, immediately seized the head, and showed it to the people as he walked round the scaffold; he accompanied this monstrous ceremony with the most atrocious and indecent gestures. At first an awful silence prevailed; at length some cries of 'Vive la Republique!' were heard. By degrees the voices multiplied and in less than ten minutes this cry, a thousand times repeated became the universal shout of the multitude, and every hat was in the air."

Immediately afterward, the excited crowd members rushed the scaffold to dip handkerchiefs into the spilled blood as souvenirs. Among them was Maximilien Bourdaloue, whose name is inscribed on the gourd along with images of key figures of the French Revolution. The gunpowder gourd became a reliquary for this morbid keepsake and was supposedly given to Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte before passing into the hands of an Italian family at the turn of the 20th c. The family contacted geneticists at the University of Bologna to test the residual blood in the gourd, although the handkerchief had long since vanished. Member of the team Davide Pettener said, "It’s a very strange story. We thought it was a joke at first because we work on population genetics. But we realized it’s very important from a historic point of view.”

The scientists scraped out 5 small samples of the dried blood to analyze the DNA, and published their results in Forensic Science International: Genetics. A gene from the Y chromosome (inherited from the father), indicated a male with blue eyes, which the king was known to have. They hope to match mitochondrial DNA (inherited from the mother) to a descendant of either the king or his mother. If they can't find a living relative, they will petition the French authorities for permission to take a sample from the dried heart of Louis XVI’s son, Dauphin Louis-Charles, who died at age 10. This relic resides in the Cathedral Basilica of St. Denis outside Paris. “A match on the Y chromosome of the Dauphin will immediately authenticate the blood as belonging to the king Louis XVI,” says team leader Carles Lalueza-Fox of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. At that point the gourd, presently valued at $700,000, would presumably be reappraised.

Two fingers

Sacred

Among the innumerable Christian relics of digits is a finger from the right hand of St. Teresa (1515-1582). I saw this first-class relic when I visited the walled city of Avila, Spain, where it is on display (2nd image) with the sole of one of her sandals, her rosary beads, and a cord she used to flagellate herself. Relics of St. Teresa enshrined elsewhere include her ring finger and a phial of her blood, her heart, and her incorrupt left arm.

Secular

In contrast, the finger of Galileo (1564-1642) is preserved in a museum. When the scientist's remains were being transferred from their humble resting place to an elaborate tomb within the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence on March 12, 1737, the middle finger of his left hand was stolen by Italian antiquarian Anton Francesco Gori (1691-1757). The finger was in the collections of Italian medical libraries and museums until it came to rest at Florence's Museo di Storia del Scienza.

Both remnants of anatomy - one belonging to a female saint and other to a man once considered a heretic - are encased in reliquaries and can be seen to this day. But Galileo's finger will soon be joined by 2 more. When the finger was snapped off by Gori in 1737, the thumb and middle finger of his right hand, along with a tooth, were snatched by an admirer and kept in private collection. As the reliquary - an 18th c. blown-glass vase - was passed from generation to generation, certainty about what it contained (even though its wooden case was topped by a bust of Galileo) was lost. It was acquired at auction by a buyer who contacted Italian cultural authorities, and they confirmed authenticity through historical documentation. These additional secular relics - long believed to be lost - are now on display in an exhibit celebrating the 400th anniversary of Galileo's observations. In addition to curating the anniversary exhibit, the director of the Museo di Storia del Scienza has applied to local authorities for permission to exhume the remains of Galileo - but the only relics he plans to retrieve are samples of DNA.

Follow-ups

Parade floats 1/2/10 A comment about this post mentioned the "Dirty Jobs" episode in which Mike Rowe helps dismantle parade floats. You can see a clip here at the 2-minute mark.

Marijuana and embalming fluid 12/28/09 Gamblers in South Africa are driving vultures to extinction because they believe that inhaling the smoke of the bird's brain confers the gift of premonition.

Bushmeat 12/27/09 National Geographic reports that many "zoos" in China are illegal fronts for the raising of tigers for their meat.

A Christmas Carol 12/24/09 A Turkish archaeologist is seeking the return of the relics of St. Nicholas (270-346) from Italy.

Happy Thanksgiving! 11/26/09 I decided against doing a post on artist Méret Oppenheim (1913-1985), but see 2 more of her great Surrealist works here (scroll down to the 2nd image) and here.

Stone/house 11/19/09 I just learned about the work of Mexican architect Javier Senosian, whose houses have a very organic style.

Taxidermy furniture 11/!6/09 A patron of a New York City restaurant has sued the owner for negligence after a 150lb moose head with antlers 3' wide fell off the wall and gave her a concussion. Meanwhile, in Florida, someone has combined an alligator and a motorcycle. Here is an article about taxidermy as a decor trend, and another artist using dead animals in her work. Lastly, check out the shoes here and here from the Virtual Shoe Museum!

World's heaviest insects 8/28/09 Owners of tarantulas are warned to protect their eyes after a man in Leeds, England, suffered spider hairs in his cornea when cleaning the cage.

Museum behind the scenes 7/25/09 The failure of the U.S. Department of the Interior to properly curate the objects under their stewardship conjures up images of the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Birthing and hoarding bunnies 6/18/09 More than 500 animals - most of them dead, including deer, cobras, and monkeys - were found in and around a home in Feltonville, Pennsylvania; they were collected not by a hoarder, but by practitioners of animal sacrifice.

"Seven Pounds" 6/14/09 The winner of a contest to have the "Best Job in the World" was stung by the extremely venomous Irukandjii jellyfish on the beach of his temporary home on Australia's Hamilton Island.

Giraffe evolution 5/15/09 A baby giraffe (pictured above) has been born - weighing 150lbs, standing 6' tall, and standing within an hour of birth - at the Niabi Zoo in Coal Valley, Illinois.

Mastectomy tattoos 4/27/09 After years of associating Susan G. Komen (1943-1980) with breast cancer, I wondered who she was.

Double-muscled dog 1/30/09 The tongue of a dog in Paisley, Scotland, swelled to 4 times normal after some pork membrane cut off the blood supply at its base.

Frank Buckland

Frank Buckland (1826-1880) is one of my favorite eccentric Englishmen of the 19th c. He made his living as Inspector of Salmon Fisheries, but it is his incredible curiosity about the natural world that, let us say, sets him apart. The man had many skills, including preparing animal skulls and skins and treating sick porpoises at the zoo, and numerous interests, including touring English ossuaries and examining ancient Egyptian mummies. He conducted many of his own experiments, including evaluating the defleshing work of dermestid beetles, and sealing toads in limestone for one year to assess credibility of stories of live toads being released from newly quarried blocks. I once began an outline for a biography and here are the things Frank did that tickled and/or appalled me most:

• Stole Ben Jonson’s heelbone from his tomb
• Determined the relics of St. Rosalia at Palermo to be goat bones
• Located the remains of John Hunter in a crowded church crypt so they could be reinterred in Westminster Abbey
• Kept a skull found during the digging of a foundation after finding it to be an asylum patient
• Kept a skull thought to be a murder victim after determining it to be a Crimean war trophy
• Led the London Acclimatisation Society in introducing exotic species into England for their meat
• Tasted buffalo, earwig, field mice, giraffe, kangaroo, leopard, mole, ostrich, porpoise, sea slug, snake, whale, zebra
• Owned a pet rat that he allowed on the dining room table
• Raised a bear, buzzard, fish, jaguar, magpie, mice, monkeys, owl, parrots, raccoon, snakes, woodchucks
• Discredited the Fee Jee mermaids exhibited by P.T. Barnum and other showmen
• Observed the mummified body of performer Julia Pastrana (photo below), whom he had seen on stage
• Questioned the safety of corsets
• Put eels in public fountain as a prank

To his discredit, Buckland chain-smoked cigars. To his great credit, he wrote the multi-volume Curiosities of Natural History. Among his acquaintainces he counted Chang and Eng Bunker (1811-1874), the “Original Siamese Twins”; Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873); Austrian anatomist Joseph Hyrtl (1810-1894); and married giants Martin van Buren Bates (1837-1919) and Anna Swan (1846-1888).

Italy itinerary

When my plans to travel to Italy in 2002 got cancelled, I had already put together the following itinerary:

BOLOGNA

• Chiesa della Santa--incorrupt body of St. Catherine of Bologna

FLORENCE

• La Specola--anatomical waxes
• Università degli Studi di Firenze--teratology specimens
• Museo di Storia della Scienza--Galileo’s finger
• Monastery of St. Teresa--incorrupt body of St. Theresa Margaret of Sacred Heart

ROME

• Crypt of Santa Maria della Concezione--bone decorations
• Protestant Cemetery--graves of Keats, Shelley
• Il Gesú--arm of St. Francis Xavier

PALERMO

• Catacombe dei Cappuccini--catacombs w/more than 8,000 mummies

NAPLES

• Pompeii and Herculaneum

I have not yet seen my share of mummies and incorruptible saints...