After I went on about memorabilia yesterday, Phil expressed his surprise that I had not mentioned Charles and the True Cross. This is an item I was unaware of. Here is a bit of explanation:
“VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- As Britain's King Charles III walks into Westminster Abbey for his coronation, he will walk behind a processional cross containing a relic of Christ's cross given to the king by Pope Francis.
"The fragments of the relic of the true cross were donated by the Holy See in early April, through the apostolic nunciature, to His Majesty King Charles III, supreme governor of the Church of England, as an ecumenical gesture on the occasion of the centenary of the Anglican Church in Wales," Matteo Bruni, director of the Vatican press office said April 20.
A Vatican official said the two fragments in the coronation cross came from a relic preserved in the Lipsanoteca Room of the Vatican Museums.
The fragments now are under glass in the center of the coronation cross, which is made of recycled silver bullion.
Anglican Archbishop Andrew John of Wales blessed the cross during a service April 19.”
Here’s some more:
“Chris Trott, the British ambassador to the Holy See, said on Twitter that "we are deeply moved and grateful to Pope Francis for this extraordinary gift."
The gift of the relic, he said, reflects the strength of the relationship between the Holy See and Great Britain, a "relationship that developed over the course of the reign of Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth, who met five popes!"”
Meeting five popes - that’s quite impressive! This is what happened when you live as long her late majesty did.
I must admit that when I heard about these fragments of the true cross I was tempted to say, “It’s a miracle they have survived so long”. And I was reminded of the moment in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s book “The Leopard” when the collection of holy relics belonging to the wife of Prince Fabrizio di Salina are almost all declared not to be truly holy after all and have to be thrown out.
But that was towards the end of the 19th century. People believed a lot more in ancient relics back then. And yet here we are almost a quarter of the way through the 21st century and we’re still believing that bits of wood come from the cross on which Jesus Christ was crucified. And we’re going to have Charles ride in a golden carriage and then follow that Welsh cross and its incorporated relics into Westminster Abbey!
For a religion that believes in a god nobody can see, indeed a religion that back in the old testament declared there should be no worship of graven images, a lot of store is set on the fancy trappings and ceremonial objects. It’s why back when I was a believer I much preferred the unadorned simplicity of the Methodist church.
So that’s religious paraphernalia dismissed. What about the matter of skin colour? There’s been quite a lot of hoo-ha about the casting of the actress Adele James as Cleopatra in a new Netflix series, all because of the colour of her skin. As we all know, Cleopatra looked like Elizabeth Taylor! No way was she really Egyptian, of Macedonian descent, possibly with some black African in there!
Kenan Malik writes about it in the Guardian.
He begins with this:
In 1751, the great American polymath Benjamin Franklin worried about the small number of “purely white People in the World”. “All Africa,,” he wrote, “is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny... And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also.” Only “the Saxons… [and] the English make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth.”
I suppose it was a fairly common belief back then. Notice that Mr Franklin talks about the English, not the Welsh or the Scots or the Irish. You can be the wrong kind of “white”, clearly! Think of the days when boarding houses here put up notices saying they would not accept Irish tenants! And for a long time Irish and Italians were considered to be inferior “Americans”, not as good a class of immigrants as the English. Hence, of course WASPs!
In his article Kenan Malik quotes an American classicist Shelley Haley, an expert in applying Black feminist and critical race approaches to the study and teaching of Classics, according to wikipedia. She believes modern sensibilities can be useful in framing how we perceive Cleopatra:
“My grandmother was white,” Haley writes, “had straight black hair, and the nose of her [Native American] Onondagan grandmother but she was ‘colored’” because of the “one-drop rule” – the insistence that “if we have one Black ancestor, then we are Black.” Similarly, Cleopatra was undoubtedly “the product of miscegenation”; so “how is it she is not Black?” Haley adds that “Cleopatra reacted to the phenomena of oppression and exploitation as a Black woman would. Hence we embrace her as sister.”
What a strange world we live in.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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