Sunday Sermonette: Horror Stories
Halloween is coming. One of the changes since I was a boy is that people now decorate for Halloween, even more elaborately than they decorate for Christmas. My neighborhood is full of inflatable animatronic ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggity beasties and things that go bump in the night.
We didn't have that back when I was a boy. Back then, if you wanted to be frightened out of your wits and your parents wouldn't let you watch the Creature Feature, you had to go to church.
The Catholic Church has always been creepy. As a young altar boy, I could scare myself witless with my overactive imagination. Being alone darkened church as the first to arrive to prepare for a service was the best. There were looming statues and the creaks and groans of the wood and the rattle and moans of the ancient heating system. If that wasn’t enough, there was the thought of how many dead people had spent their final moments above ground right where I was now standing.
"All altars have dead people in them," an older altar boy told me at the first Funeral Mass I served. I was just starting out, in the cassock and surplice my mother had sewn for me (did you know there are Simplicity patterns for sacerdotal vestments?). I'd never heard that before, but there were a whole lot of things I didn't know. There certainly seemed to be similarities between the big altar draped in embroidered cloth and the casket draped in an embroidered pall positioned in front of it.
In fact, he was right. The altar doesn't hold a whole dead body, just a part of one. According to the post-Vatican II General Instruction of the Roman Missal, Canon 1237 §2: The ancient tradition of placing relics of Martyrs or of other Saints within a fixed altar is to be retained, in accordance with the rites prescribed in the liturgical books.
The Catholic Church seems to fetishize death, ghoulishly preserving parts of bodies and displaying them to an adoring public. At the moment, the right arm and hand - well, the bony remains of it - of Saint Francis Xavier is on tour to churches in Australia. Xavier may have died over 500 years ago, but his arm actually had its own seat on the flight from Rome to Australia, accompanied by a priest.
Why the right arm? Because it is the best and holiest part of that particular saint. His right arm, the arm he used to bless and baptize, was detached from his corpse in 1614 and has lived in special reliquary every since.
For the benefit of you heathen non-Catholics, there are three classes of relics. A First Class relic is some physical remains of the saint, like bones, hair, or other body parts. The more closely associated the body part with the saint's history, the better the relic. If a saint was a pilgrim, his foot bones are considered most sacred. A bishop's right arm is better than his feet; a theologian's head is better than his right arm. Saint Ives, that grinning fellow on the right, was a 13th century canon lawyer. Other first-class relics are items directly related to the life of Christ: like a bit of the True Cross, thorns from the Crown of Thorns, and so on.
A Second Class relic is anything that the saint wore or handled regularly: a tunic or a prayer book, for example. As with first class relics, the more central the object was to the saint's life and ministry, the more important the relic.
A Third Class relic is anything has been touched to a first- or second-class relic. If you take a bolt of cloth and touch it to a reliquary containing a chip of bone from Saint Swithin, you can then cut up the cloth into tiny pieces and have hundreds of thousands of third-class relics of Saint Swithin.
Like I said, the Catholic Church is creepy. Christianity is the only religion whose symbol is a ghastly instrument of bloody, barbaric death by torture. Catholics go even further - they like to show the battered and mutilated corpse still nailed to it. They don't care if something is an arrant fraud or confirmed forgery - they'll still venerate splinters of the True Cross or the Shroud of Turin.
There's also the belief that Jesus was a revenant. I guess you'd technically refer to him as a lich. But that's not unique to the Roman church - all Christians believe that.
What is unique to Catholicism is ritual cannibalism. Catholics, not usually known as biblical literalists, claim that if Jesus said it, he meant it, and he said bread and wine are really his flesh and blood. Bible-thumping fundamentalist Protestants who’ll tell you that the universe was created in six literal days a mere six thousand years ago insist that this particular saying of Jesus is only a metaphor, but not Catholics.
Then there were the martyrs. I don't know if it was merely my parochial school education or the morbid interest in such things common to boys, but I remember reading all kinds of gruesome stories about how various saints met their untimely ends. Saint Lawrence, roasted on a griddle. Saint Catherine, broken on the wheel. Saint Lucy, eyes gouged out. Saint Agatha, breasts ripped off. Saint Vitale having his limbs dislocated on the rack, and so on. And on. And on.
Finally, there was the ever-present threat of eternal anguish and torment in Hell. What's the worst thing you can imagine? Hell is worse even than that. Flaying alive? Evisceration? Burning in unquenchable fire, hair frizzling and skin blackening and eyeballs popping? That’s just the beginning. All because you touched yourself and were hit by a bus before you could make a good Confession.
Who needs a haunted house or a scary movie? Just go to church!
We didn't have that back when I was a boy. Back then, if you wanted to be frightened out of your wits and your parents wouldn't let you watch the Creature Feature, you had to go to church.
The Catholic Church has always been creepy. As a young altar boy, I could scare myself witless with my overactive imagination. Being alone darkened church as the first to arrive to prepare for a service was the best. There were looming statues and the creaks and groans of the wood and the rattle and moans of the ancient heating system. If that wasn’t enough, there was the thought of how many dead people had spent their final moments above ground right where I was now standing.
"All altars have dead people in them," an older altar boy told me at the first Funeral Mass I served. I was just starting out, in the cassock and surplice my mother had sewn for me (did you know there are Simplicity patterns for sacerdotal vestments?). I'd never heard that before, but there were a whole lot of things I didn't know. There certainly seemed to be similarities between the big altar draped in embroidered cloth and the casket draped in an embroidered pall positioned in front of it.
In fact, he was right. The altar doesn't hold a whole dead body, just a part of one. According to the post-Vatican II General Instruction of the Roman Missal, Canon 1237 §2: The ancient tradition of placing relics of Martyrs or of other Saints within a fixed altar is to be retained, in accordance with the rites prescribed in the liturgical books.
The Catholic Church seems to fetishize death, ghoulishly preserving parts of bodies and displaying them to an adoring public. At the moment, the right arm and hand - well, the bony remains of it - of Saint Francis Xavier is on tour to churches in Australia. Xavier may have died over 500 years ago, but his arm actually had its own seat on the flight from Rome to Australia, accompanied by a priest.
Why the right arm? Because it is the best and holiest part of that particular saint. His right arm, the arm he used to bless and baptize, was detached from his corpse in 1614 and has lived in special reliquary every since.
For the benefit of you heathen non-Catholics, there are three classes of relics. A First Class relic is some physical remains of the saint, like bones, hair, or other body parts. The more closely associated the body part with the saint's history, the better the relic. If a saint was a pilgrim, his foot bones are considered most sacred. A bishop's right arm is better than his feet; a theologian's head is better than his right arm. Saint Ives, that grinning fellow on the right, was a 13th century canon lawyer. Other first-class relics are items directly related to the life of Christ: like a bit of the True Cross, thorns from the Crown of Thorns, and so on.
A Second Class relic is anything that the saint wore or handled regularly: a tunic or a prayer book, for example. As with first class relics, the more central the object was to the saint's life and ministry, the more important the relic.
A Third Class relic is anything has been touched to a first- or second-class relic. If you take a bolt of cloth and touch it to a reliquary containing a chip of bone from Saint Swithin, you can then cut up the cloth into tiny pieces and have hundreds of thousands of third-class relics of Saint Swithin.
Like I said, the Catholic Church is creepy. Christianity is the only religion whose symbol is a ghastly instrument of bloody, barbaric death by torture. Catholics go even further - they like to show the battered and mutilated corpse still nailed to it. They don't care if something is an arrant fraud or confirmed forgery - they'll still venerate splinters of the True Cross or the Shroud of Turin.
There's also the belief that Jesus was a revenant. I guess you'd technically refer to him as a lich. But that's not unique to the Roman church - all Christians believe that.
What is unique to Catholicism is ritual cannibalism. Catholics, not usually known as biblical literalists, claim that if Jesus said it, he meant it, and he said bread and wine are really his flesh and blood. Bible-thumping fundamentalist Protestants who’ll tell you that the universe was created in six literal days a mere six thousand years ago insist that this particular saying of Jesus is only a metaphor, but not Catholics.
Then there were the martyrs. I don't know if it was merely my parochial school education or the morbid interest in such things common to boys, but I remember reading all kinds of gruesome stories about how various saints met their untimely ends. Saint Lawrence, roasted on a griddle. Saint Catherine, broken on the wheel. Saint Lucy, eyes gouged out. Saint Agatha, breasts ripped off. Saint Vitale having his limbs dislocated on the rack, and so on. And on. And on.
Finally, there was the ever-present threat of eternal anguish and torment in Hell. What's the worst thing you can imagine? Hell is worse even than that. Flaying alive? Evisceration? Burning in unquenchable fire, hair frizzling and skin blackening and eyeballs popping? That’s just the beginning. All because you touched yourself and were hit by a bus before you could make a good Confession.
Who needs a haunted house or a scary movie? Just go to church!