Authors: Jack Hitt
In this century, the
paperwork required to consider Pope John XXIII for sainthood filled
twenty-five, three-hundred-page volumes.
But problems still remained
with the locals. Rome wanted miracles to serve as Sunday school lessons or
examples of personal piety. But the masses longed for big, vulgar miracles.
They wanted their crops to grow, their child’s withered arm to heal, maybe some
money. On the local level miracles exploded all over Europe, despite the best
efforts of the authorities to rein them in. Many of the miracles recorded
during the Middle Ages continue to echo the charming innocence first noted by
Augustine. Saint Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century theologian, was
renowned for levitating about two cubits (three feet) off the floor. There were
kings who could rub the heads of serfs and cure scrofula—the origin of “the
royal touch.” A group of nuns once prayed on their heads. Miraculously, their
skirts clung tastefully about their ankles.
But the proliferation meant miracles
became increasingly weird and grotesque. In effect, each generation of them had
to be more outrageous and bizarre than the last in order to sustain attention.
Peter Martyr was confronted
by a woman whose son was born without any features or limbs. He was described
as a breathing piece of meat. By the touch of Peter’s hand, the child assumed
the shape of a human being.
St. Bernard of Clairvaux
once excommunicated flies from a church.
A man named Withbert went to
Conques. Both of his eyeballs had tumbled out of their sockets, and before
Withbert could retrieve them, two birds swooped down and plucked them away.
Several years later the birds returned and popped them into Withbert’s eye
sockets. His sight was restored.
Adelheid of Katharinental
saw Christ appear one day, tear the palm from his hand and present it as a
eucharist.
Lukardis of Oberweimar
pounded his middle finger against the palm of his other hand, making a
hammering noise, until he had driven through it and miraculously produced
stigmata.
When Beatrice of Ornacieux
did the same thing with an iron nail, the stigmata did not bleed but ran with
clear water.
A nun named Angela of
Foligno sipped the open wounds of lepers and found the drink “as sweet as
communion.”
A teenager named Christina
was said to be so poor she had nothing to give up except food. She lived in the
desert on nothing. Miraculously her “dry virgin breasts” filled with milk, and
she fed off them.
Giovanni Colombini had a
chamber pot that issued a lovely fragrance upon his death. Many locals believed
that the contents would work wonders. One woman rubbed the odoriferous feces on
a facial disfigurement and prayed for a cure. Strangely, the miraculous perfume
was swept away and was replaced by its customary aroma. The church elders
explained that this occurred because the woman’s intentions were born out of
vanity. Colombini’s chamber pot was a miracle with dual lessons.
Some miracles were meant to
reveal a divine sense of humor, perhaps a vestige of those early wonders. These
miracles were called the
joca sanctorum,
jokes of the saints, which put
on display the medieval virtue of
hilaritas.
Like most humor writing, it
doesn’t age well. One miracle concerned some children who hid a block of
cheese, lost it, prayed, and found it. Guess you had to be there. Yet given the
intense solemnity of most miracles, these jokes found their audiences. Odo of
Cluny was the class clown of the Middle Ages whose miraculous
joca sanctorum
could make other clergy “laugh until [they] cried, and were unable to speak to
one another.”
Throughout the Middle Ages,
the clergy knew that they had backed themselves into a corner. They realized
that the expectation of miracles was so high that their absence could pose
problems. In eleventh-century Fleury, a mason working on a new church fell and
seriously injured himself. The monks began to pray excitedly because, as one
wrote, “We were afraid that if he died, the whole building program would be
interrupted as a result of a sudden fall in contributions to the building
fund.”
Increasingly, the
contradiction of miracles was becoming apparent. Thomas of Monmouth, the author
of the paperwork forwarded to Rome on behalf of St. Thomas of Canterbury,
wrote, “But as each miracle follows the last and the astonishing is succeeded
by the spectacular, I must take care to restrain my enthusiasm, or else the
piety of my readers will be dampened by the tedium of reading so many marvels.”
The proliferation of
miracles had trapped medieval thinkers on an intellectual Mobius strip. What
was a miracle? It became more and more difficult to say. Caesarius of
Heisterbach wrote, “We speak of a miracle whenever anything is done contrary to
the normal course of nature at which we marvel.” But Thomas Aquinas wrote that
the creator “does nothing contrary to nature.” Augustine had tried to prevent
this debate by acknowledging the contradiction inherent in divine miracles. But
now that the discussion was seriously engaged, only ridicule would end it.
In 1748, David Hume’s essay
“Of Miracles” halted the debate by stating a blunt truth: “But it is nothing
strange, I hope, that men should lie in all ages.” In the current Catholic
encyclopedia, Hume’s position is scorned as “superficial.” Indeed, but it was
enough.
What happened to the idea of
miracles is that it got saddled with too much meaning. Augustine’s small
private pleasure was creation’s constant reminder—often funny—that there are
always new ways of imagining things. This simple idea was burdened with a lot
of heavy lifting, and a complex administration was set up long ago to manage
miracles and their meaning.
The functionaries of this
bureaucracy, who first took their seats around the time of Charlemagne,
continue at their desks. Canonization is still carried out in Rome. Today to be
a saint, a man or woman needs two proven miracles. It used to be four, but the
church quietly reduced the requirement in 1983. From time to time in Rome, a board called the Consulta Medica convenes. Since all miracles these days are those
of healing, this commission is composed of nothing but Italian doctors. They
review the files of miracles to determine authenticity. Each doctor is paid
roughly $250 per miracle, rejected or affirmed. According to the Vatican, the average number of miracles authenticated annually is fifteen.
Saint Dominick of the
Highway taught his craft to other monks. Two days past Santo Domingo, I enter
San Juan de Ortega. This town is named for Santo Domingo’s most famous student,
who also picked up his master’s sensibility for epithets. San Juan de Ortega
means, literally, Saint John of the Stinging Nettle.
For centuries San Juan was an oasis in the scrub forests of Burgos Province, a thriving pilgrim hub
famous among my predecessors for uncommon generosity. Over time, the town
boasted a beautiful church, a full monastery, and a convent. In the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the place ran out of money and
respect. One of the many waves of anticlerical fury washed the last monks and
nuns from the area. The abandoned cathedral, with its high ceiling and
cavernous stone niches, was adopted by the local farmers as a hay barn. Today
six or seven descendents of those farmers are all who live here.
A few other pilgrims—the
Frenchman Louis, a young Italian fellow named Paolo, the two dull Dutchmen and
a Swiss man— have converged here this afternoon. All of us have gathered out
front of the old monastery and hear the story of this place, told by Father
José Marie. A part-time resident, he has personally presided over San Juan’s rescue and rehabilitation. José Marie is a part-time priest at five churches in
this region. But he’s been working on San Juan for decades, cadging a few
pesetas from pilgrims, flattering tourists until they poke a bill in his
offertory box, and hounding the federal government in Madrid to come forward
with some historic preservation money. Coin by coin, he has saved the church.
The old monastery has been partly converted into an impressive pilgrim’s
shelter. The rotting convent next door awaits future work—a sideshow of smashed
walls, rooms exposed to the elements, and high weeds sprouting from cracks.
José Marie is an
extraordinarily short man with a throw-pillow paunch. He has the face of a
smoker, although he isn’t one. Euclidian lines and angles are etched deep into
dark skin. His face looks like a crumpled paper bag.
He’s a restless man, always
in motion, rearranging himself. He slides and clicks his feet, tapping the
stone floors with his loafers, forever in search of a comfortable position. His
introductory banter is a friendly questioning, yet he barely waits for answers.
“Where are you from? No, let
me guess.
“Where did you start?
“How long have you been
walking?
“Isn’t San Juan the best
pilgrim stop on the road?
His hands slip in and out of
his pockets. Items are extracted and forced to re-up in the continuing odyssey
of objects orbiting his body. Keys appear from his pants, are fiddled, and then
are secreted inside his sports jacket. A knife emerges, opens, and closes
before disappearing behind his back. He checks his shirt buttons and his
collar. An envelope is examined, read, and then dispatched to a new location.
While talking, José Marie steps outside the building for no reason. All of us
follow and rearrange our group around him, and then he moves again.
“Come, come, come, let me
show you,” he says, hastily waving a few of us into the church. A pilgrim gets
to see a lot of churches, so by now standards are pretty high. José Marie shows
us the ornate sepulcher of San Juan himself. And he tells us the story of one
of San Juan’s miracles, which ends with a pilgrim opening his empty rucksack
and finding a loaf of bread. Knowing nods are exchanged.
Near the nave he directs our
attention to a finely carved capital of the Annunciation. As amateurs in
Romanesque architecture, we admire its pristine condition. Being nearly a
thousand years old, it’s in better condition than any I have seen on the road.
José Marie explains that because the church spent a century or two stuffed with
hay, a great deal of the destructive water was soaked up. The paradox of
neglect, he explains, is that it bequeathed to him a church of unmatched
preservation.
José Marie’s smile draws
open to show a big, perfectly arranged display of ivory dice. He has an
overcompensating grin, the kind that tries too hard and is common among priests
and TV hosts. But his schtick, this energetic gregariousness, is tempered by an
amusing intelligence, and it’s tough not to cotton to him. José Marie points to
a window and says that for many, many years in the old days, the pilgrims
walked the road and tried to time their arrivals to San Juan de Ortega on the
day of the equinox in March and September.
“On those two days,” José
Marie says in an exaggerated hush, “when the length of the day and the night
are exactly the same, at five
p.m.
precisely, a
single ray of light spills over the bottom of that
arched window there and illuminates the capital of the Annunciation perfectly
from corner to corner.” From a pocket he produces a postcard photograph of the
capital bathed in a soft squared golden light. The postcards are for sale.
“Look at this,” he cries.
José Marie is handing out glow-in-the-dark rosary beads. He puts one near a
lamp and then cups it inside his sports jacket. Each of us is obliged to put
our heads inside his coat to see the glowing beads.
“Think of what we could have
done with these—in the old days.” His eyes light up mischievously.
José Marie invites us to
dine with him tonight and then sends us to our quarters to get washed up. They
are extravagant by pilgrim standards. Huge rooms with great windows.
Comfortable beds. Expansive bathrooms. Hot and cold running water. Even
makeshift laundry facilities—a place to wash and, crisscrossing the cloister,
drying lines on pulleys pinched by clothespins. There is even a sitting room
for pilgrims to relax— comfortable chairs, side tables, clean ashtrays.
After we wash up, we return
to the center of action to find José Marie chatting with tourists who have
driven out of the way to see the old church and monastic buildings.
From across the way, we see
José Marie at work. He greets the only woman in the group by taking her hand,
bowing grandly, and madly kissing the back of his own palm.
It is difficult to maintain
any cynicism in the face of such cornpone. This is Father José Marie, and he
knows what works. At the end of the afternoon, he will ask these tourists for a
donation, and they will give amply. The show is vaudeville, but he does well
with what he can.
“How many stars do our
accommodations have?” he shouts to us as we walk up.
“Four, four stars,” each of
us cries in our competing tongues.
“No. One star. There is only
one star,” says José Marie.
“No, no. Four,” comes the
response. Louis the Frenchman looks at me, and I look at a Paolo. The Dutchmen
and the Swiss guy—all of us—exchange wide-eyed glances to underscore our
sincerity. We
mean
it: San Juan is debauchery, luxury, flowers on the
table, mint on the pillow.