Religious relics

Ossuary obsessions:
A few words about religious relics

PATRICK D. HAZARD

Holy Jesus! The Christian theologians of America feel a suddenly sinking sensation-as James Cameron, the man who gave us Titanic, promotes (at the New York Public Library, no less) his new Discovery Channel documentary on ossuaries found at a Jerusalem construction site. Cameron contends these two stone "coffins" contain the "human" remains of not only an unresurrected Jesus, but also his stand-in father, Joseph, his mother Mary, his wife Mary Magdalene, and their only begotten son. You can't get more contentious than that.

O.K., no DNA. The names on the tombs are as common in Jerusalem of that era as Tom, Dick and Harry were before status-happy American parents starting naming their offspring after movie stars. But a statistician asserts that there's only one chance in 600 that another family would have the same combination of names as this almost-Holy Family and related add-ons. But what’s embarrassing— aside from the huffy-puffy bombast of suddenly incredulous and sneerful theologians— are the astonishing details this fuss has flung up from the dustbin of Christian history.

Take Jesus's foreskin (carefully). Would it surprise you to learn that during the High Middle Ages no fewer than 14 churches in Europe claimed to have this idiosyncratic one-of-a-kind relic? (It did this ex-altar boy ) When one such "copy" was offered to Pope Innocent III as a pious gift, he flinched and changed the subject. Indeed, the a whole range of relics was multiplying at such an exponential rate that the Council of Trent blew its theological whistle at what it called these relics of pagan superstition and excoriated the scramble for filthy lucre that this dingy business had generated.

And have you found these?

In the wake of the foreskin as relics were Veronica's Veil that wiped the suffering brow of Jesus during his passion, the Holy Sponge with which he was offered vinegar and water, the Lance that pierced the heart of the Crucified Savior, the Tears of Jesus during the Passion, the Holy Umbilical Cord, and (God save us!) Jesus's Milk Teeth. Once you start collecting relics, there's no stopping the imaginatively greedy.

And the Council of Trent ukases came too late to stop King Henry V in 1421 from seeking out one edition of the foreskin from a church in Coulombs to ensure that his wife, Catherine of Valois, would have an easy birth. (Heh, who would have thought that a foreskin could be a perk?) Custom had it to bury the aforesaid skin in the ultimate ossuary of the mother. (The word "relic" derives from the Latin verb, relinquere, to leave behind.)

It was such wholey foolishness that prompted Martin Luther to nail his theses to the church door in Wittenberg. Erasmus of Rotterdam used wit as his weapon against these "miraculous" multiplications of fig leaves and fishy customs: he reckoned there were so many slivers of the Cross Christ was crucified on that he must have been nailed to an entire forest. And that good Catholic, the late Senator Eugene McCarthy, used to joke that Saint Francis had 35 fingers. No Assisi he.

Saint Catherine of Siena claimed to see the sacred prepuce in a vision as it became a ring symbolizing her wedding with Christ. (Traditionally, all nuns were brides of Christ.) A certain Saint Bridgit claimed that a bit of that prepuce on her tongue gave her an orgasmic experience.

And the 17th century Renaissance pundit Leo Allatius speculated that at least that part of the sacred member had ascended into Heaven— where it became the rings of Saturn. Medieval superstitions were burning out as vaudeville jokes.

Sacred nonsense in Islam, too

Why fuss over such arcane trivia? Well, one recent reason is the sudden re-release of analogous sacred nonsense in Islam. Our Christian traditions grew out of similar absurdities, although the recent Dover (Pa.) hassle over Intelligent Design and Evolution shows how close we remain to our pagan beginnings. Recidivism is the real Original Sin.

Islam kills people for violating the strictures of Sharia Law. A poor soul in Afghanistan was killed for converting to Christianity. During the Inquisition we burned people to death for esoteric unbeliefs.
Seculars must defend to the death the right of theologically hypersensitive people to believe whatever, as long as they don't harm or kill people who disagree. Who would have thought before 9/11 that we'd be lying awake nights trying to figure out what to do over fatwahs?

My personal secular saint

Heh, I studied scholastic philosophy under the Jesuits, and still concede it stretched my brain. But in graduate school, logical positivism simply erased its credibility for me. Concepts like Transubstantiation (that the bread and wine at Consecration do really become the body and blood of Jesus) is the religious equivalent of doing philosophical back flips off the low board: dazzling but useless.

The Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount remain to counsel all, religiously orthodox and unbelievers alike. But it helps to study the "evolution" of superstitions enough be able to hold your own Council of Trent.

Pagan traditions and peddling lucrative fantasies are unworthy of the brain God gave each of us, to use as we see fitting, i.e., freedom of the will. Forethoughts, not foreskins, make a world more civilized. As my secular saint, Eugene Victor Debs, once proclaimed: "Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization."