A Year in Europe

by Walter W. Moore

"In this city of Naples they believe in and support one of the wretchedest of all religious impostures one can find in Italy—the miraculous liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius. Twice a year the priests assemble all the people at the Cathedral, and get out this phial of clotted blood, and let them see it slowly dissolve and become liquid; and every day for eight days this dismal farce is repeated, while the priests go among the crowd and collect money for the exhibition. The first day the blood liquefies in forty-seven minutes—the church is full then, and time must be allowed the collectors to get around; after a while it liquefies a little quicker and a little quicker every day, as the houses grow smaller, till on the eighth day, with only a few dozen present to see the miracle, it liquefies in four minutes. [8]

"And here, also, they used to have a grand procession of priests, citizens, soldiers, sailors, and the high dignitaries of the city government, once a year, to shave the head of a made-up Madonna—a stuffed and painted image, like the milliner's dummy—whose hair miraculously grew and restored itself every twelve months. They still kept up this shaving procession as late as four or five years ago. It was a source of great profit to the church that possessed the remarkable effigy, and the public barbering of her was always carried out with the greatest éclat and display—the more the better, because the more excitement there was about it the larger the crowds it drew and the heavier the revenues it produced—but at last the day came when the Pope and his servants were unpopular in Naples, and the city government stopped the Madonna's annual show.

"There we have two specimens of these Neapolitans—two of the silliest possible frauds, which half the population religiously and faithfully believed, and the other half either believed or else said nothing about, and thus lent themselves to the support of the imposture."

The House of the Virgin at Loretto.

I had read the story of the Casa Santa, or Holy House, the little stone building, thirteen and one-half feet high and twenty-eight feet long, in which the Virgin Mary had lived at Nazareth. In 336 the Empress Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, made a pilgrimage to Nazareth and built a church over the Holy House. This church fell into decay when the Saracens again got the upper hand in Palestine, and when the Christians lost Ptolemais the Holy House was carried by angels through the air from Nazareth to the coast of Dalmatia. This miraculous transportation took place in 1291. A few years later it was again removed by angels during the night, and set down in the Province of Ancona, near the eastern coast of Italy, on the ground of a widow named Laureta. Hence the name, Loretto, given to the town which sprang up around it for the accommodation of the thousands of pilgrims who flocked thither, and which is now a place of some six thousand inhabitants, whose principal business is begging and the sale of rosaries, medals and images. In a niche inside the Casa Santa is a small black image of the Virgin and Child, of cedar, attributed, of course, to St. Luke. We did not visit Loretto, but at Bologna we had the satisfaction of seeing a fac-simile of the Casa Santa, with its little window and fireplace, and the replica of St. Luke's handi-work in the niche above. A large number of women, some of them handsomely dressed, were saying their prayers and counting their beads before the altar that had been erected in front of these images and the Holy House, and a few were kneeling in the narrow space behind the altar, close to the fireplace of the house. As we passed, one of these women, in plainer garb, interrupted her devotions long enough to hold out her hand to us, begging for pennies, but without rising from her knees. There was nothing unusual about this, except that this beggar made her appeal to us while actually on her knees to the image of the Virgin, for nothing is more common in Italy than for visitors to a Roman Catholic church to pass through such "an avenue of palms" when leaving it.

The Wonder-working Bones of St. Anne in Canada.

I had even seen a few relics, not mere reproductions like that of the Casa Santa at Bologna, but the relics themselves. For instance, three summers ago, when in Quebec, I had made a special trip to the Church of St. Anne Beaupre, some twenty miles below the city, for the purpose of seeing the wonder-working relics of St. Anne, the alleged mother of the Virgin Mary—a bit of her finger bone and a bit of her wrist bone—which are devoutly kissed and adored by thousands of pilgrims to this magnificent church from all the French and Irish portions of Canada, and which are said to have wrought miraculous cures of all manner of maladies, cures which are attested by two immense stacks of canes, crutches, wooden legs, and the like, which rise from the floor almost to the roof on either side of the entrance. In the store in another part of the church I had got a clue to it all by seeing the poor pilgrims buying all sorts of cheap, tawdry, worthless little images and pictures, and especially little vials of oil of remarkable curative virtue because it had stood for a while before the image of St. Anne, and for which they paid probably five times as much as the oil had cost the priests who were selling it.

The Iron Crown of Lombardy.

These, then, are potent bones and images and oils, but by far the most interesting relic I had seen before reaching Rome itself was the Iron Crown of Lombardy, at Monza, a little town in Northern Italy. This is the place where the good King Humbert was assassinated on the 29th of July, 1900, and it is not without interest for other reasons. For instance, it has a cathedral built of black and white marble in horizontal stripes, and containing, besides the tomb of Queen Theodolinda and other interesting objects in the nave and its chapels, a great number of costly articles of gold and silver, set with precious stones, in the treasury, as well as various relics, such as some of the baskets carried by the apostles, a piece of the Virgin Mary's veil, and one of John the Baptist's teeth. But we should never have made a special trip to Monza in such weather as we were having at the time of our visit, last November, had it not been for our intense desire to see its chief treasure, the Iron Crown, the most sacred and most celebrated diadem in the world, a relic possessing real historical interest, not because of any probability whatever in the story of its origin, but because of the extraordinary uses and associations of it within the last thousand years.

A Winter Trip to Monza.