Okay, this is downright silly. And bizarre. And, well, I don’t even know.
You can now purchase the fragrance once worn by Pope Pius IX. The ads read: “Private formula. Historic, refreshing aftershave! A wonderful gift! Free shipping.”
You know, I’ve never heard or read of people meeting His Holiness and saying, “Your Holiness, you smell mahvelous!”
Adding to his evidence (never stated outright as such) that Padre Pio’s stigmata may have somehow been manufactured, Sergio Luzzatto (in Padre Pio: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age) explains in great detail how, when it happened, the Italian people were attempting to understand their suffering during World War I.
Remember that the stigmata event was recorded as happening on September 20, 1918 — after a series of setbacks for the Italians, already several years of suffering, and horrors of trench warfare that had never before been witnessed. Padre Pio returned from the war (he was an enlisted priest/soldier), had his experience, and rapidly became an “Italian Jesus.” Within a year, pilgrims were flocking to see him in droves, and the friar’s ongoing suffering was viewed as redemptive for all of Italy.
Join me beginning Monday for a week of ongoing book review of this fascinating new study.
Italian historian Sergio Luzzatto writes beautifully (and the translation from the Italian is well-done), documents his research thoroughly, and mixes contemporary and cultural references with traditional doctrine and hagiographical analysis. At the start of his book, he cites a recent Italian study that today’s Italians venerate St. Padre Pio more than St. Francis of Assisi, the Virgin Mary, and even Jesus. All the more reason why this critical biography is so needed.
When it comes to a triptych of a saint’s martyrdom, I find I can’t look away. Almost like a traffic accident. http://bit.ly/gL39Kv
Beginning Sunday, February 6, through February 11, I will be reviewing an important new book about Padre Pio. It is the first serious biographical study of the man, mysticism, and controversies surrounding this incredibly popular 20th century saint.
The book is written by a prominent Italian historian, now translated into English for the first time. Join me Feb. 6-11.
This will be an interesting discussion, as it relates to so many of the persistent themes you’ve been seeing on the Almost Catholic blog (and in my Almost Catholic book) for the last few years.
Today is the feast of St. Lucia (also known as St. Lucy), the patron of writers. To be honest, I’m not quite sure how she ever came to be our patron, but I certainly like her story!
She was a beautiful Sicilian girl, engaged against her will–a common occurrence in former days–to a man she did not love or even care for. She chose, instead, to dedicate her life to God. But the fiance would have nothing of it. Refusing to be spurned by this girl without getting even, he outed Lucia as a Christian to the local governor. This was during the persecutions of Christians during the reign of the Roman Emperor Diocletian, ca. 303. Facing certain torture, to force her to marry, Lucia instead gouges out her beautiful eyes with her own hands. Her iconography always shows her carrying her eyes in a goblet so she can give them to that suitor who seemed to want her so badly. You go, girl!
She is the patron saint of the blind–which makes pretty obvious sense–but again, I’m not quite sure how she became the saint of writers. But I’ll take her!
For this mini-review of my book, The Lure of Saints: A Protestant Experience of Catholic Tradition on the Christianity Today blog for women. Seems like I have a kindred spirit in Michelle!
I sometimes feel a bit like Don Quixote, who read hundreds of books on chivalry and knighthood and then foolishly determined to wander the world imitating them by righting wrongs, helping ladies in distress, and bringing nobility back to the people along his path. Quixote often scolded Sancho Panza, his infinitely cleverer companion, for laughing at his expense, talking too much, and questioning his actions. A wickedly funny character created by Miguel de Cervantes for his famous novel by the same name, Don Quixote is perhaps the greatest idealist in history, fictional or true. He is at times a holy fool, a saint (according to W. H. Auden), and a mirror image of each person who tries hard to be something he or she has read about in books.
Don Quixote is considered foolish precisely because he wholeheartedly believes that what he has read in books about medieval knights actually happened. He is egotistical because he sincerely believes that he, too, can be a gallant knight. But irony is rich throughout the novel, as we are never quite sure if Don Quixote might actually be the sanest person around. He never seems to know that he is playing a role, as in a play—because a knight is very clearly not what Don Quixote is, deep down, with all of his bumbling and mistakes.
Perhaps such role-playing is what we all are doing who read the Lives of saints, at least those of us who are trying to imitate the explorers and exemplars who have gone before us.
I stumbled across an old Penguin pb from the 1950s of SELECTED ESSAYS by Hilaire Belloc, edited by J. B. Morton. Much of it is ephemeral (just like much of G. K. Chesterton now is), but much is terrific, as well.
In an essay simply titled, “St. Patrick,” he writes this about what he calls “Personality”…
“If there is one thing that people who are not Catholic have gone wrong upon more than another in the intellectual things of life, it is the conception of a Personality….
“The hundred-and-one errors which this main error leads to include a bad error on the nature of history. Your modern non-Catholic or anti-Catholic historian is always misunderstanding, underestimating, or muddling the role played in the affairs of men by great and individual Personalities. That is why he is so lamentably weak upon the function of legend; that is why he makes a fetish of documentary evidence and has no grip upon the value of tradition. For traditions spring from some personality invariably, and the function of legend, whether it be a rigidly true legend or one tinged with make-believe, is to interpret Personality. Legends have vitality and continue, because in their origin they so exactly serve to explain or illustrate some personal character in a man which no cold statement could give.”
The word saint comes from the apostle Paul. Just as Paul became the architect of the word love in his first letter to the Corinthians he also developed the first Christian understanding of holiness and sainthood throughout his epistles. As Notre Dame professor Lawrence Cunningham explains in his succinct but exceptional guide, A Brief History of Saints, Paul’s frequent use of the Greek word agios as a generic term for members of the early Christian communities was a way of saying, “by their identification with God, through the saving works of Christ, they have become linked to and identified with God and, in this sense, are saints.”
