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RELICS: PEREGRINATIO AD LOCA SANCTA

In Prague in the year 1677 you could go to Saint Vitus Cathedral to see: the breasts of Saint Anne, totally intact, kept in a glass jar; the head of Saint Stephen the Martyr; the head of John the Baptist. The nuns of Saint Teresa would show interested visitors a sister deceased some three hundred years earlier, sitting behind bars, very well preserved. The Jesuits, meanwhile, had the head of Saint Ursula and the hat and finger of Saint Francis Xavier.

A hundred years earlier a Pole had wound up in La Valetta on Malta, from whence he wrote that a local priest took him around the city and showed him: ‘palmam dextram integram (the whole right hand) of Saint John the Baptist, perfectly fresh, as though he’d just cut it off the body, and having opened its crystal case, he gave it to my unworthy lips to kiss, the which being the greatest glory this sinner has ever known, blessed be the Lord. He also permitted me to kiss a snippet of that saint’s nose, the whole leg of Saint Lazari Quadriduani, the fingers of Saint Magdalene, a portion of the head of Saint Ursula (this striking me as strange, for in Cologne, on the Rhine, I also saw the whole head, and touched my unworthy lips to it).’