The Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City has lost an incomparable treasure: a bone fragment believed to be from the New Testament’s Mary Magdalene.
The fragment, smaller than a fingernail filing, has been in the magnificent Cathedral of the Madeleine in downtown Salt Lake City since 1918.
Woven into a red cloth imprinted with a fleur-de-lis pattern and glued onto cardboard, the relic was encased in a bronze and glass reliquary, which sat on an altar.
On July 10, cathedral staffers discovered the reliquary shattered on the ground and the relic missing. They contacted the police and offered a $1,000 reward for information about it.
Now, the Rev. Martin Diaz believes they know the culprit.
“We have a fairly good idea who took the relic,” Diaz said Monday, “and I don’t believe he even remembers he was here.”
It was a “sad case” of a person who thought he could steal something valuable, the priest added, but the glass case that houses the relic normally “takes two people to move.”
Diaz is realistic about the improbability of recovering the consecrated item — but hopeful.
“Miracles happen all the time,” he said. “We even have a saint — St. Anthony — who is a saint of lost things.”
The diocese is praying, but Diaz believes it is likely gone forever.
A big loss
(Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City) A display in downtown Salt Lake City's Cathedral of the Madeleine containing a bone fragment believed to be from the New Testament’s Mary Magdalene. Cathedral staffers say the relic was stolen last week.
The priest is doubly disappointed as he sees this unthinking act as undoing local history and connection to St. Mary Magdalene, the cathedral’s namesake.
Indeed, the majestic cathedral is the only one in the country named for the devoted female follower of Jesus.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Cathedral of the Madeleine in downtown Salt Lake City is pictured on Tuesday, Dec. 26, 2023.
There is some speculation that the diocese’s first bishop, Lawrence Scanlan, chose St. Mary Magdalene, whose feast day is July 22, to give early Utah Catholics something to celebrate at the same time Latter-day Saints celebrate Pioneer Day, which is July 24.
What is known is that in 1918, the diocese’s second bishop, Joseph Glass, went to France and brought back the relic and another one reportedly from Christ’s cross (which remains in the sacred space).
On top of that, it was Glass, Diaz said, who created the cathedral’s vibrant color scheme and picked the paintings.
What it means
(Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City) A display in downtown Salt Lake City's Cathedral of the Madeleine containing a bone fragment believed to be from the New Testament’s Mary Magdalene. Cathedral staffers say the relic was stolen last week.
“I am devastated, " said Cristina Rosetti, a religious studies expert who was in the cathedral parish for years and has a particular devotion to Magdalene. “She was “an apostle to the apostles.”
She has heard all the skeptics, asking how the church knows it’s her.
“We already believe that Jesus’ body becomes bread,” Rosetti explained. “What’s to say it isn’t her?”
Catholicism is an “incarnational faith,” said the scholar, who now lives in Quebec. “It is not an abstract thing but grounded in a reality” of bodies and bones — no matter how tiny.
To lose this one, she said, is particularly painful.
It is, Rosetti declared, “a wound.”
The diocese “can get another relic in Rome,” Diaz said, but it won’t be from Magdalene. Those are exceedingly rare.
The disappearance of the bone fragment is a double whammy for the diocese.
“We are losing a connection to Bishop Glass,” he said, and “to our precious history.”
