mistress of the vatican.pdf - End Time Deception

Eleanor Herman
eteries digging up rotten bones—of pagans—calling them the bones of
early Christian martyrs, and selling them to pilgrims for high prices.
Not only human remains were sold. No one seemed to mind that some
saints’ bones had a disturbingly canine appearance.
One of the most daring feats of relic stealing occurred in a.d. 828
when two Venetians smuggled the body of Saint Mark the Evangelist
out of Muslim-controlled Egypt, where he had been buried. It was
thought that Muslims, who had their own cult of saints, would never
allow their enemies the Catholics to cart off such a powerful relic, which
could even be used against them in battle. They would sooner hide it or
destroy it than let it fall into the hands of Christians.
The two Venetians, having secretly dug up the body, took it to their
ship, and stashed it into a barrel of pickled pork, a food abhorred by Islam.
Then, when Muslim customs officers arrived on board to check
the cargo, the smugglers smilingly opened the barrel. “Unclean!” the
Muslims cried, running off the ship in terror. And that is why Saint
Mark is in Venice to this day, and crowds still throng to see the magnificent
church that sprouted around his bones.
One of Martin Luther’s beefs with the Catholic Church was the veneration
of false relics and the belief that such veneration would confer
a get-out-of-purgatory-free card. Until Luther’s followers tossed them
into the trash, one German church boasted a feather from the wing of
the angel Gabriel, and the bishop of Mainz had a magically solidified
flame from Moses’ burning bush. Even today, the cathedral at Aachen
has Jesus’ diaper and the loincloth he wore on the cross. Most of all,
Luther was disturbed that eighteen disciples were buried on German
soil, when Christ had had only twelve.
The multiplication of relics didn’t disturb Catholics, however. If a
Protestant visitor to Italy politely asked a priest how there could be, for
instance, two heads or three feet of a particular saint, he would smile,
shrug, and say, “It’s a miracle!” One Italian church reportedly possessed
the head of John the Baptist as a child.
A sure sign of God’s approval was a corpse that remained fresh long
after death. In 1599 the body of Saint Cecilia, an early Christian martyr,
was found under the high altar of the Roman church named after her.
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