Month: September 2013

Saints On Display, Ctd

by Chris Bodenner

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A reader sends the above photo:

Here in Philadelphia, we’ve got the entire body of a saint on display. St. John Neumann is not very well-known outside of Philadelphia. He was a Redemptorist priest who became the fourth bishop of Philadelphia and is credited with founding the parochial school system and the Forty Hours devotion. During the canonization process, his body was exhumed from its resting place in the basement of St. Peter the Apostle Church and found to be in excellent condition after nearly 100 years in the ground. The basement of the church was converted into a church and shrine. There’s a side room off of the sanctuary that serves as a mini-museum to St. John Neumann and a gift shop.

I’ve been to the shrine a few times. The entire experience is equal parts fascinating and creepy. I believe in the veneration of saints, but spending time looking at a dead saint’s body feels strange.

Another dead saint:

A relic was actually one of the catalysts for my conversion from Lutheranism to Roman mundiCatholicism. The skeleton of Saint Munditia lies in Old St. Peter’s in Munich, and it is stunning. We simply don’t have stuff like this here – I speak of North America, but particularly of Toronto, where I’m from. I first saw the relic on my first trip to Europe in the late 1990s, and it was part of my broader discovery of the spiritual richness of the Roman church. The old Protestant dig is to disparage Roman Catholicism for the smells and bells, but that’s where my journey of faith was leading me. To me, Lutheranism was dry, untethered to either a rich history (since it seemed Christianity only really began in 1517) or a larger family of faith (since each congregation is essentially independent; when visiting another congregation, you need to pre-clear having Communion with the pastor before the service). Munditia’s relic showed me not only the faith’s ancient roots, but also its physical manifestations. These people in the New Testament – they existed, and you can see their bones. You can see the bones of those who believed so strongly in Christ that they died for it. For me, who grew up in an utterly unadorned and nondescript church, it was a revelation that led to a much deeper faith.

More dead saints and readers’ thoughts on them here.

Even The Secular Search For A Savior

by Matt Sitman

William Deresiewicz laments that we can’t seem to leave behind our “messianic impulse”:

There is always some one, or some thing, that is just about to save us from ourselves. Of late the leading candidate has been the Web. It’s going to unleash a flood of innovation. It’s going to usher in a golden age of creativity. It’s going to transform our politics. WikiLeaks; the cult of Aaron Swartz; the collected works of Thomas Friedman; the belief that a legion of Joyces and Dylans, freed from the shackles of the culture industry, is about to spring forth—all these are signs of technological messianism in its latest form.

Blaming this tendency on “the little child in each of us” who still expects our parents to “swoop down and lift us up from our troubles and fears,” he connects it to our inaction in the face of climate change:

It isn’t God who’s going to end the world; it’s us. And we’re not going to end the world; we’re ending it. I grew up in the shadow of nuclear war. Then, at least, we were properly panicked. We had seen what the warheads could do, and a sudden stroke of annihilation was all too easy to conceive. But this—a slow extinction that’s already underway—we don’t seem psychologically equipped to come to terms with. The feeling has to linger, even among the most rational, that somehow, something is going to rescue us. That’s the only explanation I can think of for the lethargy, the apathy, the stunned catatonia of our response, the fact that we aren’t all running shrieking, every hour, in the streets.

Related Dish coverage of religion and climate change here and here.