![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/615\/2018\/05\/51DZjjohy4L._SX328_BO1204203200_.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Think of the Catholic Church and you might think of pedophile clerics, financial malfeasance. Even before such scandals erupted\u2013even if they had never occurred\u2013some have found plenty to criticize about official Church policies in the last couple of decades: its intolerance of other religions; its hostility to women\u2019s ordination; its long-term campaign to undermine liberation theology.<\/p>\n
Outside observers might ask why Catholics who oppose such policies don\u2019t simply leave. I put this question to a Sister of Charity some years ago. Her answer: \u201cThe bishops don\u2019t get to decide what it means to be a Catholic.\u201d Galileo was threatened with torture and condemned for heresy but still didn\u2019t break with the Church; for him, the problem wasn\u2019t with Catholicism, but with the scoundrels in positions of power. For the 14th century mystic Marguerite Porete, the Church hierarchy was the \u201cLesser Church,\u201d in contrast to the \u201cGreater Church,\u201d those who truly loved God. It seems rank-and-file Catholics have always made a distinction between their day-to-day spiritual practices and a distant, privileged hierarchy.<\/p>\n
This is where the saints come in, so to speak. As Colin Dickey tells us in his entertaining and thought-provoking essay collection\u00a0Afterlives of the Saints <\/i>(2012),<\/a> \u201cCatholicism reveals its folk aspect, its native traditions and local customs\u201d in the beliefs that spring up around the saints, the miracles attributed to them, the treatment of their relics, and their representations in paintings and sculpture.<\/p>\n Take, for example, Lawrence, a third-century martyr who, \u201caccording to legend, was executed on a gridiron over an open flame. As he was being burned alive, so the story goes, he cried out to his tormentors, \u2018This side\u2019s done; turn me over and have a bite.\u2019\u201d Dickey first heard of Lawrence from his high school chemistry teacher, who read to his students every day from a book of saints\u2019 lives. When the students laughed at Lawrence\u2019s clever line, the teacher angrily insisted that it wasn\u2019t funny. \u201cLike so many believers,\u201d Dickey observes, the teacher<\/p>\n conflated the sacred and the solemn. Patriarchal religions like Christianity tend to be like this. . . . But in other religions, laughter is integral. The anthropologist Byrd Gibbens writes, \u2018Many native traditions held clowns and tricksters as essential to any contact with the sacred.\u2019 . . . Because of this, Lawrence seems to me a saint imported from another religion, closer to Coyote or Raven than to Stephen or Catherine.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n This passage demonstrates several of Dickey\u2019s great strengths as an essayist, already familiar to readers of his work in\u00a0Lapham\u2019s Quarterly<\/i>\u00a0and elsewhere: not only is he widely read and knowledgeable, but he goes beyond the amusing anecdote and raises larger issues. Moreover, it\u2019s clear he\u2019s spent a great deal of time thinking about his subject-matter; several times he mentions that he has pondered a particular photograph, painting, or anecdote for years before writing about it.<\/p>\n There are 17 essays here, each focused on a different saint or, in the last two chapters, on people who perhaps should have been canonized (the third-century philosopher Origen and the fifteenth-century mystic Margery of Kemp). The breadth of the author\u2019s knowledge and interests is evident in every chapter. The essay on St. Lucy, for example, also touches upon Vincent van Gogh, Dante, and John Donne. In the course of reading the collection, we learn about anatomy and dissection in sixteenth-century Italy and about the Skoptsy cult of self-castraters in nineteenth-century Russia; we hear from authors like Chaucer, Flaubert, Kafka, Borges, and the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran.<\/p>\n The most intriguing discovery for me was Saint Foy, a third-century virgin-martyr about whom almost nothing is known. When Foy\u2019s relics were relocated to the Conques monastery in France in the ninth century, the locals started reporting visions of a young woman who performed miraculous cures, including restoring eyesight. More oddly, she was known to resurrect animals from the dead, and some of Foy\u2019s activities were \u201cso bizarre that the nobility began referring to them as Foy\u2019s \u2018jokes.\u2019\u201d One of these \u201cjokes\u201d involved a knight who prayed to Foy for relief of a hernia; the advice she gave him (in a vision) involved placing his scrotum on an anvil and having a blacksmith hit it with his hammer. What ensued could have come straight from a\u00a0Three Stooges\u00a0<\/i>skit. As reported by Foy\u2019s eleventh-century biographer, Bernard of Angers, the terrified knight dove out of the way of the hammer and \u201chis herniated intestines were sucked back inside so completely that they never ruptured again.\u201d Foy could be cruel, too, inflicting devastating punishments on those who offended her monks: a roof collapsed on one such unfortunate; another was felled by an \u201carrow from heaven\u201d that pierced his brain. Dickey is uneasy with Foy: \u201cOf all the saints,\u201d he writes, \u201cthe only one I truly fear is this young girl from southwestern France.\u201d<\/p>\n Other essays in the collection provide similarly odd details. In the essay on the apostle Bartholomew, who was believed to have been flayed alive, Dickey notes that many paintings depict the saint holding, \u201cin addition to his own skin, the tool used to cut that skin off, a tool that looks sort of like a cheese cutter, so Florentine cheese merchants took Bartholomew as their patron.\u201d But Dickey isn\u2019t interested in a carnival-barker approach (step right up, folks, and look at these wacky Catholics!<\/i>). Instead, he asks what the saints\u2019 exploits tell us about what it means to be human. He asks what the beliefs, stories, and images, no matter how bizarre, tell us about faith.<\/p>\n And he is deeply sympathetic to his subjects, including Paula, the wealthy Roman woman who supported and accompanied Saint Jerome but has been eclipsed by Jerome\u2019s fame. He gives a poignant account of the 6th century ascetic queen Saint Radegund, providing generous excerpts from her long poem \u201cThe Thuringian War,\u201d in which her despair and loneliness are much more evident than her devotion to Christ. He champions the cause of Margery Kemp, the eccentric visionary known for her copious weeping:<\/p>\n The reasons Margery has never been canonized are painfully obvious. She was already a married woman, with children, when Christ came to her fully. . . . She could have retired to a convent but chose not to do so, nor did she subordinate herself under a powerful male protector. . . . She chose instead to remain her own person, to wander, to cause trouble. . . .\u00a0. . . Margery\u2019s love is difficult, uncompromising, but readers . . . keep finding her, finding kinship with that love. . . . A community of believers, the wasted and the hopeful, the freaks and the dreamers, gradually grows around her. Perhaps sainthood will find her yet.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Though Dickey doesn\u2019t discuss it here, it\u2019s interesting to think about the basic assumption underlying a belief in saints: that the living and the dead can indeed communicate with each other. The dead (whether saints or not) appear to us, speak to us, perform miracles. The living affect the dead, too: Our urgent requests can inspire the miracles. Our prayers for the souls in Purgatory can ease their suffering (a belief that particularly irked Protestant reformers, especially adherents of predestination). One could argue that it is this basic mindset, more than acceptance of the pope\u2019s infallibility\u2013or even his authority\u2013that makes a Catholic a Catholic. So while the Vatican is embroiled in scandal, ordinary folk take solace from the saints, their mysteries, their occasional absurdities.<\/p>\n \u201cThe image of the saint,\u201d Dickey tells us, \u201cworks like a parable: It doesn\u2019t tell a story so much as hide it. . . . Or, as Kafka put it, \u2018all these parables are really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already.\u201d<\/p>\n Rosalie Morales Kearns<\/strong>, author of the novel\u00a0Kingdom of Women<\/em>\u00a0(Jaded Ibis Press, 2017)<\/a>, is\u00a0a writer of Puerto Rican and Pennsylvania Dutch descent. She\u2019s the founder of the feminist publishing house\u00a0Shade Mountain Press<\/a>, author of the\u00a0story collection\u00a0Virgins & Tricksters<\/em>\u00a0(Aqueous Books, 2012)<\/a> and editor of the short story anthology\u00a0The Female Complaint: Tales of Unruly Women<\/em>\u00a0(Shade Mountain, 2015).\u00a0<\/a>A product of Catholic schooling from kindergarten through college,\u00a0Kearns has a B.A. in theology and an M.F.A. in creative writing. This article was originally published in 2013 in the Philadelphia Review of Books.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \n<\/p><\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 Think of the Catholic Church and you might think of pedophile clerics, financial malfeasance. Even before such scandals erupted\u2013even if they had never occurred\u2013some have found plenty to criticize about official Church policies in the last couple of decades: its intolerance of other religions; its hostility to women\u2019s ordination; its long-term campaign to undermine […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1326,1087,31],"tags":[23,2777,2780,2359,2783],"class_list":["post-6269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catholic-ghost-story","category-popular-piety","category-saints","tag-catholic","tag-colin-dickey","tag-lives-of-the-saints","tag-rosalie-morales-kearns","tag-st-foy"],"yoast_head":"\n