Skepticism, Science & Pseudoscience

I love relics. When I was on a visit to my mother's hometown in Austria as a child, I was fascinated by the "catacomb saints" they had in the church.

These things are amazing, and all over Central Europe:



Traders in Rome would sell bodies they looted from the catacombs and sell them as "Christian martyrs" to folks building baroque churches. With no freaking clue who these folks were, they are all dressed up and on display. First dead person I ever saw.

But since then, I've always liked to see the collections, now kept in the "treasures" sections of cathedrals, of the odd bits of bones, teeth and other body parts of holy notables in the gaudiest display capsules. Now, you can buy trading cards with bits of game jerseys, wood from bats, and so on that seem to fill the same urge to have something tangibly connected to whatever it is one admires.

The problem with relics, from the point of view of the church organization, is that they can be politically disruptive. If you start drawing the pilgrim traffic away from someone else's church, then your relics are fake, and mine are real. Or, the relic can be advancing one bishop's status over another. Once the relics make their way into folklore, the early denunciations are papered over. A similar set of events happened with Our Lady of Guadeloupe, of which the story of its origin is quite the tale. They've got it hanging too high above the motorized observation walkway to really get a good close look at it now, though.

I've seen a bunch of pieces of the true cross, a drop of Christ's blood (in a very unassuming chapel in Bruges), an earbone of St. John the Beloved, and a list of others. I understand the true grail is in Valencia, Spain.

You can always tell the genuine ones, because they have the word "true" in front.

I was under the impression that the chemistry of the shroud image was a subject of some debate. Not having a well-developed curatorial sophistication, though, my understanding was that it was some kind of superficial scorch that had been touched up a number of times, instead of having been painted. But by its "origin", I meant the process by which it was made, and not the specifics.

The souvenir business in Constantinople must have been awesome during the Crusades.