St. Januarius, or San Gennaro, as he’s known in Italian, is the patron saint of Naples, reputed to have died in 325 A.D. He’s celebrated with big festivals in Italy and New York, and you may remember that it was during this festival that Don Corleone (in the younger incarnation played by Robert de Niro in The Godfather: Part 2) assassinated the boss Don Fanucci, with the gunshots masked by the firecrackers in the streets.

But there’s a miracle involving San Gennaro, for a vial of what is reputed to be his blood (about 60 ml) is kept in a glass vessel inside a reliquary at the Naples Cathedral, where three times a year it’s exhibited by the priests. The “miracle” occurring when the solid “blood” liquifies and then becomes solid again. Although the Church won’t officially sanction this as a genuine miracle, they don’t impugn it, either, and won’t permit any tests on the blood except crude spectroscopy through the glass, which has shown some dubious indications of hemoglobin.

Here’s the “blood” liquifying in 2011; at about 3:04 the blood is certified to have liquified, somebody waves a handkerchief, and the crowd goes wild. It’s taken as a good omen (in years in which the stuff hasn’t liqufied, bad things have happened), and assures believers that God is in his Heaven.

Wikipedia describes the ritual:

For most of the time, the ampoules are kept in a bank vault, whose keys are held by a commission of local notables, including the Mayor of Naples; while the bones are kept in a crypt under the main altar of Naples Cathedral. On feast days, all these relics are taken in procession from the cathedral to the Monastery of Santa Chiara, where the archbishop holds the reliquary up and tilts it to show that the contents are solid, and places it on the high altar next to the saint’s other relics. After intense prayers by the faithful, including the so-called “relatives of Saint Januarius” (parenti di San Gennaro), the content of the larger vial typically liquefies. The archbishop then holds up the vial and tilts it again to demonstrate that liquefaction has taken place. The announcement of the liquefaction is greeted with a 21-gun salute at the 13th-century Castel Nuovo. The ampoules remain exposed on the altar for eight days, while the priests move or turn them periodically to show that the contents remain liquid.

The liquefaction sometimes takes place almost immediately, but can take hours or even days. Records kept at the Duomo tell that on rare occasions the contents fail to liquefy, are found already liquefied when the ampoules are taken from the safe, or liquefy outside the usual dates.

There are several naturalistic explanations for this miracle (first described in 1389) that you can read about here and here—explanations hindered by the Church’s refusal to permit invasive sampling (and really, what do they have to gain from that?)  The most viable seems to be that the “blood” is a thixotropic gel, that liquifies when agitated. At CICAP, authors F. di L.Garlaschelli et al. have replicated this phenomenon using materials that would have been available to fakers in the 14th century:

Thixotropy might prove a good hypothesis to explain this “miracle”.  Thixotropy  the property of certain gels to became more fluid, even from solid to liquid, when stirred, vibrated, or otherwise mechanically disturbed, and to resolidify when left to stand. Common examples of such substances are catsup, mayonnaise and some types of paints and toothpastes.

Thus, the very act of handling the reliquary, repeatedly turning it upside down to check its state, might provide the necessary mechanical stress to induce the liquefaction. A successful performance of the rite, therefore, does not need conscious cheating, while not excluding its occurrence, as gentle or sharp movements can certainly control the timing of the liquefaction.

Indeed, over the centuries, unexpected liquefactions have often been observed whilst handling the relic case for repairs.

In support of the thixotropic hypothesis, we made up samples whose properties resembled those of the relic. We used substances that would have also been available in the fourteenth century. After some testing with bentonite clays (producing a thixotropic but unpleasantly mud-like gel), we settled for a reddish-brown FeO(OH) colloidal solution.
This gel is the right shade of brown without the addition of any dye; it becomes perfectly liquid when shaken (See Fig. 1 ) and, just like the relic, can even produce the globo and bubbles on its shiny surface (The real boiling even of a volatile liquid in a closed vessel under such conditions is quite untenable).

All the compounds for this concoction could have been readily available to a Neapolitan artist or alchemist of the 1300s. CaCO3 (from chalk, i.e. limestone, or crushed eggshells) also formed the basis of many white pictorial pigments. K2CO3, available from wood ashes was also well-known, and can be used instead of CaCO3. FeCl3 is available in the mountains around Naples

Indeed, there were several reports in the 14th century of other “liquifying blood miracles.”

However, the blood failed to liquify on the third occasion this year, over a few days in mid-December. An article in Christian Today (CT)describes how Italian Catholics have reacted with fear, for when the blood fails to liquify, as it did in 1939, 1940, 1943, 1973, and 1980 (war and Nazi occupation, cholera epidemic, and earthquake, respectively), bad stuff happens. My view is that the latest failure is connected with Donald Trump. From CT:

Fears of more earthquakes in Italy, cholera and other prophecies of doom circulated on social media after the blood of San Gennaro failed to liquefy.

Gennaro, whose name is often rendered as St Januarius, lived in the third century and is the patron saint of Naples. He is believed to have been a victim of the Roman emperor Diocletian’s Christian persecution.

At his death, it is said, some of his blood was collected by an onlooker and is to this day stored in Naples cathedral in a glass ampoule.

. . . When Pope Francis visited the cathedral in March last year, clergy said they observed the dry blood begin to turn liquid. The blood was said to have “half liquefied”. The three official liquefaction dates are in May, September and December but it does also liquefy for some Popes, although not all, when they visit the cathedral.

This month on the third annual date for the miracle, there were no signs of liquefaction. December 16 is the day Neapolitans remember the eruption of Vesuvius in 1631 and the intervention of San Gennaro to stop the lava before it entered the city.

. . . Fears of more earthquakes in Italy, cholera and other prophecies of doom circulated on social media after the blood of San Gennaro failed to liquefy.

It would be great if scientists could get their hands on this blood, but that’s unlikely. However, the Catholic Church’s ambiguous stand on the issue is canny, for it allows the believers to remain believers without the Vatican having to endorse a sketchy “miracle.”

h/t: Matthew Cobb

Yes, the Pope announced today that old fraud, Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu, otherwise known as Mother Teresa, will ascend to the pantheon of Roman Catholic saints on September 4. As CNN reports:

In December, Francis announced that Mother Teresa would become a saint after recognizing a second miracle attributed to her: the healing of a Brazilian man with multiple brain tumors after loved ones prayed to her to heal him, the Italian Catholic bishops’ association’s official newspaper Avvenire reported. That miracle occurred after her death.

The nun was beatified in October 2003 by now deceased Pope John Paul II. He approved a first posthumous miracle.

A 30-year-old woman in Kolkata said she was cured of a stomach tumor after praying to Mother Teresa. A Vatican committee said it could find no scientific explanation for her healing and declared it a miracle.

Bojaxhiu died in 1997, after long opposing birth control (in India!), and having run a string of institutions where dying people were given Jesus instead of medicines. On top of that, at least one of the two miracles required for sainthood was a hoax. As I discussed in Faith Versus Fact, the “cure” of the Indian woman Monica Besra, supposedly afflicted with ovarian cancer that regressed after she looked at a picture of Bojaxhiu, was actually a cure of a tubercular tumor, and her doctor, who gave her conventional medical treatment, took the credit. I know nothing about the other “miracle” (a cancer as well), but of course some cancers spontaneously regress.

Never mind: the Church needs saints to keep feeding its supplicants. If you want to know what Bojaxhiu was really like, read Christopher Hitchens’s The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (great title!), or dig out the free 2013 paper (in French) by two Montreal researchers that pretty much comes to the same conclusion: Mother Teresa was a fraud, unworthy of even an encomium. (I have a summary in English here.)

The Big News this morning is that Pope Francis has, miraculously, come across another miracle performed by Mother Teresa—or rather by her spirit. This gives her the second miracle she needs to go beyond beatification to full canonization, becoming Saint Teresa. The Vatican clearly put the old fraud on the fast-track to sainthood ever since she died, and now they get their chance. In the old days, it took decades or centuries from candidacy to canonization, but now, trying to court popular sentiment, the Vatican has accelerated the process.

But remember that even Mother Teresa’s first miracle was totally bogus. As I wrote in Faith Versus Fact:

The Vatican itself, which requires a miracle to beatify someone, and two miracles to make them a saint, is none too scrupulous about the medical evidence needed to elevate someone to the pantheon. The beatification of Mother Teresa, for instance, was the supposed disappearance of ovarian cancer in Monica Besra, an Indian woman who reported she was cured after looking at a picture of the nun. It turns out, though, that her tumor wasn’t cancerous but tubercular, and, more important, she’d received conventional medical treatment in a hospital, with her doctor (who wasn’t interviewed by the Vatican) taking credit for the cure.

(See also the objections of Indian rationalists to this “evidence.”)

Now, just in time for Christmas, the Pope has recognized a second miracle. The BBC reports:

Pope Francis has recognised a second miracle attributed to Mother Teresa, clearing the way for the Roman Catholic nun to be made a saint next year.

The miracle involved the healing of a Brazilian man with several brain tumours in 2008, the Vatican said.

Mother Teresa died in 1997 and was beatified – the first step towards sainthood – in 2003.

. . . “The Holy Father has authorised the Congregation for the Causes of Saints to proclaim the decree concerning the miracle attributed to the intercession of blessed Mother Teresa,” the Vatican said on Friday.

She is expected to be canonised in Rome in September.

. . . There are few details about the recovery of the Brazilian man, whose life the Vatican says was saved in the second miracle.

His identity has not been disclosed to maintain the discretion needed for the investigation, the Catholic New Agency has said.

It says he was unexpectedly cured from brain tumours in 2008 after his priest prayed for Mother Teresa’s intervention with God.

Well, before Agnes Bojaxhiu can be elevated to the Heavenly Pantheon, she has to be vetted, including examination by the genuine “Devil’s Advocate,” who militates against making her a saint. It was Christopher Hitchens who did that when Bojaxhiu was up for beatification, as described in this article.

But the procedure is not an objective examination of the miracles and saint-worthiness of Mother Teresa; it’s a pure put-up job. We can see that because the Vatican already says she’ll be a saint within a year. I wouldn’t bet against that!

The Church is none too scrupulous about these “miracles,” of course. They decide in advance that someone will become a saint, like the popular John Paul II, and then, if you look hard enough, you’ll find people willing to come forward to provide the requisite two “miracles.” It’s not even close to an objective, scientific procedure.

Even if there were no natural explanation for these “miracles,” usually involving the disappearance of a disease, isn’t it odd that those diseases happen to be the ones that can show spontaneous remission anyway? Nobody gets canonized for helping legs or eyes grow back. And in the case of Mother Teresa’s first miracle, the “remission” occurred after medical treatment, and the disease was misdiagnosed anyway.

Catholics should be ashamed of themselves for buying into this bogus vetting of saints. For, after all, this is not just an earthly honor, for sainthood is not supposed to be bestowed on an individual by the Church, but recognized as a special sign of holiness and God’s favor. And once you’re a saint, you have special access to God, and therefore praying to saints gives one a hotline to the divine.

What a foolish idea, and one made more foolish by the purely subjective decision that it takes at least two miracles to confer—excuse me, recognize—sainthood, and by the arbitrary and tendentious way these miracles are recognized.

h/t: Matthew Cobb

The Shroud of Turin, which is revered by many Catholics as the real cloth that covered Jesus’s body after his crucifixion, is of course a fake. First, have a look at it again. You can see the image of Jesus in both fore and aft views, his hands covering his genitals.

The first record of the shroud is in 1355, and it’s been revered ever since (though not officially endorsed by the Catholic Church) as a miracle, like the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe that supposedly appeared on a cloak in Mexico in 1531 (I’ve seen it). The Shroud reposes in the Cathedral of Turin, and is occasionally exhibited to the faithful. (This will happen again next year.)

The image has degenerated substantially over the centuries. We know this because there are a fair number of paintings from centuries ago showing what it looked like. The degradation is due to its repeated unfurling and exhibition, which would crack and flake the paint, in addition to the fact (revealed in the article I’ll cite in a second) that in past times it was customary for supplicants to hurl their rosaries at the shroud and then recover them.

But we know the Shroud is a fake for several reasons. Carbon dating of the linen cloth (in three separate labs) has placed its manufacture between 1260 and 1390, which (if you know dating) is the time at which the flax plants furnishing the cloth would have been harvested, no longer absorbing carbon from the atmosphere. Further, an Italian scientist managed to reproduce the Shroud by using materials that would have been available during the Middle Ages.

The other reasons for fakery (not fraudulence, as it apparently wasn’t designed to deceive people) are given in a very nice article by the historian Charles Freeman that just appeared in History Today, “The origins of the shroud of Turin.” (It’s free online.) I recommend that you read it, as it’s a fascinating summary of what we know about the shroud.

The other reasons for fakery are these:

• The shroud is covered with gesso (calcium carbonate; ground-up chalk), which was used as a ground for painting. If it was the miraculous imprint of Jesus on a burial shroud, there would be no reason for the gesso.

• As Freeman notes, the nature of the cloth itself bespeaks a medieval origin:

“Circumstantial evidence also comes from the nature of the weave. Linen has been woven from 6,000 bc and herringbone weave has been known in Sweden from as early as the second millennium bc. However, three-in-one weave, in which the weft threads go under one thread of the warp and then over the next three, is very rare, with few examples earlier than the silk damasks of the third century ad. No three-in-one herringbone linen weave has ever been discovered from an ancient site, let alone one that has been preserved in such excellent condition as the Shroud. The only surviving example of a three-in-one herringbone twill in linen other than the Shroud is to be found in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. It consists of two fragments of a block-printed stole or maniple. The print has been dated to the 14th century, confirming that this pattern of weave was known then.”

Freeman adds that there are cotton fibers mixed haphazardly in with the linen, probably the result of cotton in the air that was being spun or woven nearby and landed on the shroud as it was being produced. But cotton and flax weren’t processed in the same sites until medieval times, giving further evidence for a late production of the Shroud.

• As Freeman notes, the position of the fore-and-after figures of Jesus don’t correspond:

“What can we say about the painting on the Shroud? The images are crude and limited in tone. They show none of the expertise of the great painters of the 14th century, who, even on linen, were capable of mixing a variety of pigments into rich colours. The join of the head and the shoulders on the frontal image is particularly inept. Although the artist did try to reproduce images that might have touched a crucified body and left a mark, the two images are not even simultaneous representations of the same body. This can be seen from the arms as they are shown in the early depictions. If you lie on the ground and place your elbows in the same position as those on the back image of the Shroud, you can quickly see that it is impossible to hold the position of the crossed arms in the front. There is a difference of seven centimetres between the lengths of the two bodies. Then again the heads do not meet, suggesting that this was not a cloth that was ever folded over an actual head. A cloth laid on a body would pick up its contours, but there is no sign of this. Again, the hair of the body would have fallen back if the figure had been lying down but the blood is as if it is trickling down the hair of a standing figure. In short, it appears to be a painting made by an artist whose only concession to his subject is to imagine that this is a negative impression of the body (as shown by the wound on the chest being on the left of the image in contrast to the conventional right, as seen in the Holkham crucifixion scene) that had been transferred to the cloth.”

• Finally, the image changed over the year. In 1355 to at least 1559, Jesus was naked, with his hands covering his genitals. But in 1578, as Freeman notes, reproductions show it with a loincloth over Jesus’s groin and butt. Clearly there were some prudes, possibly the Bishop of Milan, who were distressed at the exposure of the Saviour’s bum.  The loincloth later disappeared, though there’s still a white patch on the Shroud showing where it was.

Here’s part of an engraving by Tempestra in 1613, clearly showing the shroud with the loincloth on Jesus (click to enlarge):

I highly recommend Freeman’s piece, which is loaded with history, science, and scholarship, but written for a popular audience. It does go easy on religion, saying clearly that the Catholic Church never recognized the Shroud as authentic, but considers it an “object of veneration”: a religious piece that is simply supposed to inspire people to muse about Christ’s Passion.

But it’s not as simple as that, for several Popes, and the Church itself, have never explicitly admitted it’s a fake—a mere painting rather than some divine imprint of Jesus. Rather, as is its wont, the Church stays mum, refusing to take a strong stand on its authenticity. They clearly want to have their cake and eat it too, saying it’s an “object of veneration” so they won’t look stupid because science has debunked its authenticity, but nevertheless still hinting that, somehow, it might be a real relic of Jesus.

We can see that in a recent news article by Inés San Martin on the Catholic Crux website describing how Pope Francis will venerate the Shroud when it’s exhibited in Turin between April 24 and June 24 of next year. (The Pope will visit on June 21.)

All three recent popes have been careful not to pronounce definitively on the authenticity of the shroud, generally referring to it as an “icon” that inspires genuine faith regardless of its historical origins.

“The pope comes as a pilgrim of faith and of love,” said Archbishop Cesare Nosiglia of Turin, papal custodian of the Shroud, during a Vatican news conference Wednesday to announce the pope’s trip next June.

“Like his predecessors did, Pope Francis confirms the devotion to the shroud that millions of pilgrims recognize as a sign of the mystery of the passion and death of the Lord,” Nosiglia said.

Is that a weasel statement or what? The last paragraph simply vindicates the many people who not only see this as a “sign of the mystery of the passion and death of the Lord,” but see it as a relic of the passion and death of the Lord.

In view of the multifarious evidence, the Church really should say that it was a medieval painting that could not have been Jesus’s burial shroud. But they won’t do that; it would turn off the supplicants who think it’s real.  Indeed, even the Crux article casts doubt on the dating methods:

A radiocarbon dating test performed in 1988 over small samples of the icon by three laboratories, at the universities of Oxford and Arizona, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, concurred that the samples they tested dated from the Middle Ages, between 1260 and 1390.

Other scientists, however, believe those results could be off by centuries, pointing to the possibility of bacterial contamination of the cloth. They note, for instance, that burial shrouds for Egyptian pharaohs sometimes test to centuries later than their known age for precisely that reason.

Hogwash! As we’ve seen, the debunking of the shroud rests on far more than just carbon dating, and the pieces from the Shroud were cleaned and dated in three separate labs, all giving roughly consonant dates. And if it’s bacteria, how come all that bacterial carbon got into the shroud in the Middle Ages, and none since then?

It hasn’t helped that the Popes keep visiting the damn thing, keeping alive the belief that it’s genuine. As Crux notes:

Despite the controversies, Pope Benedict XVI visited the shroud during its last public exhibition in 2010, and St. John Paul II did so three times: in 1998, in 1980, and in 1978, months before the conclave that elected him pope.

During the first days of his pontificate, Francis referred to the disfigured face depicted in the Holy Shroud as “all those faces of men and women marred by a life which does not respect their dignity, by war and violence which afflict the weakest …”

Now why would the Popes keep making pilgrimages to something that’s just a painting?

Catholics must have their miracles, even in the face of counterevidence. Just once I’d like to hear the Church declare unequivocally that the Shroud is simply a painting from the 14th century or so. And I’d also like to hear them say that Adam and Eve weren’t the historical ancestors of all humanity. (Genetic studies have disproven a two-person ancestry.) But it will be a cold day in July (in Chicago) when that happens!