St. Bartholomew travelled to India and then Armenia, where he exorcises a demon and heals the daughter of King Polymius. The king and his household are baptized, enraging the king’s brother, who has Bartholomew either crucified, skinned alive, beheaded, or all three. The account of his flaying in the Golden Legend is the one that stuck in the imaginations of the medieval faithful.

Some of his relics (including bones and a piece of his flayed skin) are kept in San Bartolomeo all’Isola, Tiber Island, Rome. The basilica is over a thousand years old and built on the site of a temple to Asclepius, god of medicine and healing.

The dramatic nature of his death and its opportunity for artists to show off their anatomical skills led to a strong tradition of Bartholomew in art. Let’s begin with El Greco’s c. 1614 image, since he’s shown in triumph rather than torment, holding the flaying knife associated with his martyrdom while holding a chained demon to show his triumph over evil.

Bartolomeo Bulgarini (14th century) also leaves him with his skin, although he doesn’t look nearly so pacific as he contemplates the instrument of his torment.

A damaged 13th century fresco in Ferrara gives us three stages of the life of the saint: his baptism of King Polymius, his flaying, and his beheading.

Tiepolo’s 1722 Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew shows the moment before his skinning.

Joseph Proetzner’s 1755 statue at The Church of St. Peter in Munich depicts the intact saint holding his own skin.

The scenes continue in a fairly grisly fashion, such as thus one by Ignazio Perucca (around 1780).

Pompeo Bartolo’s 18th century oil also gives us the saint and his skin:

Pierre Le Gros (c. 1705-12) in the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran:

St. Bartholomew Flayed (Marco d'Agrate, 1562, Duomo di Milano) is probably the most famous depiction of the apostle, but it’s more striking as a display of the sculptor’s anatomical skill than as a work of piety.

An etching by Jusepe de Ribera from the early 17th century:

Matteo Di Giovanni Di Bartolo (15th c) makes a striking use of red.

Matthias Stom, 17th c.:

St. Bartholomew, patron saint of skin diseases, leather tanners, and twitching, pray for us.

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An Owl Among the Ruins

The Steward of the House

A homily for the 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time (A…

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11 days ago · 15 likes · 1 comment · Deacon Tom

I stumbled upon some social media reactions to it and many were predictably Protestant:

LOL. Okay bro, I bet your fellowship chapel has a rockin’ P&W band. I can guarantee you it’s not only extremely Christian, but among the oldest things Christians do together.

What you’re seeing is an event in Catania Sicily marking one of the four major commemorations of one of the most beloved early church martyrs. This is the 900th anniversary of the restoration on Agatha’s relics to the city after they had been stolen and taken to Constantinople for centuries. The skull of the saint is in an elaborate reliquary that looks like this:

In the video, the crown and top of the head lifts off and the skull is gently placed inside by Cardinal Pietro Parolin1, the Vatican’s Secretary of State. The kiss is a gesture of respect which Catholics offer to many things we hold sacred. I kiss my breviary and Bible when I take them up or put them down.

This was apparently too much for some, and the poor mayor of Catania, seen below, was accused of “necr0philia“ for this touching gesture.

The Union of Atheist and Agnostic Rationalists of Catania (who are totally sane you guys for real, stop laughing!) called it "a shameful concession to necr0philic superstition and tribal rituals."

For his part, Mayor Enrico Trantino, my new favorite politician, called it “a gesture of devotion, not only my personal one, but representation of all the people of Catania, and I would do it a thousand times.” He called the criticism “surreal, degrading, and instrumental" and considered it a remnant “of that woke culture that often sees presumed violence. It chilled me, despite the summer temperatures, to read that the kiss was interpreted as violating a virgin. Instead, it should be read more as one given by a child to a parent.”

The relics of the saints are a focal point for a saint’s cult, and they enable people to request her prayers for intercession or thank her for miracles attributed to her. The practice is not only ancient: it’s Biblical.

St. Agatha devotions arise from the earliest centuries of the church, developing quickly in the wake of her martyrdom and the spread of her legend.

Agatha was a lovely teenage girl who attracted the attention of the Roman prefect Quintianus. She proclaimed her faith in Christ and refused him. To break her, Quintianus first sent her to a brothel, and then subjected her to prolonged torture, including tearing her breasts off with tongs. In the stories that developed around her life, St. Peter appears to her in prison and heals her wounds. Attempts to kill her failed, and she died in prison, around the year 251.

Her veneration spread quickly, with women seeking her intercession for diseases of the breast. When miraculous healings followed, her cult grew and several churches were dedicated to her. The locus of devotion is Catania, where she is credited with saving the city many times from eruptions of Mt. Etna and invasion. A year after her death, according to legend, her burial veil was carried in procession to end an eruption of the volcano, and the flow of magma stopped.

This strong devotion created a long tradition of art, much of it centered around breasts, naturally. Because: breasts.

The devotion to Agatha emerged directly from the community of Christians, and was elaborated over time, becoming one of the strongest and most fertile examples of the cult of the saints.

St. Agatha, pray for us.

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She joined a group of Benedictine nuns until Francis had a small convent built near San Damiano, where she and a growing number of women could live much like the men who followed Francis. Eventually, against her will, Francis made her the abbess of the group, which would eventually include her mother and two of her sisters.

Little is known of her early life, and even her remaining letters and document…

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Like so many titles of Mary, Our Lady of the Snows is a mixture of the legendary and the practical. The story is late and unverifiable, but the patronage is real and useful. Driving through a blinding snowstorm, fingers white-knuckled on the steering wheel as you try to keep the car on the road, who do you want to invoke? I speak from experience. Very handy in a tight spot.

The feast recognizes the prominence of the basilica on the Esquiline hill, one of the four patriarchal churches in Rome commemorating the first centers of the church: St. John Lateran (Rome, the see of Peter), St. Paul Outside the Walls (Alexandria), St. Peter (Constant…

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The first up is a vision of hell, as the damned soul is licked by both tongues of fire and the tongues of demons (made from shards of mica).

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The trial transcript for the condemnation of St. Joan of Arc mentions St. Margaret more than 120 times. She’s usually paired with St. Catherine, and sometimes St. Michael. Joan never specified which Margaret and which Catherine, but Margaret of Antioch and Catherine of Alexandria were both saints with wide devotions and popular lives set in verse, so it’s considered likely that she was referring to them.

This has caused problems for some, because the lives of both were woven out of the common cloth used for the vitae (lives) of many saints. Margaret’s story used narrative cliches and fantastic imagery, offering wonders that left even a purveyor of legends such as Jacobus de Voragine, the 13th-century author of The Golden Legend, in doubt about their veracity.

There is no way to tell if any genuinely historical information about St. Margaret has come down to us in some way. She is just a name in martyrologie…

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I once had a fly fall into the precious blood as I was about to consume it. I looked at it a moment, considered my options … and swallowed it, so this story about St. Norbert resonates:

At a later date, worn out with fasting and vigils, Norbert celebrated Mass in a crypt. After the Lord’s Body and Blood had been consecrated, a large [poisonous] spider fell into the chalice. When the priest saw it he was shocked. Life and death hovered before his eyes. But lest the sacrifice suffer any loss he chose rather to undergo the danger and consumed whatever was in the chalice. When the service was finished, believing he was going to die, he remained before the altar and commended his awaited end to the Lord in prayer. Then he was disturbed by an itching in his nose. He scratched it, and soon the spider was expelled by a sudden fit of sneezing. Through this event both his faith in both God and God’s goodness to him became evident.

Vita Norberti A

Ther…

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And they came up and took hold
of his feet
and worshiped him.
Matthew 28:9

Ascension is among the most quirky and delightful subjects for pious art, with a number of artists simply showing the feet of Jesus as the clouds take him away. This shifts the focus from Jesus to the observers, and thus to the viewer, drawing us into the experience of the Ascension in a way a full body figure wouldn’t quite do.

Feet had their own significance in the Gospel: at the last supper, with the woman who washed his feet with her tears and dried them with her hair, in parables, in the nails that pierces him, and in the very idea of a peripatetic preacher whose feet carried him on dusty roads all across the land. By elevating them above the crowd, they give this humble part of the anatomy a devotional focus that is unique. The last part of Jesus to disappear from view are the very things to carry each of us across the land to spread the Gospel.

St. John Chrysostom:

Some among you may desire to be like these …

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Everyone worships--the difference is what we choose to worship. Where do we locate the power that allows us to order reality and make sense of it? The atheist will say they do not believe in God and thus do not worship Him. Very well, so they believe in 3 pounds of soggy gray tissue and center their belief in that. It is a de facto worship. To believe the workings of the mind correlate to some outside reality is itself an act of faith.

I’d say between the two, those who seek their answers i…

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In the left panel, we see the donors, peering through the door into the room of the Blessed Mother. The peculiar servant in the back seems to have been added later. The figures are:

• Peter Engelbrecht, the Donor (kneeling in front), a wealthy merchant from Mechelen.

• The Donor’s Wife (kneeling behind), probably Margarete Scrynmakere, added later, possibly after the marriage.

• Servant (background) added later, possibly a self-insert by the artist, or perhaps a symbolic figure like Isaiah.

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I published the first section of this before, but I’ve expanded it to look at how treatments of Arthur changed under the influence of Geoffrey of Monmouth, turning Arthur from a relatively negative figure in early saints’ lives to a model Christian king.

The literature of King Arthur exerts a powerful gravitational pull, drawing in history, lore, legend, fiction, poetry, folktale, art, and even faith. The New Arthurian Encyclopedia, a catalog of all things Arthur, is roughly the size of a phonebook, and until you’ve dug past the first layer—Malory, Tennyson, Chretien de Troyes, Prince Valiant, Hollywood—you don’t begin to grasp just how huge this ever-evolving, loosely connected body of work really is. Within it, in a small forgotten corner, is the place where Arthur meets the Catholic saints.

If a genuine historical figure is at the core of the Arthur legend, that man was likely a warlord or chieftain living in Britain around 500 AD. The traces of him in literat…

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Was Jesus Nailed to the Cross?

It seems like an easy question to answer, but the Gospels are silent on this moment of the crucifixion.

If you look at the four Gospel accounts of the crucifixion itself, nowhere do they specify that Jesus was nailed to his cross. We have such specific images in our minds of this scene that this may come as a shock to some, but let’s look at the passages.

• Mark: “And they crucify him” (15:24)

• Matthew…

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In the numerous pilgrim accounts up through the early 13th century, there is no indication of a fixed Way of the Cross as we know it today. By the late 13th and 14th century there are some hints of a route taken by Christ to Calvary, with certain moments noted. These include the earliest mentions of the place where Simon helps carry the cross, where Jesus met the weeping women, and where Mary swooned, but they are merely noted as holy places, not as a unified Way to follow. The medieval version of a packaged tour included locations we now associate with the Stations of the Cross and many we don’t, including a house where the rich man from the parable of Lazarus was supposed to have lived.

By the end of the 14th century, with the Holy Land in the more restrictive hands of the Turks, the Franciscans maintained tight control over their holy sites and the pilgrims, in part to get Christians in and out of the city quickly to avoid conflicts. …

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A mass of ferocious men ride across the sky on giant black goats and black horses, making a fearsome din as they charge to the hunt, baying black hounds at their sides. Those who hear the approaching noise must not look or they risk being dragged into the Wild Hunt of the dead.

With plenty of local and national variations, this image of phantom hordes of huntsmen or soldiers has deep roots in Northern European culture, most firmly associated with Woden. We first find it recorded in the middle ages in various forms, and after that it never really leaves.

Jacob Grimm named and described it in Deutsche Mythologie (Teutonic Mythology) Volume III, arguing that Germans didn’t drop their stories of the gods when they became Christian, but merely assigned them new roles. What he called the Wild Hunt took on the name Hellequin’s (or Herlechin’s, or Helething’s) Hunt, from the Germanic roots heer (“army”) and thing (“assembly”), and a new religious meaning.

A Purg…

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Whatever cruelty was exercised upon the bodies of the martyrs was light, or rather it was as nothing, compared to the cruelty of Mary’s passion. St. Bernardine of Siena says that so great was the dolor of the Blessed Virgin that if it was subdivided and parceled out among all creatures capable of suffering, they would perish instantly. An Angel revealed to St. Bridget that if Our Lord had not miraculously supported His Mother, it would not have been possible for her to live through her Martyrdom. It would be easy to multiply similar passages, both from the revelations of the Saints and the writings of the doctors of the Church.1

St. Bernard of Clairvaux certainly thought Mary was a martyr. Building on the prophecy of Simeon that a sword would pierce her heart, he preached that

only by pass…

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When Adam was dying at the age of 900, he sent Eve and their son Seth back to Eden to beg the angel guarding the entrance for the oil of mercy to anoint him in his illness. St. Michael appeared to them, saying it was time for Adam to die, and the oil could not be obtained until the crucifixion. Instead, he gave Seth wood from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and said that when that wood flowered, Adam would be saved. From this wood came the wood of the cross, and at the crucifixion it bloomed.

In another version of the story, St. Michael gave Seth three seeds from the forbidden fruit and told him to place them under his father’s tongue when he was buried. From these seeds grew a cypress, an olive, and a cedar tree which were all eventually used to make the cross.

These early legends, later incorporated into medieval versions of the pseudepigraphal Life of Adam and Eve and other texts, are part of a strong tradition identifyi…

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The Feast of St. Blaise is one of the most widespread pieces of popular saintly devotion to survive in contemporary liturgy. From small suburban parishes to basilicas, the practice of blessing throats with a pair of crossed candles bound with a red ribbon remains much as it was 400 years ago. Although the candles are rarely lit today, the priest or deacon places them upon each parishioner’s throat, and prays, “Through the intercession of Saint Blaise, bishop and martyr, may God deliver you from every disease of the throat and from every other illness.”

St. Blaise, bishop and martyr, was born in Sebaste, which was the capital of Armenia Minor and is today called Sivas, located in Turkey. We know that he was martyred about the year 316 during the reign of the Emperor Licinius (308–24), on the order of the pagan governor Agricolaus. His cultus flourished in …

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People wrongly assume this is some kind of Satanic salute, with the index and pinky fingers making little devil horns (hence “throwing up the horns”). In fact, it was popularized through the late, great singer Ronnie James Dio, of Rainbow, Black Sabbath, and Dio. Ronnie was the proud grandson of a nonna from the old country, who would make the traditional gesture to ward off the malocchio, or “evil eye.” It wasn’t a salute to the devil: it was protection against him.1

The gesture is found in multiple cultures and religions, including Hinduism and Buddhism, and typically has a similar apotropaic function: removing negative energy. It was later adopted by wiccans and satanists as a “horn” gesture a symbolizing the goat, horned god, Satan, or evil in general (its exact opposite meaning in every other culture for thousands of years) because, as extensive scientific r…

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St. Vincent was subjected to one of the more protracted and gruesome deaths in the saintly literature, which may be why he captured the imagination of the faithful in the early church. Five sermons about him from Augustine survive (numbers 274 through 277A), and each sermon followed the reading of his Acts, or perhaps the poem (576 lines long) by Prudentus, which alternates four-line stanzas of piety with grim details:

A gridiron with its cruel spikes,
Set far apart, a rough bed makes,
And under it the glowing coals
Breathe forth the fumes of torturing heat.

This kind of hagiography certainly held the attention of the faithful, as Augustine well understood:

We have been watching a magnificent spectacle with the eyes of fa…

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See the end of the post for an update on the site.

As with so many good things, our story starts with a Benedictine. A monk named Magnus decided to retire into the wilderness, as Benedictines are often wont to do, some time in the 12th century. Accounts vary as to the year, the land in the area had been deeded to the Benedictines of St. Lambert’s in the earlier part of the century.

The monk carried with him a statue of the Blessed Mother and Christ Child, carved from linden wood and standing about 18 inches high. The Child holds a red orb (or is it apple?) in one hand and with the other reaches for his Mother, who points to him. Since this kind of story gives the anti-Marian faction fits, I’m going to emphasize that element: *Mary points us to Jesus*.

While on his journey, the monk encounters either a large rock (in most versions) or a tree blocking his path. He places the statue on the ground, whereupon the rock or tree splits to clear his way. Taking this as a sign…

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