Statue of St Gerard Majella, a Patron Saint of people false accused
I was brought up a Catholic - Catholic school and everything. My maternal grandmother spoke of going to Mass every morning and twice on Sundays and my father had converted to Catholicism in order to marry my mother and remained a devout Catholic until the end of his days.
Me? I ‘rebelled’, as my father put it, and my devout aunt described me as ‘a recovering Catholic’, with a smile in her eyes and a nod to personal choice. ‘There are lots of ways to get to heaven’, she’d say, ‘we don’t all have to follow the same path.’ I took that to heart and dabbled in all sorts of things, but I never quite gave up my fascination with patron saints. Almost everyone knows about St Jude the Apostle, (contemporary of Jesus), patron saint of lost causes, St Christopher (?-251), patron saint of travel, St Anthony (1195-1231), patron saint of lost property, and St Francis of Assisi (?-1226), patron saint for animals. I’ve been known to make pleas to them all.
Some, if not many, even most saints are patrons of several things – St Anthony is the patron saint of the poor, sailors and fishermen, of priests and travellers, amputees, animals, Brazil, old people, pregnant women, shipwrecks, and more. Phew! He’s a busy, busy man. St Francis of Assisi is the patron saint of animals, ecology and Italy.
There are patron saints of all sorts of things; situations in life as well as towns, cities and organisations. The Catenians, the Catholic organisation for Catholic professional and businessmen, which does sterling work for charitable causes, invokes St Thomas More (1478-1535), the patron saint for politicians, statesmen, lawyers and widowers, as their patron, and St Bernadette, (1844-1879), the patron saint of illness, people ridiculed for their piety, poverty, shepherds, shepherdesses and Lourdes, is the patron of The St Bernadette Trust, which organises pilgrimages to Lourdes in France.
I had also known of St Gerard Majella (1726-1755) in his capacity of patron saint of the Pro-life movement, unborn children, expectant mothers, childbirth and children. Not an unexpected remit one might think, in view of the interconnectedness of all those aspects of life, but I only learned recently of his additional ‘patron duties’. He is also the patron saint of Lay brothers, good confessions and -surprise, surprise (at least to me) - of false accusations.
Why false accusations, I wondered? Well, again- surprise, surprise – because he was a victim of one, when a woman he had helped insinuated that he was having a relationship with the daughter of a family he visited. ‘Sexual impropriety’ rears its ugly head as ever.
Digging a little further, I discovered, perhaps not surprisingly, or maybe even more surprisingly, that St Gerard is not the only patron saint of false accusations. St Dominic Savio (1842-1857) is also such a patron, having been accused of causing mischief at school when two other boys were the guilty parties. He took the blame though the truth was discovered before long, and after his tragically early death became the patron saint of choirboys, and juvenile delinquents as well as the falsely accused.
There’s more – St Rocco (1295-1327) is the patron saint of contagious diseases, epidemics, dogs and - you’ve guessed it – false accusations, having been falsely accused of being a spy and serving a jail term. He was falsely accused by his uncle and spent the last 5 years of his life in jail. This led to my discovery that even Leonardo da Vinci was falsely accused of sodomy in 1476 and arrested, though the case was dismissed 2 months later for lack of evidence.
But I digress.
I discovered even more patron saints of false accusations– St Raymond of Nonnatus (1204-1240), St Matilda (1080-1118), St Dominic (1170-1221), St Elizabeth of Hungary (1207-1231), St Margaret of Cortona (1247-1297). Why so many you may ask? Of course, I cannot explain with any certainty why there are so many, but it does seem clear that false accusations are not a modern phenomenon, nor are they a figment of anyone’s imagination. Nor are they particularly rare if the Catholic Church sees the need for such patronage.
So, could it be that here is another demonstration that false accusations of any type are not as rare as some would have us believe? Could it be that they really are part of the human condition in that people, men, women and children, will lie and accuse another of something as and when it suits their purpose? Could it be that false accusations of sexual crime are just, as if not more, common than any other false report of anything else? (And we know, for example, that the high level of false claims of whiplash injury prompted a change in the law.)
In this secular world, when the constraints of living a good and moral life imposed by religion has lost its hold for many, and there are few consequences for lies, especially in the realm of lies relating to ‘sexual impropriety’ of all descriptions, why would anyone with any common sense whatsoever continue with the claim that ‘people don’t lie’ or, rather, more specifically, ‘women don’t lie about that sort of thing’. Clearly, people lie and have done for centuries; probably since humans first developed language.
It can be said with certainty that people DO lie, they have done since the beginning of time and they lie about EVERYTHING. After all, if not, why would parents find it necessary to teach their children to not do such a thing? Why do all the major religions speak against lying and how it calls one’s integrity, even worth as a person into disrepute?
Lies are what have brought about the executions of queens and commoners alike, and the jailing of probably more men accused of murder, rape and everything else than any civilised society should be comfortable with. Thousands of Postmasters and Postmistresses were falsely accused of crimes, even jailed for non-existent crimes, and thousands of, (primarily), men falsely accused of sexual, (and other), crimes have been interviewed and released without charge. This is not to mention the many more hauled through the courts and acquitted at trial or worse, wrongly convicted and their struggle to be exonerated. How can it reasonably be argued any longer that false allegations are ‘vanishingly rare’?
Far from their being an epidemic of violence against women and girls, I would go so far as to say that there is an epidemic of lying – lying about the level of violence perpetrated by men and experienced by women, and lying about the nature and results of the violence that does exist. We live in the safest of eras, safest in terms of all types of crime, and a police report of a crime is not necessarily an actual crime. We record false allegations as crimes and view the total as a true representation of crime levels at our peril.
By Felicity Stryjak
Felicity Stryjak is retired having worn many hats in her life so far, teacher and paralegal among them. She was born in Torquay in 1953 and has lived in a variety of interesting places both in the UK and abroad. She intends Scotland to be her final place of abode.
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