The “Fantastical Creature” of Cluny, in the Abbey Church

Although nothing on the scale of St. Mary’s R.C. Church in Newport, nor St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, we do receive occasional requests for tours of our 1960 Abbey Church of St. Gregory the Great. While other houses of worship elsewhere may tower over us in size, historical importance or age, there is something intriguing to many about visiting a Mid-Century Modern, pre-Vatican II monastic (i.e., non-parish) church. Designed by the renowned Italian-American architect, Pietro Belluschi (1899-1994), for a community of English Benedictine monks, it contains a fine collection of furnishings by the Japanese-American craftsman, George Nakashima (1905-1990). It is also situated amidst a full collection of Belluschi structures comprising much of the School’s upper campus. And, by the way, adding to the multiculturalism, there is a Zen Garden out back. We have regularly hosted architecture classes from Roger Williams University in nearby Bristol and from Yale University, a bit further afield. Alberto Quartaroli, new Director of the Richard Lippold Foundation in Mineola, New York, made a visit to take his first-ever look at the site-specific wire sculpture, Trinity, it supporting strands emanating from above the main altar, designed and executed on site by Lippold (1915-2002). In addition, members of the Nakashima family have made road trips from New Hope, Pennsylvania, to survey the many wood furnishings George Nakashima supplied for the church, monastery, and school. Embedded in the native fieldstone interior walls of the church are several medieval curiosities which have survived the centuries, having come to the monks from generous benefactors. Visitors can see the 15th century Burgundian seated Madonna and Child in the sanctuary, a small “fantastical creature” (possibly a water spout) from the original Abbey of Cluny, a stone architectural fragment in the form of a Gothic lancet, and the walking figure of St. Nicholas, 4th century Bishop of Myra, whose way is lit every December 6 by a solitary beeswax candle.

These four European stone carvings drew into the church on December 3 and 4 two sections of the Form IV Humanities class taught by Dr. Kristin Harper ’09, new to the Portsmouth Abbey School faculty this year. The students may have been surprised at first to be offered the same hospitality and respect accorded to older visitors. With the winter term having just commenced after their return from Thanksgiving break, the focus of the course now is the period of history known as the Middle Ages, their studies covering from about 500 to 1500. In the classroom they had begun preliminary talks about Roman catacombs and the cult of relics as they relate to the early Christian Church. What better place to move their discussion forward than inside a church on their own campus which holds, altogether, twelve altars, each containing one or more relics. With that knowledge, we began to dig into the catacombs a little deeper, so to speak. With the massive 1937 main altar as a focal point, the students gathered around the limestone artwork designed and fabricated by the master stone-carver John Howard Benson (1901-1956) of Newport. They saw carved Scripture passages from both the Old and the New Testament, a bas-relief carving of the Paschal Lamb of God, and the inset square stone plug in the top which contains a relic (as do all twelve altars), possibly of Pope St. Gregory the Great, patron of the monastery. These carved artworks are not usually visible to the faithful seated in the pews, and the altar top is always covered by an altar cloth (except when the altars are stripped during the Sacred Triduum). The connection was tangibly made clear to the students between martyrs’ bones in the catacombs, where early ceremonies and Masses are believed to have been conducted, and the tradition of anointing altars with similar relics.

I explained to them that the word “relic” may loosely refer to many things outside of a church and its liturgical practices, such as an outdated political system, a warship salvaged from the ocean’s bottom, or a piece of technological hardware. But what interested these teenagers most were the relics they had come to learn about, such as the bones of saints, their skulls, hair, teeth, toenails or fingernails, and even tiny bits of clothing or vestments. They left knowing the difference between the various classes of relics, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. One of them shared that on Wednesday, the very day we met, the skull of St. Thomas Aquinas was being displayed in the chapel at Providence College during a one-day stop on its ten-city tour of the U.S. Two days later, on Friday, December 6, The Providence Journal featured a front-page, above-the-fold story (prime journalistic real-estate) with two photographs of P.C. students venerating the “REVERED RELICS” as the headline writer posted in all-caps. Fr. Simon Teller, O.P., P.C.’s chaplain and director of campus ministry, was quoted by the reporter, Antonia Noori Farzan, as saying that, while relics remind the faithful that the dead will experience resurrection someday, Catholics revere the relics of the bodies of saints “like they were temples of the Holy Spirit.”
The Benson AltarThe Abbey does not have any skulls in its relic collection, but I do remember vividly often walking past the Minor Basilica of Santa Maria in Cosmedin in Rome where one finds the alleged skull of St. Valentine, beheaded after giving assistance to others who were also eventually martyred. It was a highlight of my walking tour of Rome for guests. Dr. Harper’s students did get to examine several of the Abbey’s relics and at least one is a special bone, albeit a tiny chip of a bone, belonging to St. Louis IX, King of France, according to the documentation in Latin that accompanies it. It is a first-class relic preserved in a small reliquary, or receptacle, called a theca – a biological term that refers to “an enveloping sheath or case of an animal or animal part” (Merriam-Webster). The theca is behind the head of Jesus as mounted on an ebony and silver pectoral cross, once worn around the neck of the mother superior in a convent of nuns. A similar theca holds what is identified as a relic of “S. Benedicti Ab.”
Relic of St. Louis IXOne second-class relic which intrigued the students is a two-sided letter hand-written to a graduate of Portsmouth Priory School by St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta (1910-1997). Dated July 7, 1990, she thanks Hugh A. Markey ’40 (1923-2015) for his “kind letter” and “for the love you share with us all through your gifts.” A first-class relic of the foundress of the Missionaries of Charity, which drew awe and silence as it was passed from hand to hand, safely in a laminated card, was “A piece of Mother Teresa’s hair donated by the Missionaries of Charity / St. Louis, Missouri,” whose simple house and chapel I used to frequent for Mass. The St. Louis sisters gave Mother a haircut on one of her visits to the same house and swept up every last strand of her white hair.
Relic of St. BenedictThese wide-ranging Humanities tours ended in the Linenfold Room adjacent to the Stillman Dining Hall, where the students were invited to touch not only the medieval linenfold paneling along the expanse of one wall, covered with framed examples of medieval illuminated manuscripts, but also the 15th-century batten door-within-a-door with original hardware intact, also part of the Abbey’s Hungerford-Mackay Collection of European and English Architectural Fragments. Hopefully, these tours brought to these students, as relics bring to the faithful, a tangible awareness of proximity to distant ages, and a sense not of obsolescence but of relevance and of reverence.

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