I don’t share the Church’s creepy grá for preserved body parts of dead saints

Amidst all the red roses and disappointing dinners this Wednesday, let us take a moment out for all the starcrossed lovers who will make the pilgrimage to Whitefriar Street Church in Dublin to visit St Valentine’s actual withered heart, reposing in the unlikely resting place of a box made of gold. Personally, I’d prefer a card, but to each their hopelessly romantic own.

Still, it’s worth noting that this February, Valentine’s heart has competition in the gruesome saints’ body parts stakes: a sliver of St Brigid’s skull was gifted earlier this month to the church that bears her name in Kildare town by the Brigidine nuns, its guardians for the past few hundred years. A man from the Kildare Tourist Board — who knew? — said on the news that this might give Kildare its own Camino, making the town the Santiago di Compostela of midLeinster, which is nice.

I’ll admit that my immediate reaction to this happy event was mild surprise that St Brigid was a real person. In spite of recording a whole and supposedly knowledgeable podcast on the subject, I had presumed that Brigid belonged in the same bracket as Patrick and Santa Claus, a sort of mixumgatherum of a handful of different people; some historical, some fictional. If I were to pinpoint my skepticism, I suppose it would stem from the whole cloak business – it just didn’t seem entirely plausible that a functional cloak could magically extend to cover all of Kildare. I once owned a jumper that was half the size of Leitrim, but still.

Brigid’s elevation from the mythic to the historic sent me down a Google mine, where I learnt that the matron saint’s remains, originally interred at a monastic church in the county, were spirited away to what is now Downpatrick Cathedral during the Viking invasions for fear the pillagers would, I don’t know, pillage? In Downpatrick, Brigid was reburied alongside St Patrick and St Columba —again, who knew? — and 400 years later, the graves were reputedly destroyed on the orders of Henry VIII. Somehow — the internet is vague on the details — their relics survived and were again spirited away, as nothing ever seems to be anymore, this time to a small town outside Lisbon. In 1930, a skull sliver was returned to Ireland and gifted to the Brigidine Sisters in Tullow, Carlow from whence it has now made the short journey back to County Kildare.

Anyway, good luck to her skull fragment in its new home and all that, but for much the same reason as I won’t be darkening Whitefriar Street’s door this Wednesday, I’m afraid I won’t be walking any future Kildare Camino either.

Even back when I was card-carrying and Mass-going, I always found the Catholic

Church’s obsession with the body parts of dead saints revolting. For a religion entirely predicated on the corporeal body being fleeting and of no long-term value, its interest in preserving bits and pieces of the decayed dead seems at best anomalous, and at worst, downright creepy. St Peter’s Basilica in Rome is full of dead popes and the Vatican Museum next door is like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle of bits of fibulas and tibias and tongues and thumbs and other leftovers of sainted lives, all displayed in expensive and exquisitely crafted gold, silver and jewelled reliquaries.

Obviously, given our own long and enthusiastic adherence to Rome, we were well up for collecting bits of the saints here as well. Along with Valentine’s heart and Brigid’s skull, we have Oliver Plunkett’s whole head in Drogheda and I’m fairly sure I’ve prayed to some extremity of St Charles in Mount Argus. Unless it was a fever dream, I’m also fairly certain there is an entire altar boy in a glass case somewhere in Wexford.

About 15 years ago, the heart of St Laurence O’Toole — again with the hearts! — was sensationally stolen from Christ Church Cathedral and returned, apparently unharmed (though honestly, how would you know?) eight years later, when I presume it was put back in its wooden box within an iron cage as nature clearly never intended.

It all just seems a bit, well, gothic to me. In the admittedly unlikely event I ever get canonised, let this be my testament that I have absolutely no desire to have bits of me hacked off and distributed around the churches of the world. Plant a tree over me by all means and let people tie bits of cloth to my branches in the thin hope I can do them an obligement.

If lovers want to come and sit under me on a future Valentine’s Day, that would be fine too. Provided they bring offerings of wine, obviously. Even saints are only human.