RELICS IN GENERAL, AND THE IRON CROWN OF LOMBARDY IN PARTICULAR.
ROME, _December 23, 1902_.
I had heard of relics before. Years ago I had read Mark Twain's account
of the large piece of the true cross which he had seen in a church in
the Azores; and of another piece which he had seen in the Cathedral
of Notre Dame in Paris, besides some nails of the true cross and a
part of the crown of thorns; and of the marble chest in the Cathedral
of San Lorenzo at Genoa, which he was told contained the ashes of St.
John, and was wound about with the chain that had confined St. John
when he was in prison; and of the interesting collection shown him in
the Cathedral of Milan, including two of St. Paul's fingers and one
of St. Peter's, a bone of Judas Iscariot (black, not white), and also
bones of all the other disciples (presumably of the normal color), a
handkerchief in which the Saviour had left the impression of his face,
part of the crown of thorns, a fragment of the purple robe worn by
Christ, a picture of the Virgin and Child painted by St. Luke, and a
nail from the cross--adding in another place that he thought he had
seen in all not less than a keg of these nails.
But I had hardly taken Mark Twain seriously in these statements, not
knowing at the time that his _Innocents Abroad_ was, notwithstanding
its broad humor, really one of the best guide-books to Europe that was
ever written.
[Sidenote: The Palladium of Venice.]
I had read repeatedly the story of the bringing of St. Mark's bones
from Alexandria, in Egypt, to their present resting-place in St. Mark's
Cathedral at Venice--a story which is related as follows in that same
lively volume:
"St. Mark died at Alexandria, in Egypt. He was martyred, I think.
However, that has nothing to do with my legend. About the founding of
the city of Venice--say four hundred and fifty years after Christ--(for
Venice is much younger than any other Italian city), a priest dreamed
that an angel told him that until the remains of St. Mark were brought
to Venice, the city could never rise to high distinction among the
nations; that the body must be captured, brought to the city, and
a magnificent church built over it; and that if ever the Venetians
allowed the Saint to be removed from his new resting-place, in that
day Venice would perish from off the face of the earth. The priest
proclaimed his dream, and forthwith Venice set about procuring the
corpse of St. Mark. One expedition after another tried and failed, but
the project was never abandoned during four hundred years. At last it
was secured by stratagem, in the year eight hundred and something.
The commander of the Venetian expedition disguised himself, stole the
bones, separated them, and packed them in vessels filled with lard. The
religion of Mahomet causes its devotees to abhor anything in the nature
of pork, and so when the Christian was stopped at the gate of the city,
they only glanced once into the precious baskets, then turned up their
noses at the unholy lard, and let him go. The bones were buried in
the vaults of the grand cathedral, which had been waiting long years
to receive them, and thus the safety and the greatness of Venice were
secured. And to this day there be those in Venice who believe that if
those holy ashes were stolen away, the ancient city would vanish like a
dream, and its foundation be buried forever in the unremembering sea."
[Sidenote: The Gift of Leo XIII. to London.]
More recently I had read of what has been well called the burlesque
enacted at Arundel Castle no longer ago than in July, 1902, in which
the Duke of Norfolk, Cardinal Vaughan, and many lesser ornaments and
dignitaries of the Romish Church, took part.
"Pope Leo XIII., in order to show his 'good-will to England,'
sent from Rome the remains of St. Edmund to garnish the new Roman
Catholic cathedral at Westminster. It was an appropriate gift, for
such buildings are usually garnished with 'dead men's bones and all
uncleanness.' But as the cathedral is not yet finished, as a further
token of good-will, the relics were committed to the care of no less
a personage than the Earl Marshal of England. They arrived at Arundel
on the evening of July 25th, and were placed for the night in Fitzalen
Chapel. The next morning the whole castle was astir betimes, for the
great event of the day, the transference of the bones to the castle
chapel, was to take place. This was accomplished in a solemn and
befitting manner. A procession was formed, and, to the measured tread
of the Earl Marshal of England, Cardinal Vaughan, several archbishops
and bishops, and a mixed company of priests and acolytes and a numerous
train of household servants and dependents, carrying banners, crosses,
crucifixes, censers, lamps, candles, torches, and other ecclesiastical
stage paraphernalia, the remains of St. Edmund were borne to their
resting-place. All went off well, and at last the curtain fell on
the finished play, to the satisfaction of every one. Unfortunately,
however, the Pope and all concerned had to reckon with English
common-sense and with English love of truth, and it was not very long
before it was proved to the world that the bones, like most relics of
the kind, were counterfeit--whoever else's bones they were, they were
not those of St. Edmund."[7]
[Sidenote: The Blood of St. Januarius.]
I had read with cordial approval Mark Twain's animadversions upon the
fraud which is regularly practiced on the people of Naples by the
priests in the Cathedral:
"In this city of Naples they believe in and support one of the
wretchedest of all religious impostures one can find in Italy--the
miraculous liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius. Twice a year
the priests assemble all the people at the Cathedral, and get out
this phial of clotted blood, and let them see it slowly dissolve
and become liquid; and every day for eight days this dismal farce
is repeated, while the priests go among the crowd and collect money
for the exhibition. The first day the blood liquefies in forty-seven
minutes--the church is full then, and time must be allowed the
collectors to get around; after a while it liquefies a little quicker
and a little quicker every day, as the houses grow smaller, till on
the eighth day, with only a few dozen present to see the miracle, it
liquefies in four minutes.[8]
"And here, also, they used to have a grand procession
of priests, citizens, soldiers, sailors, and the high dignitaries
of the city government, once a year, to shave the head of a made-up
Madonna--a stuffed and painted image, like the milliner's dummy--whose
hair miraculously grew and restored itself every twelve months. They
still kept up this shaving procession as late as four or five years
ago. It was a source of great profit to the church that possessed the
remarkable effigy, and the public barbering of her was always carried
out with the greatest _éclat_ and display--the more the better, because
the more excitement there was about it the larger the crowds it drew
and the heavier the revenues it produced--but at last the day came
when the Pope and his servants were unpopular in Naples, and the city
government stopped the Madonna's annual show.
"There we have two specimens of these Neapolitans--two of the silliest
possible frauds, which half the population religiously and faithfully
believed, and the other half either believed or else said nothing
about, and thus lent themselves to the support of the imposture."
[Sidenote: The House of the Virgin at Loretto.]
I had read the story of the _Casa Santa_, or Holy House, the little
stone building, thirteen and one-half feet high and twenty-eight feet
long, in which the Virgin Mary had lived at Nazareth. In 336 the
Empress Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, made a pilgrimage
to Nazareth and built a church over the Holy House. This church fell
into decay when the Saracens again got the upper hand in Palestine,
and when the Christians lost Ptolemais the Holy House was carried by
angels through the air from Nazareth to the coast of Dalmatia. This
miraculous transportation took place in 1291. A few years later it
was again removed by angels during the night, and set down in the
Province of Ancona, near the eastern coast of Italy, on the ground
of a widow named _Laureta_. Hence the name, _Loretto_, given to the
town which sprang up around it for the accommodation of the thousands
of pilgrims who flocked thither, and which is now a place of some six
thousand inhabitants, whose principal business is begging and the sale
of rosaries, medals and images. In a niche inside the Casa Santa is a
small black image of the Virgin and Child, of cedar, attributed, of
course, to St. Luke. We did not visit Loretto, but at Bologna we had
the satisfaction of seeing a _fac-simile_ of the Casa Santa, with its
little window and fireplace, and the replica of St. Luke's handi-work
in the niche above. A large number of women, some of them handsomely
dressed, were saying their prayers and counting their beads before
the altar that had been erected in front of these images and the Holy
House, and a few were kneeling in the narrow space behind the altar,
close to the fireplace of the house. As we passed, one of these women,
in plainer garb, interrupted her devotions long enough to hold out her
hand to us, begging for pennies, but without rising from her knees.
There was nothing unusual about this, except that this beggar made her
appeal to us while actually on her knees to the image of the Virgin,
for nothing is more common in Italy than for visitors to a Roman
Catholic church to pass through such "an avenue of palms" when leaving
it.
[Sidenote: The Wonder-working Bones of St. Anne in Canada.]
I had even seen a few relics, not mere reproductions like that of the
Casa Santa at Bologna, but the relics themselves. For instance, three
summers ago, when in Quebec, I had made a special trip to the Church
of St. Anne Beaupre, some twenty miles below the city, for the purpose
of seeing the wonder-working relics of St. Anne, the alleged mother
of the Virgin Mary--a bit of her finger bone and a bit of her wrist
bone--which are devoutly kissed and adored by thousands of pilgrims
to this magnificent church from all the French and Irish portions of
Canada, and which are said to have wrought miraculous cures of all
manner of maladies, cures which are attested by two immense stacks
of canes, crutches, wooden legs, and the like, which rise from the
floor almost to the roof on either side of the entrance. In the store
in another part of the church I had got a clue to it all by seeing
the poor pilgrims buying all sorts of cheap, tawdry, worthless little
images and pictures, and especially little vials of oil of remarkable
curative virtue because it had stood for a while before the image of
St. Anne, and for which they paid probably five times as much as the
oil had cost the priests who were selling it.
[Sidenote: The Iron Crown of Lombardy.]
These, then, are potent bones and images and oils, but by far the
most interesting relic I had seen before reaching Rome itself was the
Iron Crown of Lombardy, at Monza, a little town in Northern Italy.
This is the place where the good King Humbert was assassinated on the
29th of July, 1900, and it is not without interest for other reasons.
For instance, it has a cathedral built of black and white marble
in horizontal stripes, and containing, besides the tomb of Queen
Theodolinda and other interesting objects in the nave and its chapels,
a great number of costly articles of gold and silver, set with precious
stones, in the treasury, as well as various relics, such as some of the
baskets carried by the apostles, a piece of the Virgin Mary's veil,
and one of John the Baptist's teeth. But we should never have made a
special trip to Monza in such weather as we were having at the time of
our visit, last November, had it not been for our intense desire to see
its chief treasure, the Iron Crown, the most sacred and most celebrated
diadem in the world, a relic possessing real historical interest, not
because of any probability whatever in the story of its origin, but
because of the extraordinary uses and associations of it within the
last thousand years.
[Sidenote: A Winter Trip to Monza.]
So, regardless of the wet, cold, foggy weather that we found in
Milan, and the rivers of mud and slush that were then doing duty for
streets, and the splotches of snow that lay here and there in the
forlorn-looking olive orchards, we took the electric tram, which was
comfortably heated, and ran out to Monza, a distance of some ten miles.
When we stepped into the chilly cathedral and looked about us, we could
not at first see anybody to show us around, though there were a good
many poor people saying their prayers there. Evidently the custodians
were not expecting tourists at such a season and in such weather.
But presently, in an apartment to the left, we found a number of the
priests warming their hands over a dish of twig coals covered with a
light layer of white ashes, which they kindly stirred a little to make
them give forth more heat as they saw us stretch our cold hands also
towards the grateful warmth.
[Sidenote: The Treasury of the Cathedral.]
When we asked if we could see the Iron Crown, they said we could; but
instead of going at once to the chapel in which it is kept, they got a
great bag of keys, large keys, thirty-seven in number, as the observant
statistician of our party ascertained, and led us into the treasury and
unlocked a great number of doors (one of which had seven locks), and
showed us the costly objects and precious relics above mentioned. We
were only mildly interested in these--even in the apostolic baskets,
the Virgin's veil, and John the Baptist's tooth--partly because we were
so cold and partly because of our greater interest in the more famous
relic which we had come especially to see.
[Sidenote: The Chapel of the Great Relic.]
At last one of the priests, attended by an acolyte, took up a censer,
placed a little incense on the coals with a teaspoon, and, swinging it
in his hand by the chain, led us back into the cathedral, turned to
a chapel on the left, unlocked an iron gate in a tall railing which
separated this chapel from the body of the building, closed the gate
again when our party had come inside, and, while a dozen or so of
the people who had been at their devotions crowded up to the railing
and peered curiously through, he and his attendant began to kneel
repeatedly before the altar and to swing the smoking censer on every
side. Above the altar was a strong, square steel box, over which, in
plain view, was suspended a _fac-simile_ of the Iron Crown, made of
cheaper materials, while the real crown was still concealed within the
steel safe.
[Sidenote: The Great Relic itself.]
Handing the censer to his attendant, that it might be kept swinging
without intermission, the priest produced another series of keys and
proceeded to unlock a succession of small doors in the side of the
metal safe, which proved to be a "nest" of caskets, one within another,
the last of which was a glass case. Drawing this out, he brought into
full view the venerated crown of the Lombard kings, and told us to step
up on the stool by the altar so as to see it better. It is made of six
plates of gold, joined end to end, richly chased, and set with splendid
jewels. But one would see at a glance that neither the material, nor
the workmanship, nor the gems, could account for the unique reverence
with which it has been regarded for centuries, and an indication of
which we had just seen in the service conducted by the priest. Among
the regalia in the Tower of London, and at several other places in
Europe, we had seen crowns which far surpassed this one in costliness
and beauty, but none of which, nor all of which combined, had ever
excited a thousandth part of the interest attaching to this old crown
in Monza.
[Sidenote: Why the Crown is so Sacred.]
The explanation is this: within that ring of jointed plates of gold
runs a thin band of iron, which priestly tradition says was made of one
of the spikes that fastened the feet of our Lord Jesus Christ to the
cross. It was this band of iron that we tiptoed to see, hardly noticing
the bejewelled rim of gold around it. It was on account of this band of
iron that the priest and his attendant swung their censer and performed
their ceremony as we entered. It was this band of iron that gave to the
crown its sacred place above the altar. It was for the safe keeping of
this band of iron that the steel case, with its numerous locks, was
made. It was from this band of iron that the diadem received its name,
the Iron Crown of Lombardy.
[Sidenote: How it was Used by Charlemagne and Napoleon.]
And what were the historical uses of it, referred to above, which made
it so much more interesting to us than the many other so-called nails
of the true cross elsewhere? Well, this among others: on the last
Christmas day of the eighth century, while Charlemagne was kneeling
with uncovered head before the high altar of St. Peter's in Rome,
the Pope approached him from behind, and, placing the Iron Crown of
Lombardy on his head, hailed him as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.
A thousand years later on the 26th of May, 1805, Napoleon Bonaparte,
"watched by an apparently invincible army which adored him and a world
which feared him," standing in the vast marble cathedral at Milan,
with fifteen thousand of his soldiers around him, lifted this same
Iron Crown of Lombardy into their view, and placed it upon his brow,
saying, "God has given it to me, let him touch it who dares!"
[Sidenote: High Reflections and Hard Cash.]
That men who, like Charlemagne and Napoleon, had reached the highest
pinnacle of human power, should seek to enhance their influence by
crowning their heads with one of the nails which, as their followers
believed, had pierced the Galilean's foot, is a richly suggestive fact.
But we must keep our tempted thoughts to another and less edifying line
at present.
When we had examined all the parts of the famous crown to our
satisfaction, we stepped to the desk in the ante-room and paid our five
francs (one dollar), the regular price for the exhibition of the Iron
Crown, then left the cathedral, bought one or two post-card pictures of
the crown, and took the tram through the dreary weather back to Milan,
well pleased with the results of our first pilgrimage to the shrine of
a real Roman Catholic relic in Italy.
[Sidenote: Rome Caps the Climax.]
But on our arrival at Rome, a month later, we found that, interesting
as were the relics which we had seen or read of elsewhere, they were
nothing to those in the Eternal City itself. In this, as in everything
else except such little matters as cleanliness and morality and
truthfulness and honesty, Rome outvies all her rivals. It is only fair
to add, however, that, since the overthrow of the papal sovereignty and
the establishment of a capable government, Rome has improved immensely
in the matter of cleanliness, and even her immorality is not so
flaunting as it was. This is attested by the Hon. Guiseppe Zanardelli,
the present Premier of Italy, who says:
"The church appears better than it once was. I no longer see in Rome
what I used often to see in my young days, ladies driving about its
streets with their coachmen and footmen in the liveries of their
respective cardinals. Has this improvement come about because the
church is really growing better? Nothing of the kind. It is because the
strong arm of the law checks the villainy of the priests." That is the
testimony of the Prime Minister of Italy.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Do American Roman Catholics Believe in the Relics?]
A few weeks after my return from Italy, while driving one afternoon
with a friend of mine, a lawyer of high intelligence and wide
information, our conversation turned to the subject of the recent death
of Pope Leo XIII., and from that drifted to the alleged liquefaction
of the blood of St. Januarius, and from that to relics in general. I
mentioned some of the facts above stated concerning the numerous pieces
of the true cross and the miracle-working bones and oils to be seen in
Roman Catholic churches in Europe. "But," he said, "surely the Roman
Catholics in America do not believe in such mediæval superstitions."
I happened to have in hand a couple of copies of a daily newspaper,
published in one of our Southern towns, dated August 9, 1903, and
August 17, 1903, respectively, containing extracts from the letters of
a Roman Catholic bishop, the highest dignitary of his church in that
State; and, for answer to my friend's remark, I cited the following
passage from the bishop's letter of July 10th, written from Munich,
concerning the abbey church of Scheyern:
"The chapel of the Holy Cross is specially sacred, as within is
preserved a very large piece of the true cross upon which Christ was
crucified, brought to Scheyern in 1156 by Count Conrad, the Crusader,
who afterwards entered the monastery as lay-brother, and lies buried
near the altar upon which the sacred relic is preserved."
Also the following passage from his letter of July 12th, written from
Eichstadt:
"I remained the guest of Prince Ahrenberg for the night, and early
in the morning, accompanied by some Benedictine students, I made a
pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Walburg. Above the altar is the large
silver receptacle into which flows the miraculous oil from her sacred
relics, which is known the world over."
[Sidenote: What America Needs is Some Relics.]
Writing from Vienna, July 20, 1903, concerning the imperial palaces,
he says, "They are awfully big and grand, and cost a lot of good
people's money," but adds that "the pride and glory of Vienna" is the
Cathedral, and then exclaims: "How often have I wished we could have
some such church in ----, so that our good people who cannot visit the
achievements of Catholic life in Europe could form some idea of the
greatness of the religion of their fathers!"
One hesitates to differ from so good an authority on such matters as
this bishop, but really would he not agree, on reflection, that what
this benighted and decaying country of ours needs to bring it up to a
level with Italy and Austria and Spain is not a big church, but some
relics? Would not some miraculous oil, or some wonder-working bones, or
a piece of the true cross, or one of the nails, if placed on exhibition
here attract far more attention than a big church, and enable "our good
people who cannot visit the achievements of Catholic life in Europe"
to form a much better "idea of the greatness of the religion of their
fathers"? Does it not seem strange that so many hundreds of these
relics should be kept in those enlightened and happy countries like
Italy, where "the achievements of Catholic life" are so well known,
and where Mother Church has for centuries had full sway, and that none
of them should be brought to these benighted Protestant regions, where
they could effect such a salutary change in the faith of the people?
But, seriously, as I added to my friend in the conversation referred
to, I have a better opinion of the intelligence of our good Roman
Catholic people in America than to believe that they put the slightest
credence in these childish superstitions. Whatever the bishop above
quoted may believe, I am confident that the intelligent Roman Catholic
people of our country have no more faith in many of these alleged
relics than we have.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] _The Roman Catholic Church in Italy_, Alexander Robertson, pp. 203,
204.
[8] In July of this year, 1903, while the Roman Catholic world was
greatly exercised over the grave illness of the late Pope, Leo XIII.,
the Associated Press dispatches from Naples reported that the blood of
St. Januarius had miraculously liquefied at that unusual time in token
that the prayers offered for the Pope's recovery had been answered.
The Archbishop of Naples has up to the present time vouchsafed
no explanation of the fact that the Pope died a few days later,
notwithstanding this miraculous assurance that he would recover.