mistress of the vatican.pdf - End Time Deception

Eleanor Herman
Third-class relics were articles that had touched the saint when alive
or his bones after death. Even these were thought to have healing powers,
having soaked up the magical properties of the saint’s body through
physical contact. It was, however, generally not accepted that a person
with whom a saint had shaken hands could set himself up in a church
for public veneration as a third-class relic.
The pope’s relatives usually showed their piety by endowing their
own churches. But because every church worth its salt had to have a
first-class relic, and so few new saints were forthcoming in such a degenerate
age, somewhere a saintly corpse had to be dismembered.
In 1638 Anna Colonna wanted a chunk of the body of Saint Filippo
Neri to send to her new chapel in Naples. Neri, who died in 1595, had
been a friend of Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s and had founded a religious
order called the Congregation of the Oratory. Because he had died only
some forty years earlier, his body had not yet been sliced up and distributed
as those of ancient martyrs and medieval saints had been, and this
corpsely integrity was a great source of pride to the Oratorians. Each
year on his saint’s day, the body was brought out from under the altar
and exposed to the faithful.
One day a priest who had some business in the Vatican happened to
glance at a table bearing decrees awaiting Urban VIII’s signature. To
his horror, on the top of the stack was a decree ordering Saint Filippo
Neri’s exhumation and dismemberment. The priest ran to the Oratorians
and told them that they were about to be robbed. The monks immediately
appointed two of their brothers to hide the body without
telling anyone its location, and then to hide themselves.
When the church officials came with their long knives, they had the
tomb opened and found that the body was gone. The assembled monks
said—quite honestly—that they didn’t know where the body was. Furious,
the officials had to be satisfied with carting off some silver vases
in which had been placed the saint’s heart, intestines, a nerve, a tooth,
and some hair. Though sad to lose such valuable relics, the Oratorian
fathers were happy they still had an intact saintly body—which the two
monks dragged out of a closet once the furor had died down. But this
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