St. Catherine's head

By Jack Brummet, European Travel Editor

When I was traveling in Italy in the mid-80's, I was curious  interested  fascinated obsessed with the reliquaries and other collections of people's physical remains.  And if you went to a lot of museums, churches, and basilicas, you would bump into various collections of what I called Shards of Saints and Parts of Popes.  But my friend Nick nailed it one night over a few glasses of lovely Tuscan wine, when he called them The Papal Giblets [1]. 


Rome’s Capuchin Crypt lies beneath the Santa Maria della Immacolata Concezione dei Cappuccini church in Rome. It's not a crypt in the same sense as the Paris catacombs or the crypts beneath the Vatican, but the walls of this series of chapels are entirely decorated with the bones of deceased Capuchin monks.

Rome’s Capuchin Crypt

There is a chapel in Rome—the church of Saints Vincenzo and Anastasio—very close to Trevi Fountain (and near the very site where St. Paul was beheaded)  that contains the hearts of almost thirty popes, from Sixtus V (d. 1590) to Leo XIII (d.1903). When a Pope was embalmed, it was a custom to remove their heart, which was placed into an urn. This church keeps those urns because it is the official parish church of the Quirinal Palace which the Popes used as their summer home since the 16th century.

St. Catherine's head

A trip to Sienna requires absolutely requires at visit to the mummified head, and finger, of St. Catherine at the Church of San Dominico [2]. It was one of the most memorable things I saw in Italy.  She is the patron saint of both Italy and fire prevention (she was reportedly fireproof).

Saint Catherine of Sienna once received a vision that Jesus gave her a wedding finger made of his own holy foreskin. She "wore" thing ring her entire life, although no one else could see it.  She would whip herself to dampen the unholy urges she sometimes felt.  At the age of 16, her family attempted to marry her off, but she wasn't buying that.  She cut off all her hair and scalded herself in a hot springs in order to make herself flat out too ugly to marry.  
























St. Catherine experienced stigmata—when she was 28, five red rays shot out of the crucifix she was praying to and pierced her hands, feet and heart.  She had visions, and lived on nothing but the Blessed Sacrament (a sip of wine and a cracker).  It is also said that she could spontaneously heal, was impervious to flames (she was fireproof!), and had the ability to levitate.  

The Church of San Dominico

She died of stroke in Rome in 1380 at the age of 33. The people of Sienna wanted her body back. They couldn't steal her whole body, so they cut off her head and put it in a sack.  Legend says that guards stopped the thieves but when they checked the sack, only found hundreds of rose petals in the bag.  When they returned to Sienna, the head had re-materialized.To this day, the head is still on display in Sienna, along with Saint Catherine’s dismembered thumb [3].  For some reason, her foot is in Venice. 

St. Catherine's finger

[1] [Ed's note: *Sidebar* There is a rumored Papal Phallus repository squirreled away in some shrine or crypt. And drifting even further off topic, I believe, that Lord Byron's pride and joy actually merited its own urn when it came to disposing of his body. If that is true, and if the relic did survive into the third millennium, All This Is That can't find it.]

[2] Although not nearly as strange as the trial of Pope Formosus. In the ninth century, "a successor of Pope Formosus (891-896) exhumed his 9-months-dead body and put it on trial for perjury and other crimes. As Notre Dame scholar Richard P. McBrien recounts in 'Lives of the Popes,' Formosus' cadaver was 'propped up on a throne in full pontifical vestments' for the trial, and after his conviction, 'three fingers of his right hand (by which he swore oaths and gave blessings) were cut off.' " (From the St. Louis Post Dispatch).

[3] St. Catherine's head, being many centuries old now, is not so nearly well-preserved as say, Lenin's, or Mao Zedong'a, or even the body of Sylvester, the mummified corpse that stands in a display case in Seattle's Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe.

---o0o---