{"id":2399,"date":"2015-10-12T07:20:52","date_gmt":"2015-10-12T11:20:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=2399"},"modified":"2015-10-12T07:20:52","modified_gmt":"2015-10-12T11:20:52","slug":"too-creepy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=2399","title":{"rendered":"Too creepy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The corpse of Saint Maria Goretti is <a href=\"http:\/\/lacrossetribune.com\/news\/local\/body-of-saint-to-be-displayed-at-namesake-madison-parish\/article_4ea131b0-bf47-59f6-b41f-c09f2330516b.html\" target=\"_blank\">touring the United States<\/a> just now.  This is seriously creepy in multiple respects.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<p>It&#8217;s one thing to preserve and display a body in connection with a funeral.  It&#8217;s another thing entirely to preserve a body as a sacred relic for gawkers to stare at.<\/p>\n<li>\n<p>Saint Maria was sexually assaulted when she was 11-years old, and died as a consequence of the assault.  Her last words, and her chief claim to sainthood, were of forgiveness for her assailant.<\/ul>\n<blockquote>\n<p>More than 100 years ago, an 11-year-old Catholic girl in Italy, stabbed 14 times by a man attempting to rape her, forgave her attacker on her deathbed and said she hoped she would be with him forever in heaven.<\/p>\n<p>The act of mercy by Maria Goretti \u2014 and others attributed to her spirit after her death \u2014 would lead the Roman Catholic Church to declare her a saint in 1950.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I can understand why the Catholic Church might think it&#8217;s a good idea to set before parishioners an example of a positive attitude toward rapists, but am I alone in thinking this reeks of manipulative cynicism?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The corpse of Saint Maria Goretti is touring the United States just now. This is seriously creepy in multiple respects. It&#8217;s one thing to preserve and display a body in connection with a funeral. It&#8217;s another thing entirely to preserve &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/?p=2399\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2399"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2399"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2401,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2399\/revisions\/2401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.bobfelton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}