Desanctification of a Saint

Relaxed in the back seat of his black limousine, Richard Cardinal Gushing, Roman Catholic archbishop of Boston, riffled through the newspaper as the car rolled through the Massachusetts countryside. He was on his way to dedicate the first Catholic church in the town of Dover--red brick St. Philomena's, which Pastor Joseph J. Boyle and the members of his three-year-old parish had just completed. Suddenly a news item riveted Cardinal Cushing's attention: the Vatican's Sacred Congregation of Rites had stricken St. Philomena, "the virgin martyr," from the roster of saints. For the cardinal, who had distributed 800 statuettes of St. Philomena to Dover's Catholics, it was an unexpected blow.

A few minutes later, the parishioners of Dover were startled to hear their new church solemnly dedicated by the cardinal as the Church of the Most Precious Blood. "It was a difficult job," said the cardinal when it was all over. "It was like telling the Irish there was no St. Patrick."

"Agent in Heaven." "St. Philomena" was "discovered" on May 24, 1802 in the catacomb of St. Priscilla on Rome's Via Saleria Nova as the skeleton of a 13-to 15-year-old girl with a badly fractured skull. On her grave was the cryptic inscription: LUMENA PAXTE CUM FI. The letters of the inscription were on tiles, and scholars came to the conclusion that they had somehow become misplaced--perhaps by an artisan who could not read--and should have been PAX TECUM FILUMENA. The presence of a glass phial containing the remains of what was assumed to have been blood, together with certain symbols (two anchors, three arrows, a palm and a flower or torch), was interpreted by archaeologists as proof that the remains were those of a martyr. Her tender age led to the assumption that she was a virgin.

In 1805 Pope Pius VII consigned the bones to the care of a priest, Don Francis di Lucia, who had them enshrined in the church of Mugnano del Cardinale near Naples, where they promptly began to produce a flood of miracles and special favors. A Neapolitan nun named Sister Mary Louisa of Jesus claimed to have received a series of revelations about Philomena's life and martyrdom, on the basis of which Don Francis di Lucia compiled a "biography" of the "saint." As a martyr, her formal canonization was unnecessary, but in 1837 Pope Gregory XVI authorized her public veneration and established her feast day (Aug. 11), and in 1855 Pope Pius IX approved a Mass and office for that day.

Philomena's saintly popularity soared with what seemed to be the miraculous cure of the dying Venerable Pauline-Marie Jaricot, French founder of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith. Philomena was also one of the favorite saints of St. Jean Vianney (1786-1859), France's famed Cure d'Ars, who called her his "dear little saint" and his "agent in heaven." In recent times some 300,000 tourists have visited her shrine at Mugnano del Cardinale each year, and countless churches have been dedicated to her--more than 100 in the U.S. alone.

But for decades scholars have been skeptical. Philomena's official demotion finally came as part of a long-term program, given extra impetus by Pope John XXIII, to tidy up the liturgical calendar by eliminating those saints about whom so little is known that their existence may be doubted. The Congregation of Rites indicated last week that there were more demotions to come.

"Crying All Day." Philomena's desanctification is causing widespread consternation this week--Catholic girls found themselves greeted with "Hello, No-name." "I've been crying all day," said Sister Marie Helene of Mother Seton Sisters of Charity in Greensburg, Pa., who has devoted 45 years to St. Philomena's cause, has written a book about her (St. Philomena, Powerful with God), and raised $10,000 to build a shrine to Philomena on the campus of Greensburg's Seton Hill College.

Laymen might worry about misaddressed prayers, but churchmen know that there is no such thing as a dead-letter office in heaven. For Sister Marie Helene and all those whose prayers have risen to Philomena through the years, there is some comfort in the closing words on the "saint" in the current edition (1956) of Butler's Lives of the Saints: "We do not know certainly whether she was in fact named Philomena in her earthly life, whether she was a martyr, whether her relics now rest at Mugnano or in some place unknown. And these questions are only of relative importance: the spiritual influence of her whom we call St. Philomena is what really matters; . . . in the words of our Lord: 'Is not the life more than the meat and the body more than the raiment?' "

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