Pious Postmortems. Bradford A. Bouley
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу Pious Postmortems - Bradford A. Bouley страница 7
![Pious Postmortems - Bradford A. Bouley Pious Postmortems - Bradford A. Bouley](/cover_pre678278.jpg)
Although he may have been genuinely concerned about the welfare of the believers, the father general’s decision to prevent access to Felice’s body also further stoked the crowd’s enthusiasm. The assembled believers now surrounded the building and began to demand access to the corpse. In the midst of this spectacle, Cardinal Anton Maria Salviati elbowed his way into the church and advised the Capuchin leaders to either send for the Swiss Guards or immediately bury the body so as to remove the object of the crowd’s devotion and thereby calm it.46
Salviati’s involvement was likely a purposeful intervention by the papacy in a scene it had deemed excessive. After all, Salviati was a high-ranking cardinal who was a member of the apostolic chamber, had served the Curia on a number of dangerous diplomatic missions, and had worked to extend papal power and Catholic interests against Protestant ones.47 Given his diplomatic background and elite status, he was the perfect agent of papal authority to defuse this tense situation. Immediately after Salviati’s intervention, Fra Felice was placed in a wooden coffin and laid in the Capuchin cemetery attached to San Bonaventura. That the Capuchins had not done this earlier suggests that they were deploying Felice’s holy cadaver to incite the passions of believers in Rome.
Cantalice’s case was not unique. Promoters of sanctity regularly managed access to and staged interactions with a prospective saint’s body in an attempt to build enthusiasm and establish a cult. In the small town of Rossano in Calabria, for example, local Capuchins attempted to put forward one of their brothers as a saint. They therefore staged viewings of his body, which was said to miraculously resist rot. His corpse was moved from a group tomb to the sanctuary of the church. His brothers then allowed small groups of local parishioners, and especially local women, to enter the sanctuary to see and venerate the body. As lay believers, in particular women, normally would not have had access to this section of the church, the experience was designed to inspire wonder and awe. In fact, these activities soon generated a strong local following, despite the fact that the exact identity of the deceased brother was unknown.48
In addition to managing access to the body of a prospective saint, supporters could engage almost in a sort of multimedia campaign to encourage belief in an individual’s holiness.49 Those who sought to forward the cult of Girolamo Mani in Verona in the 1650s, for example, began to print and distribute vitae depicting the prospective saint with holy rays of light coming from his head, implying that he already was a saint. This use of the printing press soon helped to create a sizeable local following for Mani.50 In 1632 in Benevento, in Campania, the local Jesuits unearthed and displayed the body of Caterina Margiacca, whom they believed to be holy.51 They then distributed her bones as relics and printed portraits of her holding a halo-like crown.52 In this case, the circulation of both relics and imagery helped spread and enlarge her cult. Portrait statuary was also made of prospective saints and displayed publicly to stir devotion. Such was the case for one prospective saint who had the name “venerable” placed underneath a statue carved in his likeness, which was then strategically located above the central altar in his parish church.53 In each of these examples, the promoters of sanctity clearly sought to encourage and focus the veneration of deceased individuals whom they deemed holy. A variety of media was thus employed to convey the message. These cases, which are among a few dozen that appear in the archives of the Roman Inquisition, are likely just the tip of the iceberg and represent generally how saints were promoted.54
The effort expended to canonize Ignatius of Loyola (d. 1556) probably represents the most elaborate attempt to promote a saint’s cult in this period. After Pope Clement VIII denied Loyola’s canonization process in 1599 on the grounds that too few miracles had been attributed to the Jesuit founder, several supporters undertook a campaign to generate belief in Loyola’s saintliness. They sought to fashion a reputation for him as a miracle worker. Cardinal Cesare Baronio (1538–1607), author of the famous Ecclesiastical Annals, along with the first Jesuit cardinal, Francisco Toledo, conducted displays of devotion at Loyola’s tomb. These displays focused on the healing powers of the holy man’s relics.55 The campaign extended into other media as well, with the cardinals and the Jesuits commissioning new vitae and even portraits by Peter Paul Rubens that cast Ignatius as a miracle worker. These actions were successful and the promoters of Loyola’s sanctity persuaded Pope Paul V to open the process of canonization just a few years later, in 1605. Loyola was canonized in 1622.56
Although Loyola’s case was successful, this crowd-fueled promotion of sanctity became suspect in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and most cases discussed here come from Inquisition trials. Such concern was not without basis: the promotion of an individual’s sanctity by inflaming the masses did not necessarily dovetail with official, papal views on how the faith should be promulgated and could be counterproductive, leading to resistance to central authority. In 1655, for example, a woman named Francesca da Montimaggiore from the diocese of Fano, part of the Papal States on the Eastern coast of Italy, claimed to have enjoyed a vision in which the locally venerated saint Oliver (d. ca. 1050) revealed to her that he was buried under a large stone in a nearby parish church.57 He had been there for some time, but now “no longer wanted to be buried.”58 News spread within the local community, and based on the strength of Francesca’s vision, a large group of believers began to worship at the rock in the small church. The bishop, concerned about this growing cult, ordered that the rock be removed so that “the truth could be made clear.”59 Once the bishop’s agents moved the stone, the gathered faithful found no body. The cavity that the rock covered was left open for several hours, permitting the worshipers to use the evidence of their own eyes to recognize that Francesca’s vision was false.
The cult of “Saint” Oliver became a rallying point for local believers against the Church hierarchy. Undeterred by the lack of a body, the faithful came up with two theories: either the body had been moved secretly by the bishop at night or, given the lack of veneration shown to him by the religious authorities, Saint Oliver chose to hide his remains when the stone was moved.60 In short, when the bishop did not support their faith in Saint Oliver, the local parishioners became convinced that he was either attempting to deceive them or was perhaps not a very faithful Catholic. Lacking the corporeal remains of the saint, believers took pieces of the rock as “relics.”61
Oliver’s absent remains catalyzed old divisions in the community and accentuated a preexisting divide between the bishop and his parishioners. Indeed, the cult acted to support Francesca’s claims to sanctity through her ability to prophesy—an ability viewed with skepticism by local ecclesiastical leaders. The inquisitor, who had now been deputed to deal with this case, quickly brought the matter to a close by sealing the doors of the church and preventing access to the stone.62 There is no coda explaining what the parishioners of that church did when it was sealed, but it is likely that they either ceased going to services or dispersed to other nearby churches. In either event, the suppression of this burgeoning cult disrupted local patterns of worship and quelled growing religious enthusiasm.
Much of the initial phase of canonization, therefore, entailed encouraging and then managing the cult of a saint. The Curia, however, viewed such activities with increasing concern. The Roman Inquisition was already tasked with suppressing any such unapproved veneration. These efforts, which were somewhat ineffective, were aided in the 1620s, when Pope Urban VIII promulgated a series of decrees designed to deal with the problem of unapproved veneration. In particular, in 1628 he forbade the canonization of any holy person until fifty years had elapsed since his or her death.63 Thereafter, the opening move in any canonization proceeding was to establish that no cult had existed sooner than fifty years after the saint’s death.64 This served a double purpose: such a time lag was assumed to lead to a more careful consideration of the saint’s