From the New York Times bestselling author of The Vatican Diaries, a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how the Vatican investigates claims of miraculous events
Apocalyptic prophecies and miraculous apparitions are headline-grabbing events that often put the Catholic Church’s concept of “rational faith” at odds with the passion of its more zealous followers. To some, these claims teeter on the edge of absurdity. Others see them as evidence of a private connection with God. For the Vatican, the issue is much more nuanced as each supposed miraculous event could have serious theological and political consequences. In response, the Vatican has developed a highly secretive and complex evaluation system to judge the authenticity of supernatural phenomena.
Former journalist John Thavis uses his thirty years’ experience covering the Vatican to shed light on this little-known process, revealing deep internal debates on the power of religious relics, private revelations, exorcisms, and more. Enlightening and accessible to Catholics and non-Catholics alike, the book illustrates the Church’s struggle to balance the tension between traditional beliefs and contemporary skepticism.
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Vatican Diaries, a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how the Vatican investigates claims of miraculous events
Apocalyptic prophecies and miraculous apparitions are headline-grabbing events that often put the Catholic Church’s concept of “rational faith” at odds with the passion of its more zealous followers. To some, these claims teeter on the edge of absurdity. Others see them as evidence of a private connection with God. For the Vatican, the issue is much more nuanced as each supposed miraculous event could have serious theological and political consequences. In response, the Vatican has developed a highly secretive and complex evaluation system to judge the authenticity of supernatural phenomena.
Former journalist John Thavis uses his thirty years’ experience covering the Vatican to shed light on this little-known process, revealing deep internal debates on the power of religious relics, private revelations, exorcisms, and more. Enlightening and accessible to Catholics and non-Catholics alike, the book illustrates the Church’s struggle to balance the tension between traditional beliefs and contemporary skepticism.
The Vatican Prophecies: Investigating Supernatural Signs, Apparitions, and Miracles in the Modern Age
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The Vatican Prophecies: Investigating Supernatural Signs, Apparitions, and Miracles in the Modern Age
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Overview
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Vatican Diaries, a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how the Vatican investigates claims of miraculous events
Apocalyptic prophecies and miraculous apparitions are headline-grabbing events that often put the Catholic Church’s concept of “rational faith” at odds with the passion of its more zealous followers. To some, these claims teeter on the edge of absurdity. Others see them as evidence of a private connection with God. For the Vatican, the issue is much more nuanced as each supposed miraculous event could have serious theological and political consequences. In response, the Vatican has developed a highly secretive and complex evaluation system to judge the authenticity of supernatural phenomena.
Former journalist John Thavis uses his thirty years’ experience covering the Vatican to shed light on this little-known process, revealing deep internal debates on the power of religious relics, private revelations, exorcisms, and more. Enlightening and accessible to Catholics and non-Catholics alike, the book illustrates the Church’s struggle to balance the tension between traditional beliefs and contemporary skepticism.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780698156319 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 09/15/2015 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Group |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 592 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
—THE GOSPEL OF SAINT MATTHEW
Introduction:
At the Crossroads of Reason and Wonder
The Mexican man fidgeted in a wheelchair, waiting for a blessing from Pope Francis. It was Pentecost Sunday in May 2013, two months after Francis’s election, and there was already extraordinary public enthusiasm for the new pontiff. The pope’s down-to-earth and unpredictable style had captured the world’s attention, and TV cameras followed his every move. Like his predecessors Francis ended his liturgies by personally greeting a line of the sick and their caregivers. On this day they had assembled in a shaded corner of Saint Peter’s Square. Among them were pilgrims with cancer, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, and other serious infirmities.
The young man from Mexico, Angel V., did not suffer from any common illness or disability, however. He was convinced that he was possessed by the devil. For years exorcists in Rome had tried, unsuccessfully, to cast out his demons. One of them believed that Angel was possessed by no fewer than four evil spirits; ridding him of them would require a prodigious spiritual effort. But where ordinary exorcists had failed, perhaps a pope could succeed—especially a pope like Francis, who in his first weeks had shocked listeners by describing the devil as a real force in the modern world, and warning Christians to guard against Satan’s cunning ways. After repeated attempts, Angel’s clerical friends in Rome had finally received permission to bring him to the papal Mass. For the Vatican he was just one more sick person in a wheelchair, but for a small group of priests seeking to revive the exorcism ministry, he was an important test case.
Pope Francis was unaware of all this as he made his way down the line of the ill and impaired, greeting each sufferer and leaning in to offer a few words of comfort. When he came to Angel, he laid his hands on top of the man’s head. Angel began to writhe and breathe heavily. His mouth opened wide, emitting a strange howling sound, and then he slumped in his chair. Vatican security guards quickly blocked the view of the professional photographers who were present and moved the pope along.
Had Pope Francis just performed an exorcism? The media headlines and YouTube postings suggested that he had, and several priests who routinely did exorcisms agreed. If not the full-blown exorcism rite, they said, Francis had at least recited a prayer of liberation from Satan, and the dramatic effect of the pope’s intervention was there for all to see. A few hours later, however, the Vatican spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, categorically denied that Pope Francis had conducted an exorcism. The pope had simply said a generic prayer to relieve suffering, which he often offered to the sick. For the Vatican, the case was closed.
This episode, described in greater detail in the fourth chapter of this book, is a striking example of the Vatican’s extreme sensitivity to any suggestion of the existence of real-world demonic manifestation. The devil may be acceptable as a theological reality, but not as a personality who makes people howl, levitate, speak in unknown languages, and exhibit superhuman strength—all classic signs of possession, but far too Hollywood for modern Vatican tastes.
In a wider sense the “exorcism” of Angel V. highlights a growing tension between the Vatican’s more intellectual approach to faith, heavily skewed toward philosophical and doctrinal assertions, and the popular thirst for something more tangible. In an age in which Christianity is supposed to be the faith of reason, many are still fascinated by the possibility of miracles, apparitions, encounters with the devil, and other signs of the supernatural.
Balancing these two aspects of faith is a task that has increasingly occupied the Vatican’s time and resources. In recent years its offices have issued a series of instructions aimed at controlling devotional and mystical experiences whenever they threaten to disturb the church’s beliefs and practices. In a sense the Vatican is engaged in vetting the supernatural and filtering “wondrous” experiences, to minimize anything it judges unorthodox, superfluous, excessive, or bizarre. At the same time, of course, officials in Rome cannot be seen as placing limits on divine intervention, including the possibility of God’s intercession in everyday life—that would be viewed as betraying the church’s oldest traditions.
The diverse forms of the supernatural—miraculous events, apparitions, healings, prophecies, and demonic interference—have been essential elements of Christianity from the moment God said “Let there be light” in the Book of Genesis. The wonders of creation brought about by the word of God were followed by numerous Old Testament accounts of divine favor or retribution: the Nile River turning to blood, one of the ten plagues of Egypt; the withered hand of King Jeroboam, who tried to silence a prophet; the diviner Balaam’s donkey, who spoke to his master in a man’s voice; or the revelations received by biblical prophets like Daniel, who foretold events from his own time to the End Times. The life of Christ was marked by an even more intense flurry of supernatural activity. Jesus raised the dead, healed the sick, restored sight to the blind, cast out demons, changed water into wine, fed the multitude with a few loaves and some fish, and walked on water. The New Testament records thirty-seven miracles of Christ, but as the Gospel of John states, “There are also many other things that Jesus did, but if these were to be described individually, I do not think the whole world would contain the books that would be written.”
According to scriptural accounts the Apostles continued to perform miraculous wonders after Christ’s death. They cured the ill and the lame, rid men and women of evil spirits, caused prison gates to burst open, and experienced prophetic visions. Saint Peter’s spiritual powers were so great that even his passing shadow was said to have healed the sick. Miracles came to be seen as an important indicator of sainthood, and in the eighteenth century the Vatican established formal criteria for validating miracles as part of the canonization process.
In a very physical way, pieces of human bone and other relics came to preserve the link to the early Christian evangelizers and saints, and their supposed supernatural potency made them fixtures in churches in Europe and, in later centuries, on every other continent. In the Middle Ages relics retrieved from the Holy Land assumed greater importance as communities began to rely on their patronage and protection. Sometimes even small towns would honor a whole pantheon of patron saints, each of whom specialized in overcoming a particular type of disease or adversity. Prayers answered by saintly intercessors were often memorialized with ex-voto offerings, new shrines, or the construction of major churches.
Apparitions of the Virgin Mary were a later development in the church’s history. In some areas of Christendom they began occurring frequently by the late Middle Ages, and were sometimes tied to annual processions or other events. Many towns in Mediterranean countries venerated their own particular “miraculous” images of Mary—typically, weeping icons or bleeding statues—which were objects of prayer and invocation. Over the last two centuries messages from Mary, delivered directly to chosen visionaries, have increased dramatically. The most famous of these apparitions have attracted worldwide followings, and some have won the Catholic Church’s official approval. But hundreds of others have never attained more than local notoriety, and in many cases church authorities have avoided an official pronouncement on the visions or the prophetic messages that accompany them.
The other side of the supernatural coin, demonic influence, has always compelled Christians. The struggle against malignant magic and sorcery very much engaged the early church, and for centuries it was acceptable for both clergy and laypeople to drive out evil spirits by invoking the power of Christ, the saints, and the angels. Exorcism eventually became a recognized sacramental in the Catholic Church with its own rite, which was last revised in 1999.
From the beginning, then, Christians have relied on a web of supernatural connections in prayer, worship, and daily life. In early times there was not much controversy over these displays of divine power; they were accepted, at least by the Christian community, in the spirit of wonder and gratitude. For many centuries, in fact, the church hierarchy had no official set of procedures to investigate and authenticate such phenomena. The dangers inherent in private revelation, however, came to the fore in the fifteenth century, when the fiery and popular Italian Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola prophesied a series of scourges to be sent by God to purify a corrupt church in Rome. Alexander VI, the Borgia pope, took note and, after continued defiance by Savonarola, had the friar hanged and his body burned in his native Florence in 1498. The threat to authority posed by prophecies, and their ability to stir the masses, alarmed the Vatican, which began to insist on closer vigilance over all forms of supernatural signs and communications.
Today, with global media attention focused on every new claim of the miraculous and Internet pages dedicated to the latest “divine” messages, the Vatican is ever more sensitive to the potential damage, both internal and external, posed by false miracles, apparitions, and prophecies. Internally the risk is primarily that of sowing confusion and doubt among the faithful. The central Christian belief that God’s public revelation ended with the New Testament leaves little room for dogmatic surprises and innovative prophesying by private visionaries. Nowadays no one is burned at the stake for heresy, but Catholic seers who do contradict official church teachings or invent new ones have been criticized, ostracized, and in some cases excommunicated.
Equally important to the Catholic Church is how it appears in the eyes of the world. In their ongoing campaign of global evangelization, popes and other Vatican authorities have emphasized that faith and human reason go hand in hand, and that the church has no desire to turn back the clock to the time before the Enlightenment. They argue that the church has been a thoughtful, if at times critical, force in the shaping of contemporary civilization, and as such rightfully merits a voice in the modern age. For that reason many Vatican officials wince whenever they hear about a new weeping Madonna, a healing relic, or a prophetic housewife taking dictation from God.
In the view of several experts interviewed for this book, the strain between the theological and devotional wings of the Catholic Church is real, and reveals itself whenever the hierarchy must pass judgment on apparitions, miracles, and private revelations. “Devotion to the saints and belief in the power of the saints sometimes borders on superstition,” one Vatican theologian said. “On the other hand, ‘superstition’ is often used by the theologically enlightened to dismiss popular piety, because they don’t appreciate the importance of these devotions.”
But the demarcation lines are far from clear or complete. Even Catholic rationalists remain open to expressions of the divine, embracing a broader concept of reason and rejecting the idea that empirical science is the only path to truth. From the Christian viewpoint, material and supernatural realities coexist across a continuum in a world created by God and redeemed by Christ. They are not two separate realms; their points of contact are limitless. The Catholic understanding of the world is sacramental, in the sense that all things can be a medium of the divine and a means of grace, which helps explain why supernatural events have always been given wide latitude in the church. Even today many skeptics (including Vatican officials) may profess incredulity at the proliferation of apparitions and apocalyptic signs, yet will recount personal encounters and wondrous experiences that defy rational explanation.
The Vatican does not have a Department of the Supernatural, a central clearinghouse for all things miraculous or inexplicable. Instead, its various bureaucratic agencies, often operating with little coordination, attempt to evaluate and regulate a wide variety of extraordinary occurrences, though in most cases they throw responsibility for a verdict back to the local bishop. The Vatican’s approach can be liturgical, doctrinal, or scientific, and the inevitable result is a series of mixed messages when it comes to otherworldly signs and wonders: One Roman Curia congregation may issue a document cautioning against “the mania of collecting relics” and superstitious belief in their powers, while another office will distribute small pieces of saints’ body parts for veneration by the faithful. Likewise, while one group of doctrinal officials may be monitoring charlatan prophecies—including suggestions that Pope Francis is the antipope—other Vatican experts are writing books unlocking scriptural codes to the End Times. A papal commission investigates supposed Marian apparitions in the Bosnia and Herzegovina town of Medjugorje at the same time that cardinals are publicly disagreeing about the authenticity and value of the visions. The Vatican allows carbon-14 testing that dates the Shroud of Turin to the Middle Ages, but six months later a pope declares that the Shroud is “certainly a relic” from the time of the crucifixion. One Vatican office invites the submission of supposed miracles that demonstrate the power of saintly intercession, but then turns to medical science to reject about half of the miraculous claims.
The Vatican’s efforts to be more objective and transparent about supernatural phenomena have sometimes backfired. A classic example came in 2000, when Pope John Paul II and top doctrinal officials divulged the third secret of Fatima, publishing a formal text and a commentary on the meaning of the Blessed Virgin’s message to three Portuguese children in 1917. This initiative to set the record straight after decades of secrecy and ominous speculation not only failed to convince many Catholics, but ended up spawning a small industry of books and videos speculating about a Vatican cover-up. The third secret of Fatima was the Vatican equivalent of Area 51: any attempt at an official explanation was bound to ignite new conspiracy theories.
One central issue in the debate over mystical visions and prophecies is whether they are a matter of God’s communicating directly with a devout individual, without the mediation of the institutional church—and if so, why? This is a question that Saint Ignatius of Loyola posed after his own mystical experiences in sixteenth-century Spain. Ignatius came down firmly on the side of the mystic, saying that spiritual exercises should “permit the Creator to deal directly with the creature, and the creature directly with his Creator and Lord.” Ignatius was called before the Inquisition to justify his teachings, but unlike others who were branded as heretics, he was able to explain that a personal mystical relationship with God did not signify rejection of the practices and guidance of the established church.
Today one of Ignatius’s modern followers, the German Jesuit Hans Zollner, is among a new breed of Catholic thinkers who are trying to build bridges between science and religious realities. Zollner, vice-rector of the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and head of its Institute of Psychology, is a theologian and a licensed psychologist. He studies phenomena like demonic possession with a wary and clinical eye and estimates that out of a thousand such cases, perhaps only one does not have a psychological explanation. “I would say, the more serious and the more reasonable a person is, the more he will concur that almost all these people need psychological help, and this will be the cure for them, not an exorcist,” Zollner observed in a recent interview.
Yet Zollner added that scientists sometimes exclude belief in demons and miracles and apparitions simply because they don’t fit into the prevailing empirical categories: “This is a major philosophical fault in many areas of science, because science has become a creed for some. They say things cannot be proven scientifically, but what they consider ‘scientifically’ is something that has been developed over the last one hundred and fifty years.”
Between omniscient science and blind faith, Zollner said, some have proposed a third kind of reality, an outlook that is both philosophical and spiritual, and thus more open to religious and transcendent experiences. There is no doubt that direct experience with the supernatural is still very meaningful in the lives of many Christians, he pointed out: in fact, as Catholicism becomes a more globally diverse religion, it is being forced to embrace cultures where the dividing line between objective science and the supernatural is not so well defined. Some of these cultures have a deep attachment to the miraculous. “What is ‘normal’ by Anglo-Saxon and Western European standards,” Zollner said, “is not necessarily normal in Papua New Guinea or in the jungles of Congo. That goes from how we greet each other to how we consider extraordinary phenomena.”
Zollner observed that Catholic academics, like other intellectual elites, tend to share a bias against mystical visionaries and their prophetic revelations. The Catholic Church as a whole, he believes, needs to work harder to preserve a healthy connection with transcendent realities. This is all the more important today because Western societies are showing signs of a potentially detrimental schism between the rational and the supernatural—a growing disconnect between the scientific, hardwired world of people’s daily lives and their private spiritual search. Established churches have not always responded to these aspirations, and, for many people, unguided spiritual exploration has replaced religious affiliation. Unmoored from the practices and traditions of faith, Zollner said, the appetite for the supernatural can manifest itself either in irrational and even destructive practices, like Satanic cults, or in a wide spectrum of fantasy seeking (for example, in popular films and literature) that reflects the fundamental human desire for transcendence. The church must reclaim the big themes of redemption and salvation, Zollner argues, and that means openness to the possibility of divine action in people’s lives.
Navigating a modern approach to the supernatural is not easy, however. For one thing, the Vatican views signs and wonders as supplements to Scripture and doctrine, and never as a main theme. In addition the role of the miraculous has changed in increasingly pluralistic and secular societies. In Catholic cultures of past centuries, miraculous events and their commemoration strengthened the faith identity of local communities and often functioned as the interface between religious and civic life. The Vatican’s priority was to make sure these devotions were doctrinally sound and that local enthusiasm for signs, relics, revelations, and prophecies didn’t get out of hand. Today, however, such phenomena are frequently cut off from the traditional roots of Catholicism and devotional life and are instead treated as curiosities, gothic anomalies that pop up here and there on the spiritual panorama. If supernatural occurrences were once a sign of health in the mystical body of the church, the hierarchy now views them as free radicals, unstable elements that need to be better controlled.
Often, miracles no longer have a unifying role, even at the local level. Claims of supernatural phenomena today are just as likely to divide Catholic communities as bring them together. In some cases, when promoted aggressively by groups of lay Catholics, they are seen as challenging the clerical monopoly on spiritual authority. These are among the reasons why the Vatican has ramped up its oversight efforts and encouraged bishops to take a stronger hand in investigating any new “signs” from heaven that land in their diocese. In recent years the Vatican has injected an uncharacteristic note of urgency in its instructions on how to manage eruptions of the supernatural. Rome has learned that in an era of instant global communications, it can no longer wait years or decades to reach a judgment. The supposed Marian apparitions at Medjugorje offer the perfect example (and, from a management point of view, a practically irresolvable problem). By the time the Vatican set up a commission to investigate the matter in 2010, the apparitions had been taking place for nearly thirty years. During that time dozens of books had been published to promote Medjugorje, movies about it had been released, and tens of millions of pilgrims had visited the Herzegovinian village. In effect Catholic devotees had already voted with their feet, making it politically difficult for officials in Rome to remove Medjugorje from the apparition map. The Vatican has also discovered that social media, uncontrolled and unfiltered by church authorities, are now routinely used to propagate claims of divine messages and prophecies. Facebook pages and blogs tout “Catholic End Times Prophecies,” various apparitions of Mary, prayers against diabolical possession, and the private revelations of a number of Catholic seers. Not surprisingly, when the supernatural goes viral, it outstrips the Vatican’s ability to investigate and verify.
On a personal level, too, modern mystics face new kinds of pressures. Historically humility has always been considered a sign of authenticity among those claiming to experience apparitions and miraculous signs. Today, however, these individuals are expected to take their turn in the media spotlight. The Vatican prefers that visionaries keep a low profile, but the world wants them to be celebrities—accessible, popular, and willing to engage in self-promotion.
When it comes to the supernaturally sacred, the news media love to depict the Vatican as desperate to preserve outdated practices and beliefs. If Rome sponsors a workshop on demonic influence, for example, the headlines will inevitably speak of a “revival of exorcism.” If the Vatican puts the purported bones of Saint Peter on display, it represents a “return to relics.” In reality a more subtle and complex shift is occurring, as the Vatican lets go of archaic elements that no longer make sense in the age of reason. Its overall emphasis has been to move away from supernatural events that contradict the rational world toward a more holistic approach, one that sees the connection to the divine as a constant in spiritual life.
That is a delicate task, however, and not without opposition, for Rome’s desire to moderate the theatrical side of the supernatural is not always shared by the faithful in the pews. Local apparitions, weeping or bleeding images, healing relics, and enigmatic prophecies can still galvanize many Catholics in the twenty-first century, and there’s inevitably a degree of resistance when the hierarchy tries to shut down these displays.
“These miracles should not be hidden,” wrote one Catholic who signed a 2011 petition to reopen an investigation into reports of multiple weeping statues in the Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton Church in Lake Ridge, Virginia. For several months in 1992, the statues and other images appeared to shed tears or blood in the presence of a priest who was said to have the stigmata, the wounds of Christ’s crucifixion. The events, known as the Seton Miracles, were witnessed by hundreds of parishioners. Diocesan officials investigated the matter at the time, found no particular significance or message, and silenced the priests involved. Nearly twenty years later local Catholics were still wondering why the Seton Miracles hadn’t had more impact. Among them was Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who referred to the episode in a 2010 speech and asked: “Why wasn’t that church absolutely packed with nonbelievers, seeking to determine if there might be something to this?” Scalia argued that it was not irrational to accept eyewitness testimony to miracles; what was irrational, he said, was to reject a priori, with no investigation, any possibility of miracles.
Multiply the Seton Miracles by several hundred or more across the international Catholic horizon, and one can understand why the Vatican has neither the capability nor the desire to monitor every reported apparition or wondrous occurrence. Instead, it issues strategies and procedures for local church authorities to follow. Increasingly the Vatican’s policies have called for caution and closer regulation of the supernatural:
• Rules and guidelines for authenticating apparitions and supposedly divine messages now underline the limited importance of personal revelation and the need for vigilance by bishops—especially when apocalyptic prophecies identify the Vatican as part of the problem.
• Vatican officials have been particularly wary of visions that portray the Blessed Virgin Mary as a source of new revelation, a unique mediator, or a “goddess,” or that press for a new Marian dogma.
• By revising the Rite of Exorcism and approving a church-sanctioned association of exorcists, the Vatican has actually increased its control over demon-hunting Catholic priests and curbed the activities of freelancers.
• In recent years, there has been a conscious effort to move away from cutting up saintly body parts for relics, a practice that one church official described as “obsolete.”
• Even in the one area where the Vatican routinely proclaims scientific evidence for supernatural events, the verification of miracles for sainthood causes, change seems to be in the air. Pope Francis has waived the miracle requirement for several saints, and some argue that it’s time for the church to move away from inexplicable healings in favor of a wider view of the “miraculous.”
These are important trends, and often go unnoticed. There is, however, no master plan for altering the church’s relationship with the supernatural. As in most Vatican affairs, forces sometimes push and pull in different directions. To give just one example, even as Vatican officials are limiting the distribution of corporeal relics, papal liturgists prominently feature saints’ body parts in canonization Masses and other ceremonies. Opinions are likewise divided on the Shroud of Turin, the influence of the devil, and supposed messages from Mary.
One constant is that manifestations of the supernatural continue to simmer among the faithful, percolating up like hot spots on the global Catholic landscape. In response, the Vatican attempts to coolly examine the facts and exercise quality control, extinguishing any hint of fanaticism.
This book reveals the behind-the-scenes struggle to keep all this in balance. It tells the stories of recent miracles, apparitions, and prophecies from the diverse perspectives of key players: the true believers, the in-house skeptics, and the Vatican’s diligent investigators. It describes the shock waves when a new pontiff like Francis starts to talk about the devil, or messages from Mary, or false prophets. It explains how public relations have influenced, and at times displaced, quiet discernment in mystical life. It offers assessments from the Vatican’s field generals and theoreticians, and testimony from the miracolati who believe they’ve been saved by heavenly intercession. Finally, it examines the question that with increasing urgency Catholic thinkers and officials are trying to answer: In the church of the twenty-first century, can the miraculous and the reasonable peacefully coexist?
CHAPTER ONE
A Piece of Holiness
The religious souvenir shops that populate the Borgo neighborhood outside the Vatican are mostly family-run operations that have peddled the same goods to pilgrims for generations: rosaries, medals, crosses, and holy cards. The margin on sales of these items is so low that many of the smaller stores have closed in recent years. So when a popular new product comes along, the kind that will have people waiting in line to get inside the doors, it’s an opportunity that the vendors cannot afford to miss.
In the fall of 2006 “relics” of Pope John Paul II went on sale in the Borgo and were an immediate merchandising triumph. The Polish pope had died only the year before, and his canonization cause was still in the early stages, but neither the Catholic faithful nor Rome’s shop owners wanted to wait for an official Vatican declaration of sainthood. Statuettes labeled “Saint John Paul II” had been selling briskly all year, and now people were lining up to purchase something even better: a small medal that enclosed a tiny piece of cloth, supposedly cut from a “papal habit.” Signs in Italian, English, and Polish announced, “Relics of John Paul II on sale here.”
As it turned out, the vendors were bending the definition of “relic,” because the fabric in question had never actually been worn by the late pope. Instead, an enterprising Italian had taken a white alb down to the crypt of Saint Peter’s Basilica and, when the guards weren’t looking, quickly touched it to the tomb marker of Pope John Paul. He then cut the alb into thousands of minuscule fragments, enough to keep his cottage industry going for months. Touching objects to the tomb of a holy individual is a centuries-old tradition in the Catholic Church, but marketing such items as “third-class relics” crossed the line from devotion to exploitation. It didn’t take long for Vatican authorities to demand an end to the sales, and shop owners—many of whom were tenants of the Vatican—promptly complied. The John Paul II “relics” disappeared.
But the story didn’t end there. Officials of the Diocese of Rome, who were in charge of John Paul II’s sainthood cause, officially denounced the profiteering aspect of this entrepreneurial venture but also recognized a growing appetite for mementos and relics of the late pope. They began distributing their own holy cards with genuine relics—minute pieces of a cassock that had, in fact, been used by John Paul when he was alive. These were “second-class” relics ex indumentis (from the clothing) and came with certification from the Rome diocese. The holy card was inscribed with a prayer “to obtain graces through the intercession of John Paul II.” Because the item was available online, the tiny office in the diocesan headquarters was soon inundated with requests from all over the world. And thus a new problem arose: distribution costs. Although the holy cards and relics were available free of charge, the website began encouraging a “free-will offering” for postage and handling, which came back to haunt them when newspapers began reporting that the church was, in effect, selling the relics under the guise of a request for donations. The Diocese of Rome vehemently denied that these were financial transactions. “Relics absolutely cannot be bought or sold because they are sacred objects, they have no price. The problem of the sale of relics is widespread on the Internet, and let me say that this is a sacrilege,” said Monsignor Marco Frisina, head of the diocese’s liturgy office. But the damage was done. Despite Frisina’s explanations, to the outside world the entire operation had the whiff of money about it.
The sale of relics has been a sensitive subject for the Catholic Church since the time of the Reformation, when the trade in relics and indulgences flourished. The Vatican eventually condemned the practice, and modern church law states straightforwardly: “It is strictly forbidden to sell sacred relics.” Nevertheless, there are gray areas. For example, it’s generally considered appropriate to charge money for a reliquary, a container holding the relics, which in some cases can be antique and very valuable. As a result, when buying relics online or at auctions, one often sees the proviso that the purchase price refers to the theca, a round metal locket, and not to the relic it contains—a disclaimer that many view as a ruse. Church officials have also stated that it is acceptable, even laudable, to purchase a relic in order to “rescue” it from mistreatment or desecration. But here, too, there are moral and practical problems. Rescuing a relic might help create a market for additional sales; or, if a relic is being auctioned, “rescuers” might only be bidding up the price against one another.
In the case of John Paul II, the monetary aspect of the relic distribution raised a red flag within the Vatican, where some officials had already been grumbling about the overeagerness of Polish clerics promoting the sainthood cause. “We’re handing out his relics, and the paperwork for the beatification isn’t even completed,” one monsignor remarked in 2007. Even before Pope John Paul died, though, some of his closest advisers had been thinking about relics. As the pontiff lay in bed on the morning of his death, doctors took some of his blood for analysis. The pope’s private secretary, Archbishop Stanisław Dziwisz, asked if he might have an additional vial of blood as a “remembrance,” and the doctors happily complied, giving him two vials and adding an anticoagulant agent so it would remain liquid. Dziwisz, who was eventually named a cardinal in the pope’s former archdiocese, Krakow, would later distribute the blood drop by drop to churches and dioceses clamoring for a John Paul II relic. John Paul’s hair from his final haircut had been preserved. It and his blood were considered first-class relics, taken ex corpore, or from the actual body, and their importance increased when it became known that no bones or organs had been removed from the pope’s corpse up to the time of his canonization. There would be no distribution of his body parts, and that meant the stock of first-class relics would be quite limited.
Long before John Paul’s canonization ceremony in 2014, the offer of cloth relics disappeared from the Diocese of Rome’s website. In fact, the entire sainthood campaign was soon moved to www.karol-wojtyla.org, far removed from the Vatican’s own Internet site, where there had never been any offer of relics. The day he was officially proclaimed a saint, some of the holy cards with bits of his cassock were selling for close to $100 on eBay.
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When the Second Council of Nicaea convened in 787, it decreed that every Christian altar should contain a relic. For centuries “a relic in every church” was indeed the norm, but the Catholic Church’s expansion beyond relic-rich Europe made that edict harder and harder to maintain. The Second Vatican Council affirmed that placing relics under the altar was still a worthy practice, but said nothing about its being a required one. In the post–Vatican II liturgical renewal, which swept many sacred images from churches and minimized iconography, relics were increasingly forgotten. Traditionalist critics complained that with their disappearance, the church lost tangible reminders of the communion of saints. But for many Catholics, relics now began to be perceived as medieval holdovers. As the church modernized, the miraculous claims associated with some of its most famous relics seemed to invite ridicule. Along with the catalog of officially recognized body parts—the hand of Saint Teresa of Ávila, the finger of Saint Thomas, the head of Saint John the Baptist (claimed by several churches), the toe of Saint Francis Xavier, the foot of Saint Blaise, the heart of Saint Camillus, the tooth of Saint Apollonia, the nail clippings of Saint Clare of Assisi—were relics the church now downplayed or dismissed, most notably the foreskin of the circumcised baby Jesus, known as the holy prepuce. (The contemporary attitude was not too far removed from that of the Renaissance author Giovanni Boccaccio, who satirized the relic trade by having a fictional friar sell one of the angel Gabriel’s feathers.)
The last thirty years, however, have seen a resurgence of interest in relics. Vatican officials account for this by citing the saint-making boom under Pope John Paul II, who personally presided over the canonization of nearly five hundred men and women from every continent. At every beatification and canonization ceremony, relics of the new saints were borne in procession and prominently displayed near the papal altar. This new visibility of relics, along with the increasingly multicultural population of saints and blesseds, led to the resurgence of dioceses and parishes requesting relics for local veneration. Schooled in a religion that emphasized doctrine, sacraments, and Scripture, modern Catholics were rediscovering a potent devotional element: the charismatic power of the saints, communicated through their physical presence in the form of relics, a visible link between heaven and earth.
At the Vatican, where more tradition-minded clerics were being appointed to head various offices, the return of relics found the expected support, and more and more often relics began turning up at papal liturgies. To inaugurate the Year for Priests in 2009, Pope Benedict XVI prayed before the heart of Saint John Vianney, which had been brought to Rome especially for the occasion and exposed in a glass and gold reliquary. Benedict also urged Vatican archaeologists to retrieve potential relics of Saint Paul from an ancient tomb sealed beneath an altar in Rome’s Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls, and then rejoiced when bits of human bone were found. More recently, to close the Year of Faith in 2013, the bones of Saint Peter were displayed for public veneration for the first time in history—a move that sparked internal debate at the Vatican, because archaeologists are far from convinced that these were actual relics of the first pope.
Pope John Paul II found another use for relics: as peace offerings to separated Christian Churches of the East. Aware that many relics preserved in Rome or Italy had deep meaning to various Orthodox Christian communities, John Paul began returning the bones of their significant saints. In 2000 he presented the patriarch of the Armenian Apostolic Church with a femur of Saint Gregory the Illuminator, who converted Armenia to Christianity in the fourth century. When John Paul traveled to Bulgaria in 2002, he brought with him the right humerus of Saint Dasius, a Christian soldier in the Roman army who was martyred there during the Diocletian persecutions. In 2004 he consigned a portion of the relics of two of the greatest Orthodox saints, Saint Gregory Nazianzen and Saint John Chrysostom, to the Ecumenical Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople; the Orthodox had long considered the relics to have been stolen from Constantinople during the Crusades, when they were taken to Rome. The Russian Orthodox Church, meanwhile, was the recipient of a unique relic of Saint Nicholas, whose remains had been “rescued” in 1087 from territory conquered by Turks and brought to Bari, Italy. In 2001 Patriarch Alexei received a container filled with a sweet-smelling liquid that oozes inexplicably from the saint’s tomb; called the Manna of Saint Nicholas, it is held by many to be a cure-all for diseases.
Father Zdzisław Kijas, a Polish Franciscan in his midfifties, works in one of the back offices of the Congregation for Saints’ Causes, at a desk decorated with holy cards, a ceramic angel, and a tin of Mac Iver cherry sweets. His youthful face breaks into a smile when he tells visitors how long he’s worked at the Vatican (“three years, nine months, and nineteen days”). Kijas is the congregation’s relics expert, and at an annual course for promoters of sainthood causes he lectures on the evolution of relic veneration, from biblical times to the modern age. He agrees that relics are coming back into vogue.
“The idea of having a relic in a church is still important, a sign that we have a link with the communion of saints. For a time after the Second Vatican Council, relics lost their appeal, in part because of ignorance, but I think we’ve moved out of that phase. Interest in relics is returning, and not only in the church. Just look at show business and the culture of celebrity, where ‘relics’ used by the stars are sold for incredibly high prices.”
It’s an argument often made by Vatican officials, who, when asked why the church venerates the miter of Saint Thomas Becket or a tunic worn by Saint Louis, are likely to mention the price fetched at auction by a Jackie Kennedy dress or an Elvis guitar.
“In fact, I would say that even as the church has tried to moderate the veneration of relics, society has taken it to new limits,” Monsignor Kijas said. As Kijas explained it, the Vatican keeps a judicious eye on the removal and distribution of relics, whether they come from someone already proclaimed a saint or someone who has been beatified (in church parlance, a “blessed”), which is the stage before official sainthood.
Traditionally most relics have not been removed from the corpse at the time of a holy person’s death, but only with the approach of beatification, when a tomb is moved to a more dignified location or during an exhumation to verify the burial place and examine the condition of the body. This latter ceremony, known by the Latin term recognitio, is still generally performed today, and once the tomb is unsealed, it’s effectively open season on relics—in theory, at least. Each sainthood cause has an appointed postulator, whose job is to guide the cause to completion and to take care of the necessary documentation. It’s generally the postulator who, with the approval of the Vatican’s saints’ congregation, orders the removal of body parts for relics. In past centuries such exhumations were the occasion of abuses, usually well intentioned but excessive by modern standards. To give just one example, when the tomb of Saint Teresa of Ávila was opened a year after her death in the late 1500s, the saint’s spiritual director, Father Jerónimo Gracián, cut off her left hand and had it sent to a Carmelite convent—except for her left ring finger, which he removed and wore around his neck for the rest of his life. In subsequent years Saint Teresa’s relics were dispersed piece by piece, including her heart, right arm, a foot, her left eye, and a piece of jawbone. Claims to the relics became the focus of a bitter conflict among various Catholic groups, and church officials sometimes cite the episode to illustrate the potential dangers of relic veneration.
That wouldn’t happen today, Monsignor Kijas explained: “If the body is intact, you can take some bone. But there is a hygienic element in all this, as well as respect for the body. You can’t just cut off parts at will. In some cases, there may be no relics removed.”
In 1994 the Vatican quietly promulgated new rules that said small pieces of the bones or flesh of saints would no longer be given out to individuals but “only for public veneration in a church, oratory, or chapel” that made a specific request. One reason is that worshipping a relic in one’s own home is no longer considered a healthy spiritual practice: Catholics should be coming to church to venerate the saints, not keeping relics to themselves.
Once the physical material is removed, it’s carefully maintained and dispensed to pastors and church communities who follow the application procedure. Typically a local parish will submit a request for the relics of a saint when dedicating a new church in his or her name for placement under the altar. When the Archdiocese of Anchorage wanted a relic for the Saint Andrew Kim Taegon Church, dedicated to a Korean-born priest and martyr of the nineteenth century, they waited for two years before authorities in Rome finally FedExed a piece of bone from the spine of the saint.
The size of relics has been a matter of debate among Vatican experts. When it revised its rules twenty years ago, the Vatican recommended that relics venerated in churches be large enough to be recognized as parts of the human body. That policy seems to have been ignored, in part because most of the relics in circulation today are fragments, and also because the severing of a saint’s arm or leg would strike many today as mutilation.
“What we say now is that a relic should be visible. In other words, that it’s not powder, that it be visibly recognizable as a relic, something that can be seen or touched. In the past, we’ve had relics so small that you needed a magnifying glass to view them,” Monsignor Kijas explained. Especially in recent years, the trend of drawing blood or cutting hair immediately after death has won favor precisely because it does not require slicing up a body.
But obtaining first-class relics has become more and more difficult, as their continued popularity has created a supply-and-demand problem for the Catholic Church, especially with regard to the remains of ancient saints. In Rome caches of bones are kept under lock and key in a number of churches, but their distribution has been limited in recent years.
In a convent attached to the medieval church of Santa Lucia in Selci, on the edge of Rome’s old Suburra neighborhood, Augustinian nuns still carve up the bones of ancient saints for distribution by the Diocese of Rome. The remains of many saints ended up in Rome, and long ago these cloistered nuns were put in charge of organizing them and “packaging” them for the faithful. At one time a steady stream of pilgrims would make their way to the massive brick convent and ring a bell next to a metal grate. The grate would slide open, the shadowy visage of a nun would appear, and the negotiations would commence. Sometimes the request would be for a relic of an early Christian martyr, while others would ask for something more obscure—say, a bone fragment from the third-century bishop Saint Trophimus of Arles. The nuns would search their inventory of the remains of hundreds of saints, kept in carefully labeled boxes, and do their best to satisfy the supplicant. The price tag could range anywhere from the equivalent of a few dollars to more than a hundred. Payment was not for the relic, of course, but for the exquisitely wrought theca in which the relic was enclosed, often decorated with foil and gold wire.
Santa Lucia in Selci was once a well-known stop on the devotional underground route, but nowadays few relic seekers visit this forgotten convent. The Vatican’s 1994 restrictions had a big impact. For a while the nuns at Via in Selci continued to distribute relics to individuals despite the Vatican edict, but eventually they fell into line with the new policy. All requests are now handled through Rome diocesan offices, by means of an official procedure that requires the signature of a bishop; the days of dispensing relics at the convent door are long gone.
On a recent rainy evening, Suor Elena, who manages the relic bank, walked slowly up the steep hill in front of the convent, leaning on a cane and guided by a younger Filipina sister. (As in many Rome convents, most of these cloistered Augustinian nuns today are from the Philippines.) Suor Elena, who had spent sixty-six years at this convent, spoke wistfully of the golden era of relics. “We still have them, but we’re running low. There are only small fragments of the ancient saints, and we’re not getting many new ones,” she said. To make the most of their resources, the nuns have been equipped with a microtome, a high-tech instrument used to slice paper-thin segments of bone. Even so the raw materials must be used sparingly.
Along with the Augustinian nuns in Rome, other churches and monasteries hold relics of specific saints and parcel them out. A little-known storeroom at the back of Saint Peter’s Basilica holds the bones of many early Christian martyrs, each boxful cataloged and authenticated with an official seal. Not every saint is available, of course, but the active roster of relics includes the remains of some surprisingly famous figures. The bones of Saint Francis of Assisi, buried nearly eight centuries ago, are distributed by Franciscan friars at the Church of the Twelve Holy Apostles in downtown Rome; they use material collected when the saint’s tomb in Assisi was exhumed in 1978. The reopening of Saint Francis’s burial place was undertaken to repair the grave site, and had to be approved by Pope Paul VI. Vatican officials are adamant that remains must not be exhumed merely in order to collect more relics—though when the opportunity presents itself, postulators are usually there to replenish supplies.
Increasingly officials are not taking bones from the tombs of those being canonized or beatified, said Monsignor Enrico Viganò, a Vatican liturgist. As a result, those asking for relics are more likely to receive an article of clothing or a prayer book used by the saint. In some cases the relic falls into a gray area. In 1999 the Saint John Cantius Parish in Chicago received a relic of Saint Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, a widely venerated Italian Capuchin priest who died in 1968, which consisted of a square of linen stained with blood from a laceration in the saint’s side, a wound known as the transverberation of the heart—in mystical tradition, the piercing of a soul inflamed with the love of God. The Chicago parish proudly proclaims it a first-class relic.
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The role of relics in religious practice is a sensitive topic among Vatican experts. “Relics still have a place in the church, but we need a better understanding of their spiritual value,” explained Monsignor Kijas. “It all depends on a person’s faith. If someone doesn’t approach this with faith, it’s just a piece of cloth or bone. There’s no magic power in a relic. In a way, it does transmit the force of a saint’s holiness, so it can stimulate the holiness of the person venerating it. But it doesn’t work like a talisman, and people need to know this.” For years, in fact, the Vatican has been tempering relic enthusiasm with caveats like “We don’t worship relics, we venerate them,” and “Relics don’t perform miracles, God performs them through the intercession of saints.”
Part of the controversy regarding relics arose because of the abuses in the relic trade that occurred in the Middle Ages. In the 1200s Saint Thomas Aquinas defended the veneration of relics, arguing that it reminded the faithful that saints are “members of Christ and friends of God.” Because saints are our intercessors with God, Aquinas said, it’s natural that Christians should want to draw close to them: “We ought to honor any relics of theirs in a fitting manner: principally their bodies, which were temples, and organs of the Holy Spirit dwelling and operating in them, and are destined to be likened to the body of Christ by the glory of the Resurrection. Hence God Himself fittingly honors such relics by working miracles at their presence.” One wonders what Thomas Aquinas would think, however, were he to walk today into the former Dominican monastery of Sant’Eustorgio in Milan, where the saint’s right thumb is displayed in a church museum, about four hundred miles from the rest of his remains in southern France.
Theologians will explain that relics also reflect Christianity’s “incarnational” nature, as a religion centered around the belief that Jesus Christ, as man and God, definitively bridged the gap between human and divine. The Word was made flesh, and flesh and the material world were made “holy.” In a particular way, veneration of the relics of saints recognizes that, first, Christ’s role as redeemer involves the assistance of other mediators and, second, that God continues to work through them—even after they have died, through the agency of their bones, garments, and other objects related by touch. Among the New Testament accounts of Jesus’s miracles is his healing of a woman who had suffered gynecological bleeding for twelve years. In Saint Mark’s Gospel, she approached Jesus convinced that if she could just “touch his cloak” she would be healed, and when she did so, “Immediately her flow of blood dried up. She felt in her body that she was healed of her affliction.” Jesus notes that it was faith that healed the woman, but his clothing became the conduit for the supernatural power that was kindled by her faith.
This tradition of miraculous healings or other transformations was carried on by the Apostles. In the Acts of the Apostles, we are told that miracles were accomplished through Saint Paul, so that “when face cloths or aprons that touched his skin were applied to the sick, their diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of them.” Even the Old Testament contains some references to the supernatural power of clothing, like Elijah’s mantle, and of relics. The Book of Kings describes how a group of Israelites, under attack by raiders, threw the corpse of a fallen comrade into the tomb of the prophet Elisha. When the dead soldier came into contact with Elisha’s bones, he “came back to life and got to his feet.”
The lesson of these accounts is that God reaches people not only through prayer or spiritual effort but also through the material world, which can be charged with sanctity. The problem, according to Vatican experts, is that such theological aspects of the power of relics are often poorly understood by Catholics, especially the most enthusiastic devotees of relic veneration. “For many people, it’s almost like magic. They don’t see the larger design of salvation at work, they just want to touch the relic,” one monsignor observed. Wherever relics are routinely displayed these days, the faithful are usually reminded that the Mass and the sacraments are more powerful spiritual tools than relics. The packed churches in Naples on the occasions of the miraculous “liquefaction” of Saint Januarius’s blood, for example, have prompted more than one priest to suggest that attendees might come more frequently to Sunday Mass. But such encouragement generally has little effect. The drawing power of a relic cannot be underestimated, even in the modern age.
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The Vatican has taken steps to keep relics out of the liturgical spotlight—for example, by prohibiting their public veneration on an altar and keeping relic devotions separate from the Mass. But in recent years it has approved a number of relic “tours” that have brought saints’ body parts and sacred objects to countries around the world. In late 2013 long lines queued outside Westminster Cathedral in London to venerate two relics of Saint Anthony of Padua, a floating rib bone and a piece of cheek skin. This tour commemorated the 750th anniversary of the discovery of the saint’s incorrupt tongue—held by some to be a supernatural sign of his gift for preaching.
When the bones of the French Carmelite nun Saint Thérèse of Lisieux were sent around France in 1997, the exposition drew surprisingly large crowds, including many non-Catholics. More requests followed, and since then the tour has continued to include more than forty countries, including a stop in South Africa during the 2010 World Cup. Saint Thérèse’s relics have traveled three times to the Philippines, where they have their own Facebook page, and one of her relics even journeyed into outer space aboard the Discovery space shuttle.
On Easter Sunday 2001 the relics of Saint Thérèse—a small casket containing a thighbone and foot bone—arrived in Ireland at the start of an eleven-week pilgrimage. Among those who turned out for the event was Don Mullan, a bestselling Irish author and media producer. Mullan had mixed feelings about the whole affair. Advance publicity for the relic tour had promised the arrival of an anonymous “she” who would be bigger than U2 and draw larger crowds than Madonna. When the “she” turned out to be the bones of a nineteenth-century saint, Mullan and others wondered if the organizers had lost their minds. They were predicting a million people might come to see the reliquary as it made its way across the country.