Wanted: One Godfather
Hagiography is immensely fun. Other academics have to study tedious things that actually happened, but hagiographers get to study wacky saints’ lives. My favorite has to be the set of two I like to think of as The Power of Cheese.
Once, one of them starts, there was a lovely girl, beautiful, virtuous and engaged to the local prince. She complained of a rash on her chest, and her evil step-mother (ever noticed how many stories have evil step-mothers?) suggested she put milky cheese in her bra. Happy for any possible treatment the girl tried it, and the step-mother went to the prince and told him the girl had been unfaithful. “For, as you can see, she has had a child and is nursing it.” Gullible, he confronted the girl and ripped off her blouse. Because the milky cheese had leaked through her bra it looked to him like she was lactating and he chopped her head off. She caught her head in her hands and the head began praising God. One can assume that at this moment the prince thought something along the line of “Oh, shit.”
In the other version, the step-mother sends the girl to the fields to bring lunch to some field workers. Having worked out a bargain with the step-mother ahead of time the workers chop her head off, and, yet again, she catches her head in her hand and the head begins praising God. To cover their crime, the workers bury her body in the field. However God wants this girl, who is clearly a saint, to be buried in hallowed ground, so he shines a light from heaven right to the spot where she is buried and sends a cow to graze on the lush grass that grows there. The cow produces a vast amount of milk no matter the time of year. The villagers decide to leave the body where it is and milk the cow. (You knew dairy was going to come into this, didn’t you?) God decides, since the beam of light and magic cow weren’t getting the message across, to send in the big guns. He sends a dove with a scroll to the Pope. The dove flies into St. Peter’s and drops the scroll on the alter. Now, if you are the Pope and a dove shows up bearing a scroll, you read it. Unfortunately, the scroll wasn’t written in Latin, the language every civilized person can read; it is in Anglo-Saxon. The Pope asks if anyone in the house can read Anglo-Saxon and, lo and behold, there is a literate Englishman there. The saga of the murdered saint and the cow is revealed and the Pope sends someone to get the girl moved to hallowed ground. No mention is made about what becomes of the cow.
I’m not making this up. I couldn’t make this stuff up. Fun stuff like this is why I, who could be politely described as a lapsed Unitarian and honestly described as an indifferent atheist, don’t mind raising the kids Catholic. How can you reject a religion that has magic cows tucked into its mythology? But the Catholic Church has some very annoying quirks. One is the requirement, quite unfair I think, that godparents have to Catholic. More precisely, one godparent has to be an actively practicing Catholic. This is harder to manage than you might expect.
B. and I split the responsibilities. He found godparents for J.; as he comes from a large Catholic family the problem wasn’t tracking down a Catholic, but choosing from the embarrassment of riches his family offers in this area. My friend S. is going to be F.’s godmother; S.’s father is some kind of generic Protestant, and she is a Canon Law scholar, but she’s been Bat Mitzvah-ed. What can I do; my friends and family are pretty much all Jews or atheists.
So…I need a male Catholic, must be active in the Church, over the age of 16 and either over-educated or well on the way to becoming such. A liberal intellectual is preferred. Must live near Connecticut. Must give good gifts and not mind that F.’s godmother is Jewish. Anyone offended by the cow story need not apply. Anyone…anyone…Bueller…Bueller…
Stumble it!
Donate to the Zoë and Lennox Simpson Memorial Fund
and the 529 college savings accounts get a kickback.
December 24th, 2006 19:51
Just on the basis of the cheese story, I’d be Fiona’s second godmother if Ontario were at all near Conn.
You can have 2 godmothers and you don’t need a special dispensation to do it–my oldest has 2 godfathers. They also don’t require some sort of certificate of authentication to prove how good a Catholic you are–a baptismal certifcate generally suffices.