Every weekend in New York City, from spring through early fall, some neighborhood or other plays host to a street festival. But the biggest, the glitziest, the hands-down-favorite festival comes in September when for 11 days over 1 million visitors cram themselves into the narrow streets of Little Italy to celebrate the Feast of San Gennaro.
In English-language compilations of the saints he is St. Januarius. But New Yorkers, even New Yorkers without a drop of Italian blood, call him by his Italian name, San Gennaro. The first San Gennaro festival was held in Little Italy in 1926 by immigrants from Naples where devotion to the saint is very strong.
We know that in the first years of the fourth century Januarius was a bishop, but sources differ whether he served the Christians of Naples or of nearby Benevento. About the year 305, during Emperor Diocletian’s ferocious persecution of the Church, Bishop Januarius was arrested while attempting to visit some imprisoned Christians. He was beheaded. Present at his martyrdom were a few Christian women who collected some of his blood in a small glass vial which they placed in his tomb.
St. Januarius has been invoked against volcanic blasts at least since 1631 when a violent eruption of Mount Vesuvius threatened Naples. The people of the city called on their favorite saint to help them, and by his prayers the flow of lava stopped. But the enduring enthusiasm, even fervor, for the saint is older and rooted in an inexplicable event known as “the miracle of the liquefaction.”
Every September 19 a solemn ceremony is held before St. Januarius’ shrine. The archbishop of Naples brings out a small glass vial four inches in height and about two and a quarter inches in diameter. Inside the vial is a solid dark red mass believed to be the dried blood of St. Januarius, collected by those Christian women at his martyrdom. Before a throng of laity and clergy, the archbishop carries the vial to a reliquary that contains the skull of the saint. At the moment the solid mass becomes liquid, the archbishop holds the relic aloft, turning it this way and that so the crowd can see the liquid sloshing around inside the vial. With the cry, “The miracle has happened!” everyone in the church surges forward to kiss the relic.
The earliest surviving record of the liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius dates from 1389. Various attempts have been made to find a scientific explanation why something solid should suddenly liquefy, but none of them have been satisfactory. Church officials in Naples have been adamant in their refusal to permit scientists to break the seal on the vial and take a sample of whatever is inside. Furthermore, there has been no official declaration from Church authorities that the liquefaction is a supernatural event. Something happens — even skeptics will concede that much — but exactly what or why remains a mystery.
There have been occasions when the blood did not liquefy, which Neapolitans take as a warning from the saint or a sign of his displeasure. For example, the relic remained solid the year Naples elected a Communist mayor. But there have also been incidents of the blood liquefying spontaneously, as when the late Cardinal Terence Cooke of New York visited the shrine of St. Januarius in 1978. Cardinal Cooke, by the way, is currently a candidate for sainthood himself.
Thomas Craughwell is the author of Saints for Every Occasion (Stampley Enterprises, 2001).
(This article courtesy of the Arlington Catholic Herald.)
