When the saints go marching in

My mom was an extremely devout Roman Catholic, and I still recall her instructing me to "pray to St. Jude" when I was worried about a bad outcome.

At some point I thought to ask her, "Why St. Jude?"

"Because he's the patron saint of lost causes," she explained.

I pondered on that for a moment.  "If he's in charge of lost causes," I finally said, "wouldn't he be the worst person to pray to?  Shouldn't I be asking for help from someone with a better track record?"

My mom, who had many fine qualities but was born without a sense of humor, didn't appreciate my attempt at levity.  She took her saints seriously.

St. Jude is hardly the only Catholic saint whose story is a little on the odd side.  Consider, for example, St. Rita of Cascia, who lived in the fifteenth century in Perugia, Italy.  Rita at first seemed like she was destined to live a completely ordinary life.  She was the daughter of a moderately wealthy couple in the town of Roccaporena, and upon reaching marrying age was wedded to a nobleman named Paolo di Ferdinando di Mancino.  Mancino turned out to be a nasty piece of work, and was verbally and physically abusive to poor Rita, but by her "humility, kindness, and faith" she was able to convert him to better behavior.  They had two sons, Giangiacomo Antonio and Paulo Maria, and everything was going on swimmingly until a guy named Guido Chiqui, who belonged to a rival family, stabbed Mancino to death.

Well, Rita was understandably upset, especially after all the effort she'd put in to turn her husband into a nice guy, and she was even more chagrined to find out her two sons were planning on taking revenge and murdering Chiqui, so she prayed that they be spared from doing something that would land them both in hell forever.  God obliged by making them both die of dysentery.

So be careful what you pray for, I guess.

Rita, now husbandless and childless, decided to join a convent, where she died in 1457.  She's now the patron saint of abused people.

A painting of St. Rita of Cascia from her tomb [Image is in the Public Domain]

Then there's St. Lidwina of Schiedam, a fourteenth-century Dutch woman who was injured while ice skating at age fifteen, and afterward supposedly didn't need to eat anything.  Despite this -- and the alarming and bizarre claim that she "shed skin, bones, and parts of her intestines, which her parents kept in a vase and which gave off a sweet odor" --  she lived another thirty-seven years, and upon canonization became the patron saint of chronic illnesses... and ice skaters.

Seems like if I was an ice skater, I'd want to pray to someone who hadn't nearly died doing it, but that's just me.

Then there's the third-century St. Denis, who was a Christian bishop among the Parisii, a Gaulish tribe who lived along the banks of the River Seine (and for whom Paris is named).  St. Denis went around preaching, and apparently was so well-spoken that he converted a lot of local pagans, which pissed off the local authorities.  They appealed to the Roman Emperor Decius, who gave the order to arrest Denis and his friends Rusticus and Eleutherius.  After a stint in prison, all three were beheaded with a sword on the highest hill in the area -- what is now called Montmartre.

So far, nothing too odd.  But after Denis was beheaded, his body stood up, picked up his own head, and walked three miles with it, his head preaching a sermon the whole way.  At some point evidently even holiness couldn't propel him any further and he collapsed and died (again) -- on the site where the Basilica of St. Denis currently stands.  But this is why many images of St. Denis are shown with him holding his own head:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Thesupermat, Paris - Cathédrale Notre-Dame - Portail de la Vierge - PA00086250 - 003, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Besides being the patron saint of both Paris and France as a whole, guess what else St. Denis is the patron saint of?

Headaches.

Another third-century saint who is mostly famous for how he died is St. Lawrence, who came from the town of Huesca in Spain.  He preached all over southern Europe but got himself in trouble when he was in Rome in 258 C.E. by recommending redistribution of wealth to the poor.  (If you can imagine.)  The powers that be decided Lawrence needed to go, and they came up with a nasty way to do it -- they chained him to a grill and roasted him over an open fire.  Lawrence, defiant to the end, yelled at his executioners, "You can turn me over, I'm done on this side!"  And this is why he's the patron saint of cooks... and comedians.

But the weirdest claim I've seen along these lines is an obscure seventh-century British saint, St. Rumbold of Buckingham.  Rumbold was supposedly the grandson of King Penda of Mercia, who was a prominent pagan, but his parents (names unknown) converted to Christianity.  Rumbold was born in 662 C.E. and only lived three days -- but was born able to talk.  His first words were allegedly "Christianus sum, Christianus sum, Christianus sum!" ("I'm a Christian, I'm a Christian, I'm a Christian!"), which even if you're devout must have been creepy as hell.  Afterward Rumbold  politely requested baptism, and preached several sermons before expiring.  

There are several places named after him, including St. Rumbold's Well in Buckingham:

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Fractal Angel, St Rumbold's Well - geograph.org.uk - 423381, CC BY-SA 2.0]

The best part of the whole story, though, is that Boxley Abbey in Kent had a famous statue of St. Rumbold, that was small and light (because, of course, he was a baby), but sometimes inexplicably would become so heavy no one could lift it.  The deal was, the monks said, that only someone who was holy and pure of heart could lift the statue.  Well, when the Dissolution of the Monasteries happened during the sixteenth century, and Boxley Abbey was abandoned and largely torn down, it was discovered that the statue was fixed to its heavy stone base by a wooden pin that could be released by a person standing unseen behind the alcove.  So, basically, one of the monks would check out whoever was trying to lift the statue, and decide if they were holy enough to pull the pin for.

Sometimes even Miracles of God need a little human assistance, apparently.

Anyhow, that's our cavalcade of holiness for the day.  Unsurprisingly, I think the whole thing is kind of weird.  I feel bad for the saints who got martyred -- no one deserves that -- and even for poor St. Rita with her life-long run of bad luck.  I don't think I'll be praying to any of them, though, however much our country could use some help from St. Jude at the moment.

Or even from talking babies and guys walking around carrying their own severed heads.

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Leaps of faith

Sometimes my searching for topics for Skeptophilia leads me down some very peculiar rabbit holes.  Like yesterday, when (while looking for something else) I stumbled upon a link to a Wikipedia page called "Levitation of saints."  So of course I couldn't resist having a look at that.

And... wow.

Apparently there's a long tradition in Christianity that holy people can fly, or at least float.  I was raised in a staunchly Roman Catholic family, and as befits such an upbringing, I read the Bible and other religious texts regularly, but I had no idea about this.  Some of the stories don't come from the Bible directly but from hagiography (writings by and/or about saints), which understandably lead some people to take them with a substantial grain of salt (me, I take it all with a substantial grain of salt, but I suspect you already knew that).

In any case, apparently there were a good many saintly types who, if they didn't exactly fly, engaged in falling with style.  Here's an eighteenth-century engraving of a guy named Joseph of Cupertino, for example:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Is it just me, or does he look kind of freaked out by this?  From his expression it seems like he was out one day for a nice quiet walk through the Italian countryside, and suddenly WHOAAAA HOLY FUCK WHAT'S HAPPENING he got picked up bodily and hoisted aloft.  Joseph (who was, by the way, a real guy, and lived from 1603 to 1663) was a mystic and seer whom the local Franciscans didn't particularly like.  They thought he was a bit of an uneducated rube; one of the more literate church leaders of the time said Joseph was "remarkably unclever."  They finally admitted him to their order, albeit somewhat reluctantly.  It's clear they were kind of embarrassed by the whole claims-of-flying thing, but couldn't find a good reason to turn him away, so he joined up and spent the rest of his life as a Franciscan monk.

Skeptic Joe Nickell, after checking out contemporaneous writings describing Joseph of Cupertino's airborne acrobatics, was predictably unimpressed:

Joseph's most dramatic aerial traverses were launched by a leap—not by a simple slow rising while merely standing or kneeling—but, moreover, I find that they appear to have continued as just the sudden arcing trajectories that would be expected from bounding.  They were never circuitous or spiraling flights like a bird's.  Invariably, Joseph's propulsions began with a shout or scream, suggesting that he was not caused to leap by some force but chose to.

So I guess the only miracle here was his impressive hang time.  If the whole monk thing hadn't worked out for him, maybe he should have tried out for the local track-and-field team.

You'd have thought that the Franciscans would have been more accepting of Joseph of Cupertino's leaps of faith, though, because the founder of their order -- Saint Francis of Assisi -- supposedly did the same thing.  While praying, Francis sometimes was suspended in the air at a height of "three, or even four, cubits" (a meter and a half, give or take).  A century later, Saint Catherine of Siena also floated around the place while praying, and a priest reported that when he gave her Holy Communion, the host flew from his hand straight upward onto Catherine's tongue, an image I find bizarre and strangely hilarious.

Sort of a sanctified version of the chefs at the hibachi grill tossing cooked shrimp for customers to try to catch in their mouths.

So there's a long tradition of floating saints, apparently.  The problem was, there was another group of people who were thought by the religious authorities to be able to fly, and that was witches.  So how do you tell good flying from bad flying?  Even back in biblical days this was a problem, if you believe the story in the Acts of Peter (one of the books of the biblical apocrypha).  There was this guy named Simon Magus, who was impressing the hell out of everyone in the Roman Forum by levitating, and told the crowds that he was a god.  Well, the Apostle Peter was having none of that, so he prayed for God to put an end to it, and Simon suddenly fell to the ground and broke both his legs.  The crowds (who were evidently a bit on the fickle side) immediately stoned Simon Magus to death.

Which hardly seems fair.  I mean, the guy had been flying, right?  It was hardly Simon's fault that Peter the Killjoy got involved and spoiled the show.

In any case, the religious powers-that-be never seemed particularly comfortable with people levitating.  By the sixteenth century, the Inquisition kind of decided it was all bad, and discouraged flying for everyone.

Because forbidding something that no one can actually do is pretty much a sure bet.

In any case, these days none of the hyperreligous types are claiming they can levitate.  Which I think is kind of a shame.  Hey, if Joseph of Cupertino, Francis of Assisi, and Catherine of Siena could do it, you'd think Franklin Graham, Kenneth Copeland, Joel Osteen, and Jerry Falwell, Jr. should be able to.

At least I'd like to see them try, wouldn't you?

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On a mission

There's something inherently odd about missionaries.

Now, I've met some nice ones.  There were a couple of Mormons who dropped by last fall to chat with me about religion, and when I told them (amiably) that I was an atheist and really didn't think they'd convince me otherwise, they offered to help me stack firewood.  I told them no, but I was kind of touched that they thought that since they couldn't help me in one way, they'd give a shot at helping with another.

Then, there were the Jehovah's Witnesses, both female, who rang my doorbell on a blisteringly hot day a couple of summers ago.  I was in the front yard weeding the garden, and heard them talking -- and I came out from around the corner of the house, shirtless, dripping with sweat, and disgustingly grimy.  They looked a little shocked, but it was too late to retreat gracefully.  That was one conversion attempt that I think they were perfectly glad to terminate unsuccessfully.

So it takes a good degree of bravery to go on a mission, even in the relatively safe territory of the rural United States.  You never know what you're going to run into -- and it could, of course, be much worse than half-naked gardeners.  Add to that the additional risk of missionary work in other countries, where you could be putting your safety or even your life at risk, and you have to have some grudging admiration for these folks.

But even so, there's something a little... condescending about the concept of missionaries.  "Hey, you're probably wrong about everything you believe," they seem to be saying.  "And since I'm right, let me tell you all about it!"  Where they've been successful, missionaries have done a pretty fine job of eradicating not only preexisting religions, but local culture, artifacts, traditions, and sometimes language as well.

Which is why the proposal by Pope Francis I to canonize Father Junipero Serra, the founder of 21 missions in 18th century California, has met with some pretty stiff opposition.

Serra has been hailed by Catholic leaders as the man who brought Catholicism to California, and who was responsible for educating the Native Americans who lived there -- the latter claim being pretty patronizing in and of itself, given that people who had lived successfully in a place for millennia can hardly be regarded as "uneducated" just because they couldn't read and write Spanish.  As far as Serra's treatment of the Natives -- while he and his followers didn't rush in and kill them all, like their countrymen the Conquistadors did in Central and South America, he certainly didn't treat them like equals.  Serra wrote:

The view that spiritual fathers should punish their sons, the Indians, with blows appears to be as old as the conquest of the Americas; so general in fact that the saints do not seem to be any exception to the rule.

Whatever you think of his intentions and his methods, the outcome is certain; the Natives were forced to abandon their languages, customs, and kinship ties in favor of Serra's imposed Spanish culture and religion.  Miranda Ramirez, whose Native ancestry can be traced back to people who were part of the Carmel Mission, said, "We lost everything (because of Serra)...  We were not allowed to be with our people. We lost contact with cousins, we lost the family ties.  Our language was gone."

Steven Hackel, who has written a biography of Serra, was equally critical.  "One can point to certain moments in the historical record when Serra does protect Indians," Hackel said in an interview with Al Jazeera America.  "But the larger story I think is one in which his policies and his plans led to tremendous pain and suffering, most of it unintended on his part, among Native peoples.  If one looks at the legacy of Serra's missions and what he was trying to do in California, there's no question that his goal was to radically alter Native culture, to have Indians not speak their Native languages, to practice Spanish culture, to transform Native belief patterns in ways that would make them much less Native.  He really did want to eliminate many aspects of Native culture."

Not only did Serra's actions eradicate the cultures that were already there, his insistence that the Natives abandon their villages and land has led to a further injustice -- the United States government only recognizes Native American tribes who have had uninterrupted cultural identity as meriting legally recognized membership.  Since the tribes that Serra converted back in the 18th century lost everything, even their languages, today they can't get federal recognition of their status as Natives.  Writes Karen Klein, in her piece for the Los Angeles Times entitled "What California Indians Lost Under Junipero Serra":

Because the missions mixed different Native American groups together and forced all of them to give up much of their cultural identity, many of these groups cannot meet the requirements of continuous cultural and geographical identity required to be federally recognized tribes, with the many benefits such recognition bestows. It’s one of the most painful ironies in California history — robbed of their culture by white missions the first time, and then, because of that first theft, robbed by the U.S. government a second time. 

The pope cited Serra’s role as the “evangelizer of the West” in announcing his canonization. But many see his role more as one of forced conversion rather than persuasive evangelism. I’m sure the pope realizes this; the church has recognized in the past, at least, that there were some serious problems with California’s early mission history. Perhaps that seems like a regrettable but small part of the story from the viewpoint of the Vatican, but here in California, the irreparable harm done to Native Americans is not easily minimized.

I know the argument in Serra's favor -- that he was a man of his time, that he honestly thought he was helping the Natives because he believed that without his intervention, they'd burn in hell for all eternity.  Nonetheless, there's the troubling fact that his efforts pretty much singlehandedly destroyed an entire culture.

So what do you do with someone who is acting out of what, for them, are pure motives, but who nonetheless (1) uses questionable means to attain those ends, and (2) is probably wrong in any case?  The Muslim leaders in the Middle East who advocate publicly flogging and/or decapitating heretics are, after all, operating from much the same worldview.  Better to punish one person severely for errors of faith rather than have everyone face the wrath of Allah.

My own view, of course, is pretty unequivocal; the whole shebang is really just a bunch of antiquated superstition, and no one has a right to push anyone else into belief.  Or disbelief, for that matter.  We all are capable of using our brains, and if given the freedom, to evaluate the evidence we have and decide how we think the universe works.

No missionaries necessary.

And to put it bluntly, that the Roman Catholic religion produced people like Serra should be more a cause for shame than celebration.