A sometime colleague asked yours truly if there were any saints who had not gone through the long process of canonization. The answer is of course, yes, a great many beginning with many of the cast of characters in the New Testament.
The formal process of canonization, or reviewing the reports of the holiness of a specific individual did not begin until the Middle Ages. The first known public canonization of a saint was done in AD 993, when Pope John XV declared the bishop Saint Ulrich to be a saint, but before this is was a matter for local bishops and people to determine which worthies could be held up for pious veneration.
Successive popes passed further legislation, increasingly reserving the declaration of saints to the see of Rome. Pope Urban VIII, the personal friend of Galileo, decreed in the 17th century that only saints who had been formally approved by the church could be venerated. But a more interesting question is not when, but why the Church got so interested in who got to be a saint. The answer lies in the fact that some very odd individuals, some of whom never existed, began to make their way into popular devotion. This author’s favorite in this department was Saint Guinefort, who was not only a popular saint, but he also happened to be a dog.
The story goes that Saint Guinefort was a greyhound owned by a nobleman in Lyon, France. When the knight went on a trip to the market, he left his infant son in the care of the four-footed saint. Upon returning, he found the nursery in a shambles and the dog covered in blood. Incorrectly believing that the dog ate the child, the knight drew his sword and killed the holy dog on the spot. But upon examining the overturned crib, he discovered his son alive and well and a dead viper close by. He realized then that the dog had not killed the baby but a poisonous snake that might have harmed the child. Filled with remorse, the knight took the saintly dog’s body, threw it down a well, which he filled with stones and planted flowers around it as a memorial to the pet who had saved a life. Within a few weeks, local peasants began to declare that miracles occurred at the dog’s grave and it became a place of prayer and veneration.
To interject a few words from actual history, the story clearly carries motifs common to Christian lore. An endangered holy child, an evil serpent, and sacrificial deaths all are images from the Bible. In antiquity there were many older variants on the story, going back to a Hindu legend of a pet mongoose who saved a child from a snake, and a Persian version where the hero was a cat. But whatever the origins of the story, the common people loved it.
In actual history there was in Lyon a grove of trees and a blocked well dedicated to the dog saint. Peasants with sick children would bring them to the shrine and plead with the holy dog to grant them a miracle. Babies and candles would be left at the shrine overnight to gain a healing. How long this went on is not clear, but eventually it attracted the attentions of the Inquisition, which took a dim view of things sounding unorthodox.
A Dominican friar and Inquisitor named Stephen of Bourbon visited the shrine in 1261, and declared the whole thing to be a heathen invention, and said that the foolish peasants were venerating not a saint but demons. He had Saint Guinefort dug up, his body burned and the sacred grove of trees chopped down.
In his later years Stephen wrote a pious tract called the “Gifts of the Holy Spirit” which consisted of a collection of anecdotes about famous saints who were guided by the Holy Spirit and did many wonderful things. Such stories were called “exempla” meaning that there were memorable events to inspire the hearts of the faithful to pious actions. However, he went on to comment on false stories that he deemed odious, and he recounted the tale and his trip to the canine shrine.
The friar tells us that he had been on a preaching mission in the area, and while hearing confessions, apparently heard way too many stories about Saint Guinefort. When confessions were over he went to the shrine, found it surrounded by pious women, with candles and babies. What was worse, the Inquisitor saw mothers placing their ill infants on straw beds with candles beside them and leaving them for healing. There had been several incidents where the unattended candles caused the straw to catch fire, with unfortunate results for the babies. Drawing the conclusion that the mothers must have been planning to commit infanticide, he carried out his desecration and issued an edict to the local Lord of the Manor, that anyone venerating the dog saint was to be punished by having all of their property seized, leaving them bankrupt.
This humorless decree did not stop popular devotion to the holy canine. People now came to the shrine secretly, often bearing their children to be passed between two trees to prevent illness. The local bishops over the next few centuries would issue decrees forbidding the devotion, the most recent being issued in 1938. Visiting researchers found people still venerating Saint Guinefort as late as the 1960s. And just for the record, Saint Guinefort’s feast day is Aug. 22, so mark your calendars.
Yours truly writes this sitting alongside the family hound, Baldwin the timid Rottweiler. Would he attack an evil serpent to save my life? If I bribed him with my cheeseburger, he certainly would.
Gregory Elder, a Redlands resident, is a professor emeritus of history and humanities at Moreno Valley College and a Roman Catholic priest. Write to him at Professing Faith, P.O. Box 8102, Redlands, CA 92375-1302, email him at gnyssa@verizon.net or follow him on Twitter @Fatherelder.
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Professing Faith: Saint Guinefort was popular, and also happened to be a dog - Redlands Daily Facts
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