Eat your saints, purge your demons

Why do people worship religious relics, and why is the number of trainee exorcists rising? Two new books suggest that our desire to believe in magical forces remains irresistible.

By Laura Miller

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Salon

March 27, 2009 | "Where faith decreases, superstition grows," a Roman priest once told Matt Baglio, the author of "The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist," but a less indulgent observer, having finished both Baglio's book and Peter Manseau's "Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World's Holy Dead," will be wondering how it's possible to detect the difference. Both books focus on what could be called "fringe" religious phenomena: Baglio describes the nine months a California priest spent attending a newly minted, Vatican-sanctioned course in exorcism, and Manseau traveled the globe seeking out relics ranging from St. Anthony's tongue to the Buddha's tooth to a whisker from Mohammed's beard.

What could be more regressive than blaming your infertility on an evil spirit or groveling before a mouldering finger bone? Such beliefs and practices are anathema to the more rational and liberal-minded co-religionists of the people Baglio and Manseau write about; Baglio makes much of the fact that many priests, nuns and lay Catholics no longer believe that the devil -- as a person rather than an allegory -- even exists. Nevertheless, the estimated 350 to 400 exorcists currently working in Italy are reportedly inundated with requests for their services, wading through overcrowded waiting rooms on the way to their offices every day. And the various shrines that Manseau visits on his journeys are often so packed that the faithful feel lucky to squeeze close enough to rub a handkerchief briefly over the grille protecting the reliquary containing a morsel of the remains of a prophet or saint, nabbing just enough of the sacred essence on that bit of cloth to transfer to a sick baby.

Both "The Rite" and "Rag and Bone" were no doubt primarily conceived as vessels for curious facts and bizarre stories. In them, you can find tales of possessed women vomiting up nails, live toads and "huge quantities of human sperm." You may feel like vomiting yourself when you learn that the devout have been known, when bowing to kiss the feet or hands of a saint's corpse, to discreetly bite off small pieces of the body (usually a finger or toe) and carry it away in their mouths to be enshrined in another church. This happened to Mary Magdalene and St. Francis Xavier -- whose unfortunate remains had already suffered a long sea journey, a couple of shallow burials and being "pounded" with "long pestles" by the natives of Malacca. Then there's Jesus' foreskin, of which there have been as many as a dozen purported relics circulating at any one time; an Austrian mystic dreamed of eating that like a communion wafer, though St. Catherine of Siena settled for wearing it as a wedding ring. And by the way, did you know that some Buddhists believe that small, gemlike stones can be found in the ashes of an enlightened person after cremation?

Yet despite their similar payloads of weird factoids, these two books are fundamentally different. Manseau presides over his narrative in a sympathetic and beneficent manner, genially embracing all creeds in their struggle to come to terms with "the death of those who speak of life beyond death." He represents the post-doctrinal approach to what's commonly known as "spirituality" -- vaguely devotional, but mostly just good old-fashioned humanism with a dash of awe. He has a fairly murky, grad-studentish thesis here, something about the universal appeal of holy relics residing in the fact that they "are inseparable from ideas of the body, and the body plays a role in every faith." When you get right down to it, though, is there any human activity -- from retail to music -- in which the body doesn't play a role, seeing as everything people do has to be done with a body?

Manseau also weaves ruminations on the birth of his daughter into his book, reaching (hard) for a comparison between the fragmented image of a fetus on a sonogram and the subdivided cadavers of various saints. A book like "Rag and Bone" is expected to tell of some personal authorial revelation in order to lend a dollop of gravitas to the spectacle of other people's peculiar beliefs and to fend off accusations of voyeuristic condescension. Manseau's insight seems to be that everyone can relate to a much-revered and thoroughly minced-up individual like St. Elisabeth Romanova -- a Russian Orthodox nun killed by the Bolshevik secret police and parceled out afterward among churches in various countries -- because ultimately we all started out as infants, just like Manseau's daughter, visible in sections on a sonogram. For him, this evokes "a renewed interest in all that is implied by the word miracle, or perhaps it was the experience of seeing the component parts of a human being in a state of existence that was somewhere in between, not fully in the world and not fully out of it ... Behind the glass of every reliquary is a life story told in still frame." True, but again: So what? Since everybody, including Pol Pot and the mailman, started out as a baby, our origins turn out to be much less interesting than where we wind up and how we get there.

All this amounts to Manseau's way of suggesting that the anecdotes in "Rag and Bone," while superficially freakish, bear witness to the universal condition of man, a creature whose divine longings are trapped within the limitations of a material form. True, the appeal of relics does seem to be widespread and frequently indifferent to denomination. The shriveled corpse of St. Francis Xavier draws an impressive quantity of tourists, most of whom aren't even Christians, to the basilica where it resides in the Indian city of Goa. The Jesuit monks who tend it try to be philosophical about the many wax figurines left as offerings (a Hindu custom) and about the guides who tell visitors that the "mummy" is shrinking and that Catholics believe the world will end when it finally vanishes away. None of this seems especially likely to add to the glory of the Christian God, but, "When it is Hindus in the church," one brother shrugs, "what can you do?"

But what makes relics compelling across creedal divides isn't, as Manseau muses, some earthy, Circle-of-Life acknowledgment of "the hard facts of ... bodies and death and the inevitable end of all that we know." The dismemberment of holy bodies doesn't, as he seems to think, somehow symbolize "a state of existence ... somewhere in between, not fully in the world and not fully of it," reminiscent of his daughter's fetus in utero, either. Saints' corpses aren't sought after because they're in bits and pieces, they're in bits and pieces because they're sought after, one of those rare commodities that can be multiplied by division; Manseau himself offers evidence that the Crusades were in significant part a ransacking of the Holy Land in search of relics that commanded handsome prices back home, and casually notes the "little-known fact that every Roman Catholic church has a relic," presumably as verification of its authority. Relics are potent, largely because the value of these objects lies not in their testimony to the ordinary lot of humanity, but in their promise of transcending it. The devout believe that holy relics can miraculously cure diseases, heal broken relationships, deliver loved ones from misfortune, straighten out misguided children, and so on and so on, ad infinitum. Their adoration is utilitarian. This isn't about flesh and blood, but about magic.

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