Italy, and had repeatedly broken into and desecrated the sepulchres in the catacombs, either in mere wantonness or in search for the treasures which they thought might be hidden there. In order to save the venerated relics of the martyrs from such outrages, the popes opened the tombs of the martyrs in the portions of the catacombs then accessible—a great portion being already closed up, either by the falling in of the roof or by the act of the Christians centuries before—and transferred the remains to the churches within the city for greater safety. In opening the tombs, these vases were often found, and hundreds of them are now in the churches or in the sacred museums of Rome. Three centuries ago, Bosio, and after him Aringhi, Boldetti, Mamachi, and others, penetrated into the catacombs, searched them anew, and came upon some of those portions which had not been disturbed at the time of the general removal. In such portions not a few unopened and undisturbed tombs of martyrs were found. Within lay the remains of the body—bones and dust—with sometimes the rusted fragments of the instrument of death, and frequently the vial, or ampulla, of the martyr’s blood. During the last forty years, the work of investigating the catacombs, which had been intermitted, has been taken up afresh and prosecuted with earnestness and skill by F. Marchi, Cav. de Rossi, and other eminent archæologists. They still come occasionally across the tombs of martyrs, evidently untouched since the day of deposition, and within them, or in the mortar by the head, the vases of blood are still found. Where these vials are so placed in the mortar as to be visible and accessible from without, the thin glass has generally been broken. But the bottom still
remains firmly set in the mortar, and contains or is covered to some extent by a thin, dry, reddish crust adhering to it. This crust or film is all that is left of the blood the vase originally contained. Vials, or ampullæ, in the interior of the tombs are of course perfectly preserved. It is indeed interesting to look on one of them, and to mark exactly the line to which the liquid blood once reached, and the purple hue of the sediment or crust now left, with its brighter or darker shades of color, perhaps from the character of the blood, more probably from the thickness or thinness of the crust itself. Under all the accumulated evidence, one scarcely needs to read the rude inscription found and still legible, although only scratched in the mortar when it was soft: Sanguis, or Sang: Saturnini, The blood of Saturninus. We know that this is blood which once flowed from a martyr’s veins, in testimony of his faith in Christ our Lord.
In the 17th century, when Bosio, Boldetti, and others brought out such vases from the catacombs, and special attention was directed to them, the nature of this dry reddish crust adhering to the interior was examined chemically. There was no discordance in the results obtained.
Among those who made such an examination was the celebrated Leibnitz, a Protestant, among the ablest and most learned men of that age. He gives an account of his process, and the decision at which he arrived: This coloring matter on the glass is sanguineous. Some years ago, the present Pontiff, Pius IX., had a new analysis made according to the fullest and most accurate tests of modern chemistry. The answer was still the same: This substance is, so far as chemistry can decide, precisely what
ought to remain as the residuum of human blood.
It is clear that, both as to the custom of the early Christians of carefully gathering up the blood of their martyrs, of placing it in ampullæ, or vases, and religiously preserving it, and likewise as to the identification of the ampullæ themselves, the testimony is all that can be desired. Bosio, Aringhi, Boldetti, Mamachi, Gaume, Marchi, Raoul-Rochette, De Rossi, Perret—all who have studied the question, are unanimous in recognizing these numerous old Roman vials, or ampullæ, still found in the catacombs and tombs or preserved in the churches, as the identical vials, or ampullæ, so used by the ancient Christians. On this point, there remains not the slightest room for doubt.
It is therefore but reasonable that there should exist in Naples a vial, or ampulla, of the blood of St. Januarius. He was in his day a distinguished bishop of the church. His martyrdom was public, and attracted the attention of the Christians. It was by beheading. There was no conceivable reason why the Christians should omit in that instance what they were universally so careful to do in such cases. On the contrary, to judge from the ancient accounts we have of the martyrdom of St. Januarius and his six companions, the Christians found no extraordinary difficulty in obtaining the bodies, and entombing them in their usual mode. When, eighty or ninety years later, the church had been firmly established in peace, the body of St. Januarius was taken from the original tomb and brought to Naples, as the bodies of the others were taken to the various churches which claimed them.
The very presence, therefore, of an ampulla in the custody of the
church of Naples, together with the other relics of St. Januarius, is under the circumstances prima facie evidence of its own authenticity—evidence which cannot be impugned, except by attempting to overturn a well-known and universally admitted usage of the early Christian church, or else by a supposition, equally gratuitous and absurd, that the ampulla which originally was in existence, and was prized beyond measure and carefully preserved, was somehow lost, and another fraudulently substituted in its stead. We need not recur to the olden traditions of the church of Naples or its legends concerning this relic—traditions and legends found, too, we believe, among the Greeks, whose intercourse with Magna Grecia, as Southern Italy was called, was more intimate and continued longer than with any other portion of Italy. We scarcely need the testimony of Fabius Jordanus, quoted by Caraccioli, going to show that, so far back as A.D. 685, it was the custom of the clergy of Naples to bear the relics of the head.
The historical evidence in favor of the genuineness of the relic is ample and satisfactory. There would not be a moment’s hesitation on the point but for the very vain hope which some minds may entertain that, by declining to admit the genuineness of the blood, they will somehow escape the difficulties of the liquefaction. As if the liquefaction of any other substance, with all the circumstances which characterize the liquefaction at Naples, as we have set them forth in our previous articles, would not be for them as hard if not a harder nut to crack than the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius!