It was so hot and the air conditioning was so feeble I almost bailed out of line at the Salvation Army. Instead, I passed the time by checking out the jewelry case.
Blue rhinestone earrings. Some plastic bracelets. A grimy jackknife. And two relics.
Yes, relics. They were unmistakable to the Catholic eye. Two round, brass cases the size of a half dollar, each with a glass window showing a scrap of organic material mounted on red cloth with a tiny paper label underneath. I didn’t have my reading glasses, so I couldn’t see who they were. But they were clearly somebody.
They were $3 each, so I bought them, tucked them into my wallet and drove home, trembling.
At home, I took a closer look, and nearly fell down. One said “s.Helen.Imp” and the other “S. Petri Ap.” St. Helen? St. Peter? Was this possible?
I opened the backs, and each one revealed a blob of red wax imprinted with a seal holding in place two thin red cords. These were starting to look very real indeed.
I took careful photos and sent them to Sacra, a Minneapolis-based private organization that restores and documents relics. Then I went back to the store to tell the manager it’s not her fault she didn’t recognize these things as relics, but if she gets any more, she should call a priest; these were very likely human remains.
Strange that they ended up at a Salvation Army in rural New Hampshire; but perhaps stranger that the Catholic Church is in the habit of saving little bits of bodies and bones and scraps of hair and cloth, putting them under glass, and praying before them in our homes and in our churches.
Why do we do this? What does it mean?
Pagan dread
Catholics have collected and preserved relics of their holy dead since the earliest days of the Church.
“Anywhere you have the authentic Catholic faith, you have relics,” Sean Pilcher, founder of Sacra, told me.
When Emperor Trajan threw St. Ignatius of Antioch to the lions around the year 110, Christians recovered what was left of his body, and now his arm, breastbone and possibly his head repose in various churches. When St. Cyprian was beheaded in 259, Christians spread cloths to sop up his spilled blood.
St. Polycarp, a disciple of the apostle John, was martyred by burning in the year 155, and the faithful collected his ashes and venerated them, calling them “more valuable than gold,” according to Deacon Tom McDonald, a teacher, hospice minister and author of the Weird Catholic Substack.
What Christians were doing was something new, and their pagan neighbors were baffled and sometimes horrified to see them so comfortable with death. It’s one thing to have keepsakes of the beloved dead, but it’s another to keep pieces of the dead themselves. The Jewish people considered dead bodies ritually impure, and even cultures that worshipped their ancestors generally did so with more fear than reverence.
“The dead are protected against, chained down, covered in amulets to keep them from walking,” McDonald told me. “(Stories about) ghosts in the ancient world almost uniformly are based on failure to properly care for the body.”
But Christians were not only unafraid of the dead, they believed the remains of the dead were a connection to eternal life.
“Relics are inherently sacred things. If you say St. Andrew is in heaven, what you really mean is the soul of St. Andrew is experiencing the beatific vision; but his body is really him. It’s still on earth. So there is some way that Andrew, who is beholding the face of God, is still connected to his body,” Pilcher said.
The bodies of the saints — especially the martyrs, who willingly followed Christ in death — have a particular relation to the the risen body of Christ.
“We believe those remains will participate in the resurrection, and we anticipate that moment by preserving them and venerating them,” McDonald said.
“We don’t kick someone out just because they’re dead. They’re still going to come to Mass. We’re going to put them close to the altar, because that’s the first place the dead will rise. We won’t be afraid of them anymore. In fact we’re going to put their heads in glass cases and process them around the church. Take that, pagans!”
If ancient people were afraid of making contact with dead bodies, modern people — even Catholics — often find it distasteful or disgusting. This unease is partly because modern people simply aren’t used to being close to death. We hide dead bodies away, and if they’re on view at funerals, they’re embalmed and heavily made up.
But even those who are comfortable with death might ask how Catholics can claim to respect the human body so highly, from conception to natural death, and then cut the best ones up into bits and send them around the world. … Read the rest of my latest and I guess my last for Our Sunday Visitor.
Every Lent for the last few years, we’ve been watching a worthwhile, faith-related movie together as a family on Friday nights. (Full list at the end.)
The tradition continues! And, in keeping with tradition, right out of the gate we didn’t manage to do it on the first Friday of Lent, but instead started The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) on Saturday, had some streaming issues, and finished watching it Sunday.
Maybe you’re thinking to yourself, “MY family would never watch a weird French black-and-white silent film from the 20’s, much less one that got broken up into two nights.” You may be surprised. This is an absolutely enthralling movie. My youngest kid is eight, and she sat there gripping my arm the whole time, and when it was over, she just said, “Wow.”
It follows Joan’s last week or so of life, from her trial at the hands of her captors, until her execution. The historically accurate synopsis is simply: Joan is interrogated, threatened, and tormented as the English and their French collaborators try to get her to sign a document repudiating her actions leading a revolt against the English. She eventually breaks down and complies, and is sentenced to life in prison, but she regrets her moment of weakness, takes it back, and is burned at the stake.
You might think of silent film as relying on exaggerated, histrionic facial distortions, with tossed heads and fluttering fingers, pantomime and rolling eyes meant to stand in for dialogue, but that’s not how this works. It does spend most of the film disconcertingly close to individual faces, with the camera at an odd, discomfitingly low angle, looking up at faces from about chin level.
At first I was reminded of the grotesque faces in so many paintings of Jesus being mocked — Hieronymous Bosch or many others.
But the faces of her tormenters are not actually grotesques. Instead, when you see them leering or smirking or looking outraged or disgusted, it’s just showing humanity at its recognizable worst.
Some pieces of dialogue are displayed on the screen, in French and in English, enough to keep you current with the story. An incredible complexity of emotion is displayed on screen, so although you often see the actors moving their lips and you don’t hear anything but the musical soundtrack, you don’t feel like you’re missing anything. The story and dialogue are taken directly from the contemporary account of her actual trial.
The backgrounds are very spare, with light and shadow making up the most important shapes on screen (although the sets and the costume are painstakingly accurate). Much is made of people passing by windows and in and out of shadow, and appearing in doorways. You could have convinced me the film, with its minimalism and startling angles, was shot in in the 1950’s, rather than in 1928. There is so little on screen besides human faces, every object that appears — especially the woven grass crown that follows Joan around — takes on a gripping significance; and when she is allowed to hold a crucifix as she is led up to her execution space, she cradles it so gratefully and lovingly, and you FEEL that.
You also feel how horrific it is when, previously, they try to coerce her into recanting, showing her the Eucharist — and then, when she refuses, they put the host away again, blow out the candles, and leave her to herself.
I thought many times of people who believe they are following their conscience, and find themselves rejected by the Church, or with people who say they represent the Church. Joan is entirely focused on Jesus, her king; and as soon as her captors understand that she really is devoted to him, they use it against her, and try to coerce her literally with Jesus. It’s horrible. This movie isn’t anti-Church, I don’t think. It doesn’t seem to be trying to convey the idea that the hierarchy is by definition cruel. It does show what happens when you follow Jesus, and when you don’t.
It includes the historically accurate charges against her, that she offends God by wearing men’s clothes, and that she must be guilty of witchcraft; but it doesn’t veer into territory that would surely be unavoidable if it had been made today: You don’t come away with the impression that these evil, patriarchal men are tormenting her because they can’t abide a strong female lead. It does show that they’re evil, but it’s because they don’t recognize holiness, and they don’t love or recognize the Lord. And they’re willing to use Jesus as a weapon.
There are several different musical scores that accompany different versions of this film. The one we saw, from Criterion, had “Voices of Light” by Richard Einhorn, written in 1994, and I can’t imagine an improvement. It sounded both hauntingly modern and bracingly medieval, and it sometimes underscores the emotion on screen, but sometimes provides an emotional counterpoint or contrast that heightens the sense of seeing the action from a perspective perhaps beyond the natural world. Worth listening to on its own.
In the first part, Jane is feverish and her eyes bug out in an unnatural fashion that is exhausting to watch, but after she has been bled, threatened with torture, and interrogated some more, her eyelids droop more and more, and you can’t help but internally mirror her. Although the camera isn’t from Joan’s perspective, the experience of the film is not a normal viewer experience., where the viewer watches a story unfold. It is an ordeal, in some ways, but a bracingly compelling one, that makes you feel like something is happening to you. You don’t want to look away, as you might during, for instance, The Passion of the Christ; instead, you find yourself straining all your senses so as to be as present as possible in what feels like a real encounter with something beyond a story. It’s not that it’s so realistic (although the camera seeks out every pore, hair, wrinkle, and tear on every face). It feels instead like something you remember or something you dreamed about: Not realistic, but more intimate than reality.
Before and during her execution, the camera pans past the faces in the crowd, and you see there, as you did earlier with the judges, bald human emotion, frailty, pain, regret, and also foolishness, fear, perversion. The camera spends so much time on individual faces, not only on Joan’s but on everyone’s, that you come to realize everyone is on trial. Everyone is being searched, and is given a chance to either be faithful, or not.
I wondered, as I always do when I think about Joan of Arc, why God chose to intervene in history in such an unusually political way. Joan apparently got direct orders to lead a military charge in order to bring about a specific regime change, and it really feels like God is rooting for one country over another, which seems . . . unusually Old Testamenty. But then I thought, maybe he does actually do this often, and the people he speaks to just decide not to respond! I just don’t know. In any case, this Joan is so singlemindedly fixed on her love of Christ, and her obedience to him, that you can see that that really is the main point — love and obedience — and anything else she does is merely the form her love happens to take.
That being said, she is terrified. She’s not brash or beyond human emotion. She trembles and weeps and struggles as she fights to stay true to Jesus, and you can see that she trusts God but is still terribly afraid of where that trust will lead her. She is holy, but also clearly only 19. Early on, they ask her if she knows the Lord’s Prayer, and who taught it to her. She says, “Ma mère” and a tear slips down her cheek.
Here is the “Has God made you promises?” scene.
Never ever have I seen such acting before. And it’s just her face.
There aren’t a lot of tellingly clever lines or ideas, although Joan comes across as outwitting the judges a few times, just because she’s completely honest. When they hope to trap her by asking if she’s in a state of grace, she says, “If I am not, God put me there. If I am, please God so keep me.” When they ask if God has promised to free her, she says yes, but she doesn’t know the day or the hour.
This very simplicity, and the way she is both faithful and fearful, is the most memorable depiction of faith I can recall ever seeing. The movie pretty overtly shows Joan is walking in the same steps as Jesus in his final hours. It would make very appropriate viewing for Holy Week, and it would be perfect for kids of high school age.
Content warnings: It shows torture devices and many scenes where Joan is in terror; it shows her being bled to relieve a fever, and it shows her being executed. You see her alive and inhaling smoke, and then you see her burned, already-dead body through the flames, so it’s clear what is happening, but it’s not extremely graphic. The entire movie is tense and alarming, so even though you don’t clearly see the worst things that happen to her, I can imagine this movie leading to nightmares for sensitive viewers. But she is so clearly triumphant at the end, it leaves you feeling — well, as I said, like something happened to you. Something good.
***
Here is the list of movies we’ve watched in previous years, with link to ReelGood so you can see where to stream them, and my review (if any):
They really, really loved God, enough to willingly die for Him, enough to renounce their families for Him, enough to cheerfully surrender their riches and beauty and power for Him, enough to praise Him with their last dying breaths.
We have a pretty good record of getting cast out of every Catholic community we stumble into. This is good news, because it means we never have to make costumes for All Saints Day (we do have fun making Halloween costumes, though).
But how about you? Did you suddenly realize that, in a fit of good Catholic momming, you promised to whip up costumes for both days? I’m here to save your bacon. These costumes are suitably edifying for any church-sponsored party, but edgy enough to earn you all the Mary Janes and Raisinets you can eat on October 31.
Your most obvious twofer choice is martyrs. Grab whatever weapon catches your fancy in the Halloween aisle, and you’re guaranteed to find some Catholic somewhere who was killed with it. We’re just that popular! Buy two tubes of blood, one for the gorefest and one for pious reenactments, and you’re set.
Hilarious on October 31:
But there are non-bloody saints, too, and even some adorable sidekicks. You wear a ratty bathrobe and skip showering for a week or two, and you can pass as either a civic-minded individual tirelessly lobbying for societal and legal acceptance of an all-natural homeopathic remedies
Replace that sinister moan and lumbering gait with a fervent gleam in the eye and a pleasant, un-decompopsed scent, and you become, ovulously, Lazarus:
Here’s an idea which clearly marks you as one of those people who may be a little bit too enthusiastic about Halloween for someone your age:
But wait! With a few tweaks done in a sensitive and reverent way, you could easily be St. Christopher.
But don’t tell anyone it was my idea.
In closing, here is a joke I will keep telling until someone else thinks it’s funny. You can buy a Dobby mask, and BOOM, Curé of Ars.
What’s that you say? What are my kids going to be this year, if I’m so smart? I’ll give you a hint: So far I’ve sewed two furry leg warmers together, hemmed a black cloak, spray painted a few acorns gold, and bought some tulle that was on sale, and also kind of a lot of fake teeth. That’s right: We’re going, en masse, as the domestic church, and I just dare you to get in our way.
If you have ever looked in the mirror and thought with shame and distress that you could never die for your faith, think again. Life in Christ is a life of a thousand, million little deaths: deaths to old ways of thinking, death to false security, death to complacency, death to trivial comforts. Any time you inquire about your Faith, you are whispering to Christ, however reluctantly, that you are open to killing off some part of yourself that does not deserve to live.
Photo: By nieznany – Polish Righteous awarded with medals for bravery by the Holocaust Remembrance Authority. Cropped and color managed by Poeticbent (dyskusja · edycje), Domena publiczna, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7130230
Where do we go when we as a church are caught persecuting ourselves? How do we respond when the aggressor lives within our walls, and when the criticisms of our church are accurate and true? When the enemy of the faith is a hostile outsider, our course seems clear: we fight back, to defend ourselves and our church. But this is a different matter.
Or she wasn’t canonized just because she managed to remain a virgin, anyway.
Let’s back up. When you think about holiness, do you fall into bathwater thinking?
Bathwater thinking is when you forget the baby — the living, breathing, vulnerable persons in front of you — and instead, you wallow around in that warm, familiar bathwater of your indisputably worthy cause.
Think about St. Gianna Molla. A good many people believe that this woman’s greatness came in her eager, joyful acceptance of death in order to save her baby. Not so. It is true that she was willing to accept the risk of death when she refused the therapeutic hysterectomy that would have killed her unborn child. And she did end up giving her life so that her baby could live. But the whole time, she prayed and hoped and longed to live. She wasn’t devoted to being pro-life: she was devoted to her baby. And she wanted to live, so that she could be with her baby and her husband and the rest of her beloved children. She was pro-life: she hoped for life in abundance, including her own.
The same is true, in a somewhat different way, for St. Maria Goretti, whose feast is today. Over and over, I’ve heard this saint praised as a holy girl who prized her viginity so highly that she was willing to die to defend it. And she did die as a result of defending her viginity. But when her would-be rapist attacked her, she pleaded with him to stop because he would be committing a mortal sin, and he would go to hell. She didn’t say, “Please, please, spare my virginity!” She begged him to spare himself.
This is what it looks like when someone is close to God: because they love God, they want to spare the person in front of them. They are in love with living human beings, not in love with virtue in the abstract. They are focused not on the idea of morality, but on the person whose life and safety (whether physical or spiritual) are at stake.
In Maria Goretti’s case, she was focused on her rapist — and it was her love for him, and not her blindingly pure devotion to virginity, that converted him and brought him to repentance before he died. That is how conversions happen. That is how people are saved: when other people show love for them. It’s about other people. It’s always about our love for God expressed as love for other people. That’s why, before someone is declared a saint, they have to perform two miracles for people still on earth. Even after death, it’s not about the cause or the system or the virtue in the abstract. It’s always about our love for other people.
Ideas like holiness, chastity, humility, charity, diligence, or any other virtue that springs to mind when you think of a saint? These are bathwater. These are the things that surround and support the “baby” of love in action. A bath without bathwater is no good; but a bath without someone to be bathed is even more pointless. God doesn’t want bathwater saints, ardently devoted to a cause or a principle or a movement or a virtue. God wants us to love and care for each other. Love for each other is how we order our lives. Love for each other is how we serve God.
Love for each other is how we imitate Jesus. He didn’t die for the cause of salvation; He died for us, as billions of individual beloved children.
It’s not an either/or: we don’t have to choose between pursuing virtue and showing love. But virtue doesn’t exist in a vaccuum, and the pursuit of holiness doesn’t mean anything unless it’s manifest in love for each other. It’s always about our love for other people. Otherwise, what’s the point?
***
Image via Wikimedia Commons: By Giuseppe Brovelli-Soffredini[1] (Original source of this reproduction is unknown) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
This post was originally published in a different form in February of 2014.
The monsignor who spearheaded the saint-making process for El Salvador’s slain Archbishop Oscar Romero said Wednesday it was Pope Benedict XVI— and not Pope Francis — who removed the final hurdle in the tortured, 35-year process.
Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia told reporters Benedict “gave the green light.” Speaking a day after Francis declared that Romero died as a martyr for the faith, Paglia said Romero’s beatification would likely be within a few months in San Salvador.
Paglia says Benedict told him on Dec. 20, 2012, the case had passed from the Vatican’s doctrine office, where it had been held up for years over concerns about Romero’s orthodoxy, to the saint-making office. From there it proceeded quickly, taking a mere two years for theologians, and then a committee of cardinals and bishops, to agree unanimously that Romero died as a martyr out of hatred for the faith.
I don’t know about you, but the narrative I always heard and accepted was that Oscar Romero did good work, but was a little hinky in his leanings, and so the more conservative element in the Church didn’t want to touch his cause for beatification; but Francis is enough of a free-wheeler to cut through that red tape and get this thing moving. I’m not saying that’s what you thought; I’m saying that’s what I thought, without thinking about it much.
Instead, it looks like this is installment #3,908,555 in the story titled “The Vatican works very, very slowly, and most of us know almost nothing about what goes on there” (and installment #598,773 in the story titled, “So, you thought you knew Benedict?”). I’m really looking forward to learning more about Abp. Romero, who was assassinated while saying Mass, apparently for appealing directly to soldiers to stop murdering the citizens of El Salvador.
