Episode 599: The Horrible Lives and Deaths of the Saints - The Middle Ages

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Speaker 1 There's no place to escape to this is the last podcast on the left.

Speaker 1 That's when the cannibalism started.

Speaker 1 You know who should be a saint? Who? The guy who invented shoe inserts,

Speaker 1 Dr. School, St.
School.

Speaker 1 Yes, Saint Dr. Scholl.
No, I'd like to be Dr. Saint Scholl.

Speaker 1 He did not go to 15 years of uncomfortable foot school to be Mr. Saint Joel.
And he's one of the very few Jewish saints.

Speaker 1 You're only saying this because we're currently in New York and we're walking a lot right now, aren't you? My back really hurts. My back hurts.
My penis hurts, but I think that's because of my jeans.

Speaker 1 Yeah, or it's because you yank it so much when you're away from your wife. My wife just got back.

Speaker 1 And so I can retire old gripper.

Speaker 1 Welcome to the last podcast on the left, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Marcus Parks.
I'm here with the gripping Henry Zabrowski. Not gripping as much anymore because I'm back in the married life.

Speaker 1 Very nice. And I'm here with Ed Larson, who I assume has not been gripping since we arrived in New York City.
I've been flopping.

Speaker 1 It's actually a problem.

Speaker 1 He needs to go to a doctor. He needs to get his new penis bone inserted.

Speaker 1 And today we're going to be expanding upon the world of the Catholic Saints. Yay!

Speaker 1 By popular demand.

Speaker 1 Seriously, this whole story, and I was just in the Met for the, like, I went through, and I did not understand how much Saint merch would be at the Met. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 It's all, because, like, I I guess, because the last time I went, I was, we were in the middle of doing all this research, and now I went and I was like, it's a whole room of reliquaries where you go, and you really just see just how,

Speaker 1 like, how do you put it? It literally is merch. Like, it's, it's, it's fun and fanfare.
Yeah, they wouldn't paint fucking normal people. You got to be a saint to get painted.

Speaker 1 Unless you had the money, and then you could pay to be painted. But that didn't happen until later on.

Speaker 1 I got it, and then I got the impression that a lot of times you didn't even look like the person that they painted. Many times.
Impressionist. Thank you.
Me and Jamie Fallon.

Speaker 1 So, in our last installment on the Saints, we covered the role that they played in the development of early Christianity during and immediately after the largest instances of Christian persecutions perpetrated by the Romans.

Speaker 1 We went up until like 400 AD or so. There's some good words here.
I like persecutions and perpetrated together. Yeah.
Marcus has plenty of $10 words. He does.

Speaker 1 These are more $7 words.

Speaker 1 I save the $10 words for the pros. I need you to do more.
I'm going to do a little couple later. I probably won't know.
I really hope that you do some Cormick McCarthy, like the blood, it drives.

Speaker 1 The moon,

Speaker 1 it stares.

Speaker 1 The boy, he sucks.

Speaker 1 The girl in my car cross-state lines.

Speaker 1 Today, however, we're going to explore how the saints of the Middle Ages played a huge role in the establishment of Christianity as the religion of choice for much of the Western world. Good for them.

Speaker 1 Yeah. In addition to how they helped the establishment of power structures that lasted for centuries in Europe and how much of it involved corpses and murder.
Yay! That's the best part.

Speaker 1 A lot of corpses. It almost is a feature that you have to die to be super for God.
Yeah, well, you know, Catholicism is very metal. It's very intense.
It's very morbid. It's very death heavy.

Speaker 1 Well, they want your blood. They want your cum.
They want your shit. They want to eat it.

Speaker 1 The Catholics are fucked. I found a picture of myself the other day in the stations of the cross play and it's just me holding a spear at Jesus.
I was like,

Speaker 1 I want to embrace myself.

Speaker 1 Now, before we get into the nitty-gritty, it might be helpful to talk a bit about how saints are chosen and ratified, as it were. This is a process called canonization.

Speaker 1 These days, there are two lanes by which one can become a saint, martyr or non-martyr.

Speaker 1 If you died a martyr, meaning you were voluntarily killed because you didn't waver in your faith in Christianity, then only one miracle needs to be attached to you, either during life or after death.

Speaker 1 Yeah, as long as we got your body and your soul, like you gave that up for us, we only need one. Yeah, only one.
Now, an after-death miracle, is that like stories that people told about the person?

Speaker 1 No, that people would say, we'll get more into it later, but basically it's people say, I prayed to this person and now I'm healed, therefore it is a miracle.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and it can turn your flopper into a grower if you pray at a picture of Mother Teresa. And by pray, I mean pull on your penis.

Speaker 1 I've been praying to St. Conker.

Speaker 1 Oh, Joe.

Speaker 1 Well, the miracle part is why all those other Christians who died alongside the saints we talked about last episode didn't get canonized. Ed, I think you brought up that point.

Speaker 1 Why did Christopher get canonized when all the people who were around him got killed? You can't just die for Christianity. God has to choose you for reasons that are never given.

Speaker 1 You know, it's something you file under moves in mysterious ways. Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 1 which is a great file because it covers everything. Anything.
Martyrs, however, began to run out as Christianity became a more dominant world religion.

Speaker 1 And when Christianity became a dominant world religion, a person was more likely to be killed for not being a Christian than they were for being a Christian.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it flips to the other side because it's not as cool to die for Christ if everybody's dying for Christ. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So to allow for the creation of more saints and therefore more bonus content for the Catholic Church, the church had to widen the net.

Speaker 1 They figured that if a person was simply a model Catholic and a virtuous person, a good example as it were, they could be canonized if two miracles could be attributed to them in life or after death.

Speaker 1 As far as how the after-death stuff works, we'll get into that later. But this expansion of sainthood begs the question as to who decides who gets to be a saint.

Speaker 1 See, back when it was all reprobrises and elmos and blandinas. Blandina!

Speaker 1 Blandina, quit pulling your tits out at the stove. Did you drink all the lemonade again? Blandina, you're sucking all the milk and you're leaving your mill, your mouth rings on the edges of the box.

Speaker 1 This crystal light tastes like piss. Oh, it's piss.
It is piss.

Speaker 1 Well, back then, saints were chosen mostly by local chapters, isolated groups of Christian cultists. And this freedom to choose enabled Christianity to take root in hundreds of places across Europe.

Speaker 1 The way I'd kind of put it is that it changed from the way last podcast and left grew from a grassroots, everybody telling each other about it. We won the People's Choice Award at the Webby's, right?

Speaker 1 That was our folk canonization by the internet people of the time. Which is still, we love our Webby every day.
It's in my office.

Speaker 1 I think about the Webby and I miss that magical night, that one night we got to be at the Webby's office. Yeah,

Speaker 1 Joe McHale mispronounced my name and made fun of me. Oh, yeah, it was great.
I love it. Mispronounce Marcus Parks? I called him Mark.
He called me Mark Parks and said, that's a stupid name.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he's a piece of shit. He's a piece of shit and an idiot.

Speaker 1 Why would you do that? I don't know. But you see, that was how things used to get chosen.
It was always about the public. They were building up these ideas and that...

Speaker 1 helped Christianity for a while because it showed, look, that loving our shit. We're going to make them a saint.
We're going to use the popularity index and we're going to make them a saint.

Speaker 1 But then it would switch to the smartless brand of internet, right? Where now you have a bunch of celebrities and then, like, you know, the Megan Markles,

Speaker 1 the Kelsey brothers of the world, where what they do is they package their famous podcasts and then just give it to you. And then you suck it up like a bunch of dogs and pigs.

Speaker 1 And that's when they change. That's the difference when they took over canonization.
Fucking Christ.

Speaker 1 Now, do saints have to be after Christ? Like, why isn't Noah or Moses a saint? You have to be a saint after, because it's Christianity. It has to be Christian.
Yeah. And Noah didn't die for...

Speaker 1 Noah wasn't a martyr. You couldn't technically.
He did a ton of miracles.

Speaker 1 I don't know, but that was mostly. He was done by God.
He was different. He was a wizard.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 1 I mean, don't worry. Magic plays

Speaker 1 a big role in all of this.

Speaker 1 But by the second half of the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church decided that canonization needed to be centralized within the upper echelons of the church, both in who was chosen to be a saint and the process by which it was done.

Speaker 1 This had two effects. First, the church could make sure that the people didn't inject any ideas or philosophies into the Catholic doctrine that ran contrary to the church's agenda.

Speaker 1 They got to hold on to canon, right? Like, that's the thing. They got like one.
That's where canon comes from.

Speaker 1 When we worked from D.C., where they showed up and we wanted to maybe use Superman for a thing, they're like, oh, you want to use Superman?

Speaker 1 Here's the four-inch book of rules that you have to follow to use Superman.

Speaker 1 Second, Second, it gave the church the ability to carefully tailor new saints to make sure they were continually relevant.

Speaker 1 Like we talked about last week, you know, the latest saint, the first millennial saint, Carlo Acutis, they call him God's influencer.

Speaker 1 So they're trying to find some way to stay relevant in the 21st century. Does God's influencer also sell Casper mattresses? Like, does it work like that?

Speaker 1 Is he out there selling, like, I'm trying to think, Blue Chew?

Speaker 1 Well, as our head researcher Joel put it, the tailoring of saints to keep up with the times is sort of how Marvel and DC reboot superhero storylines every few years to attract new audiences.

Speaker 1 But they still make sure to keep just enough of the original concepts in place so as to not freak out the older fans. Think of it like the first Into the Spider-Verse movie.

Speaker 1 You remember that movie, right? I loved it. Fantastic movie.
I mean, you can have a black Spider-Man as the main character, but you still have to have white Spider-Man there right alongside

Speaker 1 a bunch of white white Spider-Man.

Speaker 1 All the rest of the Spider-Man happened to be white. Yeah, even the chick was white.

Speaker 1 I didn't notice one Jewish one. And I feel like that's an issue.

Speaker 1 Oh, I love Joel Peter.

Speaker 1 And if you throw an obscure fan favorite like Spider-Ham into the mix, along with a couple of little Easter eggs so people can feel special. Oh, I know that.

Speaker 1 That's a reference to Spider-Man number 52. Then you got a hit.
Did they do the Spider-Man green armor one? That was my favorite Spider-Man. Spider-Man green armor? When he had green armor.

Speaker 1 I have no idea what you're talking about. This is a real 90s Spider-Man.
Yeah. This is my hologram cover of Spider-Man.
Spectacular Spider-Man. Very good.
He was green emeralds.

Speaker 1 I think that might have just been the color of the cover. And isn't the amazing Spider-Man? It's the amazing

Speaker 1 spectacular, and then there's just regular Spider-Man. The pedophile Spider-Man.
Have you seen that one? Pedophile Spider-Man? That's shooting all kinds of ways.

Speaker 1 Little kids look like haunted houses.

Speaker 1 Catholicism.

Speaker 1 Don't talk like that about him. He's traumatized.

Speaker 1 Catholicism's use of the saints, especially in the Middle Ages, it worked much the same way.

Speaker 1 It introduced new characters while keeping just enough of the original magic so people don't react badly when something they hold so dearly changes just a little bit.

Speaker 1 And the more you drag them along, the more you have, to use super dumb advertising terms, a sticky customer.

Speaker 1 The more you get them to include the DLC of it, the more they're willing, they're showing their willingness to be involved in the religion. Yep.

Speaker 1 Now, for this episode, our source is far more academic than the first one and far more occult.

Speaker 1 This time, we have Saints of the Later Middle Ages by Andre Vauchez, which is recommended only to the most dedicated hagiographers due to how extremely dense it is. I tried.
And I've read Dianetics.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's very difficult. It's very academic.
There's no reason to read it.

Speaker 1 Nevertheless, our team was still able to glean a fascinating narrative from these pages, along with a ton of other sources all over the internet, which often contradict each other wildly, as could be expected.

Speaker 1 So remember that. When we're talking about religious figures, everybody's got a different set of, let's use the word, opinions about these things.
So just remember, it's part of what we're doing here.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's a different set of opinions. It's a different set of interpretations, a different set of fucking everything.
The stories can wildly change from web page to web page, book to book.

Speaker 1 You know, how they became saints, what happened,

Speaker 1 what they were like in life. Like, there's no consensus on hardly anything.
It's almost like the details.

Speaker 1 Yes, it does. It's almost like the details were made up in the first place and they don't really matter.
Yeah.

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Speaker 1 Now, as we said earlier, aside from the Virgin Mary, John the Baptist, and the Apostles, only martyrs were up for sainthood in the early days of Christianity.

Speaker 1 And before you ask about John the Baptist, he's an interesting character, too. He got his head chopped off.
Yes, but it's going to continue to talk.

Speaker 1 He was killed because King Herod's second wife just didn't like him because he was being very sanctimonious about Herod divorcing his first wife to marry her.

Speaker 1 And so she tricked her husband into beheading John the Baptist after his stepdaughter made him horny with a sexy dance at his birthday party.

Speaker 1 And because he was so horny and pleased with his stepdaughter, he told her that he'd give her anything she wished. And so she went to her mother and said, mother, what should I wish for?

Speaker 1 And her mother said, wish for the head of John the Baptist on a platter. And so he asked for the head of John the Baptist on a platter after her mother told her to.

Speaker 1 And that's a bit of a simplification, but really, it's not that much of a simplification. What the fuck? So it's like the real housewives of Constantinople? Like, this is the dumbest shit.

Speaker 1 Definitely a couple C's back in the dictionary. Also,

Speaker 1 man, that's out.

Speaker 1 You could hold down Alice Cooper. Yeah.

Speaker 1 He was King Herod. Yeah, King Herod.

Speaker 1 Alice Cooper was King Herod? Yeah.

Speaker 1 What are you talking about? Oh, the great Jesus Christ. Oh, Miss Wonderful.
Oh, friend Jesus Christ, superstar. Oh,

Speaker 1 if you can show me yours, so divine, can you turn this water into wine?

Speaker 1 Now, the martyrdom aspect of sainthood set forth a sort of perpetual motion because the more Christians the Romans killed, the more it strengthened the faith of other Christians who inspired other people to become Christians who were also then killed.

Speaker 1 And this cycle continued until Christianity became the dominant religion. It's kind of an interesting feature.
You really it really is. It's like you set up a bunch of like parameters.

Speaker 1 If you want to be a number one one Catholic, you got to die miserably to be one.

Speaker 1 And then other people see it happen and they don't realize once you're dead, you're not going to fucking know if you're a sane or not. And then they think, oh, good, I'll get to go to heaven.

Speaker 1 I guess I get box seats. No, you get to skip the line.
You don't have to wait for the day of judgment like everyone else. Right, that's right.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, because isn't that actual the theology? Yeah, that's the actual theology. Is that you hang, you'll never see heaven.
But I thought that Jesus opened heaven.

Speaker 1 I thought that was the idea that Jesus opened heaven. Satan is sitting up there, judging fuckers.

Speaker 1 He's just the fucking, he's the bouncer yeah well I mean it's for me the whole day of judgment thing like it seemed it's definitely up to interpretation uh because some people do believe that it will that we will never get into heaven until the day of judgment is that that's why people are pushing for the day of judgment because we're all just people just hanging out in the queue yeah people are just hanging out people are just you know like in what did jesus do uh he died for our sins and made it possible for it's kind of like you know that's a miracle it's like

Speaker 1 yeah but after it's like when a restaurant calls us and like allows us to have reservations. Yeah, you know exactly what you're talking about.

Speaker 1 You have an opportunity to spend money with Supreme this afternoon. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Now, when the persecution of Christians ended in the early 4th century, the worship of martyrs became a massive part of the religion, and the process of exhuming the corpses of saints to transfer them to places where they could be easily and safely worshipped began.

Speaker 1 That's awesome. This practice also increased the power of local bishops who were responsible for the worship and celebration of their local saint.

Speaker 1 These bishops gained further renown for compiling and distributing histories of their saints throughout the Christian world. These are the so-called hagiographies.

Speaker 1 This created a large number of martyr cults, which you'd think would run afoul of the Ten Commandments.

Speaker 1 But it was found that martyr cults were more successful at converting European pagans who had no frame of reference for a more ethereal Middle Eastern religion like Christianity.

Speaker 1 I find that fascinating in a way where like it really was, I don't know, on some level, they must have known what they were doing, right?

Speaker 1 They knew that this style of like, we'll let them start their little grassroots

Speaker 1 like churches on their own. Like, we'll let them do it.
And because what it's doing is it's flipping people without them having to. do anything.
Yeah. And they know it.

Speaker 1 They could just sit back and take the new people.

Speaker 1 Well, it changed throughout the centuries, like especially when the missionaries came to America and tried starting to convert like the indigenous people because the indigenous people would say like, oh, you got a God?

Speaker 1 Cool. Cool, we'll just fold them into the rest of them.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we'll just put them in. But then the Catholics got particularly pissed off.
It's like, no, no, no, you can't fold them into the rest of your guys. And you're like,

Speaker 1 I'm just here, man. I just fucking, I just got,

Speaker 1 you just showed up. You got, I'm barely wearing anything.
And of course, it varied from tribe to tribe, but you know, that was overall what happened again and again.

Speaker 1 Also, these small town bishops, you know, like, they didn't have the internet. They didn't have phones, you know, so they were kind of like, they were going crazy.

Speaker 1 They were doing weird shit, just making up the religion as they went. That's awesome.
Yeah, that's got to be fun. Yeah.
Oh, it's got to be extremely fun to make up all your own shit.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and then see if it sticks. But martyr cults, they focused on the relics of the saints, amulets, talismans, clothes and bones, which could actually be seen and prayed to.

Speaker 1 So while European pagans couldn't really wrap their heads around the ephemeral concept of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Most people can't.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 They could understand that if they worshipped a thing they could see, like a necklace or a skull, then they could expect something in return. In other words, they could understand magic.

Speaker 1 But that also puts us on the slippery, hardcore slope towards idolatry, which is going to make everybody super butthurt.

Speaker 1 Now, as far as how these magical powers are defined, Christian dogma said that saints were compensated for their merits and sufferings with a reward of a mystical power called Virtus. Virtus!

Speaker 1 It is strange, you just get a power, you get powers, but it's completely passive. Yeah.
Virtus is only awarded after the saint's death, and it's contained within the bodily remains of the saints.

Speaker 1 Think of it like radioactivity, it's like radioactivity, but good. Yeah, but wholly.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Now, because a saint's corpse was imbued with Virtus, that meant that it was not supposed to fall prey to the same inconveniences of decomposition as any old cadaver left in the street.

Speaker 1 Instead, it was said that the corpse of a saint would still feel as soft as they had when they were alive. Soft as a saint.
That's how I like my toilet paper.

Speaker 1 That made it appear as if the saint was just sleeping. It was even said that even after burial, a saint's body would not decompose.

Speaker 1 And it was often claimed that if a saint's corpse was exhumed years after it was buried, it would still appear as if it was freshly dead.

Speaker 1 And that seems to be a main point of a lot of canonization, is the idea of like, he ain't green.

Speaker 1 Like, yeah, it's the aim bones. But were they digging them up at all? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 And they were staying?

Speaker 1 Well, according to legend. Yeah, they were just hacking off parts of them, though.
But at that point, they were just hacking off parts.

Speaker 1 But the unintended consequence of this is that if anyone found a corpse that appeared as if it had not decomposed to the expected level, then the person whom that corpse belonged to had a chance of being worshipped as a saint, even if they hadn't been the greatest person when they were alive.

Speaker 1 Well, by the rules, God must know something about this guy that everyone who knew him when he was alive didn't.

Speaker 1 So stories would be created and histories would be rewritten just because Jimmy the shithead had died or been buried in a place where his body was more likely to avoid decomposition. Well, look at it.

Speaker 1 We saw the marsh people, right? And the swamp guys, like all the flat people. Like if you're if you're buried in a specific conditions,

Speaker 1 mud, you could be mummified. That can look like you're a saint.
If you're buried in specific dry conditions, you could look mummified. You could literally dry out specific cold conditions.

Speaker 1 You can just turn into, essentially, you just kind of dry, like a jerky. Or you freeze, yeah.
Yeah, so that is, you know, it's very difficult.

Speaker 1 You can dig up a lot of guys in the fjords and find out that they're all, you know, accidental saints. I love Saint Nicino Man.

Speaker 1 He's one of my favorites. One of my favorites.
I love, oh, because nothing like the historically religious touch of the weasel.

Speaker 1 He's an apostle.

Speaker 1 It was also said that Virtus could manifest itself in how the corpse smelled. This is interesting.
Yeah. A saint was supposed to have a particularly strong, distinctive, and pleasant scent.

Speaker 1 It's supposed to smell. Yeah.
Saints are smelly. Yeah, it was supposed to be present both in life and in death.
A smell that was called the odor of sanctity. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 I think I smelled the odor of sanctity earlier today in my Uber

Speaker 1 on the way to the show. I certainly smelled it in the 33rd Street station last night.
Yeah. Oh, it's a very, what a holy subway station this must be.

Speaker 1 It's quite stale sanctity.

Speaker 1 Now, this smell was usually faked with a shitload of garlic if the saint was already dead. Is that why so many saints are Italian?

Speaker 1 That's racist.

Speaker 1 But if they were alive and considered to be a person already on their way to sainthood, there is a possible scientific explanation for the so-called odor of sanctity.

Speaker 1 See, as we said earlier, many of them. Natural deodorant.
Natural deodorant. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I got garlic in my shorts right now. I took the shit in my pants earlier.

Speaker 1 See, as we said earlier, many of the medieval saints were not martyrs.

Speaker 1 Often, they would create their own suffering through vows of poverty or by intentionally torturing themselves by putting stones in their shoes or wearing extremely uncomfortable hair shirts.

Speaker 1 Fucking jerk-offs. Yeah, no,

Speaker 1 they're all jerk-offs. Yeah.

Speaker 1 How does this make you extra holy? You're doing this to yourself.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but well, because you're going through the pain of Jesus Christ and you're just living a miserable life no one asked you bro so all saints are cutters yeah a lot of them are yeah a lot of them yeah they all could look like grimes

Speaker 1 tumbler girls just like with with messed up mascara

Speaker 1 most commonly though saints would fast meaning they would starve themselves starvation calls ketosis in humans which can produce the distinct odor of acetone now acetone does not have a conventionally pleasant scent, but it is a smell that was probably conjured in your memory the second I mentioned it.

Speaker 1 In other words, it's very distinctive. And it's likely that acetone, or nail polish remover as it's used today, is the odor of sanctity.
You know, I was looking,

Speaker 1 I was looking up why is garlic used? Because a lot of times they talk a lot about the power of the smell of garlic and how it's holy, it can heal you.

Speaker 1 We know now that garlic does have actual like healing properties or whatever, antiviral thing. But I was like trying to find out because it was also one of the,

Speaker 1 I believe it's Hektate.

Speaker 1 Is that how you pronounce it? Probably. The goddess.
The goddess, the witch.

Speaker 1 The witch goddess? The Hecate. Hekate? Yeah.
Oh, I love a cold Hecate and a summer day.

Speaker 1 They sacrificed garlic to her, and it's been around for a long time. And I was really looking up, like, why garlic? Why does it, why does it turn against vampires? Like, why is it smelling?

Speaker 1 And it's legitimately, it seems, it's just because it smells like that. Yeah.
And that when they first found it and they cracked it open, they were like, whoa!

Speaker 1 What's that? And it makes me kind of feel weird. And they're like, must be salt magic.
And then they just stuck like that forever. Great.

Speaker 1 Now, every part of a saint's corpse was supposed to be imbued with virtus, and that included their bodily secretions.

Speaker 1 Blood and even soil, stained with all of the horrible things that leak from our bodies after we die, was collected and mixed with oils that were believed to be full of supernatural powers.

Speaker 1 Peasants would scrape up soil that a saint's corpse had touched and mix it into their water, and the water used to wash the saint's corpse was collected and sold for a tidy sum.

Speaker 1 But if you wanted a discount magic potion, you could buy water that had been poured through a saint's tomb. And that was discount because it only had trace amounts of virtus.

Speaker 1 Did this kill people? Probably. Yeah, it did.
I mean, people sick. Dysentery? Like, easily, right? Most likely.
Everyone shits when they die. Well,

Speaker 1 they said a lot of times, one of the ways they could tell you were about to be magically healed is that you spent a long time getting being more sick than you've ever been. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, you would go through a night of night sweats. Thank God.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Now, because there was so much magic and therefore so much obvious profit from having even a piece of a saint's corpse in your town, Christians would often voraciously dismember the corpse of a holy person as soon as they die.

Speaker 1 That's fucking cool. I mean, honestly, spread me around.
Yeah. I mean, I have one resting place.
I walked by fucking St. Peter's the other day, and I remember they had, what's it, Carol O'Connor?

Speaker 1 What's his name? The guy, the big cardinal that everybody likes, the guy that was there. Carol O'Connor.
He's from, say, he's from the Michelle.

Speaker 1 He's a motherfucker. Somebody else, some high respect.

Speaker 1 But I just get to think of how fun it would be if you just put out that fat bastard's corpse in a big box and we just go up there with ice picks and just cut little pieces off of them.

Speaker 1 And that's what New York ought to do for a Wednesday. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, organs were removed and stored in urns, while the rest of the corpse was placed in a temporary reliquary until a proper tomb, basically a tourist attraction, could be built.

Speaker 1 And And they're nice. They look really nice.
All these reliquaries I looked at are very ornate. The reliquary is the thing that the saints, the reliquary.
That's what I got wrong last time.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the reliquary is the thing that the saints' remains are contained within. And the tomb or the church is what contains the reliquary.
Like I saw one that was very, very ornate.

Speaker 1 It was like this trifolding thing in the center of it. It was a reliquary that contained Mary Magdalene's tooth.

Speaker 1 And in it was this thing that didn't look like a tooth, but it looks like a shard of something ancient in the very center of it.

Speaker 1 And the other one I saw was awesome, where they put a skull in it, and it had a dude's skull inside of it for forever until eventually someone came and knocked a hole in the back of the thing and took the skull out of it to go bring it other places because that's what they would do.

Speaker 1 Because that's how you took it. Essentially, you just have to steal it, like the old version of stealing your god.
You probably needed an ashtray. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And we're going to get into that later, like all the different thefts. Hell yeah.
Once the tomb was ready, monks would boil the saints' bodies until only bones were left.

Speaker 1 This is the broth thing I was talking about earlier. We'll get into this later.

Speaker 1 After which, they would be enshrined in a reliquary, a container for holy relics, while the head was separated and displayed as a protective talisman for the town.

Speaker 1 But if the original saint of the town's tomb wasn't drawn the crowds it once did, and a newer, more popular saint came along, then the old saint would be moved to a shittier tomb in a smaller town to make way for the new flavor.

Speaker 1 In a way, these were like reboots for the tomb. Same familiar location and concept, new storyline.
It's always been this way. Yeah.

Speaker 1 You're just, you're one minute, you're in, the next week, you're out.

Speaker 1 It's just so crazy because, like, they would put up heads to like scare people, but then they'd also put up heads to like worship and protect people.

Speaker 1 Humans are one of the most complicated primates that you see outside of the zoo, my friends. I think the lesson here is that in the Middle Ages, people were very comfortable with dismembered heads.

Speaker 1 Yeah, these got these little words. They saw them a lot.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, the the bones and relics of the saints would also be locally traded between communities based on who was most in need of saintly virtus.

Speaker 1 This, of course, led to a large number of arguments and feuds, as well as physical skirmishes and all-out espionage.

Speaker 1 For example, in the year 866, a group of monks from one abbey were jealous of the popularity and profitability that another abbey was enjoying because they held the bones of Saint Faith.

Speaker 1 Saint Faith was an OG saint who was cooked to death over a red-hot brugier by the Romans when she was 12 years old for refusing to make pagan sacrifices.

Speaker 1 And Saint Faith was the actual patron saint of slow cookers.

Speaker 1 Also known as Saint Feuy. Saint Fey.

Speaker 1 Now, Saint Faith was a very popular saint, so the monks at the Covetous Abbey sent a guy undercover to Saint Faith's original abbey on a long con so they could be the ones in charge of the bones of a tween girl.

Speaker 1 Hello, yes, let us in. We're a bunch bunch of wet, naked girls.

Speaker 1 What we need is some shelter because our breasts are heaving and shuddering.

Speaker 1 The Trojan whores.

Speaker 1 Well, after spending a decade ingratiating himself with the abbey. Damn, that's real.
That's a real fucking smile. They had more time back then.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 The undercover monks spirited away the bones of Saint Faith late one night Setting off a protracted rivalry between the two abbeys that involved legal battles and the occasional fist fight he was never a sexy girl

Speaker 1 He was never a sexy girl he lied and all the times I made fuck to it

Speaker 1 Well in the end the monks who stole the bones kept them at their reliquary where they're still occasionally on display today incidents like the thievery of Saint Faith's bones happen so often there's actually a phrase for it, fertum sacrum, or holy robbery.

Speaker 1 Fertum sacrum means stealing the little girl's bones.

Speaker 1 I actually saw a couple of furtum sanctums on the way to Union Square this morning out there. People looking good.
People working out, a lot of walking.

Speaker 1 Now, towns and abbeys weren't just attached to their relics because of what they stood to gain from tourism. Remember, these people truly believed in this stuff.

Speaker 1 And in the end, the most important resource of a saint relic was the Virtus, because it was the Virtus that produced miracles. But the Virtus is also what drove the economic part of it.

Speaker 1 And like we talked about the last episode where there were towns built around these, like tourist areas built around these areas.

Speaker 1 The Virtus was another,

Speaker 1 I feel like there was always people that were true believers and people that were very cynical about what was going on. Sure.
And I do think. And the guys who sold the rosary beads.

Speaker 1 Yes, and the guys, they would manipulate the true believers into handling the bad shit. I feel like they're the ones there cleaning the reliquary, doing all the dumb shit.

Speaker 1 They're the guys who show up and collect all the money at the end of the day, and they're the ones who notice.

Speaker 1 Because why would saints go in and out of favor if they didn't, like, in one way, probably don't have the same juice? No. There's probably less people getting more vertices.

Speaker 1 They're saying, oh, you know, my blind aunt went to Saint Bing-Bong and

Speaker 1 she's not blind anymore, right? Cool, whatever. But then I went there and I'm still got a three-inch dick.
You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Like, it's that thing where you're like, then maybe they're moving on to another saint. And so then they're watching it from the outside in a cynical way, knowing that the Virtus means money.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, because Virtus is what produces miracles. Virtus is the juice that produces the miracle.

Speaker 1 And this is why people still to this day take pilgrimages to pray at the tombs of saints, because they believe that the Virtus can directly and concretely answer their prayers, which are usually associated with curing a disease or healing an injury.

Speaker 1 It's said that a pilgrim has to spend anywhere between nine days and three weeks before a saint will deem them worthy of attention.

Speaker 1 But when it does happen, it is said that bones and nerves can be heard cracking and popping back into place.

Speaker 1 What the fuck?

Speaker 1 Why is it like there?

Speaker 1 Well, those who are diseased sweat out their malady over a long night. And this is why people will flock to a fucking stain that looks like the Virgin Mary because they think, oh, it's got Virtus.

Speaker 1 If I hang in front of it. Yeah.
So you have to hang with it like our old-timey weed dealers do. Yeah, man.
You have to go like hang out and just be like a comedy booker and like put FaceTime in.

Speaker 1 Yeah, man.

Speaker 1 At least nine days. It's not like where you have to fucking go over to the guy's house and watch like two episodes of weeds before you're allowed to leave.

Speaker 1 Why do I think it's actually more straightforward? Just pay for it. Yeah.
Instead of hanging out, just pay for it. Well, eventually it did get to that, and that was

Speaker 1 have why we have protestantism how many people hung out with like virgin mary toast for nine days like this doesn't work this sucks this toast is not funny and the more i look at it that's a blob

Speaker 1 this is a toast of malfunction

Speaker 1 i don't believe in god anymore

Speaker 1 but around the 13th century people were reporting that they were receiving miracles from saints without being near a tomb or a relic these people said they been healed simply by praying to drawn or painted depictions of saints.

Speaker 1 This opened up a whole new line of merch for Christianity, prayer cards, which are still sold to this day. Oh, my grandmother, the entire wall was prayer cards.
Every funeral, they give you one.

Speaker 1 They like pick a saint for you, and they give you one. You put your name on the back, and all of a sudden, that's your saint.
Yep, but it ain't free.

Speaker 1 But isn't that interesting that they, like, that's another, you know, this is where the history of religion I find, because it's, in a way, it's a business and it's not.

Speaker 1 So, like, they let the audience tell them what they'll buy. Yeah.
So, they were like, Oh, you want this shit? All right, we can make that shit. Yeah, we know a lot of painters, yeah, you know.

Speaker 1 Oh man, I went to a store outside the Vatican, and it's just like holy water. It's like, come on, you telling me that the Pope can't buy blessed this fucking hey, you go, hey, make sure I get 10%.

Speaker 1 Wave your arms in front of the store, and I'm like, it's blessed, yeah, boom, done. Here you go, bless Sporos is your blessed Coca-Cola Zero.
You know, like, that's easy.

Speaker 1 That's going to be awesome as Pope.

Speaker 1 Now, right around the turn of the 12th century, the church declared that no saint could be canonized without papal authorization, because it became clear to the church that they needed to guide the future of their religion so it wouldn't become muddled and/or infused with ideas they considered dangerous.

Speaker 1 But even though this decree came from the Pope himself, people still worshiped their local saints for centuries, some of whom still aren't canonized to this day.

Speaker 1 The best example of this kind of so-called so-called folk saint is a woman named Vilgeafortis, whose legend arose in Portugal in the 14th century.

Speaker 1 According to the story, Vilgeafortis was a teenager who'd been betrothed to a Moorish king.

Speaker 1 She wanted nothing to do with the marriage, so she took a vow of virginity and prayed to God to make her ugly somehow. Me ugly.
Which is so hard as a Portuguese lady.

Speaker 1 God did so by giving Vilgeafortis a big bushy beard.

Speaker 1 And the Moorish king withdrew the engagement soon after. According to official court documents, he said, ew.

Speaker 1 Viljafortis' father, however, was so incensed that his daughter had done such a thing that he had her publicly crucified. He wasn't confused.

Speaker 1 He wasn't like, honestly, though.

Speaker 1 If you like, I think that's got to be at least conflicting, where you're like, you know, I'm mad that you messed this up with the family, but it's crazy that you have a beard now, right?

Speaker 1 It's not just like, that means it works. That means that we could pray to him for other shit.
Now, if you have your daughter crucified, do you have to pay for it?

Speaker 1 According to tradition, yes. Normally, the father of the crucified has to pay for it.

Speaker 1 No. Per the rules, Vilgephortis meets the criteria of a saint, a martyr with one miracle.
Although the martyr part is debatable. Yeah, because it wasn't necessarily for God.
It was because

Speaker 1 she didn't want to marry the guy, but God helped her.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but I think the reason behind the church's refusal to canonize Vilja Fortis and why her veneration was eventually actively suppressed was because Vilja Fortis was a rebellious woman who disobeyed her father and rebelled against the idea that a woman is a thing to be traded.

Speaker 1 And God, by giving her a beard, was on her side. It's true.

Speaker 1 God chose. God said, all right, I'll make you ugly.
Yeah, God said, yeah, you're right. You shouldn't have to marry this guy.
You shouldn't be treated like property.

Speaker 1 But if he was a real man, he'd shave that beard and he'd kiss you anyway because it's what's underneath that counts it comes down to that's why i had to shave my beard because you got to show you got to be reveal yeah you have to reveal to your wife saint gillette

Speaker 1 well in addition vil gefortis was and sometimes still is called upon by women who want to escape abusive husbands and we all know that the catholic church is of the firm opinion that you should stay with your spouse until you die no matter how miserable or abused you might be it's almost the point.

Speaker 1 It's almost like you should then definitely stay because that's your trial. Congratulations.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you get to become closer to sainthood because you have all these examples of all these people who suffered for Christ and suffering brings you closer.

Speaker 1 Suffering brought the saint closer to Christ. So too, can you be brought closer to Christ by staying in a horrible marriage? Now, so can you ask for forgiveness if you murder your husband? Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Always. Don't get divorced.
Just kill him. Exactly.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 1 And put all your reasons on the bullet casings because it's fun as hell for everybody else.

Speaker 1 How America would kill my mother?

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Speaker 1 Now, another change the church made when they were rewriting the rules of sainthood was to even further loosen up who could be considered a saint.

Speaker 1 Reacting to outside pressures, the church offered up a new kind of saint who could be canonized simply for being an extremely virtuous human being. Is it just because the talent pool was thinning?

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 they just needed more time. And it was also...

Speaker 1 How do we expand again? Well, no, it was also because the people were asking for it. The people were like, hey, there's this guy.
He's fucking amazing.

Speaker 1 Make him a saint.

Speaker 1 Come on, make him a saint. Why not? Do we know how many saints there are? That's a great question, Eddie.
It's more than 10,000.

Speaker 1 It was an editing joke for you. You don't know because it was an editing joke.
Yeah, but now it's dead. Now they do.

Speaker 1 Well, the man who inspired this change, whose horrible name is right up there with Reprobus, was an extremely popular Italian tailor named Homo Bonus. Oh, yeah, Homo bonus.
Extra K. Yeah, dude.

Speaker 1 I got two butts.

Speaker 1 It's great.

Speaker 1 That's great for him. I mean, how is it? I can't imagine how it's pronounced in Italian, like homobonus.
I think it might be homobonis.

Speaker 1 Homobonis. I'll say it faster.
Yeah, that's always how you get through everything. That's how I do it.
Homobonus. Homobonis.
Well, homobonis was an honest merchant. It's horrible any way you say it.

Speaker 1 He was an honest merchant who gave most of his money to the poor. And because he was so popular, he became Saint Homobonus after his death.
It's so horrible.

Speaker 1 When you smell elegant, there's no dash in there.

Speaker 1 There's no... Homobonus.

Speaker 1 We didn't write his name.

Speaker 1 We're just gambling because we don't know how he is. It's impossible not to address Homobonis.

Speaker 1 Homobinas. Homobonus.
Saint Homobonus, after his death,

Speaker 1 became patron saint of tailors, shoemakers, and businessmen.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Now, not stopping there, the church also formalized the process of making a recently dead person a saint, which included interrogating witnesses about miracles and interviewing people who knew them to make sure they were as virtuous as the petitioner said, which included an investigation.

Speaker 1 And think about what you're willing to say when a guy from the Vatican shows up and he's asking all these questions.

Speaker 1 You're good, and you are, if you're talking to somebody from the Vatican and you're not in trouble, you are like, you're obviously a super fan, right?

Speaker 1 You're there, you're there to talk to them about it. They're going to ask you pointed questions about your homo bonus friend, right? They're going to say, what, what did he do? What were his miracles?

Speaker 1 And you're going to want to make that guy happy. I think you're going to want to tell that guy exactly what he wants to hear and more.
And they're going to be like, wow, yeah.

Speaker 1 Imagine getting jealous, though. And like, your buddy dies and he sucks, you know, and then the Vatican shows up and they're like, tell us, you know, is Jerry Saint Worthy? Like, fucking Jerry?

Speaker 1 Jerry's the guy.

Speaker 1 Let me ask you, let me just ask you. How'd you get that? All right.

Speaker 1 I've been doing these fucking Zoom saint auditions for the last fucking four years.

Speaker 1 Well, if it was said that a saint in waiting had miraculously healed a person, a church official would be sent out to see if the healed person had remained clear of the malady from which they had been cured, because it was only a miracle if a person was permanently healed.

Speaker 1 In other words, you had to pass the sniff test, and you had to pass it thoroughly. And one saint who was thoroughly sniffed was Claire of Montefalco.

Speaker 1 While she was alive, Saint Claire was supposedly capable of what we would call astral projection, in which she would fall into a deep religious trance and leave her body to join in loving union with the soul of God.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I did that too, man. It's called mushrooms, man.
Yeah, bro. Yeah, bro.
Yeah. Fucking sticky leaves, dude.
That's all you need, man. Patriot saint of mescaline.
Yeah, dude.

Speaker 1 She's just getting fucked by God. Super fucked.
No, I mean, seriously, she's going up there. Is that what she means by communion with the Holy Spirit? Loving union

Speaker 1 with the soul of God does sound like. Doggy style.

Speaker 1 It sounds like. Oh, let's hit that doggy style alarm.

Speaker 1 Room rolls out.

Speaker 1 Well, according to witnesses, her favorite. Sorry, everything.
I'm sorry,

Speaker 1 it's been a hard week. I lost a good friend.
Two days ago, I lost a good friend out in the open. I can't believe he's gone.

Speaker 1 I've been missing him ever since. I got, I just, I've not been right.

Speaker 1 Oh, God.

Speaker 1 According to witnesses, her face would brightly glow during these trances, and people would poke her body to get her to stir and would even try moving her. But St.

Speaker 1 Claire's physical form was solid as a rock when her soul was visiting God.

Speaker 1 Once Claire died, though, the clergy cut open her corpse as they usually did with people who were already on their way to sainthood.

Speaker 1 But this time, to check a claim Claire had made in which she felt as if her physical heart contained a physical cross, they opened up the organ. Whoa!

Speaker 1 Supposedly, located in the chambers of her heart, they found a tiny crucifix, a tiny crown of thorns,

Speaker 1 and a tiny whip.

Speaker 1 The scourge. You know, for you know,

Speaker 1 you do the self-flagellation. The scourge.
Are they sure the cross was an IUD? Yes.

Speaker 1 They get all the way up into her heart.

Speaker 1 Sometimes you own her too hard of her horse ride.

Speaker 1 A little cross in the uterus protecting my wife from my semen.

Speaker 1 But the power of Christ. Well, find the power of Christ to compare you.
Come.

Speaker 1 Well, figuring if one organ was holy, maybe others would be as well, they opened up her gallbladder and found three gallstones, which they took to represent the Holy Trinity.

Speaker 1 That's sick.

Speaker 1 Hey, listen, I know this is sounding crazy, right? You cut her boobies off so I could play with them. Listen, I just want to see what it's like, okay?

Speaker 1 I've never just played with boobies without a woman next to them.

Speaker 1 And so, Claire of Montefalco became Saint Claire.

Speaker 1 Now, besides just the control issue, another problem the Catholic Church had with the populism model of sainthood was that there were a lot of people who were locally worshipped as saints who didn't really have a reputation outside of their own village.

Speaker 1 In addition, many of these populist saints were usually just well-loved local Christians who'd been killed or murdered in horrible ways, but hadn't necessarily been martyred.

Speaker 1 This is just so so many people just saying, I'm sorry you got diced up to death after death. And it's like, man, they're dead.
They don't know. Yeah, you didn't get killed in London.

Speaker 1 You got killed in some little shire, and so no one gives a shit. Yeah.
For example, there was Radagund of Veldenburg. Yep.
He was a farm servant eaten by wolves, but also a good guy. So, St.
Radagund.

Speaker 1 That's it. That's all he was? Yeah.
She's a good guy. She's a good guy.
There was Panassia of Corona, who was murdered by her mother-in-law. What did she do? Bad death.
That's it. Yeah, bad death.

Speaker 1 But she's a

Speaker 1 slaves.

Speaker 1 The worst was a German pilgrim named Nantveen, who was unjustly accused of being a pedophile by a village he was just passing through and was subsequently burned alive. See, that's not sainthood.

Speaker 1 I call that like a mulligan. Because a bunch of guys going like, hey, listen, I'm sorry.
We had just seen, what was it, the river? Was that the one with Sean Penn where they beat the basic river?

Speaker 1 So I was all fucking, oh man, I was keyed up. I'm sorry.
we thought that Jimmy the pedophile was out of town that week. We didn't know it was just initially.

Speaker 1 It turned out that he was there the whole time.

Speaker 1 I think they should investigate the priest that made him a saint and be like, hey, sometimes

Speaker 1 mistakes are made.

Speaker 1 Well, in one case from the 13th century, a town in France actually canonized a dog. Yeah.
Saint Guinefort the Greyhound.

Speaker 1 That totally demoralizes every other meaning of the saint.

Speaker 1 Oh, I'd much rather hang out with a bunch of dogs and saints. Yeah.
Yeah, of course.

Speaker 1 But still, like, if you're like, if you think that you're the holiest of holies and then suddenly they let a fucking dog in. Yeah, fucking super dogs there.
Who was it? St. Bernard?

Speaker 1 It was a greyhound. Oh, fuck.
God damn it. God damn it.

Speaker 1 He got you. He got me.
You got me. He got me.

Speaker 1 Well, according to legend, the dog had been left alone with its master's child, and the dog protected the child in his master's absence by violently killing a snake that had had slithered its way into their home.

Speaker 1 Fuck yeah. But when the child's parents returned, they found the dog first, who presented himself with bloody jaws.

Speaker 1 Coming immediately to a very reactive conclusion that the dog had eaten their baby, the parents killed the dog immediately. Is French always jumping a conclusion? I love killing dogs.

Speaker 1 But when they heard the child, but when the parents heard the child crying, probably because he was distressed by the noise that had been made when the parents killed the dog.

Speaker 1 It's super noisy to immediately kill a dog. Yeah.
The parents rushed to the kids' room and found the dead, mangled snake nearby.

Speaker 1 I know you are now. I know.
You are up to one pack a day.

Speaker 1 The parents realized their mistake and dropped Guinefort's body down a well, which was then covered with stones and planted with trees.

Speaker 1 It actually became an extremely popular shrine where large miracles were said to occur, presumably because St. Guinefort was such a good boy.
What happened to the parents?

Speaker 1 They

Speaker 1 took care of the shrine. Oh, wow.
Like they dedicated their lives to the shrine of St. Guinefort.
Wow. If

Speaker 1 this other guy can crucify his daughter,

Speaker 1 these people can kill a dog. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Wow, yeah. Let's hold space for them.

Speaker 1 But the point is, when dogs and farm workers started making the cut, the church realized that it needed to put the people in their place, both spiritually and socially.

Speaker 1 So they switched the focus of saints from regular people to nobles, royalty, and clergy to remind everyone who God's chosen really were.

Speaker 1 Well, when they would investigate the canonization of all these nobles, the nobility and the clergy tended to back each other when it came to proclaiming their virtues, because it was in the interest of the ruling class to appear as if they were favored by God over the peasants in every way.

Speaker 1 And they didn't just take that as their station in life showed them

Speaker 1 that they were special. This also helped reaffirm the concept of primogeniture in royalty.
That's what I mean.

Speaker 1 Where the firstborn inherits the titles and powers of the king because God wants him to do that, no matter how horrible of a ruler a person might be.

Speaker 1 But the practice of canonizing nobility and royalty was particularly popular in France and England, although the practice of canonizing kings started off way back in the early days of Christianity as yet another tool for recruitment rather than simple subjugation.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and it also just shows that the rulers are now in charge. This is like us making it even more powerful.

Speaker 1 Like that's kind of what I mean where the dog one kind of lowers, but the king ones raise the value of the other saints. Well, the dog ones probably sold a lot of amulets.
It did.

Speaker 1 Yes, it very much did. Yeah, it was the patron saint of babies in France for centuries.
Yeah, literally, yeah, it made him a lot of money. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, the oldest holy king was Saint Sigismund, the king of Burgundy in what is now France, died 523 AD.

Speaker 1 He strangled his own son to death, then was beheaded and thrown down a well by his rival Clodomir. He's a real saint.
Yeah, that's what I like. Yeah, yeah, oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 But that's all to say that Sigismund hardly lived a noble life, nor did he die a martyr's death. You see, it's the Homer Bart meme.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 But Sigismund was the first barbarian leader of the Gauls to convert to Catholicism.

Speaker 1 So it was in the church's best interest to rewrite his history and make him a saint so a cult could form around him. That's big brain thinking.

Speaker 1 And that changes a lot of shit because

Speaker 1 you're trying to convert these guys. Yeah.
That's so much better than just killing them because then you get them too. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And to further tighten their grip, the Catholic Church would elevate long-dead leaders of converted regions into sainthood, rewriting their story before aggressively spreading it to prevent a backslide into paganism.

Speaker 1 You can't revert to a story that's not there anymore.

Speaker 1 By the Middle Ages, however, Christianity had become the dominant religion in Western Europe, so this retroactive manipulation of history was no longer necessary.

Speaker 1 Instead, they had to worry about canonizing nobility in the here and now to secure their future and their power.

Speaker 1 The Catholic Church began rejecting all canonization requests from the people and instead transformed the process of canonization into an industry of preparing nobility and clergy for sainthood while they were still alive.

Speaker 1 Basically, it's like padding a college application with extracurricular activities. Tell me, I know your GPA looks very good, but have you killed your son?

Speaker 1 That might actually help some of the numbers here we're finding if we look at some of the cross references. Can you be a dog?

Speaker 1 Can you kill a dog? Can you kill a dog? Can you be eaten by wolves? Can you block me? Not sick anymore. But this is like how we got like Saint Edward, who was a king.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 It was King Edward, and he just like, ah, you know, when I die, I'm going to be a saint. And everyone's like, of course.
Yeah, yes. Then you could have a couple of people like afterwards.

Speaker 1 They're like, yeah, I prayed to St. Edward and he cured my fucking dropsy.
Yeah, yeah, he was over there. I was having a hard time coming up with the new mix for the Yay album.

Speaker 1 And I prayed to Saint Eugene. And next thing you know, humma dubba dump dump bump.

Speaker 1 Humma dubbed.

Speaker 1 I was fired.

Speaker 1 But before long, contemporary martyrs began to reappear in the Catholic religion after the Middle Ages, when Henry VIII created the Church of England because the Pope had refused to grant him a divorce in 1534.

Speaker 1 Half a century later, the relationship between the Church of England and the Catholics had gotten pretty acrimonious, so the Anglicans declared Catholic priests to be guilty of high treason simply for existing on British soil.

Speaker 1 Drink them up. The Anglicans ain't fucking great either.
Drink them up!

Speaker 1 Get off of them! I said, get off!

Speaker 1 But this is, again, I like religion when it's this openly a scam. This is when you're like, you see how little it really matters?

Speaker 1 They're just making up the rules as they go. Yeah.
In addition, those who harbored Catholics and especially Catholic priests could be fined, imprisoned, and executed.

Speaker 1 And that's how a woman named Margaret Clitheroe came to become one of the many martyred saints killed by the British. She's a real clit hero.

Speaker 1 You're not like Clit clit hero.

Speaker 1 It's hard on the thumbs.

Speaker 1 How do you think I busted my wrist?

Speaker 1 Clitar hero.

Speaker 1 In addition, those who

Speaker 1 call him that a tar hero.

Speaker 1 Clitar hero. Yes.

Speaker 1 Now, Margaret probably would have never been discovered hiding priests had she not been so arrogant. Flags were raised when she loudly sent her son Henry to train for the priesthood in France.

Speaker 1 And when Margaret's husband was summoned for questioning, he folded almost immediately. Seems like Margaret's husband didn't really like her very much.
Yeah, I don't know why, though.

Speaker 1 It sounds like she's a lovely woman.

Speaker 1 You know? Yeah, she seemed very, just she seemed very, very, very, very, very, very Catholic. And I think her husband really didn't give a shit.
Yeah, no, he's just like, I don't care.

Speaker 1 Maybe it's just because Margaret is a really fun name to yell. Margaret!

Speaker 1 God damn it, Margaret! Margaret, I have had it with your nonchalance!

Speaker 1 When Cliff Rowe's house was searched, soldiers very quickly found Catholic priests in a hidden room that was built specifically for this purpose. Priest-shaped tubes.

Speaker 1 These rooms, seriously called priest holes,

Speaker 1 were built in houses all over England and still exist in some structures today. Put them head first.

Speaker 1 Yeah, dude, just a just a hole, just like a literal hole. Well, it's a little hidden room.

Speaker 1 No, No, it's not like just a hole, like a literal like hole, like Looney Toon's hole in the ground. He pushes his head up like, uh, like a little groundhog.
It's like a pantry. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Now, Margaret refused to plead guilty or innocent one way or another after she was arrested so her children wouldn't be compelled to testify against her. It's like Colonel Clink.

Speaker 1 I know.

Speaker 1 Now, as was the custom at the time for people who refused to plead one way or another in the English judicial system, she was sentenced to death by pressing, crushed to death, all while being pregnant with her fourth child.

Speaker 1 Whoa, that's how you pop.

Speaker 1 How does that happen?

Speaker 1 I'm totally ignored.

Speaker 1 I'm totally going to ignore that. Because I knew you were going to mention something about it because it popped into my head, too.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it did. It did.
Well, it depends on how many months pregnant she is. At that time, it's technically, you're no longer a lady, you're a gusher.
Can we please move on?

Speaker 1 Now, two British sergeants were supposed to carry out the dreaded task of crushing a pregnant woman with rocks. But not having the heart, they hired four beggars to take their place.

Speaker 1 And they're all like, yeah, I can't wait.

Speaker 1 I've been thinking about this for a long time. What do you think, Radio Joe? Will we get the keeper? Come on, I want some of the slime.
Can I have what's left of the baby? I want to eat it.

Speaker 1 These guys are great.

Speaker 1 Task rabbit.

Speaker 1 Joe helps me with everything.

Speaker 1 Well, after stripping Margaret down and tying a handkerchief across her face, the beggars lay Margaret on a sharp rock about the size of a man's fist and placed it in the small of her back.

Speaker 1 Then they took the door from her own home, which that was part of the custom of pressing to death. It had to be a door from their own home, and they laid it on top of her.

Speaker 1 Finally, they started stacking rocks on the door, little by little.

Speaker 1 Ten pound by ten pound by ten pound. Crazy.
The torture was designed so the sharp rock would break her back before she died.

Speaker 1 And all told, the slow crushing of Margaret Clithrow took an excruciating 15 minutes. Damn.

Speaker 1 And they knew that she was finally dead, like the wicked witch of the west, because of her name, her labias just popped out at the bottom of the door

Speaker 1 at the very, very end. That's something they knew she was done.

Speaker 1 And that a boat sank because loose lips sink ships.

Speaker 1 See, that's too far.

Speaker 1 That's too far because that's not even on topic. No, it's really not.
It's not even on topic. No, it's quite a non-sequitur, Edward.
Sorry.

Speaker 1 St.

Speaker 1 Margaret, however, wasn't canonized until 1970, when she and dozens of other martyrs from this time period were canonized in a ceremony honoring a group that sounds like a bad British invasion ban: Cuthbert Main and the 39 Companion Martyrs.

Speaker 1 Top of the pops.

Speaker 1 This week. This week, on top of the pops, we've got Cuthbert Main and the 39 Companion Martyrs.
With their

Speaker 1 strawberry sunset.

Speaker 1 It's a strawberries haunted and I can't see the day.

Speaker 1 Go grab the door and I'll get the stones.

Speaker 1 Preston and Preggy.

Speaker 1 You ever seen that?

Speaker 1 Have you ever seen Preston a Preggie? That's a B-side, I think.

Speaker 1 Really rare.

Speaker 1 But before we go, let's cover one more saint.

Speaker 1 One who is said to have had an actual magical power. He's my favorite one.
Although it seems like his powers were completely out of his control and totally accidental.

Speaker 1 He's more like an X-Man than a Spider-Man. This saint was named Joseph of Cupertino.

Speaker 1 According to Franciscan accounts from the 17th century, Joseph was quote-unquote remarkably unclever, but was able to achieve regular bouts of levitation and he would have ecstatic visions.

Speaker 1 Now, for ecstatic visions, just understand that what that is, it's like you're having like a trance state.

Speaker 1 Joseph of Cupertino was a local simpleton that was very, they all liked him. Everyone liked him.
And he came up there going, like, hey, everybody, you got, you guys see Paracross state? Paracross.

Speaker 1 Paracross. And everyone's just like, oh, hey, Joe, you know, being like, oh, he's really manhandling the sugar packets.
He's like, Let's say, get off of the sugar packet.

Speaker 1 You know, we love him, though. We love, you know, he's going to be like, you need help.
You need help in the back of me getting the eggs. Being like, no, Joe, we don't need help.
Thank you, though.

Speaker 1 Thank you so much. You're so sweet.

Speaker 1 But instead of being venerated for his regular bouts of levitation, in which he would fly, Joseph was deemed disruptive and was confined to a small cell where he was forbidden from joining any public gathering.

Speaker 1 I don't feel bad because I just don't want to bum anybody out. If you feel like I need to be in here, then that's fine from me.

Speaker 1 Fun new expression is he's so dummy-flow.

Speaker 1 Well, partly, this is because levitation was widely connected not to a godly blessing, but devilish witchcraft.

Speaker 1 As such, Joseph was very lucky to not end up on the rack, especially after he was put up for an official inquisition. It's just kind of fun to be in a new place, everybody asking questions and stuff.

Speaker 1 I hope you guys found the power of Christ.

Speaker 1 Where you should have put that.

Speaker 1 Let's nail him in the fucking forehead. Let's turn his bones into rimptic fucking confetti.
I think that's a good idea. Go ahead and do that.

Speaker 1 But instead of being tortured to death, Joseph was passed from one friary to another until he finally landed with an understanding group of Cappuccin friars in the Italian town of Fasombrone.

Speaker 1 He lived a simple life until his death and was canonized a little over a hundred years later.

Speaker 1 But concerning his so-called miracles, it's been suggested that Joseph of Cupertino may have actually just been a very talented, if misunderstood, gymnast.

Speaker 1 What does that even mean? According to my girls down. A girl looks good.
They never seen anyone do a backflip before. This guy was dumb enough to try.

Speaker 1 According to written accounts, some of his alleged levitations originated from a crouching position instead of being prone, standing. Look at him.
Hey, guys, look.

Speaker 1 But I could do this. Hey, guys, look.
It's possible that witnesses mistook a very impressive leap made by a very

Speaker 1 good job. No, no, no, no.
A very impressive leap made by a very agile man as levitation. And the story just grew from there.
Hey, man. I get it.
Air Jordan. He was like that.

Speaker 1 And he was, you know, he was good at business, good at basketball, not great at being a father. Nope.
Even worse as a son. Whoa.

Speaker 1 Sadly. Really, really sadly.
But yeah, Joe, he just flied to float. Yeah.
But I just stand at jumping jacks. It's kind of amazing that they didn't just fucking kill him.
Yeah, it was.

Speaker 1 I think it was because he was

Speaker 1 not that bright. Remarkably unclever.
Remarkably unclever.

Speaker 1 He was nice. He was very nice.
And they're like, this guy can't. He's just floating there.
And he also didn't really seem to enjoy it that much. Yeah, somebody.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because he would fly and go, no, oh, no. Oh, no.
Somebody get a string. Oh, no.
I'm going to be clever. Oh, no.
And they're like, what do you do with that guy?

Speaker 1 Yeah, every time they tried to kill him, the guy had a hammer next to his head. He's like, I can't do it.
He's too cute. He's too cute.
He's so nice. He's so nice.
What are you doing with that hammer?

Speaker 1 You're going to put up a painting?

Speaker 1 What are you doing with that?

Speaker 1 What are you doing?

Speaker 1 What are you doing? You want a ham? You want to go out for lunch?

Speaker 1 God damn it, Joe.

Speaker 1 Send him to a fryer. Just get down.
Just get off the ceiling. This map is real cute.
Get off the fan, Joe.

Speaker 1 But nevertheless, because of Joseph of Cupertino's aerial abilities and his so-called remarkable uncleverness, he has probably the widest span of patrons, being both the patron saint of intellectual disabilities and astronauts.

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 1 Come on, do astronauts feel

Speaker 1 what they're like. And that's where we get the insult.
Your mom is an astronaut.

Speaker 1 Where does he even? This is the idea of getting that here's your Joseph of Cupertino, really the patron saint of simple boys. Simple Jack is supposed to accompany me to the ISS.

Speaker 1 That's it for the Saints for this second installment. Maybe we'll do more in the future.

Speaker 1 We have more stories. I mean, there's 10,000 Saints.
There's so many stories. They all are wacky and horrible.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I couldn't even tell the story of Tommy Cantaloupe. We ran out of time.
Yeah, but guys, this is not... I heard some conjecture that episode 600 was not going to come until 2025.

Speaker 1 And to those people, you're fucking dead ass wrong. Yeah, there's a whole month till 2020.
Next week, we begin a very large series that I'm very, very excited for.

Speaker 1 It's a story we've wanted to tell for a very long time. And this is going to be, it's going to be fun.
It's going to be really fun. So many great characters in this.
It's going to be a three-parter.

Speaker 1 It's, I'm, I'm fucking jazzed for this one. It's the story of my C-section.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Five days long.

Speaker 1 Well, thank you guys so much. Go to patreon.com slash last podcast on the left, and you can pay to watch us flop around.
We're here in the lovely, we got to thank these studios here. Melrose.

Speaker 1 Melrose Podcast. Reb Melrose Podcast.
Thank you so much for having us. You guys were awesome.

Speaker 1 And go to lastpodcast and left.com to buy tickets for our live show.

Speaker 1 Tomorrow night, we are at King's Theater. We are doing good for, honestly, we're doing great for tickets.
But just come out. We're not a ton, but we opened up the second balcony or whatever.

Speaker 1 Come on out. So there's a little extra room.
It's an impossibly large room. So please come out.
We're going to have doing, we can't fucking wait to be back. And we're in Philly tonight.

Speaker 1 Yeah, we're in Philly tonight. But also in January, don't forget, it's going to be a great Christmas present.
We're going to be in Atlanta on January 11th at the Cook Coloroxy.

Speaker 1 And also after that, we'll be in Dallas,

Speaker 1 Nashville, Detroit, Toronto. Toronto.
Yeah. And if you're looking for another really nice Christmas gift for your loved ones, get in your orders now for Spring Hill Jack Coffee.

Speaker 1 Yes, we have a brand new one.

Speaker 1 We have a new line also coming out as well. We have a new line coming up, but they make, but the rest of the Spring Hill Jack.
I'm a High Strangeness Man myself.

Speaker 1 I love it. I like my Phillip, and I like, yeah.
Yeah, I'm a High Strangest Man. So, yeah, go buy some Spring Hill Jack coffee for your loved ones.

Speaker 1 Beautiful. This is great.
Hail, Satan. And let's go be let's go be saintly today, Marcus.
All right. Go kill somebody at the hotel and ask for forgiveness at St.
Peter's.

Speaker 1 Hail Tia Nicole Blanket Chip.

Speaker 1 She's a fan that we lost this week. Patron Saint of Last Podcast Network.
That's very, very sweet. Absolutely.
Thank you, Adam. Our guest producer for today.
Thank you, Adam. Yes.
All right. Bye.
Bye.

Speaker 1 Bye, hugging them. Bye.

Speaker 4 Hi, I'm Jenny Slate. And believe it or not, someone is allowing us to have a podcast.

Speaker 1 I'm Gabe Leidman.

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And we like to reach out to kind of get advice on how to live our lives.

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