flour

I couldn’t believe my fucking ears this morning on Today, it’s one thing to deal with Thought For The Day (already a bone of contention for both religious and non-religious listeners, despite my contempt for any form of religion you may be surprised to hear that I sort of don’t mind it, I digress) but to have to suffer further Christ-based twaddle in the form of ‘news’ was quite frankly beyond contempt. But then it got me thinking.

In 1888 a 15-year-old girl entered a Carmelite Convent in some godforsaken (do I stutter? No) bit of France. The poor cow died nine years later of consumption but not after having written a book called The Story of a Soul, which probably is nothing like The Story of O as it speaks of doing good deeds in heaven as opposed to being whipped into a sexual frenzy and fucked half to death. Widely known as the Little Flower, to those that subscribe to Catholicism, St Therese of Lisieux was declared ‘the greatest saint of modern time’ in 1925 and her poor-little diseased remains became official relics.

First off ‘relics’ would seem to fly in the face of the whole body-being-merely-a-shell-for-the-soul gig, to treat mortal remains as more than just a marker of earthy existence has more in common with paganism than Catholicism, to then imbue them with some sort of magical significance is sort the sort of caper Satanists get up to. In fairness to Christianity (and you don’t hear ‘fairness’ and ‘Christian’ much in these pages) the Anglicans spurn such nonsense, precisely because, well, even they have a cut-off point when it comes to begging fucking belief.

So, ignoring this whole religious contradiction, and the fact the god these folk believe in allowed her to die at a very young age of a truly dreadful and violent disease, her saintly remains -‘credited’ with healing the sick, when in reality and guess what, ironically, her remains are riddled with highly contagious and wholly deadly tuberculosis for fucks sake- are now on month ‘tour’ in the UK. The tour will include York Minster the Catholic cathedrals of Plymouth, Birmingham, Cardiff, Liverpool, Salford, Lancaster, Middlesbrough, Leeds, Nottingham, Westminster… oh, and Wormwood Scrubs. I’m not kidding you (who thought that one up?)

Anyhoo, what we have here is a terribly sad story of a deluded young woman dying way before her 3 score year and 10 in the most horrific way imaginable way. And to think she spent the best part of her teens and early 20’s just thinking about a load of old crap.