So you’ve got yourself a nice relic, say, some little crunchy bit of a martyred saint, but where do you keep it? Not in the sock drawer with the soft porn, no sir. The correct answer is you show it off in a monstrance.
Your proper monstrance is a display item in gold and/or silver, possibly encrusted with jewels, maybe featuring a sunburst and a cross. It’s valuable, even melted down with the saint-bit sieved out. Jesus, as you might recall, made kind of a big deal about wealth, for its own sake, being a deal-breaker for getting into heaven. Jesus was not impressed by riches. Fortunately, his word does not apply to the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church will happily gild, bejewel, and slather-in-satin any building, object, or important personage in its purview. The Catholic Church is by some estimates worth 30 billion dollars, and that is all to its credit now that everyone is fed, clothed, and housed.
Nearly every Catholic church has a relic of some kind in its altar, although that has not been required since 1969. It’s hard to imagine how there was so much saint shrapnel to go around, but there you go. Starting back in the fourth century, once it was legal to be a Christian, people rifled through the tombs of saints for venerable booty and it got around. Simony, or the sale of relics, is condemned as a sin in the Code of Canon Law, but you can get around that by merely selling the golden monstrance and throwing in the relic for free. I am not kidding.
What are the relics good for? Well. You might want to venerate a relic to get relief from ailments. A lot of St. Sebastian is in one basilica in Italy and that’s the very spot where pilgrims from all over used to come together for protection from the plague. Although that, there, is asking an awful lot of poor Sebastian.
There are just a few Biblical references to the powers of dead holy men. In one, a man was buried in the grave of Elisha, but when he came into contact with Elisha’s bones, he came back to life. Which is exactly what I would have done if I’d been sleeping it off and someone threw me on top of a dead man.
But miracles are always being associated with these relics. The official Catholic position is that relics have no magical powers of their own. What’s really going on is that God’s work was done through the lives of the saints and His work naturally continued in their skeletal vicinity after their deaths. So, you know, that’s totally different from magic.
I can’t say I’m without superstition. There is something cool about important artifacts that belies their mere material composition. The original Declaration of Independence is not like a grocery list. Why do we venerate? I myself once kept a bar napkin signed by Captain Beefheart (“Love over Gold, D. Van Vliet”) and somewhere along the line someone wiped their mouth on it and threw it out. I’m over it now.
But if relics weren’t important, Dave and I wouldn’t have argued for so long over whose mommy our countertop meat grinder came from. Both our mommies had one, and apparently they were identical. Dave uses it to make hash. At some point we quit arguing over it. We have assigned it a general aura of Mommyness, because we are both fortunate enough to have had wonderful mommies, and you really don’t need much more grace than that.
But it does make you wonder: what would be your own best relic if you should turn out to be worthy of veneration? There would be no end of secondary relics for me just due to my lax housekeeping. I’ve touched everything in this house and rarely clean up after myself. With any luck there will be published novels to venerate. Knock yourself out with my bones. But the holiest relic of Murr would have to be Pootie. Whoever gets Pootie, take him to see the world. Let his fuzzy light shine.
Because, as Saint Patrick Swayze might have put it, nobody puts Pootie in the monstrance.
My mother had a countertop meat grinder too. She would put leftover cooked roast beef through it to make hash, just like Dave. Mixed it up with ketchup and beef gravy out of a can and chunky boiled potatoes. Melted about a pound of butter in a frying pan and let the mixture get brown on the bottom.
Then the home grinding got too difficult and time consuming, so she took her cooked beef to the local grocery market, which was a tiny place that catered to bored, possibly drunk housewives and also sold gin and cigarettes, Mom’s staples. She’d ask the butcher to put the beef through his big grinder and he always obliged, as he charged double for the gin and cigarettes.
Then one day, the butcher let the plastic baggie get caught in the grinder along with the meat. Pretty bad scene. The meat was ruined, and the grinder had to be completely disassembled and meticulously cleaned to get all of the plastic baggie parts. I guess we had TV Dinners that night. And the butcher could no longer oblige.
Thank you for sharing. I mean it.
I would love to know what everyone’s relic would likely be if they were declared a saint. (Certainly not going to happen to ME… but in the event….) Since I am a really good cook, I would think it might be my wooden spoon, my mom’s cutting board — which I still have that was made by my uncle John, and my cast iron frying pan. It would all, of course, be blessed with holy water with a good bit of rye whiskey added to it. Instead of reciting passages from the bible over it, they would recite passages from Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential.
Sounds good! I still do not have a cast iron pan and I’m plenty aware that that is a character flaw of mine. It’s been pointed out. You people are in a cult.
I have a large cast iron pan so heavy that I no longer put it away — it stays on the stove all the time. I used to haul out a pair of them to cook party quantities of potato latkes and put them both away later. I don’t know that I’ll be doing that any more. For cast iron performance with minimal weight I recommend Netherton “spun black iron” instead.
Now that I’m older, I had to put my cast iron Dutch Oven away. I will probably donate it to Goodwill or else it will remain in my attic for whomever to sell or give away. Lots of things I had in cupboards now are too heavy, so had to be put on bottom shelves: my crock pot, pressure cooker, electric knife sharpener, All-Clad sheet pans. I used to do strength training and was pretty strong for my size. Now I have to have shopkeepers put purchases in multiple bags because it’s easier to distribute the weight when carrying bags from the car to the house. Losing abilities sucks.
I love Pootie.
Ain’t he photogenic, though?
My bathrobe! The holy polyester-plushy purple bathrobe of the beatific, and revered Saint Roxanna. You can tell it’s genuinely divine by the cat hair inextricably felted into the cuffs and lappets.
It has LAPPETS? Oh my. I am beyond impressed.
OK, what is a lappet?
It’s like a flat dingleball. I think. I have something in mind, anyway.
and we all shine on… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLy2SaSQAtA (I have been trying to rid myself of the Catholic educational experience…I think back to St. Hyacinth and his hangnail … I have been blessed!)
One of the things I liked about Catholic grade school: I was WELL AHEAD of my class mates when I went to public high school. By about a year and a half. So I didn’t have to study because I knew it all already. However. I went from getting As in Algebra to Fs at the latter part of the year. And being a Questioner — and a smartass — I frequently asked the nuns why, and how, and other stuff they couldn’t answer to my satisfaction. I think that maybe catholicism was instrumental in my being an Atheist now.
Fred! I just looked up St. Hyacinth. Fascinating. Do not know about the hangnail. Please advise.
Thank you Murr, and all commenters. I learned a lot today!
One of these days I’m just going to punt and give a spark word and say: GO, COMMENTERS! Not that lazy yet though.
Being anti-Catholic (ie Lutheran) we were not into saint or relic veneration- but we did have a statue of Jesus in church. I amused myself during the ever overlong services by squinting first one eye, then the other closed in rapid alternation succession. The Jesus statue would jump side to side and look lively . It was a miracle. It was animation!
Aww. That’s just your eyeballs duking it out for getting your nose out of the way.
Yes please, whoever gets Pootie please take him travelling. Maybe even to Australia?
Pootie would totally love to meet a wombat. That’s a fack.
I’m really impressed by how many of us out here in the audience are recovering Catholics!
You are legion.
Can I assume your primary reference is the venerated 1993 tome “Saints Preserve Us” by Sean Kelly and Rosemary Roger’s? My favorite.
Ummm…..no?
My father was a Presbyterian; my mother was Catholic. When they married, my father had to promise to raise any children as Catholics. He did for a few years until my mother bailed and became Presbyterian (and then so did my siblings and I). I think I was in 3rd or 4th grade when that happened. All I remember is telling my parents that the priest changed clothes after he came down the aisle of the church during Wednesday afternoon catechisms. I have no idea what that was about, and I remember going to church with my Aunt and there was a balcony for the little people (adults) who worshipped there. When I, as an adult, brought this up with my aunt, she absolutely says that it was not true, so who knows. Anyway, my first and only look at a relic was in a cathedral in France where, out of curiosity, I paid a fee to see the relics. I saw the purported elbow bones of a saint, held in what looked like a miniature golden carriage of the type used in Britain for royalty. At that point I decided that the Catholic church has way more money than it should have if they aren’t going to use it for good, like food, housing and healthcare for the poor. I just went to the Vatican and St. Peter’s. My opinion stands. I’ve been a heathen for decades.
Well you’ll end up paying for THAT!
My monstrance would hold my copy of Bertrand Russell’s “Why I Am Not A Christian.” Or maybe I could put a Snickerdoodle in it and call it a “Cookie Monstrance”!
You win.
Agreed!