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OLD PAGAN STUFF
Many of the Pagan gods were converted into Christian Saints, and seem to have brought over with them the special curative or prophylactic attributes for which they were invoked as specifics. Indeed, the whole system was purely Pagan: “Cures, apparitions, prophecies, visions, transfigurations, stigmata, pleasant odor, incorruption—all these phenomena were also known to antiquity. Ancient Greece exhibits stone monuments and inscriptions which bear witness to cures and apparitions in ancient mythology. History tells of Aristeas of Proconnessus, Hermotimus of Claxomenae, Epimenides of Crete, that they were ascetics and thereby became ecstatic, even to the degree of the soul leaving the body, remaining far removed from it, and being able to appear in other places.” (CE. ix, 129.) The pious plan of temporal salvation in the Ages of Faith is thus historically vouched: “The whole social life of the Catholic world before the Reformation was animated with the idea of protection from the citizens of heaven. There were patrons or protectors in various forms of 221 illness, as for instance: St. Agatha, diseases of the breast; Apollonia, toothache; Blaise, sore throat; Clare and Lucy, eyes; Benedict, against poison; Hubert, against bites of dogs.” (CE. xi, 566.) “Catania honours St. Agatha as her patron saint, and throughout the region around Mt. AEtna she is invoked against the eruptions of the volcano, as elsewhere against fire and lightning.” (i, 204.)
To the infamous sanctified fable of St. Hugh are imputed sundry unholy accusations and persecutions against the Jews,—(here only repeated because they are falsely affirmed in the inspired Bull of Canonization. A Christian child was lyingly alleged to have been crucified by the Jews; the earth refused to receive its body, and it was thrown into a well, where it was found with the marks of crucifixion upon it; nineteen Jews were infamously put to death for the fabulous crime, and ninety others were condemned to death but released, for the sake of greed, upon payment of large fines; “Copin, the leader, stated that it was a Jewish custom to crucify a boy once a year”! (CE. vii, 515); similar infamies of falsehood are related in connection with St. William of Norwich. (CE. xv, 635.)
Here is a monumental miracle with every assurance of verity. “St. Winefride was a maiden of great personal charm and endowed with rare gifts of intellect. The fame of her beauty and accomplishments reached the ears of Caradoc, son of the neighboring Prince Alen.” She refused all his advances; frightened by his threats she fled towards the church where her uncle St. Beuno was celebrating Mass. “Maddened by a disappointed passion, Caradoc pursued her and, overtaking her on the slope above the site of the present well, he drew his sword and at one blow severed her head from the body. The head rolled down the incline and, where it rested, there gushed forth a spring.” St. Beuno, hearing of the tragedy, left the altar, and accompanied by the parents came to the spot where the head lay beside the spring. “Taking up the maiden's head be carried it to where the body lay, covered both with his cloak, and then re-entered the church to finish the Holy Sacrifice. When Mass was ended he knelt beside the Saint's body, offered up a fervent prayer to God, and ordered the cloak which covered it to be removed. Thereupon Winefride, as if awakening from a deep slumber, rose up with no sign of the severing of the head except a thin white circle round her neck. Seeing the murderer leaning on his sword with an insolent and defiant air, St. Beuno invoked the chastisement of heaven, and Caradoc fell dead on the spot, the popular belief being that the earth opened and swallowed him. Miraculously restored to life, Winefride seems to have lived in almost perpetual ecstasy and to have had familiar converse with God.” The place where this signal miracle occurred was at the time called “Dry Hollow,” but with its miraculous spring its name was changed to Holywell, and it stands there in Wales to this day, a bubblingly vocal witness to the verity of this holy yarn. Born in 600, beheaded and reheaded at sweet sixteen, she died Nov. 3, 660; “her death was foreshown to her in a vision by Christ Himself.” (CE. xv, 656-657.) “For more than a thousand years this Miraculous Well has attracted numerous pilgrims; documents preserved in the British Museum give us its history, with the 222 earliest record of the miraculous cures effected by its waters. These ancient cures included cases of dropsy, paralysis, gout, melancholia, sciatica, cancer, alienation of mind, blood spitting, etc. etc., also deliverance from evil spirits.” (CE. repeats the history of St. Winefride, or Gwenfrewi, in vii, 438.)
St. Wolfgang, by a unique miracle, “forced the devil to help him build a church.”—Et id omne genus—ad nauseam. Such is a handful of the holy chaff of faith, purveyed by Holy Church to all Believers to this day. Scores of like saint-lies are here omitted to save space.
These gross and degrading impostures by forged miracles not only went unrebuked and unchecked by the Vicars of God; many of the vice-Gods were among the most prolific miracle-mongers of the ages of Faith. One of the most notorious wonder-workers and wonder-forgers of Holy Church was no less a personage than His Holiness Pope St. Gregory the Great (590-604). He has the doubtful distinction of being the author of four celebrated volumes of Dialogi, which are a veritable thesaurus of holy wonders. From this treasury of nature-fakery we have seen the old Pagan example, affirmed as Christian fact by Gregory, as quoted by CE., of the man carried off by mistake by the Angel of Death, but restored to life when the oversight was discovered. He also relates a great flood of the Tiber which threatened to destroy Rome, until a copy of His Holiness's “Dialogi” was thrown into the swollen waters, which immediately subsided, and the Holy City was thus saved. His Holiness solemnly records the case of an awful belly-ache suffered by a holy nun, which he avers was caused by her having swallowed a devil along with a piece of lettuce which she was eating without having taken the due precaution of making the sign of the cross over it to scare away any lurking imps of Satan; and this devil, when commanded by a holy monk to come out of the nun, derisively replied: “How am I to blame? I was sitting on the lettuce, and this woman, not having made the sign of the cross, ate me along with it!” (Dial. lib. i, c. 4.) When elected Pope in 590 the city of Rome was afflicted by a dreadful pestilence; the angels of the angry God of all mercies were relentlessly flinging fiery darts among the devout Christian populace. To conjure away the pestilence—due perhaps primarily to the filth of the Holy City and its inhabitants—His Holiness headed a monkish parade through the stricken city, when of a sudden he saw the Archangel Michael hovering over the great Pagan mausoleum of Hadrian, just in the act of sheathing his flaming sword, while three angels with him chanted the original verses of the Regina Caeli; the great Pope made the Sign of the Cross and broke into Hallelujahs—(that is, “Praise to Yahveh,” the old Hebrew war-god). In commemoration of the wondrous event, the pious Pope built a Christian chapel, dedicated to St. Michael, atop the Pagan monument, and over it erected the colossal statue of the Archangel in the sword-sheathing act, which stands there in Rome to this day—the Castel Saint' Angelo, in enduring proof of the miracle and of the veracity of papal narratives. (CE. vi, 782.) The authorship of this monkish Hymn to the Queen of Heaven being unknown, pious invention supplied its true history: “that St. Gregory the Great heard the first three lines chanted by angels on a certain Easter 223 morning in Rome while he walked barefoot in a great religious procession, and that the Saint thereupon added the fourth line.” (C.E. xii, 719.)b Such is ecclesiastical “history.”
The literary attainments of His Holiness Gregory were tempered, if not corrupted, by his holy zeal, for “in his commentary on Job, Gregory I warns the reader that he need not be surprised to find mistakes of Latin Grammar, since in dealing with so holy a work as the Bible a writer should not stop to make sure whether his cases and tenses are right.” (Robinson, The Ordeal of Civilization, p. 62.) However, his zeal for more material things was not thus hampered: “Pope Gregory I contrived to make his real belief in the approaching end of the world yield the papacy about 1800 square miles of land and a revenue of about $2,000,000. He used bribes, threats and all kinds of stratagems to attain his ends.” (McCabe, LBB. 1130, p. 40.)
His Holiness Gregory I was himself one of the greatest thaumatur-gists of the Ages of Faith: “the miracles attributed to Gregory are very many.” (CE. vi, 786.) When Mohammed was forging his inspired Book of Koran, the illuminating spirit, in the guise of a dove, would perch on his shoulder and whisper the divine revelations into his ear,—a miracle which none but quite devout Mohammedans believe. But Peter the Deacon, in his Vita of His wonder-working Holiness, records that when St. Gregory was dictating his Homilies On Ezekiel: “A veil was drawn between his secretary and himself. As, however, the pope remained silent for long periods at a time, the servant made a hole in the curtain and, looking through, beheld a dove seated on Gregory's head with his beak between his lips. When the dove withdrew its beak the holy pontiff spoke and the secretary took down his words; but when he became silent the secretary again applied his eye to the hole and saw that the dove had replaced its beak between his lips.” (CE. vi, 786.) No good Christian can doubt, after this proof, that their Holinesses are constantly and directly inspired and guided by the Holy Ghost, as Holy Church assures. Wonderful as this bit of Gregory's history is, to recommend him to lasting remembrance, “his great claim to remembrance lies in the fact that he is the real father of the medieval papacy.” (Ibid.) These qualities of the Holy Father which we have noticed may to an extent explain some of the eccentricities of the Medieval Papacy.
FORGED AND FAKED RELICS
“Making every allowance for the errors of the most extreme fallibility, the history of Catholicism would on this hypothesis represent an amount of imposture probably unequalled in the annals of the human race.”As loathsome an example as is to be found in the annals of Christian apologetics for fraud and imposture is this from CE., following a long and revolting exposition of the Christian frauds with respect to holy Relics of the Church: 224Lecky, History of Rationalism, i, 164.
“Still, it would be presumptuous in such cases to blame the action of the ecclesiastical authority in permitting the continuance of a cult which extends back into remote antiquity. [i. e. into Paganism.] ...It may well be that the holy God of the Christians is immune to dishonor by worship through lying Christian frauds; but one may question the dishonor to the human mind wrought by the impostures of God's Vicars and his Church, cozening men into holy faith in lies; to say nothing of the shaming dishonor of Church and priest, who with utter want of good faith and common honesty created and fostered all these degrading Churchly cheats.“Supposing the relic to be spurious, NO DISHONOR IS DONE TO GOD by the continuance of an error handed down in perfect good faith for many centuries”! (CE. xii, 387.)
Before viewing some of these priestly impostures, never once rebuked or prevented by pope or priest, but, rather, industriously stimulated by them for purposes of perpetuating ignorance and superstition, and of feeding their own insatiate avarice, CE. will be invoked to give a graphic, though clerically casuistic and apologetic review of the debauchery of morals and mind which made possible these scandalous unholy practices of Holy Church.
“Naturally it was impossible for popular enthusiasm to be roused to so high a pitch in a matter which easily lent itself to error, fraud, and greed for gain, without at least the occasional occurrence of many, grave abuses. ... In the Theodosian Code the sale of relics is forbidden (vii, ix, 17), but numerous stories, of which it would be easy to collect a long series, beginning with the writings of Pope St. Gregory the Great and St. Gregory of Tours, prove to us that many unprincipled persons found a means of enriching themselves by a sort of trade in these objects of devotion, the majority of which no doubt were fraudulent. At the beginning of the ninth century the exportation of the bodies of martyrs from Rome had assumed the proportions of a regular commerce, and a certain deacon, Deusdona, acquired an unenviable notoriety in these transactions. What was in the long run hardly less disastrous than fraud or avarice, was the keen rivalry between religious centers, and the eager credulity fostered by the desire to be known as the possessor of some unusually startling relic. In such an atmosphere of lawlessness doubtful relics came to abound. There was always disposition to regard any human remains accidentally discovered near a church or in the catacombs as the body of a martyr ... the custom of making facsimiles and imitations, a custom which persists to our own day in the replicas of the Vatican statue of St. Peter—[itself a fraud] or of the Grotto of Lourdes—all these are causes adequate to account for the multitude of unquestionably spurious relics with which the treasuries of great medieval churches were crowded. ... Join to this the large license given to the occasional unscrupulous rogue IN AN AGE NOT ONLY UTTERLY UNCRITICAL but often curiously morbid in its realism, and it becomes easy to understand the multiplicity and extravagance of the entries in the relics inventories of Rome and other countries. 225The pettifogging sophistry of the foregoing argumentation, as of that which follows from the same clerical source, needs no comment. The Church of God, headed by his own Vicar General on earth, divinely guided against all error in matters of faith and morals, and which can detect the faintest taint of heresy of belief further than the most gifted bird of rapine can scent a carcass, can make no apology for permitting these degrading superstitions, which it not only tolerates but actively propagates and encourages, for the rich revenues they bring in. What a catalogue of its most sacred mummeries is branded with the infamy of fraudulent in the following:“Such tests [to secure the Faithful against deception] were applied as the historical and antiquarian science of that day were capable of devising. Very often, however, this test took the form of an appeal to some miraculous sanction, as in the well known story repeated by St. Ambrose, according to which, when doubt arose which of the three crosses discovered by St. Helena was that of Christ, the healing of a sick man by one of them dispelled all further hesitation. Nevertheless it remains true that many of the more important ancient relics duly exhibited for veneration in the great sanctuaries of Christendom or even at Rome itself must now be pronounced to be either certainly spurious or open to grave suspicion. To take one example of the latter class, the boards of the crib (Praesaepe) a name which for more than a thousand years has been associated, as now, with the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore—can only be considered to be of doubtful authenticity. ... Strangely enough, an inscription in Greek uncials of the eighth century is found on one of the boards, the inscription having nothing to do with the Crib but being apparently concerned with some commercial transaction. It is hard to explain its presence on the supposition that the relic is authentic. Similar difficulties might be urged against the supposed ‘Column of the Flagellation' venerated at Rome in the church of Santa Prassede, and against many other famous relics. ... Neither has the church ever pronounced that any particular relic, not even that commonly venerated as the wood of the Cross, is authentic; but she approves of honor being paid to those relics which with reasonable probability are believed to be genuine, and which are invested with due ecclesiastical sanctions.” (CE. xii, 737.) Such sophistry!
“The worship of imaginary saints or relics, devotion based upon false revelations, apparitions, supposed miracles, or false notions generally, is usually excusable in the Worshipper on the ground of ignorance and good faith; but there is no excuse for those who use similar means to exploit popular credulity for their own pecuniary profit. The originators of such falsehoods are liars, deceivers, and not rarely thieves; but a milder judgment should be pronounced on those who, after discovering the imposture tolerate the improper cults [!] ... The Catholic devotions which are connected with holy places, holy shrines, holy wells, famous relics, etc., are commonly treated as superstitions by non- Catholics. ... It must be admitted that 226 these hallowed spots and things have occasioned many legends; that popular credulity was in some cases the principal cause of their celebrity; that here or there instances of fraud can be adduced; yet, for all that, the principles which guide the worshipper, and his good intentions, are not impaired by an undercurrent of error as to facts. [!] Moreover ... the Church is tolerant of ‘pious beliefs' which have helped to further Christianity Thus, alleged saints and relies are suppressed as soon as discovered, but belief in the private revelations to which the feast of Corpus Christi, The Rosary, the Sacred Heart, and many other devotions owe their origin is neither commanded nor prohibited; here each man is his own judge. ... The apparent success which so often attends a superstition can mostly be accounted for by natural causes. When the object is to ascertain, or to effect in a general way, one of two possible events, the law of probabilities gives an equal chance to success and failure, and success does more to support than failure would do to destroy superstition.” (CE. xiv, 340, 341.) All these holy cults are thus confessed frauds and superstitions fostered by ecclesiastic greed.Let us remember that no True Church in Christendom can be built and consecrated without a box of dead man's bones or other fetid human scraps and relics deposited under the holy altar of God. The decree of the second council of Nice, A.D. 787, reaffirmed by the Council of Trent in 1546, forbade the consecration of any Church without a supply of relics. (CE. xii, 737.) Thus the ancient superstition is sanctioned and its observance made mandatory; an unceasing demand is created, and the market supply is more than equal to the pious demand. Hence the great and valuable, and fraudulent, traffic above confessed and clerically palliated.
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