Heavenly Bodies
Cult Treasures and Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs
by Paul Koudounaris
2013
Heavenly Bodies is a nonfiction history of an all-but-forgotten Catholic tradition from the Counter Reformation, the exhuming, decorating, and displaying of 'catacomb saints' - skeletons from the Roman catacombs, elaborately decorated with precious metals and gemstones, housed as relics in churches and monasteries, primarily in Germany and Austria. Author and photographer Paul Koudounaris visited a number that once housed catacomb saints, and a few that still do, to learn their history, see them in their present condition, and document them with photographs. There are so many photos, this is practically an art book! The text too, could stand alone, but benefits greatly from being able to see the relics.
Catacomb saints are an invented tradition, an innovation by the Catholic Church in the late 1500s, a response to the Protestant Reformation generally, and more specifically, to the looting and destruction of relics from some Catholic churches that some Protestants carried out in the name of reform. If the early Protestants were iconoclasts, Catholic leaders hoped to win back lapsed believers and strengthen the resolve of their faithful by leaning into this contrast, and decorating their churches with impressive new icons. New catacomb saints were delivered to German churches mostly during the 1600s, but new deliveries continued into the 1800s, albeit at a slower pace.
Producing a mass supply of revered dead, all at once, a millennium and a half after the founding of their religion, confronted Catholic leaders with an interesting manufacturing problem. Plenty of new saints had been canonized over time, but they (and their remains) were all already accounted for. But the Roman catacombs might hold an untold number of early Christian corpses, and before the religion was legalized by Constantine in the early 300s, many of them might be martyrs. The catacombs would also contain the remains of Roman pagans and Jews, plus non-martyred Christians. So how could you tell which entombed remains were martyrs? And how could you be sure of finding enough martyrs to supply all the parishes in Germany that you wanted to decorate?
The answer of course is to use sloppy, ambiguous criteria that produce a lot of false positives, and to insist that every positive you produce is authentic and legitimate. You need both methods that lie, and to convince yourself that really, they're producing the truth. Sociologist Kai Erikson wrote about this in Wayward Puritans, how the early American religious communities kept counting more and more frivolous offenses as 'crimes' in order to continue punishing a consistent number of community members for misbehavior. But you see it wherever leaders set a quota and authorize those below them to meet it in whatever way they can justify. So you'll see it in police forces that use traffic tickets and civil asset forfeiture to collect revenue, in corporations that set profit targets that can't be met legally. You see it in the software Republican officials use to find voters to disenfranchise, in the guidelines Trump's immigration enforcers use to identify people with no criminal records as gang members who can be arrested and deported, in the AI software Netenyahu's army uses to label Palestinians as members of Hamas who can be targeted for execution by drone strike. You see it in the buggy equipment ghost hunters use to generate proof of hauntings, and the statistical tricks scientists can deploy to produce a significant but irreplicable finding. Anyway, with their process in place, Catholic relic-hunters in Rome found enough skeletons to meet the demand, and felt confident in labeling each of them as martyrs, calling them saints, assigning them names, even if the burial markers were unreadable. Insisting on better, more truthful criteria, even at the cost of not having enough, tends to be the domain of critics. In the case of the catacomb saints, the critics were easy to ignore at first, but were eventually persuasive enough to halt the practice.
Catacomb saints are an invented tradition, an innovation by the Catholic Church in the late 1500s, a response to the Protestant Reformation generally, and more specifically, to the looting and destruction of relics from some Catholic churches that some Protestants carried out in the name of reform. If the early Protestants were iconoclasts, Catholic leaders hoped to win back lapsed believers and strengthen the resolve of their faithful by leaning into this contrast, and decorating their churches with impressive new icons. New catacomb saints were delivered to German churches mostly during the 1600s, but new deliveries continued into the 1800s, albeit at a slower pace.
Producing a mass supply of revered dead, all at once, a millennium and a half after the founding of their religion, confronted Catholic leaders with an interesting manufacturing problem. Plenty of new saints had been canonized over time, but they (and their remains) were all already accounted for. But the Roman catacombs might hold an untold number of early Christian corpses, and before the religion was legalized by Constantine in the early 300s, many of them might be martyrs. The catacombs would also contain the remains of Roman pagans and Jews, plus non-martyred Christians. So how could you tell which entombed remains were martyrs? And how could you be sure of finding enough martyrs to supply all the parishes in Germany that you wanted to decorate?
The answer of course is to use sloppy, ambiguous criteria that produce a lot of false positives, and to insist that every positive you produce is authentic and legitimate. You need both methods that lie, and to convince yourself that really, they're producing the truth. Sociologist Kai Erikson wrote about this in Wayward Puritans, how the early American religious communities kept counting more and more frivolous offenses as 'crimes' in order to continue punishing a consistent number of community members for misbehavior. But you see it wherever leaders set a quota and authorize those below them to meet it in whatever way they can justify. So you'll see it in police forces that use traffic tickets and civil asset forfeiture to collect revenue, in corporations that set profit targets that can't be met legally. You see it in the software Republican officials use to find voters to disenfranchise, in the guidelines Trump's immigration enforcers use to identify people with no criminal records as gang members who can be arrested and deported, in the AI software Netenyahu's army uses to label Palestinians as members of Hamas who can be targeted for execution by drone strike. You see it in the buggy equipment ghost hunters use to generate proof of hauntings, and the statistical tricks scientists can deploy to produce a significant but irreplicable finding. Anyway, with their process in place, Catholic relic-hunters in Rome found enough skeletons to meet the demand, and felt confident in labeling each of them as martyrs, calling them saints, assigning them names, even if the burial markers were unreadable. Insisting on better, more truthful criteria, even at the cost of not having enough, tends to be the domain of critics. In the case of the catacomb saints, the critics were easy to ignore at first, but were eventually persuasive enough to halt the practice.
Skeletons from Rome were 'articulated,' or wired into a posed whole, and decorated with embroidered cloth, beads and buttons, strings of pearls, mounted gemstones, and wires and settings of gold. They were shipped to the heart of Protestant country and seen as weapons for Catholicism. They're supposed to symbolize God's power and generosity, and the luxurious conditions that await all believers in heaven. To modern eyes, they look quite strange. They are at once macabre, morbid, shocking in the amount of wealth each one displays, and also almost unbelievably gaudy and tacky. This is the Catholic faith at its most glamorous, it's most goth. It's not surprising worshipers felt awed by them. There is one contemporary motif I'm aware of that resembles catacomb saints though - the flower bedecked skull illustrations associated with the Mexican Day of the Dead. The idea of claiming dead people, who possibly belonged to other faiths, and recruiting them into present-day religious practice also reminds me a bit of the posthumous baptisms carried out by the Mormon Church.
Once decorated, the skeletons would be displayed in churches across Germany, usually very prominently, and it seems they were successful in invigorating worshipers, including attracting pilgrims and inspiring cash donations. Many congregations devoted a special day to their saint once a year, when the body in its protective glass case might even be removed from the church and sent on parade before returning to its place of honor.
Catholicism is rare among religions for displaying a revering relics. The Protestant criticisms (eventually taken up by Catholic leaders during the Enlightenment in the 1800s) were both religious and aesthetic. The religious complaint is that the public doesn't understand sophisticated theological arguments about how the visible relic is the symbol of a saint who intercedes between God and the congregation to amplify their prayers - the complaint is that people worship the bones directly, and attribute miracles to the physical object, not the soul of the saint, or to god. And indeed, each relic accumulated a growing list of supposed miracles over the years, most often injuries healed and illnesses cured. The aesthetic argument is that they're silly and ugly and old fashioned. And of course, the gold and jewels are attractive targets for both criminal theft and legal confiscation.
Very few churches that received catacomb saints still have them, and many that remain are hidden away in storage, in attics and closets. Most of the disposals took place during the Enlightenment, when secular German leaders and Catholic authorities alike decided to hide or dispose of what they'd come to see as an embarrassing legacy, often despite the wishes and objections of everyday churchgoers who still valued the relics. That was one thing that struck me, throughout Koudounaris's account of history - how often leaders of all kinds made unilateral decisions about how the people under them ought to believe and worship, and how often those decisions were premised on the idea that the common people were stupid and must be doing it wrong.
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