John Paul II’s blood, Christ’s foreskin

THAT CABLE TV and the Internet have made the world a smaller place will be demonstrated again this weekend when the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton as well as the beatification of John Paul II will be broadcast live from London today, April 29, and from the Vatican on May 1, respectively. Based on the invitations I have received for me to annotate the royal wedding for local TV, it seems that more viewers are expected to watch the royal wedding than the beatification Mass. Had TV stations done their homework, they would have done better to get a former Philippine ambassador to the Court of St. James to annotate the wedding live from his London home which is on the same exclusive street as our former embassy across Kensington Palace. Unfortunately, this former ambassador is not invited to the wedding and will join the crowds watching the proceedings from video walls set up around London.

Today will be the last day to pick up William-loves-Kate souvenirs before they are put on sale after the wedding fever shall have died down. Popes, past and present, also have their smiling faces on tacky tourist souvenirs that range from rosaries and prayer books to bottle-openers, screwdrivers and magnets for refrigerator doors. That everything has a commercial bent these days is not something to be frowned upon because these commercial interests make live TV coverage possible today. We all like fairy-tale weddings and just hope that today’s royal wedding does not go down the same way as the last one—that of Charles and Diana. Those of us who live in the real world know that not all fairy tales end happily ever after, but it isn’t a crime to dream.

What caught my eye in the news the other day was rather medieval and gruesome. A wire story reported that four vials of John Paul II’s blood, extracted from him shortly before he passed away in 2005, are now considered holy relics! One vial will be presented to Pope Benedict XVI at the beatification Mass on Sunday. Another vial is in the care of nuns who run the Bambini Gesu Hospital in Rome, and the remaining two vials are in the care of the Archbishop of Krakow, Stanislaw Cardinal Dziwisz, who was Pope John Paul II’s secretary. A drop of John Paul’s blood was sent to Polish Formula 1 driver Robert Kubica after he suffered an accident. This same racer has the late pope’s name on his crash helmet and, if that isn’t enough protection, he wears a medallion that contains a fragment from the pope’s robe.

One would think that relics went out of style following Martin Luther and the Protestant reformation in the 16th century, but the veneration of relics continues well into the beginning of the 21st century. Of course, modern church people are quick to point out that these relics or the physical remains of a holy person should not be considered miraculous; neither should they be worshipped as the practice borders on superstition. At best, relics are souvenirs of a saintly life. They can be: first-class relics, meaning a piece of the saint’s body (e.g., bone, skin, hair, blood); second-class relics, meaning objects closely associated, often physically, with a saint, like clothing or other personal effects; and third-class relics, meaning objects that have been touched onto a first-class relic (e.g., a piece of cloth rubbed on the bones of a saint or laid on a saint’s tomb).

As a historian I have always been fascinated by relics. In my past life as a Benedictine monk,  when visiting other monasteries, I would ask to see their relic cabinet. One of my memorable experiences was in an English monastery with the keeper of relics. He had written a standard reference work on saints. “What do you want to see?” he asked. Before I could ask for the catalogue, he offered to show me a piece of the manger where Christ lay, a piece of St. Joseph’s underwear, a piece of the banner that St. George carried when he slew the dragon, and milk of the Virgin Mary. As a historian himself he could read the skepticism in my eyes, and I wonder if he was just trying to make me laugh. So he opened large drawers and brought out a whole set of garments that once belonged to Pius IX, everything from a mitre down to those specially made red shoes. As I admired this bit of physical history that lay before me, he asked, “Would you like to try it on?” I politely declined scared that lightning would strike me down if I accepted the tempting offer.

In other monasteries the relics were kept in reliquaries of gold and silver, ornamented by precious stones. These reliquaries sometimes took on the shape of the relic itself. For instance, if it was bone from a foot, then the reliquary was in the shape of a foot. I have seen reliquaries that contained arms and heads. One contained a tangled vine, which was the Crown of Thorns before all the thorns were taken away. Some reliquaries come in the form of a cross because they contain pieces from the True Cross, but nothing beats a gold reliquary in France that once held the foreskin of Christ. The relic has since disappeared. But that is not a problem because there were about a dozen churches in medieval Europe that all claimed to have the holy foreskin.

Relics, like royal wedding souvenirs, are pieces of history, remnants of memory. Whether they become objects that bring about health, happiness, safety, or a winning lotto number—now, that really depends on your faith.

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