The ancient Romans used to cremate their dead. Then they ran out of fuel and then burial underground in catacombs became popular with most Romans, as was already popular with the Jews/Christians in town.
One of the legacies of this bone ossuary type thing with Christians became this worship of bones and or relics from ancient Rome onward.
I thought it quite disgusting from a western secular civilized sense when I saw a picture of Joe the Pope kissing a vial of John Paul II’s blood in some silver reliquary at the beatification service on May Day, May 1, the great eternal pagan earth thing.
John Paul II lowered the high standards, Sacred Tradition, that got put into place centuries ago to document and certify so-called saints within the pagan sect and or RC sect of Christianity.
Indeed, I was quite disgusted when then tore John XXIII’s eternal rest from him in order to put his body on display in a glass case in St. Peter’s Basilica awaiting his second miracle to make him a saint.
And of course, you have the so-called Hitler pope of Pius XII and his ongoing PR war with Zionist propaganda against him that he did not save enough Jews when he was CEO of the catholic religion business during WWII.
Most accounts will say that John Paul II helped bring down the hegemony of communism. All well and good. But was that a moral thing or a political thing? Tough question.
Anyway, his blood, in other vials, is at home in Krakow and is being used to raise money for a John Paul II memorial church/shrine. Relics have always been a great way to bring in the tourist/pilgrim money. That, and the sale of indulgences etc.
Hell, even I in the secular world would pay a buck to see Walt Disney’s frozen head. But when you do the fantasy magic relic thing on the so-called religion side of the aisle, well, it just seems so primitive to me.
Perhaps it is the fact that John Paul the Great was on the throne for so long. Many political and moral issues got entangled together and John Paul more or less with his crony underlings covered up sexual abuse by their clergy for so long as well. That, to me, comes under the heading of mismanagement and not sainthood. But then again I am only a Cultural Christian and not a catholic Christian.
Pius XII, and I have done much research on him, lasted nineteen years. His hottest critics do not see that as a CEO he wore many hats. And that is his problem as well. There is too much documentation to hold him accountable for the actions or inactions of his bureaucracy. One day he made efforts to save Jews and the next he was totally indifferent to their plight or so it would seem.
That he, as a lifetime diplomat, was more the first Appeaser with Hitler in Europe, setting that precedent, in that he as the Vatican representative made and signed a bad treaty between the Vatican and Germany in 1933 in order to get on with his greater career ambitions back at the Vatican.
Pius XII, by his silence, tried to save the institution founded by Constantine. He did so at the expense of Jews, Catholics in Poland and the Balkans, Orthodox Christians, as well as Protestants dissenting against the Reich. He let a lot of people down for the sake of a lot of institutional dust, marble and glory.
The two career politicians, John Paul II and Pius XII, are only eligible for sainthood after they changed the rules of the game in the 1980s, moving the outfield to fifty feet and everybody gets to have five hundred homeruns per season now, that is, if in retrospect you are found worthy, and your blood or relics can be sold to raise cash etc.
Angelo Roncalli however, John XXIII, broke and bent the rules and directly saved not hundreds of Jews like Pius XII, but thousands. He did so not for ambition it would appear but for the sheer humanity of doing what was right and within his limited powers to grant and act in a time of great moral crisis during World War Two.
John XXIII deserves the title of saint. He earned it. He deserves it and would make it under the old six miracle requirement, 4 and 2 miracles, for sainthood, and not the current saints on steroid rules, 1 and 1, put in effect by General Wojtyla, the prince bishop of Krakow and Rome.
Have a nice day.
