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.
Fate was to grasp three Roman soldiers to be venerated together as Christian martyrs and saints. Getulius was a native of Gabii in Sabina, North Africa. He resigned from the army when he became a Christian, and retired to his estates near Tivoli. Caerealis, an imperial legate, was sent to arrest him. But arriving In Tivoli, he found himself taken with Getulius and his new life. Rather swiftly, Getullius converted Caerealis to Christianity. Next, Rome sent Primitivo to arrest both of them. But he was out-numbered. Not only was there Gertulius and Caerealis, but also Gertulius’s brother, Amantius. Apparently with the aid of Jesus of Nazareth, they ganged up on Primitivo to convert him to the new faith. Martyrdom — and fame — according to one version, came when these four “traitors to Rome” were tied to a stake and set afire. But, say a number of versions, they survived unharmed. This was 120 A.D., and such occurrences did not seem unusual to people of the time. The men were subsequently bludgeoned to death. The “Roman Martyrology” reports that Gertulius, husband of Saint Symphorosa, was killed on the Via Salaria. The encyclopedic study “Acta Sanctorum,” compiled over several centuries and published in Latin by the Bollandists, a respected congregation within the Jesuit order in Belgium devoted to the study of the saints, registered five bearing the name Primitivo. The only one associated with June 10 was martyred with Saint Getulius in Rome on the Via Salaria. Saint Symphorosa, it is said, buried them all in an arenarium on her estate.The veneration of saints’ relics (reliquiae in Latin and leipsana in Greek), was ancient long before Jesus appeared. Today, it is considered archaeologically a prehistoric instinct that still persists — though the Catholic Church theoretically began the difficult effort to end the display of relics in 1900.
Thus, the relics of many saints came to the New World, especially to New Spain (today’s Mexico), seemingly by the boatload. Therefore the appearance of the relics of many saints in Mexico City’s metropolitan cathedral, including those of Primitivo. These were displayed on the cathedral’s main altar on the saints’ feast days, called “Relic Days” in the liturgical calendar. The following day, according to religious custom, they were returned to their reliquary casket. But not those of Saint Primitivo, which received special attention. Because this saint had become charged with petitioning God for rain, according the Jose Maria Marroqui, his relics were placed on the altar June 10, his feast day, and were not removed until October 31, approximately when the rainy season ended.
This custom was mentioned in the chapters on “La Capilla del Santo Cristo y de Reliquias” (“The Chapel of Christ’s Image and Relics), by art historian Magdalena Vences in the book “Catedral de Mexico: Patrimonio Artistico y Cultural” (“Mexico’s Cathedral: Artistic and Cultural Heritage”), published in 1986. It was the last of 14 inventories of the cathedral’s artistic treasures compiled at irregular intervals over centuries.
He was also included in the daily Missal published in Mexico each month, and the list of saints then still being noted in many daily papers around the nation. But no information on Primitivo appears in brief biographies then being published. And his name is missing from the Penquin Dictionary of Saints at that time. Yet it was being mentioned for the June calendar in the Guadalajara published “Calendaro Rodriguez Azpeitia” and Pueblo’s “Calendario del Mas Antioguo Galvan” in recent editions. But he’s disappeared in most other places.
Well into the 20th Century it was “a very Spanish custom” to exhibit saints‘ relics on a church altar between two candles on the feast day of the saint. Every priest celebrating a Mass traditionally began by kissing the altar, a gesture of respect to the church’s martyrs. Before Vatican II, October 11, 1962 to December 8, 1965, every Catholic altar had relic fragments of some saint imbedded inside, usually from early Rome. But in 1965 a change in Church “regulations” eliminated this requirement for new altars.
More than a generation ago, the federal government moved the cathedral’s most artistic reliquary caskets to the National Viceregal Museum in Tepotzolan, according to the priest who was the Sacristan in 1997. Neither he nor his immediate successors could find whether Primitivo’s relics were removed.
Sheer inventory keeping probably accounts for this. By 1698, the cathedral had accumulated so many relics that the cathedral Cabildo (governing Chapel) constructed a huge retable to house them. Theoretically, the surviving relics are still there.
Relics included fragments or chips of bone, and other items such a splinters of the True Cross, etc. The idea that every Catholic church of importance possesses a piece of the True Cross suggests a cross of gigantic proportions and has often been questioned, frequently by some Church officials. Relics come from many sources. A fragment of the True Cross was given by the pope to the Agustinian friar Diego Salamanco in 1573 for his monastery, and was shared with the cathedral. Other were sent from Rome and Palestine each, it is said, accompanied with its own “authenitfication” certificate. But the custom of displaying relics of the martyred Saint Primitivo on the cathedral altar now is a forgotten one. That probably accounts for the undependable rains in recent years, says an elderly Mexican friend, hard used by his many years, yet possessing a fine memory.