Tag Archives: saint

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux Relic Changing Colors

Text:

“It all started about 15 years ago. I had a huge devotion to St. Thérèse, and I feel that she’s brought me many blessings in my life, so we were going as a family to France, to Paris for a week, and I realized that St. Thérèse… town where she grew up in was Lisieux, France. So I had an original relic, which is a piece of her bone, which is very rare to get. And that’s called a first-degree relic. I then purchased 25 third-degree relics. A third-degree relic is something that was touched a first-degree relic. So it touched a piece of the bone, the hair, so forth, like that. So I bought 25 of those, and my husband was on the parish council and had a meeting with the priest before we left, so I said, take these 25 with you and have them blessed before we go over to France.

He said, This is ridiculous. This is a business meeting. That would be embarrassing to come in with these, uh, medals. I said, no it’s not. The medal is also a St. Thérèse on one side, and the other side is all red. It’s got a little red circle. So, I said, take these. I said, if you don’t take them, it’s gonna look bad because I already told the priest about them. So he gets them blessed.

I got a rental car, and I said, I’m going to Lisieux. So we go, and we had a private tour, and I took her original relic and put it on the floor of where she lived in this convent. My husband and I had the original. Then we went over to her body, and my one daughter came away from the body, and she said, “Oh my gosh, my, my relic turned white.” And I was like, gosh, that’s strange. We don’t really think anything of it. We had the entire basilica to ourselves.

A neighborhood child had cancer, so I had told the mom I would light a candle in the basilica of St. Thérèse Lisieux for her daughter. So, me and my daughter are over lighting a candle, and my husband is sitting in a pew praying in the front of the church. And as we’re sitting there, lighting the candle, one by one before us, they all started, 16 out of the 25, turned from red to white. And they were just one at a time, and we are just sitting there watching this in awe. So I said to my daughter, go get your father. He comes over. He sees these relics. And he is like, “oh my god”, we didn’t even know what to do.

There was a thing of holy wood. We took all the relics and we threw them in there because, honestly, I was a little scared and overwhelmed, and my daughter was kind of in shock. No one knew what to say. We were all just super quiet. And at the end of it, we took them all out, we dried them, the red ones were still red, the white ones had stayed white. So the, the crazy thing is afterwards, my husband said, I’m not gonna tell anyone this, ’cause we’re gonna look like crazy people. And I said, “well, we do have the before and after, and all of us witnessed it.”

So we do tell people the story now. And since then, as people have gotten ill and things like that, we have given out several of them. Each of the kids have one left. I don’t have that many left because people have been buried with them, or people have come to me and asked for them. I still have my original one, and when someone, if I have a friend who has, like, you know, serious illness or whatever, they usually take it with them to doctors’ appointments and things like that. But, so that is, um, my story of my relics turning, and I think our whole family has a beautiful devotion to St. Thérèse now. My one daughter carries around a little, tiny St. Thérèse statue. It’s maybe two inches high.

Context:

The informant is a middle aged white woman from Philadelphia. She recounts a family trip to the Basilica of Saint Thérèse, a major Catholic pilgrimage site associated with Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Before the trip, the family had small medals (treated as relics) blessed by a priest. While visiting the convent and basilica, they prayed, placed the relics near the saint’s body, and lit a candle for a sick child back home. During this time, several of the red-colored relics unexpectedly turned white in front of them. In Catholic culture, relics are sacred objects connected to saints. Pilgrimage sites are often associated with miracles or unexplained phenomena, as is her tomb. The experience was emotional and overwhelming, and the family later shared the relics with others, especially those who were ill.

Analysis:

This is an example of material folklore and religious folk belief centered on miracles. The relics act as physical objects believed to carry spiritual power, and the color change is interpreted as a sign of divine presence or intervention. The event reinforces the family’s faith and deepens their devotion to the saint. It also shows how personal experiences at pilgrimage sites can become meaningful stories that are retold, especially when tied to healing.

Saint Christopher Medallion

Nationality: American
Age: 70
Occupation: Musician
Residence: Austin, Texas
Performance Date: 03/16/19
Primary Language: English
Language: Polish

Content:
Informant – “When I was being raised, Saint Christopher was an important saint. All of us, the kids, got medals, little medallions that we wore, that were Saint Christopher medals. Saint Christopher was the patron saint of travelers.
Now Christopher means Christ carrier. And the legend is that he was a big person, almost a giant, and he came upon a little boy on the bank of a stream and the little boy asked him to please carry him over to the other side. And so Christopher said sure and proceeded to carry him on his shoulders across the river, and as he went further and the water got deeper the boy got heavier and heavier, and it took all his strength, and when he finally reached the shore, exhausted, he asked the child ‘My gosh how could you weigh so much?’ And the child revealed that he was really Christ and that he was carrying the weight of the world. And then he disappeared.”

Context:
Informant – “I grew up with it. And while I was growing up, Christopher was touted as being a real person, but more recent research has found that there is no real record of his existence. The first mention of him was like 3 centuries after he supposedly existed. So they say he’s pretty much a legend.

JK – “What were the medallions for?”

Informant – “It was really a religious good luck charm. It was supposed to protect us from the travails of travels and journeys and all that.”

Analysis:
There is an interesting connection between the medallion and the story. One wears a medallion around one’s neck. You feel the weight at the back of the neck – the same place where you would feel the most weight if you were carrying someone on your shoulders.

Saint Wenceslaus

Nationality: Czech
Age: 77
Occupation: Retired Anthropologist
Residence: Portland, Oregon
Performance Date: 4/13/2015
Primary Language: English
Language: Czech

Informant: “Saint Wenceslaus was a big saint in the Czech Republic, there is this well known carol about him, though I can’t remember exactly how it goes. He was a bit like Saint Nicholas or Santa like we have in the U.S., except that he took care of people as opposed to giving gifts. The legend goes that Good King Wenceslaus was out walking in the snow and he found a poor person and gave him money, and how that what you’re supposed to do at Christmas is give money to help poor people. A bunch of legends built up around him, like the carol talks about how on this dark and stormy night, we was walking with his helper, and he told his helper to walk in his footsteps in the snow behind him, which was supposed to have a Christ-like connotation to it. An supposedly the whole kingdom under his reign was a wonderful golden age because they had this wonderful king who was a saint. A lot of Catholic churches in the Czech republic and also in places in the United States with a lot of Czech people would be called Saint Wenceslaus’s, or just Saint Wen’s. There is actually a big statue of him in the main square in Prague that is supposed to have the original king’s actual helmet on it!”

The informant is a 77 year old retired anthropologist living in Portland Oregon. Her grandparents immigrated to the United States from the Kingdom of Bohemia (in the modern day Czech Republic) in the 1890’s to escape the economic turmoil within the country in that time period. She was born and grew up in Chicago, Illinois, and studied anthropology at Stanford University, during which time she became interested in learning more about the traditions of her heritage. She has on several occasions traveled to the Czech republic to visit relatives there.

Collector Analysis: This is an interesting legend, and provides an interesting counterpoint to the classic “Winter gift giving story”. Whereas most Christmas traditions involve giving gifts you your family and loved ones, the story of Saint Wenceslaus advocates giving to those people you don’t know who are in need, specifically the poor. Saint Wenceslaus is the Catholic patron saint of Bohemia, which is currently a region within the Czech Republic. This particular legend also shows the strong connection there was between the old European royalty and the Christian faith.

St. Clare of Assisi.

Nationality: Mexican-American
Age: 22
Occupation: student/nanny
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: April 28, 2014
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

The informant (L) is a senior film major at California State University Los Angeles. L also nannies on the weekends. She grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma and attended Catholic schools before coming to Los Angeles for college. Though her interpretation of Catholicism is more modern than those of the previous generation, she still calls herself Catholic. I asked her if she had any religious folklore and she responded by telling me about the patron saint of television. She said that it was something her friends told each other and she had read in a book when she was about 10 years old. Below is the paraphrased story that she gave as the explanation as to how Saint Clare became the patron saint of television.

Saint Clare of Assisi was a nun in Italy many centuries ago. She was a very devoted nun and never missed a day of mass, ever. One day, however, she got sick and even though she wanted to go to mass, she just could not physically get her body to take her to mass. It was then, in her bedroom, that the Holy Spirit “projected the mass on the wall” of the bedroom so that she could still experience the mass without physically being at the mass. Because this is like what a television does, she was made into the patron saint of television even though she lived a long time before TVs even existed.

Though she had read this in a book, she did not know until later that it was “real” and that Pope Pius XII had actually made her the patron saint of television in the 1950’s. St. Clare is especially important to L because her school and future work life is entirely based on television and film.

It is important to note that L used the word “projected” to describe how St. Clare saw the mass, whereas the more religious sources (like http://saints.sqpn.com/saint-clare-of-assisi/) use other words like display and “able to see.” I think L’s choice of words connects St. Clare to the idea of television (as film etc. used to be projected on to a screen). Additionally, the fact that L skipped a lot of the other important things St. Clare did, like follow St. Francis and other religiously significant things, and got right to the part that mattered: how a saint became connected to television. This says a lot about the way L sees the story: it is a connection between her religion and the way she grew up and the life she is now leading. She feels connected to her religion through St. Clare.

 

Religious Object

Nationality: Mexican, Salvadorian
Age: 22
Occupation: Sub-Contractor
Performance Date: April 30, 2008
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Saint Spray

“Sometimes I buy St. Anthony spray. It’s a spray that contains holy water, like you see in church, but it’s in a spray can. There’s a prayer on it and I read it in English and Spanish. Then I say my own prayer. Then I spray it around wherever I want to get rid of the bad vibes. I sprayed it in my car last week to get rid of the bad memories that I have had in it. I believe it works, you just gotta believe.”

Frank is Catholic, but the origins of this “Saint Spray” come from Santeria. I know this because I am learning about it in my “Religions of Latin America” class. Santeria and Catholicism are closely related and share the same roots. Afro-Latinos that are descendents of a mix of Spanish, Indigenous, and Africans that mixed after the conquests. They created their own religion called Santeria that is derived from Catholicism. The same saints are prayed to in both religions, but they have different names sometimes.

The spray cans actually come in a variety of saints, which represent different aspects of life. Saints are chosen based on what one wants to pray for or what they are having trouble with. For example, St. Anthony is a patron of many things, including but not limited to animals, the elderly, seekers of lost articles, travelers, and harvests.

The spray can be defined as a superstition or as a religious object. That is to say, not all Catholics use or believe in the Saint Spray. Some discount it as Santeria, to which is notoriously more related to vodun.  Yet, as some sprays represent Catholic saints and contain prayers, the Catholic and Santeria faiths can overlap in certain practices, as some people firmly have faith in the holy saints.