The Catholic church is proudly taking the excised heart of a dead monk on a grand tour of the US. Literally. They gouged the heart out of the corpse of Padre Pio and are exhibiting it across the country.
Don’t worry. It may be incorruptible, but spectators won’t be touching it or even getting a good look at it because it is sealed for their protection within a plastic box. But, like gamma rays, apparently saint rays can pass freely through thin sheets of plastic.
He left his heart in San Fransisco
And his brain’s in Tennessee
His big toe’s on show in Moscow
His left nut, by the Zuiderzee.
The symbol of their religion is the torture device used to murder their god. Ghoulish? Nah….
If you want some really fun, look at the horrible wax effigies they claim are “incorruptible” saint-meat. It’s like Mme Tussaud’s on a big dose of shrooms.
Ugh, that shit is gross, the whole relics thing, and reliquaries in general. I was in Munich, and saw a ton in this one museum; shudders of disgust all around. I grew up in a Catholic family, and they would have loved this – creepy!
Surely more like nutrinos than gamma rays….
I too raised Catholic, now ex-, and console myself that even Springsteen (my idol) was also raised Catholic, and “worst altar boy ever”, to quote Springsteen. That even he survived that upbringing and produced the most stellar Rock icon (along with Bob Dylan). It is survivable that dogma-I-refuse-to-name. #BornToRun *squeee
That’s not the only thing that’s grotesque about the catholic church. A church in Providence fired their long-time music director for marrying another man. The parishioners, I’m happy to say, are pissed off about it, but the priest and the bishop are, of course, being total assholes. BTW the church has a lot of gay members and the guy was with his boyfriend for a long time before they married — the sin was actually getting married.
Yeah, that makes sense.
To take this in perspective, it’s actually our modern squeamishness with corpses and bits of other people that’s weird. Most societies throughout history have had a much more hands-on approach to human remains than we do – they would think us creepy and weird for just throwing our dead in holes and forgetting about them. Though I am reminded that the US in particular practices embalming with formaldehyde as a common funerary practice – which is just as weird and creepy as keeping a dried heart in a casket, and orders of magnitude more expensive.
I am much more exercised by the attitudes these Catholics take towards people who haven’t died yet than towards those who have.
Well cartomancer, I think you’re missing the point of what’s creepy about this. It’s attributing magical powers to the fleshly remnant that’s really really weird. Why would you want to see or handle it in the first place?
slithey tove #6:
Speaking of Springsteen and—or rather “in”—the church, this is currently at the top of my list of “Oh my gawd I wish I’d been there” gigs.
</OT>
@ 9, See, that’s what I think is creepy, A finger here, a knuckle there, boxed up in a crystal and gold gem encrusted thing, and people kissing it, and attributing magic powers to it.
I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but the history of reliquaries and adorning skeletons/bodies with art is one of those little historical quibbles that I think is amazingly cool and interesting.
When I die, I hope someone decides to have me gilded and covered in precious stones, and then stick me on the roof or something for people to see.
cervantes @9: It’s no more creepy than what a lot of humans have done for thousands of years the world over. See endocannibalism, exocannibalism, human sacrifice, ancestor worship (often bits of ancestors), mummification, modern embalming practices (as cartomancer points out), etc. Nothing new or exceptional here. Personally, I don’t find it any more weird than someone paying a lot of money for a napkin signed by Picasso. Nowt as queer as folk, etc.
I didn’t say it was new or exceptional. That doesn’t make it not creepy.
Give my feet to the footloose, careless and fancy-free
Give my knees to the needy, don’t pull that stuff on me
Venus de Milo can have my arms
Look out! I’ve got your nose
Sell my heart to the junkman and give my love to Rose
the church authorities are the ones who authorize and encourage doing this kind of veneration of relics. It is that that is creepy and ghoulish. The use of “Saints” and their remains to manipulate the faithful through their emotional attachment is perverse.
It is they that pay for the lavish decorations and it’s their hands that hold the things out to be kissed and touched. They hold it out to the faithful who bow and kneel before them.
it is their use to deliberately and purposely manipulate the faithful that is creepy.
uncle frogy
I find it fascinating from a historical perspective – at some time people preserved parts of bodies of people they admired. Whether it was a saint or an old king, it’s cool. Where it becomes weird is when people pray to it today.
We paraded a corpse around the country sometime this spring. I found it ridiculous that people see something holly in that corpse. I would take a look at it in a museum, with a nice big plate next to it, describing its history and reasons that led to it being preserved.
devnll @#2, the symbol of the cross and the act of crossing one’s self makes me wish the execution method at the time had been Vlad-style anal impalement.
(1) How much are the child rapists charging to see / kiss this alleged bit of preserved long pig? Follow the money!
(2) Are they bothering to usefully clean the
enclosing plasticdisease vector before the next person touches / kisses it?Other than creepy, is this even legal?
Covered under freedom of religion, no doubt.
Fixed.
(Yes, I know, the more-correct term is “tax avoidance” since the presumed no-taxes probably isn’t illegal.)
This kind of thing almost always puts a knot in the middle of my stomach, then I have to turn away before I blow chunks!
Not to mention, cannibalistic rituals make me itch…..
If they add skeletal parts from several individuals, they would get the magical artefact called a “Dead King” in the book by neo- Lovecraftean writer John Connoly.
“A Time of Torment: A Charlie Parker Thriller” https://www.amazon.com/Time-Torment-Charlie-Parker-Thriller/dp/1501118323/ref=la_B000APOEIY_1_1_twi_har_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1474924173&sr=1-1
Re cartomancer @ #8:
One of the main things that made the early Christians objectionable to their fellow citizens in the ancient world was their penchant for living with their dead–burying them under the floor of their living rooms, setting up indoor shrines, etc. In the Greek and Roman world, the dead were to be immediately taken outside the city walls to avoid ritual pollution of the entire community. Christian corpse-worship was not only disgusting to their pagan neighbors, but was regarded as a threat to public safety.
Battleaxe, #26
Indeed so. Classical civilization was, from the very beginning, obsessed with the ritual purity of proper burial of the dead. It’s a major thematic thread throughout Homer’s Iliad and Sophocles’ Antigone, it was regulated very intensively by Athenian sumptuary laws, and the Romans made it a prominent civic, religious and cultural concern. Early Christian sensibilities towards the sanctity of dead bodies were a radical departure in some ways.
But they share an origin with pre-Christian concerns in that both thought-worlds attribute great magical powers to a human corpse, and treat it as an object of reverence and ritual significance. It actually mattered to a traditional Roman that the dead be buried correctly in the right place – outside the city Pomoerium away from the business of the living – just as it mattered to the early Christian that the Christian dead be kept close to the Christian community and away from the spiritually suspect burial places of the traditional culture. Whether as source of potential pollution or source or potential sanctity, the corpse was invested with power. The traditional attitude of the polytheists is no more rational or logical than the Christian one.
Both societies would think us creepy and weird for treating corpses as just something that happens, and not regarding their inhumation as anything more than a personal, psychological concern for the family. Our complete lack of a magical, supernatural framework in which to interpret the human corpse would baffle and unnerve both sides equally.
@blf #19:
Since I was raised Catholic, I can answer this: God would not let anyone catch a disease from anything that is considered holy. Yes, even as a first-grader, I thought it was very weird and never truly believed it. I knew from putting alcohol on cuts that the alcohol in wine was the most likely reason the communion wine wasn’t a massive disease vector.
Battleaxe, #26, indeed, we’ve had a fairly recent example on close handling of a corpse caused problems during the Ebola outbreak.
28k people sickened, 11k dead, Roman Catholics in the US incapable of holding their water (See Chris Christie for an example).*
*Hey, I could’ve used Trump as an example, but I’m pretty sure he attended Our Lady of Obnoxiousness church, which is decidedly protestant of anything decent.
I think it was Saint Stephen who used to have 27 arms. That’s at least the amount of totally holy St. Stephen arms that circulated after his death.
Vivec@12,
I’m hoping bits of me will be used by medical students in their traditional practical jokes, assuming none of those bits can be used to help someone else go on living.
(Seriously, in most countries there’s a serious shortage both of organs for trnasplant, and corpses for trainee medics to dissect. Everyone should consider trying to ensure their body is used for the benefit of others when they are done with it.)
KG – also saves your family the cost and emotional distress of a funeral. (Seriously, who wants to have to organise *anything* immediately after a bereavement? Dealing with lawyers and house-clearance is quite enough, and doesn’t normally need too much input over the first few weeks: the only time I’ve ever been grateful for lawyers’ procedures working on a geological timescale.)
@38
Fair enough, I was using “body” when I meant “skeleton”.
I don’t care about what is done to my meaty bits, but dear lord please do something like this to my skeleton.
TW on the link, it’s a skeleton in fancy armor.
Also @32, my very extended family likes to throw a big party after someone dies, kind of a ‘celebrate the good times and remember them’ sort of thing. The deceased person’s attendance is optional, and as of yet none of the departed have tried to RSVP.
#31 / KG: If I don’t get mulched, I want to time it so that I can swallow a bunch of hidden messages or Easter eggs then donate myself for dissection. Sort of a fortune corpse…
Ftr: Padre Pio (1887-1968)’s primary achievement in life was 50 years of “unexplainable” stigmata: wounds supposedly matching those of Jesus’s crucifiction*.
*Yes, I know about the spelling, but I use this version for a reason…
If you want the ultimate in grotesque relics, at one time at least 11 churches in Europe claimed to have Jesus’ foreskin. The last known foreskin disappeared from Calcata, Italy, in 1983: until then, it was pulled out and paraded around town once a year.
Gregory in Seattle, that’s not the ultimate grotesquerie; there have been other grotesques well after that one (cf. this very post). Tsk.
Pierce R. Butler, you too?
I put it to you that his alleged bilocation was more impressive than his stigmata, which are pretty much run-of-the-mill in Catholic mythos.
(Avoiding superlatives and ultimates helps prevent objections such as mine
@John Morales #37 – More grotesque than worshiping a (alleged) 2000 year old bit of flesh brutally cut off a little boy’s penis?
Gregory, I was having a bit of fun with polysemy — both ‘grotesque’ and ‘ultimate’ have more than one sense.
(In passing, in the Catholic mythos, relics are venerated, not worshipped)
Obeisance and prayers offered to a saint is veneration, while the same obeisance and prayers offered to Jesus or the Father is worship. In practice, the difference is mere semantics.
Several years ago I read a eye-opening book on the mythos created around Padre Pio. I was amazed that in today’s world, miracle claims are still so easily made and spread within a religious community. I can only imagine who the ancient world of 2000 years ago must have been.