St. Gerard’s relic tour, and the awkward questions it raises

A twenty-seven-year-old lay Redemptorist, working with the poor in Muro Lucano, Italy, has been accused of fathering a child.

He has accepted the blame and has been banned from receiving communion. He has tuberculosis and is not expected to live to see his 30th birthday.

Fast forward to 1904 and this man is canonised with a number of miracles attributed to him.

Whoever put him forward had somehow learned, more than a hundred years later, that the accuser had apparently retracted her allegation and that Gerard had suffered the scandal to protect the real father.

Relics on tour

This year, on the 300th anniversary of Gerard’s birth, his remains have been on tour in England and Wales, with blessings by his relics on offer.

He’s used to a stream of pilgrims – his remains are usually kept at the sanctuary of San Gerardo in Materdomini, Italy, where a million visit each year.

If you didn’t know, you would never guess that he’s the patron saint of the unborn and childbirth.

Fortunately, the church no longer charges for blessings, but the tour organisers must be hoping for donations.

A medieval money-spinner

I don’t know whether I abhor relics because they’re gruesome or because I simply associate them with fleecing the poor and uneducated.

For medieval bishops, obtaining bits of bone, building a church for them, and promoting feast days and pilgrimages proved a very good money-spinner.

As far back as AD 374, Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, sent Vitricius, Bishop of Rouen, what he termed ‘a rich assortment’ of these relics – including bits of various Apostles. (Although nobody by then knew the place or date of their death.)

It’s very likely that the myth of Christians being continually thrown to the lions was a necessary heroic backstory to this profitable trade in martyr’s relics.

A drink for Felix

Bishop Paulinus of Mola, near modern-day Naples, pushed aside several graves and built a new hall over the tomb of his local martyr Felix, even adding a libation tube to keep the dead saint supplied with liquor.

The poor could buy him a drink, hoping he’d help them in some way. (Did Paulinus care that this had originally been a pagan ritual?)

Within a few years, the stream of pilgrims was so great that he had to replace his original modest hall with a massive, expensive new basilica. Result.

Awkward questions

St Gerard is in our diocese now, and for me he raises awkward questions, from survivor justice and false accusations to the ethics of relic tourism itself.

And isn’t there an uncomfortable irony? Whether Gerard fathered the child or not, I struggle to understand why he is charged with granting pain-free childbirth.

Is there a female saint in charge of male fertility or impotence?

More seriously, has the Catholic Church ever taken the risky move of appointing a woman who has been ‘allegedly’ accused of something scandalous into a patron saint?

This column first appeared on Flashes of Insight and has been republished with permission by Global Catholic.