mistress of the vatican.pdf - End Time Deception

Eleanor Herman
saintly corpse was always the head, which was thought to have the
greatest power. And indeed, most saints’ bodies had already lost their
heads to another church.
No, Olimpia decided, the head was too much to steal. And besides,
somebody would certainly notice it had gone missing. She could take a
finger or a tooth; probably no one would miss that. But such a small
item would not give her church the prestige it needed. Then she hit
upon the solution—the shoulder bone. Big enough to impress more
than, say, a toe, it was a solid chunk of bone, but not as controversial as
the head. She would pilfer the shoulder bone.
Saint Francesca had founded the Tor de’ Specchi Convent, where Innocent’s
sister Agatha resided. The nuns there were looking forward to
the translation as the most exciting event of their careers. They would
leave the convent at sunset to make a torchlight procession through Rome
up the hill to the church. There they would see the coffin opened, venerate
the bones of their patroness, and watch the solemn entombment.
But when the nuns arrived after an hourlong procession, they found
to their horror that the saint’s casket had been sealed with lead and already
placed in the new tomb. Why hadn’t they been allowed to see the
sacred relics? Then someone whispered that the monsignor charged
with the translation had yanked the saint’s shoulder bone off and stuck
it under his priestly tunic for Olimpia.
Giacinto Gigli wrote in his diary, “Anyone can imagine the chagrin
that the nuns felt, the cries and lamentations that were heard through
the whole Forum, and they said they would have thought that for the
love of Sister Agatha, Pope Innocent’s sister, who should have been more
respected and honored, they would have expected the contrary.”
But the monsignor who had done the dirty deed, Gigli continued,
and “did not want to hear the cries of the nuns . . . was impolite. The
next morning Sister Agatha went to the Vatican to see her brother the
pope to complain and quarrel about it. He, at the insistence of Donna
Olimpia, sent the shoulder to a place called San Martino near Viterbo.”
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Though Olimpia caught the most flack, she was not alone in abstracting
something from Saint Francesca’s coffin. The august cardinals
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