The story of San Gennaro begins in the early fourth century....

The Miracles of San Gennaro

by Christopher Shannon

Catholics who commemorate the Feast of St. Januarius may celebrate two miracles—one ancient, one modern; one Old World, one New World. This past September 19, at the cathedral in Naples, Italy, dedicated to the fourth century martyr, dried blood preserved as a relic of the saint miraculously liquefied, as it has done nearly every year for the last seventeen hundred years. Half a world away, in New York’s Little Italy, descendants of Neapolitan immigrants remembered their Old World patron saint with a ten-day Festival of San Gennaro, much as they have done for the past eighty-seven years. As skeptics sadly continue to doubt the first event, so many believers may be tempted to disregard the second. The raucous celebrations accompanying the Festival of San Gennaro stand at quite a remove from the doctrinal concerns and devotional practices that have marked “serious” Catholicism in America for the past generation. Yet the promiscuous mingling of the sacred and the profane, the public and the private, has been the great historic achievement of Catholic culture.

The story of San Gennaro begins in the early fourth century, during the Great Persecution under the emperor Diocletian. Bishop of Benevento, Italy, Gennaro was imprisoned for visiting other Christians imprisoned in the early years of the persecution. As legend has it, Gennaro was tortured and thrown into a fiery furnace, yet emerged unharmed. At the end of his tortures, he was publicly beheaded. An old man wrapped his body and head in a burial cloth, while the women of Naples soaked up his blood with a sponge, enough to fill two glass phials. Four decades later, a slave woman named Eusebia, who had been Gennaro’s wet nurse, carried the phials in a procession as the faithful transferred the martyr’s remains to the catacombs of Naples. It was during this procession that the liquification first occurred. Since that time, the miracle is said to have occurred three times each year: on the first Sunday in May, on September 19 (the saint’s feast day), and on December 16 (to commemorate the saint’s protection against the threatened eruption of the volcano at Vesuvius).

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