Catholics and their Relics

After getting my clothes into the washer and while I waited to hear the sound that told me it was time to put in the detergent and bleach, I stood at the machine doing a preliminary perusal of our local newspaper, the Long Beach Press Telegram. An article on the front page had a title like "800 Year Old Relic Stolen from Church".

After soaping and bleaching my wash, I sat to wait for the wash cycle to end and read the article. It said that St. Anthony's Catholic church had on display an 800 year old relic, that it was to be on display for all five of the Sunday masses, and that it had disappeared in between them. The article had a sketch of a mysterious woman who was a person of interest in the case, as she had been aggressive in trying to touch the relic, or the relic's housing as it were, and she had attended all of the masses.

What is this "relic" you might ask, like I did, since I have a basic understanding of what a Catholic relic is, but had no idea how a church in Long Beach could get one. Relics tend to be bones of saints, and this relic is no different. The St. Anthony's relic here at St. Anthony's church is a finger bone from the guy, Saint Anthony himself, encased in a glass vial, surrounded by a gold housing apparatus that looks like a sun on a pike. The vial is so small compared to everything else surrounding it you'd never know what the hell it is.

The Vatican sent it out to the St. Anthony's here in 1902 when the parish opened, so that answered my other question. The last sentence in the article mentioned the location of the church, 6th and Olive.



I shook my head and had to read it again. This place is very close to us, and both Corrie and I have parked in its vicinity many times, her in the evening, and me late at night.

One thing I've noticed in my distanced contact with, or readings and dealings of things Catholic, is it's always a woman's fault.

That being said, it turned out that when police found the woman's apartment nearby, she had an 800 year old golden sun on a pike with a finger bone in the middle sitting on her coffee table and visible from the closed front door. She had no explanation for how or why it got there. No joke.

It was returned safely.

St. Anthony is patron saint of lost and missing objects. Is irony dead or is it just me?

One last thing to take from this (once I stopped laughing) is that the woman was charged with commercial larceny among other things. I never really thought of it like that, that robbing a church is the same as robbing a moneymaking venture, but hey, many things can affect one's perspective.