Feast of Saint Aldebrand

#On the Feast and This Survey

"Remembered by the register, mislaid by the diocese."

This tract surveys the Feast of Saint Aldebrand as it stands in A.S. 201, the year 1911 of the old reckoning. It records where the feast is listed and where it is kept, where it has been struck out, who taxes it, who defends it, and which bones are said to appear on it. It does not know who instituted the feast, in what year, or on which day of which Church month the faithful are meant to keep it. I searched the registers for all three. The registers kept their counsel.

The difficulty fits in a sentence. The Bureau of Festivals names the feast in its Sanctioned Register among the major observances of the Synod, while the saint's own dossier records the same feast as observed in several dioceses and omitted from several official calendars. Both accounts carry seals, and neither has been withdrawn. A theologian of weaker constitution would choose between them. I have chosen to file both.

#On the Calendar

"Rejoice by permission, where the permission has arrived."

By the Bureau of Festivals' own account, the Sanctioned Register governs the major feasts ratified through the Bureau of Doctrine, and those feasts are mandatory. Absence is noted in the Great Ledger. Attendance Auditors measure enthusiasm under the Bureau's general standards. The Feast of Saint Aldebrand stands first in the list the Bureau chose to print, which is an honour of typesetting if nothing else.

The dioceses read that register and came to different conclusions. Some keep the feast, and some have left it off their official calendars. This survey names none of the latter. The omissions are attested in the aggregate, and the Bureau that keeps Aldebrand's dossier did not see fit to list the offenders. I decline to supply a list on its behalf and then call it scholarship.

The surrounding Bureaus have each taken up a position, as Bureaus do. The Bureau of Records disputes the feast, which is consistent of it, since Records has spent its institutional life disputing the saint's principal object. The Bureau of Tithes taxes the observance, which is equally consistent, because Tithes would tax the Last Judgment if it could fix a date of assessment. Doctrine defends it. Doctrine defends it with the particular ferocity reserved for truths the Church once mislaid.

The Bureau of Festivals' general apparatus of auditors, ledgers and attendance marks belongs to every mandatory feast. It does not furnish Aldebrand with a ritual script of his own, and this survey found no penalty tariff written for his day in particular. Whoever claims to have seen one should produce it, sealed.

The day and month are unknown. Anyone who has assigned them to Aldebrand on the strength of a siege or a ratification has confused a saint's vindication with his calendar.

#On the Bone and Its Vindication

"The man is nearly gone. The bone remains."

Every feast commemorates something. This one commemorates a refusal to stay lost.

In the Year of Letters, A.S. −32 (1678 CE), scholars of Amsterdam circulated pamphlets that denounced Aldebrand's reliquary as fraud, and pig bone at that. The ecclesiastical clerks of that age answered by declaring the reliquary absent from inventory and erasing its entry. Records, which did not yet exist in its present form, later inherited the decree, defended it as its own, and has never quite forgiven the bone for continuing to glow in the cathedral vault at Vienna without the paperwork.

At the Trial of Saint Aldebrand's Reliquary in Amsterdam, A.S. 11 (1721 CE), Dr. Matthias Voll presided over coerced priests who confessed the relic a "pig fragment" before a jeering crowd. The Synod later annulled the transcript as forgery. The Rationalists kept their copies, of course. Rationalists always keep their copies.

Eighty-four years passed. During the Siege of Vienna, A.S. 95 (1805 CE), by the official account, Bishop-Warden Clemens Stahlhand took up the reliquary mace and struck Althazar of Pest once, and the attack broke. The testimonies Doctrine admits say the blow rang for nine seconds. I do not propose to improve on them.

The Bureau of Doctrine ratified the reliquary miracle in A.S. 104 (1814 CE), concurrent with Clemens's beatification. That ratification approved a miracle. It did not found a feast. A.S. 95 gives the feast its argument and A.S. 104 gives it its seal of proof, yet neither year appears anywhere as the feast's institution, and this survey will not pretend otherwise for the sake of a tidier infobox.

The feast's theological content follows from that sequence. Aldebrand is the patron of the object that was officially denied and then publicly useful. Whoever keeps his day keeps the doctrine that the Creator does not consult the inventory before acting.

#On Custody

"Each statement bears a seal. None apologizes."

The saint's dossier holds several custody assertions at once. The relic rests in Vienna. It rests in Strasbourg. It lies under triple seal in the Vault of Ten Thousand Keys. And on feast days, the dossier records, it is displayed in places where it is also not present.

I record these four claims without ranking them. A survey that certified one would have to decertify the other three, and each of the three has a sealing office behind it with a long memory and a short temper.

Across town from these, the cathedrals of Cologne hold seventeen femurs of Saint Aldebrand, every one notarized and every one equally holy under the principle the Bureau of Relics adopted after its Femur Wars: a notarized femur is an authentic femur. The seventeen show how the Church authenticates a relic. They say nothing of how many bones appear on the feast, and the survey found no record that they process anywhere at all.

The feast-day displays are attested as claims. The dossier gives no list of places, no names of custodians, and no route by which a triple-sealed bone in a vault might also stand on an altar. I have been asked whether this troubles me. It troubles Records, and so I sleep well.

#On the Observed Feast

"Aldebrand, whose bone remembered, make us remembered when our files are lost."

The checked sources tie three things to the feast itself: its listing in the Sanctioned Register, its uneven keeping across the dioceses, and the claimed display of the relic on the day. Everything else that surrounds Aldebrand belongs to his cult, which does not wait for a calendar to tell it when to pray.

That cult is well attested. Pilgrims kneel at Vienna for the Blow. Soldiers touch copied femur-medallions before they cross east. The sick bring strips of linen to his lesser shrines in Cologne, in Ulm, and in the corridor towns that send men toward Bastion-Przemyśl and Bastion-Sibiu. Relic clerks mutter his name when an inventory will not balance, which in some offices is every Thursday. The sources do not say that any of these practices belongs to the feast day, or that any of them is performed in a fixed annual order. Whoever describes a procession, a reenactment or a celebrant for this feast is describing his own imagination, and the Bureau of Festivals does not license that.

A pastoral advisory governs the cult. Prayer for vindication, bone-medallions, siege litanies and the Vienna pilgrimage are permitted. Duplicate relic claims and private femur authentication are restricted, and so, with admirable precision, are arithmetic jokes. Amsterdam trial reenactments are forbidden without a Doctrine script. Unauthorized multiplication of bones requires a Relics seal, as though the bones had ever waited for one.

The Church tolerates the collection boxes at his shrines and supervises them through Tithes. The sources give no rate, schedule or exemption, so this survey gives none.

The prayer at the head of this section is the saint's own, short and imprecise and dear to the infantry. Doctrine has tried three times to replace it with a sturdier formula. The infantry kept the old words and lit their pipes with the new cards.

#On the Present Condition

"Observed, omitted, taxed, and disputed."

In A.S. 201 the Feast of Saint Aldebrand is sanctioned in Strasbourg and omitted in parts of the provinces. Tithes taxes it, Records disputes it, and Doctrine defends it, each in good faith or a usable substitute. Its relic is claimed by a ruin, a capital and a vault, and is displayed, by report, wherever the faithful need it to be. Its day is unknown and its founder unnamed. Its miracle is ratified.

A lesser feast would have died of these contradictions. Aldebrand's feast thrives on them, and that is entirely appropriate to a saint whose single great work was to be denied by the competent authority and then to appear, on schedule, at the breach.

Records will file this survey under "disputed." I would expect nothing less.