I was perusing through information on some churches in Venice and came across something that mentioned the body of St. Lucy was in a church in the city. Since she is a relatively important saint from ancient times, I thought it interesting that this is where her body ended up. Then, I saw some reference to her body being stolen in 1981. Intrigued, I did some more digging, and found this rather bizarre tidbit about what happened:
In November 1981 St Lucy’s mummified skeleton was stolen from its heavy glass enclosed crypt just below the altar of the Venetian Church of St Jeremiah. Two gunmen burst into the church and ordered the parish priest and two parishioners to lie on the floor while they seized the remains and put them in a sack. The saint’s head broke off at the neck and rolled away on the floor of the church. The silver death mask which had covered the face was left behind. Eventually a bizarre ransom note was received demanding that any page from a book called “If this T Man” be read out in all secondary and high schools in the Venice area. A month later, on her feast day, the police found the remains of St Lucy at a hunting lodge near Venice…
What in the world? Why would someone rob a church of a relic, evidently not being interested in the silver that was with the body? And what is up with this odd ransom demand? I found some newspaper articles on the story in Google News archives, but it didn’t provide much more information. I also did a search for the book “If this T Man” and could not find anything published under that title, either in English or Italian. The closest title I found was an Italian book called “If This is a Man” (1947) by Primo Levi, which is about the author’s experience as a Jew in Auschwitz during WWII. I talked with someone about this who thought that the demand may have been made by those who wanted to force the memory of the Holocaust into people’s minds. Otherwise, I couldn’t find any more information on the strange episode, or about the ransom demand.
