Authenticity Writ

#On the Writ's Authority

"Every applicant arrives believing he has brought a verdict. He has brought a question, and paid to ask it." — Hieromnemon Valerius Drax, marginal note to a returned filing

The Authenticity Writ is an application. I put that sentence first because every shrine-keeper who has carried one down the seventeen steps beneath Strasbourg Cathedral has, somewhere around the ninth step, mistaken it for a certificate. The paper under his arm asks a question. The Bureau of Relics answers in its own season, and the answer is a separate document with a separate seal.

Any local shrine, parish, cathedral, or military chaplaincy may file. All of them file for the same three permissions: to display a claimed relic, to transport it, and to invoke it in liturgical service. A bone denied all three may remain holy in the private opinion of its keepers. In the registers of the Holy Bureaus it is a bone in a drawer.

The Bureau's right to demand the Writ comes from its constitution in A.S. 92, ratified under the settlement made by the Concordat of Strasbourg in A.S. 90. The Registry declines to say who drafted the first Writ, or in what year the first was stamped. I decline to guess. The profession calls the eventual certificate a Sanctity Writ. That gives the Church two writs, one small word, and years of corridor between them.

#On the Required Particulars

The Writ demands four things. The first of them ruins most applicants.

It demands a provenance chain, unbroken, witnessed and notarized at every transfer. Consider a knucklebone carried through the Retreat in a sugar tin by a widow who had no notary, no witness, and no intention of stopping for either while Wrath's host came over the hills behind her. Her faith was perfect. Her chain has a gap the width of a war. The Examiner will find that gap, because finding it is the first thing he is paid to do.

It demands a physical description: material composition, weight, dimensions, and the saint to whom the object is attributed. That last particular is the dangerous one. A bone is anonymous. The Writ gives it a name, and from that hour the Bureau examines the name as closely as the calcium.

It demands a theological justification citing at least two canonical sources and one reference from the Bureau of Doctrine.

And it demands a filing fee in Crowns of Grace. The Bureau of Tithes collects it on Relics' behalf. Relics maintains, in every audit, every letter and every after-dinner speech I have endured, that it has never received the full payment. Tithes keeps a ledger. The two Bureaus have never agreed on the difference. The applicant paid the whole sum, and nobody consults the applicant.

The story is where frauds live. It is also where saints live, which the Bureau prefers not to mention.

#On Examination and Judgment

The Writ goes to an Examiner of the Third Degree, trained in osteology, liturgical history and chemical analysis, who inspects the relic in person. He brings brass scales calibrated monthly by the Bureau of Engineering, reagents sealed in wax ampules under the Bureau's counterseal, white gloves, and the Liber Examinationis, whose cross-references are a mortification in themselves.

The work proceeds as the Relic Authenticators have long performed it. The object comes to intake in a lead-lined box, cold through the glove, and is quarantined before anyone admires it. The chain is rebuilt transfer by transfer, against copies the Bureau of Records has held jointly with Relics since the Schisms. The bone is touched, weighed and measured against its own description. Its attribution is tested against doctrine. Then come the responses: proximity to flame, immersion in consecrated water, and in disputed cases prayer in the relic's presence, while the Examiner notes any thermal, luminous or auditory phenomena. The verdict is drafted and notarized, and the object is assigned its disposition.

The best known of these responses is the Candle Proof. A genuine relic draws the taper's flame toward it. A counterfeit makes the flame withdraw. Bureau rhetoric holds that any relic producing phenomena passes. The Examiners know better. A contaminated object can glow with great enthusiasm, and the glow says nothing about whose enthusiasm it is.

Four separate matters are therefore decided, and applicants confuse them without fail. The first is whether the object responds, the second what class it belongs to, the third whether the Bureau recognizes it, and the fourth where it may be used. A bone may pass the first and fail the fourth. With an immaculate chain and a fee received, it may fail the first and pass the rest.

#On Delay and Disposition

The Codex's own survey of the Bureaus records that the process takes, on average, four years, nine separate inspections, and a fee that would buy a modest farmstead. Those are the published figures for the average applicant. No applicant has ever believed himself average.

The rest are under review. Some files under review are older than the Bureau itself: they were inherited from predecessor registers and never closed. The Bureau does not apologize for this. It considers them in progress.

Rejection is quicker. An adverse finding brings confiscation, and confiscated relics go into Bureau custody and are never returned. The official phrase is "retired from service." Some spend their retirement in honourable interment in the Vault of Sacred Custody. Fragments judged eligible under the Saint-Bone Melting Acts are rendered into lime for mortar. Protected fragments are spared, and that distinction is made in the file before any kiln is lit.

The shrine loses more than bone. It loses its devotional focus, and the income of the pilgrims who came to kneel before it. A village saint may drop out of accepted memory within a generation, because a saint with no registered relic has nowhere to be remembered. A chaplaincy loses the object it believed would stand between a trench and the Enemy.

#On Contradictory Bones

During the Reliquary Schisms, from approximately A.S. 140 to 160, the Writ worked perfectly, and that was the difficulty. Provenance chains preserved by the Cellar Saints came in immaculate. The seals were genuine. The bones were real. Cologne accumulated seventeen femurs of Saint Aldebrand, each with an unbroken chain and each authenticated by a separate Examiner. The saint had two legs.

The Fourteenth Doctrinal Congress settled the matter in A.S. 147 with the Femur Principle: all femurs are authentic if notarized. The Writ survived. Anatomy lodged an objection, and the objection was filed.

Then Velmora began sending counterfeits across the Line. Three incidents since A.S. 180 are documented in which Velmoric relics reached frontline chaplains and worked counter-miracles among the faithful. Against those, the Writ is necessary. Its chain can expose a forged transfer, and its Examiner can watch a flame withdraw. A shrine can do neither for itself.

And then there is the tooth. In A.S. 191 a tooth attributed to Saint Uriel was authenticated, installed in the third Vigil Ark at Constantinople, and launched four times. The Vigil Ark of Saint Uriel did not fly. The hull was sound. The consecration was valid. The paperwork was flawless.

The classification is pending.

#On Present Application

On the Sagittal Line, Standing Order 88-R of A.S. 182, as corrected, requires frontline relics to be reauthenticated weekly. The chaplaincies there have learned the Writ's grammar better than any cathedral chapter in the rear. They know a recheck confers nothing new. It confirms, for seven days, that nothing has been taken away. They know what a withdrawing flame means in a trench at dusk.

Applications still arrive in Strasbourg, wrapped in oilcloth and sealed in red wax. They carry the chains of families who once hid bones in cellars and now want them back on an altar. The clerks stamp them received. The fee has been paid, or most of it has. The Examiner is on the Line.