The Father, the Son, and the Holy Goat

In the year 1166 a woman quietly passed away in a cave on Mount Pelligrino, Sicily. It was the end she chose for herself. At the age of twelve she had left home to become a hermit and devote her life to worshiping God, and her remains were left to rot in the isolated cave that was her home. Her name was Rosalia.

Then, in 1624, a deadly epidemic spread through Palermo. It was at this time that a sick woman claimed to have seen a vision of Rosalia, and for the plague to be ended, the apparition instructed, Rosalia's bones would have to be recovered. This was indeed done, but the disease still choked the city. Why had Rosalia abandoned them?

The answer came when a man named Vincenza Bonelli encountered a woman claiming to be Rosalia in the mountains. When asked why she had forsaken the town she is said to have replied "t is the will of Heaven; but I am now sent to declare that, as soon as my bones are carried in procession through the city, the plague will be stayed." Rosalia's further instructions were followed and her bones were paraded through the city. This time the plague ebbed, and for this Rosalia became venerated as the patron saint of Palermo. Every year on July 15 the residents of the town commemorate the event during a celebration called the festino.

Even though over 450 years had passed between the death of Rosalia and the procession through Palermo the people of the town were sure they had recovered her bones. The vision specified where the bones would be found, and sure enough the hunter charged with the duty found the osteological scraps. (Other accounts state that the discovery of the bones was an accident, but either way the relics played an important role during the 1624 epidemic.) The plague also lifted when Rosalia's instructions were followed, so how could these not be the holy remains of the saint?

Two hundred and one years after the miracle in Sicily the eccentric British geologist William Buckland married his wife Mary, and Palermo was one of their stops on their honeymoon tour. There the newlyweds went to see Rosalia's shrine, but something was amiss about the saint's remains. The priests escorting the Bucklands may not have known the expertise of the man standing with them, but Buckland was familiar enough with osteology to know the true identity of the bones. "They are the bones of a goat," he declared, "not of a woman."

The attending priests were horrified. In an attempt to cover their error they are said to have replied that the saint would not allow Buckland to see what was only visible to the faithful, which was odd given that Buckland was a devout Christian. (Though not a Catholic, which is perhaps what the priests were hinting at.) No matter. From that time onwards the bones of "Rosalia" were enclosed in a casket. No one was to see the saint, not no way, not no how.

Indeed, many of the relics exhibited by churches did not belong to the saints and holy figures they were said to have come from. There was even a sideshow-like competition between houses of worship to present the most impressive remains for veneration, many (if not most) of which were phonies. As observed by A.D. White (and re-iterated in The Pathological Aspects of Religions) this was a kind of idolatry and fetishism Christians were comfortable with, and the supposed curative powers of the bones of "Saint Rosalia" and others were upheld.

Even today nearly no mention of Buckland's conclusion can be found in any account of Rosalia's story I have seen so far, nor are the finer details of it typically included. From what I have been able to gather it appears that, either by accident or as the result of a dedicated search, someone found bones in the cave in which Rosalia was said to have died. It had been over four and a half centuries since she passed away and who knows what became of her bones, but there were roughly human-sized bones (probably ribs and upper limb bones) in the cave all the same. That the bones of a goat could have entered the cave would not take a miracle, nor would it require divine intervention for some of those remains to be confused with human bones.

At the time that bones were recovered many people were sick and dying of the plague, but moving the bones to the town did no good. Why should they have? A second vision was required to explain why God had seemingly forsaken the people of Palermo, and a further task would have to be completed before the plague lifted. That it did so after Rosalia's parade was coincidence, and it is interesting how the duration between the parade and the "miracle" is never cited. Indeed, coincidence and a poor knowledge of osteology came together to turn the bones of a farm animal into the holy remains of a saint. Even so, I do not doubt that many will continue to believe that the bones found in that cave were truly those of Rosalia.

Interestingly, however, Rosalia has taken on a second life in the scientific literature. In 1959 the Yale zoologist G.E. Hutchinson delivered a presidential address to the American Society of Naturalists in which he tapped Rosalia as the "patroness of evolutionary studies." This suggestion did not take, but Rosalia became associated with the primary question Hutchinson asked in the paper: "Why are so many kinds of animals?" As a result there have been many papers bearing the name Santa Rosalia in the title, but this is more of a reference to Hutchinson's paper than the saint herself. As the title of Roger Lewin's article "Santa Rosalia was a Goat" indicates Buckland's conclusion is remembered among naturalists if not the general public.