He who laughs last, laughs best
“There was a time when the staging of skeletons of the saints, installed in astonishing postures, was intended to defy death and to show victorious martyrs, therefore to vivify the faith of believers. Each parish had to have a recumbent figure, or at least relics of saints, often taken from the Roman catacombs when an underground gallery was discovered in 1578 near Via Salarie Nuova in Rome. The catacombs became an inexhaustible source of relics which were scattered in Catholic sanctuaries north of the Alps, in Switzerland and in the regions of southern Germany. A real traffic of bones was established, causing many miracles thanks to their intermediary. Each church wanted to have its recumbent and its relics, even modest, but still richly embedded in reliquaries made by nuns whose specialty it had become.”
(Source: Protestinfo.ch – 30 October 2003)
Photo of the week: Gisant de Saint Prosper 1790, Couvent de Montorge, Expo “Au-delà du visible” at Musée d’art et d’histoire, Fribourg, Switzerland 2004
καιρός remembered 
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