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From: tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney)
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc
Subject: Re: Worship of corpses by Christians
Message-ID: <1093@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: Mon, 15-Sep-86 06:36:46 EDT
Article-I.D.: hoptoad.1093
Posted: Mon Sep 15 06:36:46 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 16-Sep-86 05:34:56 EDT
Organization: Centram Systems, Berkeley
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It occurs to me that some people probably wrote off my recent allusion to
corpse worship by Christians as yet more unintelligible and false Maronic
hyperbole.  In fact, what I'm referring to is well-documented historical
fact, and its persistence to the modern day can be easily verified by anyone
familiar with European (and especially Italian) Catholicism.  Fragments of
corpses line the walls of St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, for example.
Virtually all early Christian houses of worship, which the Emperor Julian
always referred to as "charnel houses", contained fragments of corpses which
were purported to have miraculous powers.  Americans and Protestants have
fortunately avoided this appalling form of worship, but it would be an error
to forget that for centuries the only Christians were devout corpse
worshippers and that Christian churches displayed aged body parts as sacred
and even divinely blessed.
-- 
Tim Maroney, Electronic Village Idiot and Self-Assigner of Pretentious Titles
{ihnp4,sun,well,ptsfa,lll-crg,frog}!hoptoad!tim (uucp)
hoptoad!tim@lll-crg (arpa)

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