Alternative Religion/ Library

ANCIENT FAKES YET ACCREDITED

Think not that these ancient frauds of the Church have been discarded in shame by the Church now that their fraudulent origin and purpose are exposed to public obloquy and ridicule. In full blaze of world attention and publicity of the Twentieth Century, God's own Vicar vouches before the world for these tawdry impostures, brought forth before the world to lend climax of superstitious solemnity to his crazy Crusade of prayer and incited pious hatred against the brave efforts of the Russians to undo the fell work of the Church in that unhappy land. Associated Press dispatches from Vatican City announce: “To lend emphasis to the protest here, celebrated relics kept at St. Peter's—a portion of the true cross; St. Veronica's Veil, with which Christ is said to have wiped His face on His way to Calvary, and the centurion's lance which pierced His Side—will be displayed.” (N.Y. Herald-Tribune, March 19, 1930.) “After the ceremony those present will receive benediction with the sacred relics.” (N.Y. Sun, Mch. 13, 1930.) Nearby, “the stones of the pavement on which the Apostles [Peter and Paul] knelt in prayer and which are said to contain the impression of their knees, are now in the wall of the Church of Santa Francesca Romana.” (CE. xiii, 797.) Such lying vouchers are fit setting for the crusade of unholy lies and hate against a people which for centuries has been kept in grossest ignorance and superstition by greedy priestcraft, now repudiated by its victims.

The foregoing solemn vouching for antique fakeries provoked a deal of skeptical ridicule throughout the world, even among some of the Faithful: so it must needs be emphasized by repetition, with some notable other Fake Relics added for “assurance doubly sure.” So, when the Pagan Festival of Easter dawned on the Pagan “Day of the Venerable Sun,” His Royal-Holiness came forth in the full splendor of the Pagan Pontifex Maximum to celebrate the Event, and by his Infallible presence to vouch again for the genuineness of these holy spurious Relics. Probably he wore and ostentated in the joy of its recovery, the celebrated “so-called Episcopal Ring of St. Peter, rich with sapphires and diamonds,” stolen from the Vatican treasury in 1925, and recently recaptured with the thief. (Herald-Tribune, Dec. 3, 1929.) It is possible that he sat in state in the very Throne or “Chair of St. Peter,” which the Fisherman Pope used, as dubiously vouched by CE. under that caption. In any event, whatever throne he used was planted immediately above the grave where lies the headless cadaver of St. Peter himself, for “the skulls of Sts. Peter and Paul” were later viewed at the Lateran, and there “shown for the adoration of the Faithful.” As announced in several Press dispatches, an inventory of the holy Relies and ceremonials is here recorded. In preparation for the Sacred Event in the Twentieth Century: “The major basilicas will all have on display their most precious relics. ... The purported Cradle of ²³¹ Bethlehem [made out of an eighth century packing case] will be brought forth. Those attending mass at the Lateran will be able to view the skulls of Sts. Peter and Paul, and a bit of what is believed [by whom, not stated] to be the True Cross—[carried off entire in 614 by the Persians]; ... the reputed Lance of the Roman centurion who speared the side of Christ, and the ‘Holy Veil' or napkin offered to Christ by St. Veronica,”—who is a myth forged from “vera icon.” (A.P. dispatch, Apl. 19, 1930.) Also: “A fragment of the Cross and two Thorns from the crown of the Savior. ... The Sancta Scala (Holy Stairs), ... drew the usual Good Friday throngs of the Faithful today. ... Processions were held inside the ancient edifices to honor the relics, [including] what, according to tradition, are the heads of the apostles St. Peter and St. Paul ... shown for the adoration of the Faithful.” (Herald-Tribune, Apl. 19, 1930.) Then came the consummation and solemn Infallible accrediting of these “most precious relics”:—“Pope Celebrates Easter Mass. ... Relics of the Passion [surrounded him],—a reputed fragment of the Cross, a piece of the Spear which pierced [reputedly] the side of the Savior, and the Veil of St. Veronica. ... were displayed from the balcony above the Papal Altar.” (Ibid, Apl. 21, 1930.) Now at last, in Twentieth Century, “Roma locuta est—causa finita est”—and these originally bogus frauds are genuine and authentic Relics—for the Faithful who may believe it.

Samples of the “seed of the Serpent” of Eden, the scales that fell from the eyes of Elijah's servant, the original wicked flea, the two dwarf mummies of Bildad the Shu-hite and Ne-hi-miah, the 200 Philistine trophies (foreskins) brought in by David as his marriage dot (1 Sam. xviii, 25-27), the horn of salvation, and the instruments of Cornelius's Italian Band, are about the only honest-to-goodness authentic Biblical relics which seem not to be preserved among the countless holy fake treasures of Holy Church. The famous juvenile pocket-inventories of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and the monstrous fakeries of the late lamented Phineas Barnum, are paltry trivialities beside the countless and priceless Relic-treasures of Holy Church, religiously guarded for “veneration” by True Believers blessed by the privilege of paying—the more you pay the more you merit” is the maxim - to gaze in rapt awe at, and to kiss and fondle, these ghastly and ghoulish, false and forged, bloody scraps and baubles of perverted piosity. The foreskin of the Child Christ miraculously preserved exists to this day; enough of his diapers and swaddling-cloths, as of the sanitary draperies of his Ever-Virgin Mother, are of record to stock a modern department store. During the era of the unholy Crusades the soldiers of Christ brought from the Holy Land countless numbers of duly certified bottles of the Milk of the Virgin Mother of God, and drove a thrifty business selling them to churches and superstitious dupes through Europe.

Yet in existence are several portraits of the Mother of God, “said to have been painted by St. Luke; they belong to the Sixth century.” (CE. xv, 471.) “There is still preserved at Messina a letter attributed to the Blessed Virgin, which, it is claimed, was written by her to the Messenians when Our Lady heard of their conversion by St. Paul” (x, 217; cf. list of several: i, 613.) “The Shroud of the Blessed Virgin is preserved in the Church of ²³² Gethsemane.” (xiv, 775.) The Holy Winding Sheet or shroud of the Christ was formerly “exposed for veneration” at Troyes; but the Bishop “declared after due inquiry that the relic was nothing but a painting and opposed its exposition. Clement VI, by four Bulls (1390), approved the exposition as lawful.” After being stolen and hawked about, this sacred relic “is now exposed and honored at Turin.” (xv, 67-68.) There must be something wrong about this, for “The Diocese of Perigueux has a remarkable The Holy Shroud of Christ, brought back after the first crusade. An official investigation in 1444 asserted the authenticity of the relic.” (xi, 668.) The Minster treasury of the Cathedral of Aix-la-Chapelle, or Aachen, where Charlemagne enshrined the Holy Thorns, “includes a large number of relics, vessels, and vestments, the most important being those known as the four ‘Great Relics,' namely, the cloak of the Blessed Virgin, the swaddling-clothes of the infant Jesus, the loin-cloth worn by Our Lord on the Cross, and the cloth on which lay the head of John the Baptist after his beheading. They are exposed every seven years, and venerated by thousands of Pilgrims (139,628 in 1874, and 158,968 in 1881”)! (i, 92.)

Without comment we let CE. record for the faith of its readers, several of the very notable and most remunerative Relics treasured by Holy Church. That they are all impossible, are all bogus, all crude forgeries and fakes only possible of credit by the most credulous child-minds, needs no comment. The sordid debasement of the human mind to the degree of credulity here displayed, the crass dishonesty of the false pretenses which give credit to these things for purposes of extortion from silly dupes of religion, the vastness of the grand larceny thus perpetrated in the name of God,—are beyond orderly comment.

“The possession of the seamless garment of Christ is claimed by the Cathedral of Trier and by the parish church of Argenteuil; the former claims that the relic was sent by the Empress St. Helena, basing their claim on a document sent by Pope Sylvester to the Church of Trier, but this cannot be considered genuine. ... The relic itself offers no reason to doubt its genuineness. Plenary indulgences were granted to all pilgrims who should visit the cathedral of Trier at the time of the exposition of the Holy Coat, which was to take place every seven years.” (vii, 400-1.) “The Church venerates the Holy Innocents, or Martyrs, the children massacred by Herod, estimated in various Liturgies as 14,000, 64,000, 144,000 boys. The Church of Paul's Outside the Walls is believed to possess the bodies of several of the Holy Innocents. A portion of these relics was transferred by Sixtus V to Santa Maria Maggiore. The Church of St. Justina at Padua, the cathedrals of Lisbon and Milan, and other Churches also preserve bodies which they claim to be those of some of the Holy Innocents. It is impossible to determine the day or the year of the death of the Holy Innocents, since the chronology of the birth of Christ and the subsequent Biblical events is most uncertain”' (CE. vii, 419.)

In the cathedral of Cologne are preserved the skulls of the Three Wise Men who followed the Star of Bethlehem. In the neighboring Church of St. Gereon are distributed over the walls ²³³ the bones from a whole cemetery, dug up and displayed as those of that mythical Saint and his Theban Band of 10,000 Martyrs; in fitting competition are the spoils of the neighboring graveyard, yielding the bones of St. Ursula and her 11,000 Virgin Martyrs. The miraculous bones of Santa Rosalia in Palermo are the bones of a deceased goat!

“The city of Tarascon has for its patron, St. Martha, who, according to the legend, delivered the country from a monster called ‘Tarasque.' The Church of ‘Saintes Marias de la Mer' contains three venerated tombs; according to a tradition which is attached to the legends concerning the emigration of St. Lazarus, St. Martha, St. Mary Magdalene, and St. Maximus, these tombs contain the bodies of the three Marys of the Gospels.”

(CE. i, 238.)

A final job lot of these holy fetishes as recorded by Dr. McCabe with some pertinent comments, may be admired: “At Laon the chief treasures shown to the public were some milk and hair of the Virgin Mary. This was Laon's set-off to the rival attraction at Soissons, a neighboring town, which had secured one of the ²³⁴ milk-teeth shed by the infant Jesus. There seems to have been enough of the milk of the Virgin—some of it was still exhibited in Spanish churches in the nine-teenth century—preserved in Europe to feed a few calves. There was hair enough to make a mattress. There were sufficient pieces of ‘the true cross' to make a boat. There were teeth of Christ enough to outfit a dentist (one monastery, at Charroux, had the complete set). There were so many sets of baby-linen of the infant Jesus, in Italy, France and Spain, that one could have opened a shop with them. One of the greatest churches in Rome had Christ's manger-cradle. Seven churches had his authentic umbilical cord, and a number of churches had his foreskin (removed at circumcision and kept as a souvenir by Mary). One church had the miraculous imprint of his little bottom on a stone on which he had sat. Mary herself had left enough wedding rings, shoes, stockings, shirts, girdles, etc. to fill a museum; one of her shifts is still in the Chartres cathedral. One church had Aaron's rod. Six churches had the six heads cut off John the Baptist. ... Every one of these things was, remember, in its origin, a cynical blasphemous swindle. Each of these objects was at first launched upon the world with deliberate mendacity. ... One is almost disposed to ask for an application to the clergy of the law about obtaining money under false pretenses.” (McCabe, The Story of Religious Controversy, p. 353.) 

HOLY OILS, WATERS, AND FETISHES

These sacred and sanctified wonder-working objects are too numerous to more than mention a few of the most celebrated. Miraculous “waters” were in great profusion distilled or in some weird way extracted from numbers of dead Saints, “blessed” for a variety of purposes, and vended under the names of the productive Saints; as “The Water of St. Ignatius,” of Sts. Adelhaid, Vincent Ferrer, Willibrord, etc. That of St. Hubert was notably a specific for the bite of mad dogs. The formula for these holy extracts or emulsions, with their properties and miraculous effects, are set forth in the official “Rituale Romanum.” (CE. xv, 564.) The widely celebrated “Oil of Saints” was in immense vogue and possessed wonderful properties, as vouched by CE. under that title. This holy unction was “an oily substance which is said to have flowed, or still flows, from the relics or burial places of certain saints, and water which has in some way come in contact with their relics. These oils are or have been used by the faithful, with the belief that they will cure bodily and spiritual ailments the custom prevailed of pouring oil over the relics or reliquaries of martyrs and then gathering it in vases, sponges or pieces of cloth. This oil, oleum martyris, was distributed among the faithful as a remedy against sickness. ... At present the most famous of the oils of saints is the oil of St. Walburga (Walburgis oleum). It flows from the stone slab and the surrounding metal plate on which rest the relies of St. Walburga in her church in Eichstadt in Bavaria. The fluid is caught in a silver cup and is distributed to the faithful for use against diseases of the body and soul. Similarly of the Oil of St. Menas, of which thousands of little flasks have recently been discovered, found at many Places in Europe and Africa; there is also a like Oil of St. Nicholas of Myra, which emanates from his ²³⁵ relics at Bari in Italy, whither they were brought in 1087. A certain substance like flour, is recorded by St. Gregory of Tours, to emanate from the sepulchre of St. John the Evangelist; also that from the sepulchre of the Apostle St. Andrew emanated manna in the form of flour and fragrant oil.” A list half a column long is given of other saints from whose relics or sepulchres oil is said to have flowed. (CE. xi, 228-9.) 

THE AGNUS DEI

 “These are discs of wax impressed with the figure of a lamb; and blessed at stated seasons by the Pope. The rule still followed is that the great consecration of the Agnus Dei takes place only in the first year of each pontificate and every seventh year afterwards. It seems probable that they had their beginning in some pagan usage of charms or amulets, from which the ruder populace were weaned by the employment of this Christian substitute [charm or amulet] blessed by prayer. The early history of Catholic ceremonial affords numerous parallels for this Christianizing of pagan rites. ... So the purpose of these consecrated medallions is to protect those who wear or possess them from all malign influences. In the prayers of blessing, special mention is made of the perils from storm and pestilence, from fire and flood, and also of the dangers to which women are exposed in childbirth. Miraculous effects have been believed to follow the use of these objects of piety. Fires are said to have been. extinguished, and floods stayed. They were much subject to counterfeit, the making of which has been strictly prohibited by various papal bulls,”—(this proving the obtaining of money by false pretenses in the papal. monopoly of peddling them to the moron Faithful). “There are also Agnus Deis made from wax mingled with the dust which is, believed to be that of the bones of martyrs; these are called Paste de' SS. Martiri, or Martyrs' Paste.” (CE. i, 220.) The peddling of these frauds has not yet been forbidden by the criminal code, nor by the Vicars of God who gain by them. Three pages of a separate article, are devoted to the potent prayers in Liturgies, several in doggerel Latin verse, on pages 221-223. One of these inspired Papal invocations over the sacred amulets is quoted by Dr. White:

“O God, ... we humbly beseech thee that thou wilt bless these waxen forms, figured with the image of an innocent lamb, .... that, at the touch and sight of them, the faithful shall break forth into praises, and that the crash of hailstorms, the blast of hurricanes, the violence of tempests, the fury of winds, and the malice of thunderbolts may be tempered, and evil spirits flee and tremble before the standard of the holy cross, which is graven upon them.”

(White, Warfare between Science and Religion. i, 343.)

THE TRAGEDY OF THE “MYSTICAL MARRIAGE”

What to a Rationalist may seem a very inhuman superstition—though often attenuated by the clerical formula “With all my worldly goods I thee endow,” pronounced to his earthly vicar by the happy “Bride of Jesus Christ,” is the unctuously so-called Mystical Marriage, the nuptial ceremony whereby a deluded female enters into the joys of her Lord without actually sharing them. This holy mummery is thus described by the oft-cited Exponent of Catholic Truth:

“Christian virginity has been considered from the earliest centuries as a special offering made by the soul to its spouse, Christ. ... In many of the lives of the Saints, the mystical marriage consists of a vision in which Christ tells a soul that He takes it for His bride, presenting it with the customary ring, and the apparition is accompanied by a ceremony; the Blessed Virgin Mary, saints and angels are present. ... Moreover, as a wife should share in the life of her husband, and as Christ suffered for the redemption of mankind, the mystical bride enters into a more intimate participation of His sufferings,—[casus omissus being the sharing of the nuptial joys also involved in the notion of marriage]. Accordingly, in three cases out of four, the mystical marriage has been granted to stigmatics. History [priest-written, of course] has recorded seventy-seven mystical marriages, in connection with female saints, blesseds and venerables”;—a number of whom are named, including, appropriately, St. Mary Magdalene dei Pazza—“of the Crazy Ones”—as were they all. (CE. ix, 703.) ²³⁷

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