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iamshadow linked me, the other day, to a story about a theft from a Catholic church in California. Now, granted, the news article is from Yahoo, so I'm not expecting journalistic excellence, but I wasn't expecting to crack up laughing, either. The item stolen was a relic of St. Anthony of Padua and its reliquary, and the reporter was either aware and circumspect or completely ignorant of the fact that in a religious context "relic" is used almost exclusively to refer to body parts of dead saints.

Nowhere in the article does it mention that the stolen object is, in fact, A REALLY OLD BONE.

I suppose he could have been trying to be as delicate as the officials. From Reuters:

The relic, which police and church officials have declined to describe, had been on display for the first time in nine years...

There are probably plenty of rational reasons not to describe something that's been stolen, but I can only think of two off the top of my head: either they think it'll prevent people from faking up replicas to sell or "return" for reward money, or they know it's kind of freaky to keep bits of saints lying around and don't want to remind people they do it (A of P's tongue, incidentally, is on display in Italy, because Italy hogs all the good stuff).

But I think really the church should realise that if they won't describe the Relic of St. Anthony -- at least designate which bone -- we're all just going to assume it's his penis. And no amount of remarks on the irony of a relic of the Patron Saint Of Lost Stuff being stolen is going to make up for it.

After all, penis theft has precedent.

If you'll pardon the pun (or even if you won't) the story does have a happy ending. The police found the relic undamaged, and it's been restored to the church, where hopefully they've attached a bell or something to prevent this from happening again. The suspect has apparently been released "due to a medical condition" which the police won't elaborate on either; the whole thing is veritably shrouded in mystery. (It's probably something simple like she's not quite mentally stable and didn't understand what she was doing, but admittedly that's less interesting than the mystery.)

Shadow hoped, and she wasn't really wrong, that I would be inspired to write some kind of story about all this. I have to say that I think there is a rich vein of material to be found in the story of a stolen holy penis.

OH MAN I LOVE WHEN I GET TO USE THE FRACTURED PENIS TAG.

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Ancient Roman soldiers have also been sighted in the vicinity...