Furta sacra -- and not-so-sacra

Who would want to steal a human heart -- especially a thoroughly nonfunctional one? Somebody in Buenos Aires, apparently . . .

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP)- The heart of a revered 19th century Argentine friar and patriot was stolen from an urn in the Franciscan monastery where it was kept for years as a religious relic, a church official said.

Whoever scooped up friar Mamerto Esquiu's heart on Tuesday left the urn it was stored in behind, said Jorge Martinez, head of the San Francisco monastery in the northwestern province of Catamarca.

"The theft was carried out because of the heart -- nothing else was stolen," he told local reporters. "It's very sad."

Witnesses reported seeing a bearded man run from the monastery around the time the heart went missing, but no one had been arrested, the Catamarca daily El Ancasti said.

Tuesday's theft marks the second time since 1990 that the friar's heart was mysteriously spirited away, the newspaper said. -- Via the Curt Jester

The theft of relics was quite common in the Middle Ages. The practice was called "furta sacra," or sacred theft, and was considered to some degree a holy undertaking.  

According to Charles Lindholm, in Authenticity, Anthropology, and the Sacred: 

In Medieval Europe, a living bond with the sacred past was achieved through many means, including furta sacra, which was the "sacred theft" of holy relics from ruined, neglected or provincial shrines. According to historians, there was intense competition for possession of saintly body parts and other such objects, since the sanctity (and popularity) of churches rested in large measure on the number and quality of the relics displayed within them. To meet the demand, professional traffickers in holiness travelled around medieval Europe, snatching and then selling splinters of the cross and bits and pieces of various saints to anyone with funds to buy. Some priests also sought relics themselves. Bishop Hugh of Lincoln (later canonized) was one of the most assiduous practitioners of furta sacra. Allowed to handle the arm of Mary Magdalene at a rival shrine, he surreptitiously bit off a finger and took it back to his parish, where it remains today.

An extensive study of the practice can be found in Geary, Patrick J.  Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages. Princeton University Press. c.1978.

The heart in the reliquary pictured above belonged to St. John Vianney.

Comments

[prairie biker]

The Old Testament proscribes that a body should be buried as intact as possible or the person suffers eternal damnation. On what basis do Catholics justify taking body parts for icons? Isn't that rather pagan?

[gail]

New dispensation and all that. Lots of Christian practices override Hebraic purity laws. I've never understood what the attraction is, though. It seems more superstitious than pagan.

[gail]

Lindholm explains it very well, I think. It creates a link with a sacred past. Relics are also collected and venerated in Buddhism and Islam (a hair from the beard of Mohammed, for instance, is in the Topkapi palace in Istanbul.) See Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relic

[JBelle]

pffft. Look what they did to Francis Xavier and he still see thousands and thousands of people a month!