Transcript

Welcome back to Public Shame-ry.

I'm Walhen eshire.

And in honor of April Fools' Day, I thought I'd share something a little bit lighter, although it is paradoxically something a lot darker.

The gallows humor of the Catholic Church.

Our saints, and especially our martyrs, are venerated, and they're highly honored.

They were brave in the face of evil.

They had fortitude in the greatest of trials.

We look to them both in admiration and in aspiration.

And then, the church does things like making Saint Apollonia the patron saint of dentists because she was tortured by having all of her teeth pulled out.

And even the martyrs themselves were known to crack jokes amidst being tortured and killed.

So today, I wanna focus on four particular times where we find the church's gallows humor in the face of death in pretty epic ways.

But before we do that, I need to warn you.

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All right, I just had to get that straightened out, lest there be any confusion.

So let's get into it.

The quintessential example of the church's gallows humor involves the death of Saint Lawrence.

We see it both in the martyr and in the Church.

Now, Saint Lawrence was a deacon of Rome.

He was murdered in the year 258.

Historically, the Romans absolutely loved Saint Lawrence.

After Jesus, Mary, John the Baptist, and Saint Peter, Lawrence is the fifth most popular namesake for churches in Rome.

There were some 34 chapels and churches in the city named after him.

That is a lot.

And Christians in the 300s, people like the Bishop Saint Ambrose of Milan, the Christian poet Prudentius recount some of the beautiful things that he said and did.

So the Roman prefect, working for the emperor, came to Lawrence and said that it has come out that the custom and style of your secret rites is that your priests make offerings from vessels of gold.

Now, since the coffers of the emperor were depleted, the prefect was demanding that the Church's treasures be handed over by Lawrence.

Now, Saint Lawrence actually agrees.

He says if you just give him three days, he'll gather up the Church's treasure.

So three days later, the soldiers return and Lawrence presents them with a long line of the infirm and the beggars, and he calls upon the Romans to marvel at the wealth set out before you.

The soldiers are not amused, but Lawrence insists that these men and women are worth more than gold, and in fact, are much greater than the soldiers themselves.

In his words, Is disease of the flesh the more loathsome, or the sores on soul and character?

Our people are weakly in body, but within they have beauty unimpaired.

They are comely and free from distress, and bear a soul that has no hurt.

But yours, while strong in body, are corrupted by an inner leprosy.

Their superstition halts like one that is maimed.

Their self-deception is blind and sightless.

Any of your great men who make a brave show in dress and features, I shall prove feebler than any of my poor men.

So Saint Lawrence has basically just called the Roman soldiers sissies, and for good measure, he then adds, You yourself who rule over Rome, who despise the everlasting God, worshiping foul devils, are suffering from the ruler's sickness.

Now, I'm sure all of that stung worse on account of the fact that there really was a horrible plague affecting Rome at this time, what we now know as the Plague of Cyprian, and which seems to have been smallpox, although it's too hard to tell for sure.

Now the prefect, of course, is furious, and he cries out, He is mocking up, making wonderful sport of us with all this allegory, and yet the madman lives?

So the prefect decides that Lawrence must just be trying to get martyred, and so he decides to instead torture him slowly.

So he, he's gonna order that Lawrence be burnt to death, but first he ensures that the coals are not too hot in order to prolong his agony.

But as Saint Ambrose recalls, Lawrence actually makes jokes even here.

As he's being slowly roasted to death, he cries out, The flesh is roasted.

Turn it and eat.

Now there's actually an added layer of humor here that I think we miss today, because one of the accusations that Christians were facing during this period from the Romans was we were accused of cannibalism because, as Christians, we talk a lot about eating the flesh of Christ.

So here Lawrence is joking that it's the Romans who are cannibals since, you know, they're the ones slow roasting human meat.

Now as I say, this whole affair is darkly amusing.

Lawrence is cracking jokes while being tortured, but the Church jokes with him.

How else can you explain the fact that today Saint Lawrence is the patron saint of chefs and firefighters?

I mean, there's something so bizarre about the patron saint of chefs being a guy whose only food-related comments that we know of are cannibalism jokes about himself and whose only connection to fire is being roasted to death.

The irony is so rich, it is at once genuinely awesome and also feels almost inappropriate.

So speaking of awesome martyrdoms, in the third century, Saint Sebastian was a Roman soldier who had served as a member of the Imperial Guard.

He was secretly baptized, but was found out.

The emperor ordered him to be tied to a pole and shot with arrows.

According to a later account, the archers shot at him till he was as full of arrows as an urchin is full of pricks.

They believed him to be dead, and they left his body on the pole to be devoured by wild animals.

But in fact, he was alive.

Saint Irene, a Christian widow, rescued him and nursed him back to health.

He then had the guts to go back and confront the Emperor Diocletian who'd ordered his execution.

The rest of that is an amazing story for another time.

What I wanna focus on is instead what Cardinal Edwin O'Brien calls, A bit of ecclesial irony.

Namely, the fact that the Church named Sebastian the patron saint of archers.

Imagine being an archer in the Middle Ages and asking for his intercession.

Saint Sebastian, pray that I may be a better shot than the guys who tried to kill you.

Awkward, right?

Now let's look at Saint William of Perth.

He was a Scottish baker who was known for his generosity, for his piety.

One day, he discovered an infant in a basket on the doorsteps of the church that he attended daily.

He takes the baby in, names him David.Later, he embarks on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and is bringing, as I said, obviously older now, adopted son with him.

They made it just outside of Rochester, England when this David, driven by greed, murdered and robbed St. William.

A tragic, brutal act of betrayal of one's stepfather.

Well, what does the church do?

Well, of course, names St. William the patron saint of adopted children.

And I have to imagine this might be grimly comforting for families struggling, you know, whether it's parents struggling with adopted children or vice versa.

William knows your struggle and then some.

Well, the final example, like St. Lawrence, is a saint who had the presence of mind to make a joke of his own mid-martyrdom.

In this case, it's St. Thomas More.

If you've seen the official portrait of Sir Thomas More from his time as Lord Chancellor, he was, of course, clean-shaven.

But when More, who was loyal to the church and to the pope, refused to become an Anglican, he was arrested and he was imprisoned in the Tower of London where he grew a beard.

He was tried ultimately and found guilty of treason and sentenced to be beheaded.

Now, More faced his execution bravely.

He prayed Psalm 51 on his knees and he approached the block at which he was to be executed.

His executioner actually begged for his forgiveness and More assured him that he understood the man was just carrying out his office, but then warned him, My neck is very short.

Take heed therefore that thou strike not awry for saving of thine honesty.

Basically saying, Try not to miss so you don't look silly.

Then More blindfolds himself, he kneels down, he's about to be executed when suddenly he motions for a moment's delay.

What's this?

Is he panicking?

Is he about to beg that his life be spared?

No.

Remember, he has a lengthy beard now from his imprisonment.

She carefully moves the beard to one side while uttering the immortal words, Pity that should be cut.

That has not committed treason.

In the words of a 19th century historian, With which strange words, the strangest perhaps ever uttered at such a time, the lips most famous through Europe for eloquence and wisdom closed forever.

In other words, having promised Henry VIII that he wouldn't make a grand speech at his execution, the famed orator St. Thomas More, his last words were instead a beard joke.

So, what should we make of these strange moments in the lives of the saints?

I actually think St. Thomas More gives us the answer.

In his Four Last Things, which is a meditation on death, judgment, heaven, and hell, Thomas More argues that the fool laughs at the casting of his own soul into the fires of hell for which he has caused to weep all his life.

But that it cannot be but that unease and fear follow his laughter.

And that a secret sorrow mars all such outward mirth.

In other words, upon closer inspection, the life of sin turns out to be less fun than it might seem from the outside.

Not only in terms of its eternal consequences, but even in this life.

Sin makes you miserable.

Conversely, More argues that spiritual pleasure is actually so sweet, but the sweetness of it often obscures and diminishes the feeling of bodily pain.

And he suggests this is why the inward spiritual pleasure and comfort, which many of the holy martyrs of old had in the hope of heaven, it obscured and in a way overwhelmed the bodily pains of their torment.

Or in the words of Jesus, Do not fear those who can kill the body but cannot kill the soul.

Rather, fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.

So if your life is fixed upon Christ and you are in right relationship with Him, nothing, even death, is going to disturb that.

You can afford to rejoice and even laugh in the face of your death.

Now, More wrote all that in 1522, a meditation on death long before he faced his actual death, long before the rise of Henry VIII or the Anglican Schism, or the many martyrdoms that followed it.

But it's a thought that we find him revisiting as he's in the Tower of London, as he's watching Catholic monks being sent to be executed.

And he remarks to his foster daughter, Margaret, Doth thou not see, Meg, that these blessed fathers be now as cheerfully going to their deaths as bridegrooms to their marriage?

A life of sanctity, in other words, carries with it the ability to be joyful in the face of death.

The world is a dark place at times, but we can remain joyful in the midst of it if our hearts are set on the things of heaven instead.

So with that, Happy April Fool's Day and God bless you.