The Church

The first time I saw it I could hardly believe it. There in the church, was a 15^th century corpse encased in glass. Saint Rose was its name. My cousins called it Santa Rosa of course, the Italian name. I mean, it was really something else: putting a rotted corpse up on an altar for all to see. People, especially the old ladies, would kneel before it and pray for damn near half an hour. Italians are funny that way. I mean, every city is represented by a Saint, and they have the pope and all, but less than half the country actually goes to mass when Sunday comes around.

My cousins, Ilharia and Nicoletta (they brought me to this church with the rotten thing), were really proud that it was their city, their church, where the damn thing rested. They thought I was just lucky as hell to be seeing old Saint Rose lying there with her arms all folded around herself like withered branches around a tree trunk. Those black, crusty eye sockets looking up into the dim light overhead; it was one of the damnedest thing I've ever seen. But you should've heard Ilharia and Nicoletta going at it. As I looked at old Rose's yellow teeth, they told me this crazy story about some miracle or something she did (to be a Saint, it's required that you've preformed a bunch of miracles apparently). As it turned out, Saint Rose was busy doing her duty one day back in the Middle Ages, bringing food to hungry children and all, when she was stopped by a guard or a soldier or something. I guess back then it was illegal to give starving kids anything to eat (hell, I don't know, maybe I misunderstood. My cousins don't speak English all that well). Anyway, when the centurion or whatever checked Rose's cloak to see what she was carrying, the food she was hiding somehow changed to flowers. Thus she wasn't arrested and was able to continue feeding starving kids and lepers. This was the amazing story my cousins told me about Saint Rose.

And the damned thing about it was, they actually believed it! It was just the day before when we were all in Rome looking at Bernini's David and they asked me if I knew of the "myth" about him and Goliath. I told them it wasn't a damn myth and that it really happened. I mean, it's in the Bible and all. They just looked at me like I was a complete moron and shook their heads. If anyone ever tries to tell me that Italy is a religious country I swear I'll tell them to go to hell. They don't even believe what's written in the Bible for Christ's sake. And yet they believe that wild story about Rose over there.

I just kept looking at Rose in that glass coffin up on the altar (you had to look through these big iron bars, like someone would want to steal the thing). I began to wonder if that decayed mess was even real. I mean, it was unbelievably small, that body. She couldn't have been more than four feet tall. Ilharia and Nicoletta started walking away, but I stayed and looked for a while longer. I stared at her tattered robes. It looked as if they wrapped her in an old potato sack. Her nails were like splinters jutting out of her long, twisted fingers. I wanted to touch her leathery skin, to see if it was really real. Only she was surrounded by that glass (and then there were the iron bars I mentioned before). I'd had enough anyway.

I turned around and looked at the church. I can't remember the name of it or anything (maybe it was called Saint Rose's Church or The Great Important Church of Old Saint Rose Who Broke Her Neck Doing Miracles or something, I don't know). I've been to too many churches in Italy to remember any of the names. This one was in Viterbo, the former capital of the Papacy, but I didn't call it "that church in Viterbo." I was more apt to call it The Church with the Corpse. Saint Rose made that church unique. Besides that though, nothing about made it stand out from the other half a billion churches in Italy. Like all the churches over there, it was dark, quiet, and old. A few old women were scattered about among the worn out pews. Some of them were saying the Holy Rosary to themselves, their lips moved slightly, like curtains do in a quiet summer wind. It depressed the hell out of me to tell you the truth. Those ladies just sat there with the heads down like they were about to weep uncontrollably. I began to wonder if they had been hurt recently, or had lost someone important in their lives, or if this was just something all the old ladies in Italy did. As I was leaving, I saw a wooden table by the entrance with unlit candles on it (some were lit, but most of them weren't). There was a box of matches too, and under the table, a large, metal box for donations. I took a match, and lit a candle for old Saint Rose, only I didn't put any money in the box.