By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Someone recently stole a St. Mary Magdalene relic from Salt Lake City’s Cathedral of the Madeleine, the lovely landmark church where my wife and I got married 35 years ago. This reprehensible act is an all too common part of Christian history.
I started learning about relic theft in Venice a few years ago. In addition to its famous canals, the Italian city is known for the iconic St. Mark’s Square and adjoining cathedral of the same name, which once was the private chapel of the city’s all powerful doge.
The bones of St. Mark rest in the thousand year old church that millions of tourists visit annually. Venice, however, is not the apostle’s original burial place.
Our Venice tour guide explained how in the year 828, two Venetian merchants stole St. Mark’s body from Alexandria in Egypt, then under Muslim rule. During transport, the clever thieves covered the precious relics with pork and cabbage leaves.
Muslims do not eat pork, so this camouflage deterred any close inspection of the contraband booty as it left Egypt. The robbery is celebrated in Venice and even depicted in one of the basilica’s mosaics.
Relics are strange things.
I can understand the emotional value of holding onto something or some part of someone you love or admire who has passed away. After my mother died, her grandkids each wanted something she had owned, a tangible way to remember her. Remembering is at the heart of any relic.
Yet, although I am a lifelong Catholic, I’ve often rolled my eyes at the notion of keeping relics.
It’s somewhat strange to think that if one lives a consecrated life, serves the poor, and then is esteemed and canonized as a saint, your reward will be having parts of your body chopped up and displayed around the world.
The practice of keeping and venerating relics has a more sinister side too, as demonstrated by the story of how St. Mark arrived in Venice so many years after he died.
The practice of stealing a saint’s relics and moving them to a new shrine—known as furta sacra (Latin for “holy theft”)—started in medieval Christendom. Some practitioners portrayed such theft as morally necessary, as authorized by the saint, or even as requested directly by God.
More often than not, however, relic thieves hoped to bring spiritual powers (miracles) and economic benefits (pilgrim tourism) to their hometowns. A Princeton history professor’s 1991 book explains the social and cultural context of the longstanding practice and why some medieval Christians approved of it.
Perhaps because of her proximity to Jesus, St. Mary Magdalene’s bones have attracted a lot of thieves over the years, and not just in Utah.
In the 11th century, a monk stole some of her relics from Aix in Provence and brought them back to a church in Vézelay, France. Afterwards, that church became a popular starting point for the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.
In the 12th century, a man named Bishop Hugh of Lincoln visited the monks of the Abbey of Fecamp in France, and they showed him their most prized relic, the hand of Mary Magdalene. Bending close to kiss the relic, Hugh instead snapped off a piece with his teeth and brought it back to his church in England.
Relic theft typically involves much more stealth than what Bishop Hugh displayed.
St. Faith was a French Christian girl martyred by the Romans and originally buried in Agen in southern France. In 866, a monk spirited her sainted relics away to the Abbey Church of Sainte-Foy in nearby Conques, but only after spending a decade undercover as an Agen priest to position himself for the heist.
Stealth works both ways. Franciscans actually hid the remains of St. Francis of Assisi for centuries to deter thieves.
Even though St. Nicholas died in Myra in Southern Turkey where he was a bishop, most of the popular saint’s earthly remains now rest in a tomb at the Basilica di San Nicola in Bari, Italy.
In 1087, during a conflict between the Greeks and Turks, Italian sailors from Bari seized most of his remains over the objections of local Greek Orthodox monks. Pope Urban II inaugurated a new church in Bari and personally placed Nicholas’s relics into the tomb beneath the altar.
Stealing saint bones is not a quaint relic of a bygone era either. In 2008, someone took the preserved heart of St. Laurence O’Toole, Dublin’s 12th century patron saint, from the city’s Christ Church Cathedral in Ireland.
In a further (and strange) twist to the Irish relics caper, the culprits lit candles on two of the cathedral altars before leaving the crime scene. Police found the relic six years later in a public park. Reportedly, the thieves left it there because they feared it had cursed them.
Thieves also took a sliver of St. John Bosco’s brain from a church near Turin, Italy in 2017. In 2019 someone stole the relics of native Canadian saints, including St. Kateri Tekakwitha, from a Quebec City church. In 2022, a piece of Jesus’ cross and bone fragments from six saints were taken from a church reliquary in Florida.
Although it’s not quite the same thing as theft, Christian relics change hands through litigation too.
In 2019, after a long battle, a New York state court granted permission to move the body of 1950s television evangelist Bishop Fulton Sheen from St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City to a church in Peoria, Illinois where he was born. The Diocese of Peoria supported the move as part of its campaign for Sheen’s saintly canonization.
I hope the St. Mary Magdalene bone fragment stolen from the Cathedral of the Madeleine is found safe and returned home soon.
I don’t know the Utah relic thief’s motive, but his/her actions had an unintended and dubious consequence. Salt Lake City—a town founded by the Latter-day Saints—suddenly seems a bit more like the historic Catholic venues of Europe and Asia Minor.
(Photo from the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City, Utah.)
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
