During my time inside St. Monica’s Church, I learned the reason why people were willing to cross hundreds or thousands of miles to venerate the body of a saint. Prior to this, I rather agreed with the opinion of Reynard the Fox, the great trickster of medieval folklore: why travel hundreds of miles on a pilgrimage when one can pray and repent at home just as easily?
This is the second part of the narrative of my pilgrimage to the relics of St. Maria Goretti, and it looks like it will be the penultimate rather than the ultimate post. I know that many of my dear reader are more interested in anime than my religious opinions and experiences, of which the beginning of this month has been replete. So, I promise to double post tomorrow: the last of this series and then a post on Beautiful Bones – Sakurako’s Investigation, Utawarerumono (the original series), or Heavy Object.
No other incidents worthy of note took place until I reached St. Monica’s Church in Duluth. The complaints of my belly had made me half an hour late to the Mass, but not late enough to miss the homily. That the Church parking lot was full and that I needed to park in some overflow parking pleased me, as I was wondering how many American Catholics would be interested in venerating a saint’s relics–a practice which probably strikes many as medieval. Since the main part of the Church was packed, I was ushered into a conference room, in which the mass was broadcast on a large TV screen. (This stands as the one way watching Mass on TV counts as participation in it.) To my surprise, many of the Catholics attending were Asians, Africans, and Hispanics, making me a minority–something I had not expected.
After my brief reflection on the diversity of the body of Christ, I turned my attention to the missionary priest offering the homily. Several facts about St. Maria Goretti which the priest unveiled surprised me. For example, America’s people had been greatly involved with the saint and her hometown: three of her siblings came to live in America, her prayers were asked in interceding for the Americans to break out of the Anzio Death Trap during WWII (which area contains the second largest cemetery of American soldiers in Europe), the American soldiers taught the residents of her town baseball which they love more than soccer now, and the American Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Francis Spellman, led the campaign to have St. Maria Goretti’s residence in Nettuno renovated in 1953. And so, the padre referred to the saint as a very American saint. Sort of how one may view St. Padre Pio as a very American saint in his solicitude for American soldiers during WWII and even the Americans who visited his monastery afterwards. But, Italy has so many saints that they can spare some for other countries.
Medieval Otaku 