A Who's Who of Saints

St. George, the patron saint of England, earned his place in medieval Christian legend by spearing a dragon that was just about to gobble up a Libyan maiden. St. Christopher was a sort of Jolly Green Giant of the early church who ferried wayfarers across a river on his back; one of his passengers turned out to be the child Jesus, and Christopher naturally became the patron saint of travelers. St.

Cecilia, a Roman beauty who was whacked to death with a sword after her pagan captors failed to suffocate her in an overheated bathroom, was made the patron of music and musicians because she "sang to the Lord in her heart" on her wedding day.

Of course, none of it ever happened. The only facts known about St. George and St. Christopher are that they were martyrs. There is no reliable evidence for the existence of St. Cecilia, and several hundred of the 25,000 saints whose cults have been observed in the Roman Catholic Church seem to be equally fictitious. Oddly enough, most of the evidence that cut these legends down to size came not from iconoclastic disciples of Voltaire but from the Bollandists, a tiny society of Catholic priests whose job is compiling material for an accurate, fiction-free Who's Who of the saints.

A Century or Two. This week the society will publish its semiannual volume of studies called the Analecta Bollandiana, a dry, multilingual collection of research on the lives of the saints. The latest Analecta, for example, contains one article on the Bollandists' current favorite topic. St. Martin of Tours, plus others on such minutiae as an early Swedish manuscript dealing with Persian saints and a papyrus describing the life of St. Phileas. Eventually, this material may find its way into the Bollandists' Acta Sanctorum of which only 69 volumes have been published in the 360 years since Dutch Jesuit Heribert Rosweyde undertook to write accurate hagiographies. But no volume of the Acta series has been released since 1940, and Bollandist Father Joseph van der Straeten admits that "no one can say when our next will be published. Maybe in a century, maybe in two."

Membership in the society (which takes its name from Father John van Bolland, Rosweyde's successor) is limited to six priest-scholars, who are always Jesuits and almost always Belgians. The Bollandists. who have no parish duties and seldom give public lectures, live in one wing of Brussels' College de St. Michel, do most of their work in their own five-tiered, 320,000-volume library. The society's leader is Father Maurice Coens, 70, a soft-spoken expert on medieval German saints and a Bollandist for 35 years. Prospective next member is Michel van Esbroeck, 28, a specialist in Near Eastern languages who was assigned to the society by his Jesuit superiors two years ago on a trial basis. His apprenticeship will not be brief. "If all goes well," says one veteran Bollandist, "it will take at least ten years."

Philomena's Fall. Bollandist research has no official standing in the church, but Vatican scholars have often relied on the society's discoveries in deciding whether to eliminate a nonexistent saint from the calendar. As a rule, the church takes a tolerant attitude toward cults that have been honored by time and history; it does not forbid St. Christopher medals, for example. Yet it is quick to eliminate veneration of more recent non-saints with a growing vogue. Vatican officials two years ago sternly clamped down on devotees of the Roman "martyr"' St. Philomena, whose authenticity was questioned by the Bollandists as far back as 1940. The society's conclusions are not always welcome: in 1695, the Carmelites were so outraged at Bollandist doubts about the order's clouded early history that they persuaded the Spanish Inquisition to ban the Acta as heretical.

The Bollandists are not ecclesiastical muckrakers; they aim to produce sober lives of saints that will stand the scrutiny of secular historians, and are as delighted to authenticate a legend as to disprove one. Well aware that the faithful may be scandalized if a popular saint is summarily debunked, the Bollandists couch damaging discoveries in guarded, hesitant prose. But they also believe that the faith of the church will be all the stronger if it is stripped of implausible legends. Father Coens believes that the "enlightened Christian" should always be "on the alert to protect his sense of fiction and reality, employing the reason that God has given him to use."

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