We have recently witnessed the morbid display of the alleged remains of long-dead saints. These funerary fetishes included “The arm bone of St Paul”, “The arm bone of St George”, “The blood of St Lawrence” and a “relic” of St Ursula, set in the bosom of an effigy depicting the trunk of a pink-faced, buxom maid.

These holy “relics” should be taken in a solemn procession to the hospital to heal the many children suffering from life-threatening diseases. If an old shoe-lace “relic” of the dead Dun Gorg is alleged to have performed a “miracle”, surely the relics of the great saints mentioned above can perform miracles too!

In fact, the authenticity of the above relics is very much in doubt since they are not backed up by any document that can be traced all the way back to the time of the death of the saints to whom they are ascribed. The wide prevalence of belief about these relics is no proof of their authenticity. As Will Durant writes in The Lessons of History: “The Church stooped to fraud, as with pious legends, bogus relics, and dubious miracles.”

“What would Jerome say,” wrote Erasmus, “could he see the Virgin’s milk exhibited for money; the miraculous oils; the portions of the true cross, enough, if collected, to freight a large ship? Here we have the hood of St Francis, there our Lady’s petticoat, or St Anne’s comb.”

The liquefaction of the blood of saints, like “the annual liquefaction of the blood of San Gennaro in Naples, is a phenomenon that can easily (and has been) repeated by any competent conjurer... It is surprising how petty some of these ‘supernatural miracles’ now seem” (Christopher Hitchens, God is not great).

John Guillaumier

St Julian’s