The Guadalajara Reporter

Rainy season saint, martyred in Rome in 120 A.D., his displayed relics venerated by generations of Mexicans, have now disappeared

For history buffs, for the saint-struck, the fans of religious personages lost in historical mists, for aficionados of religious fecklessness, the ancient saint of rain Saint Primitivo can be enticing.

For stern agnostics, the firmly secular and rigid atheists, it must seem unfair to have so much saint stuff embracing their lives. There are saint cities and towns everywhere. You can’t escape them. Start with L.A., which is the acronym of a religious clincher: El Pueblo Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles del Rio de Porciuncula, named by a Franciscan priest accompanying the first European land expedition to California. A name honors the tiny chapel of St. Francis of Assisi on a very small piece of Italian land, a porciuncula. “The Small Town of Our Lady the Queen of Angeles of the Little Portion” thus honors both the Virgin Mary and St. Francis. Of course there is truly a host of such of saintly stuff: St. Louis, St. Petersburg, St. Francis of Wisconsin, quite obviously Santa Fe, San Francisco, Santa Monica, Santa Barbara, St. Augustine, Santa Clara, San Bernardino; it’s a list that even includes St. Edward, Nebraska, named by slight-of-hand for an uncannonized Catholic priest, Edward Serrles. So many saint communities that it would drown this page, for you can’t ignore a slew of well-known, non-city references: San Andreas Fault, Santa Anna Winds, to begin another long list. But this record isn’t as long as the number of the Church’s saints — numbering more than 10,000. Actually, it is much more when the “miscellaneous” unnamed martyrs of the Roman persecution are counted. Romans feeding Christians to the lions; Caligula, 41 A.D. Persecution got more organized under another crazy, Nero, emperor of Rome from 54 to 68 A.D.

But the Church giveth and the Church taketh away. Primitivo claimed the attention of both members of the Catholic Church and the hierarchy in Rome for centuries. “Well into the 19th century, the relics of San Primitivo, a martyr of the persecutions in Rome during the first three centuries after Christ, and a special saint charged with petitions for rain in this country, were displayed on the main altar of Mexico City’s metropolitan cathedral at the beginning of the rainy season each year,” wrote a resourceful historian several years ago. A glimpse of history to remind many Mexicans and every visiting or resident foreigner of things they didn’t know, or had forgotten.

Mexico’s famous chronicler of the customs and architectural monuments at the close of the 19th century, Jose Maria Marroqui, noted that the relics most venerated in the metropolitan cathedral were of saints Ursula and her virgin companions. Also highly prized: the relics of Pope Gelasius (pontiff, 492-496), Anastasius the Persian, Candida, Vitus, the Martyrs of Zaragoza, Hilary, Crescentia, Pope Pius V (1566- 1572) ... and Primitivus – his Latin name.

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