Roman church decorated with 4k skeletons | Hacker News Reader

Roman church decorated with 4k skeletons

smithsonianmag.com

180 pointssamizdis188 comments

A great many people are incredibly uncomfortable with the idea of death, and installations like this, and similar works of art, are a great antidote. Accepting death as the price of life might be a bit difficult for people raised in a culture that worships perpetual youth and which dreams of immortality, perhaps in the form of a digital silicon upload, but it's really a sign of maturity.

Taking a minute or so out of every day to meditate upon the inevitablity of your own death is good for one's mental health - and can be motivating. If there's something you want to do, do it now - tomorrow is not guaranteed!

"Who promised you tomorrow?" - St. Alphonsus Liguori, Preparation for Death

In some ways, the 10000+ previous days of my life are a fairly reasonable promise of tomorrow.

Gambler's fallacy

"Okay, wow. You don't want me to kill you because you have so much to live for? Umm, sunk cost fallacy, heard of it?"

“No, no, I have an MBA, I’d never fall for sunk cost. I’m all in on the ‘I’ll travel the world and do all the crazy fun stuff after I retire’ fallacy.”

In a randomly sampled million individuals, what's the probability of any of them surviving another day?

The gambler fallacy talks about a gambler who has won and believes that the cause that made him win is long lasting. But a living man is right to believe that he is alive due to forces that have a lot of momentum and won't vanish suddenly. The fallacy would be assuming that the man is exempt from accidents, that are unpredictable.

The fallacy is that assuming someone who has lived longer already has a greater chance of staying alive. which is clearly wrong?

They say past performance does not guarantee future results…

No guarantee but it is a good predictor on a long timeframe.

a person with 20,000 previous days would have greater prediction than someone with 10,000 previous days. implies on older person should predict a continuation of life, more than a younger one. incorrect?

Being born is a death sentence.

Some would say it’s incredibly cruel to bring new life into existence for that very reason.

Yet those same people (whomever they are) continue to perpetuate their own "cruel" existence.

The living can consent

You can try to do the best you can with the hand you got dealt but still wish you weren't at the table.

The human mind makes it very hard for people to do anything but continue living. It takes an unbelievable amount of effort to overcome the natural safeguards our brain has built in. Someone can hate their life, find it exceptionally cruel, yet find themselves unable to end said life despite not waiting to live it.

That aside, you can tolerate or even enjoy life while understanding that for many it's an absolutely awful experience they had no say in partaking in.

Fun fact: the will to live (or, rather, the will to continue your own existence at all costs) is considered to be one of the five poisons of the mind in the Yoga sutras.

Some people would say that, and in some cases they would be right. I don't particularly believe it to be true, but it is an interesting thought experiment

The mind is great at birthing warped antinatural thoughts. Life has so many beatiful facets, if we allow ourselves to see them. Our conscious mind gets to perceive what passed our belief-filters. It's worth trying out new ones. Saying so as a depressed, anti-everything punk radiating hatred turned annoyingly positive optimist, who prefers ugly truths to comforting lies. Got there with a willingness to question my own behaviour, accept criticism (gifts) and taking responsibility for my screwups over two decades.

See interesting philosophy books ‘Every Cradle is a Grave’ and ‘Better Never to Have Been’. Not for the easily depressed reader.

Not for the easily depressed person and definitely not for the already depressed, but I consider them worth reading. It's an interesting perspective one isn't likely to encounter very much, if ever.

People were never seriously interested in extending their lives. I submit that there's a pretty easy, macabre (to most) way to go about it:

Monoclonal antigen-free body farms. Grow human bodies in labs -- farmed donor bodies -- and get good at head transplants.

This cures most cancers, most diseases, skipping the complicated molecular biology we've yet to solve for.

Literally replace your whole body as it ages. You can renew the thymus (big!), circulatory, pulmonary system, etc. It would have a rejuvenating affect on the brain. You'd probably give humans 150-year lifespans with it. Be able to run marathons in your 70's.

We'd suck at head transplants for decades (reducing patient outcomes in the initial period), but over time could probably get quite good at it. Initial patient populations could be recruited from terminal cancer patients, where the cancers have not spread to the blood or brain tissues. Survival rates would be low, and a lifetime of paralysis would likely be the penalty for the first decade or so of patients. But in time, we'd get better. Eventually to the point where it was no longer an emergency procedure, but a preventative maintenance measure.

The ancillary tech that would spring up from this would be in the BCI domain and we'd start getting good at modeling brain states. A whole industry of related organismal-level biotech advances would arise, propelling us forward like a new space age (or AI wave, to reference a current trend of advances).

There are crazy other things you could do - race and gender changes, better than natural genes and performance (VO2 max etc) enhancements, transgenic stuff, etc. Why limit ourselves to our previous limitations?

In 200 years we could conceivably move human thoughts onto silicon and stop dying. Too late for us with present day "life extension" / "health span" prognosis, so nobody is trying.

But it's "icky" and you'd get an even worse reaction than artists take to AI art or certain greens take to nuclear. The "people should die" folks raise their pitchforks, as do the incredibly religious. It's a very tough pill to swallow.

It angers me, because it's pretty low hanging fruit. You could grow bodies as vegetables without brains. Cut them off in development genetically and surgically. Innervate and artificially grow the bodies in advanced farms that keep their muscles moving, their hormones and limbic systems pumping, etc.

If I make a billion dollars I'll put everything into it. I want to live 150 years, and I want everyone else to as well. It's way more important to me than buying stuff or collecting "experiences".

As it stands, there's little point to anything we do (despite the fact none of us behave this way). Our experiences and enjoyment are short-lived dopamine hits to decaying neural networks, which on the geologic time scale, are pathetic little flashes that will never be noticed or remembered. When our brain cells bleb and desiccate, they won't remember all the good times we had or money we spent.

My perspective is we're all already dead. We may as well be holograms of our machine descendants playing out historical recreations.

Anyway, we could solve this if we put ourselves to it. I've yet to meet anyone else that's so gung-ho about it. I just think we're too early. And to this decaying neural network, it's kind of a horror to watch how others deal with the fact.

I mostly agree with this. But the real problem is a meta-problem. Which is that society will never allow this unless everybody becomes some kind of moral nihilist ubermensch overnight. Any kind of (recognizable) deontology would have to be left behind completely. And the socially enforced "ick" reflex (which is MASSIVELY strong in most of the population) is something that can really be overcome only by people who are far right-tail in terms of intelligence or creativity or imagination. Read your comment to the average person on the street and see how they reflexively react. People on this site routinely overestimate the quality of the average human (in literally every possible way) because they only work and interact with above average people. I just don't see how we get from here to there, at least not without some massive alteration of humans, which would only really possible with true BCI or some kind of extreme eugenics effort. But in a world where either of those were possible, head transplanation would be a breeze.

the simple answers is that these technologies EITHER simply don't exist OR exist as an option at a great risk. which will be compounded by attempting more than one of these operations

You'd need political will for this, who do you think is willing to give this idea a shot/fund it? I'm betting it's the rich, and if you haven't already figured it out, they'd just create another engine of disparity, par for the course. Unlike space tourism, headtransplants scream out the final dystopia of Phillip K Dick's imaginings, a hell world that frays at it seams where you've inadvertently created rich ever-living ubermench, bound up in prolonging life to keep doing their consumption and extraction. Maybe we should invest in consciousness transplants while we're at it

Escaping mortality won’t be so easy. Glioblastoma multiforme is a nasty cancer of the brain. Neuro vascular, degenerative diseases will kill you also. Then there are viruses that give you encephalitis. A hammer and a bullet can be hard to repair also. Even if you move your brain to a computer, hard drives fail, bits get corrupted, computer viruses, denial of service attacks. Mortality is key to survival of the fittest. It’s basically a tautology because the fittest will kill the unfit. There is no immortality against a more powerful being who wants you dead.

There are some cultures that believe the remains of their ancestors are sacred. How would you encourage them to accept your POV?

Roman Catholic culture is one of those by far. What better way to attest to the sacredness of human remains but to incorporate them into the most sacred architecture we have?

Human remains of Catholics are buried until their cause for canonization calls for exhumation and examination of the relics. By the time of canonization, division of the relics has begun and they are distributed for veneration to various communities and places. This is how we treat sacred remains: by making them accessible to all the faithful for viewing, veneration, and inspiration.

What was your question again?

And for those who aren’t Catholic, or any religion or spirituality that doesn’t have this interpretation?

Do you mean, for example:

https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2018/11/01/respect-for...

> "Respect for dead bodies manifests itself in diverse ways in different cultures around the world.In Islamic law and Muslim cultures, burying the dead in the ground is the correct way to respect dead bodies. Cremation is prohibited under Islamic law because, unlike in some cultures, it is considered a violation of the dignity of the human body."

People from different cultures have to learn to respect one another's traditions if they're to live together in democratic societies, that's certainly true. Some people would instead destroy anything that offends their own particular views, unfortunately.

A stable society stands on a set of shared principles, not on blind respect of each other traditions, no matter what those are.

That no-cremation rule was made for a good reason, but that reason can't be explained to masses, hence the "just do what the sacred book tells you!" A dead body isn't completely dead, so it's better (more respectful, indeed) to keep it for two months, and then it can be burnt. But you can't keep the rotting corpse for so long due to diseases, so it's better to bury it, and once it's there it's silly to dig it out and burn. To skip these endless arguments, and the futile attemps to reason with common folk, the instructions are put into a sacred book.

I don't think viewing religious tradition as "we don't want to explain our reasoning to you plebs" is doing justice to the religion.

I believe Catholicism does have a reason that is understandable by common folk: since Jesus will resurrect the faithful to be with him in the new heavens, earth, and Jerusalem (which are seen as physical, not an abstract "Heaven" like modern American evangelicals tend to see it), there needs to be a body to resurrect.

(I'm not Catholic and never sure what Catholics actually believe, so I might be wrong here)

Well, formulated negatively, it can be said that the Church historically discouraged/forbade cremation because it has been employed by people to mock and deny the doctrine of the Resurrection.

More practically, it is a practice which unnecessarily damages the sacred bodily remains and prevents them from future veneration. So it's much more difficult, if someone should become a saint, to distribute relics of a cremated body rather than bones and significant, identifiable parts of a buried/exhumed body.

It's not like God won't find a way to resurrect bodies that have been dismembered, burned, disintegrated, destroyed, or what have you. He's God, it's no big deal. Glorified bodies are understood to be spiritual, otherworldly, and beyond our imagination, but there's also been a lot of work to describe what they're like and how they work.

Cremation also led to abhorrent practices such as scattering ashes, or keeping them on a mantle, and in modern times, turning them into personal jewelry or launching them into space. The Church didn't like that stuff either. Personally speaking, my dear uncle's cremains are on my cousin's mantle and essentially inaccessible to me, since we're not on speaking terms. I'd really like to visit my uncle's grave, but he doesn't have one!

So even today, the Church forbids cremation if it's for the wrong reasons. But it's tolerated widely because it's often cheaper and expedient.

I don't think that's how it happened. You can make arguments for all sorts of burial practices.

It was a classic argument, recounted by Herodotus:

When Darius was king, he summoned the Greeks who were with him and asked them what price would persuade them to eat their fathers’ dead bodies. They answered that there was no price for which they would do it. Then he summoned those Indians who are called Callatiae, who eat their parents, and asked them (the Greeks being present and understanding by interpretation what was said) what would make them willing to burn their fathers at death. The Indians cried aloud, that he should not speak of so horrid an act.

Herodotus used this anecdote, rather dubiously I think, it as an argument that everyone should stick to their own customs and not think too much about what other people do. But I think Darius himself, if it actually happened, used it more as an argument for tolerance, agnosticism - and cruelty.

Because it's a bit cruel to shock the poor Greeks and Callatiae like that, isn't it? And rulers of most large (and thus multicultural) empires always seemed to be a bit on the cruel side to me.

What do you do, when you encounter people, for whom everything you consider important, sacred, meaningful, just doesn't register at all, and they care about completely different things? Do you shut it out? Or do you allow yourself to drift towards indifference and nihilism, that maybe none of that stuff matters at all?

As I recall, Popper called it "the strain of civilization", how it gnaws on people to have to deal with so many people who don't share their basic values of what's important in life. And how they can resort to isolationism and cruelty to cope with it.

The Christian church's innovation was to seek a tight core of meaningful beliefs, with divine justifications of course, but be fairly tolerant of more secondary sources of meaning, those coming from custom and culture. Like Paul, who insisted that no food was forbidden to eat, even food that had been served up to idols, but that he'd nonetheless respect the dietary customs of the people he ate with because it was important to them ("Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother to stumble, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause him to fall.")

It was really the first truly multicultural faith, since up to then, faith, customs and culture had been one and the same.

So it's not so out of character, really, that the Catholic church a few years ago ruled that the Madagascar custom of exhuming the dead and dancing with them wasn't contrary to the faith, since it was "just" a cultural practice and didn't necessarily imply any beliefs incompatible with Christianity.

A stable Society stands on shared principles, but those shared principles need not intrude into every aspect of life. In fact, I believe a stable Society is one which is very careful about which values it selects as universal

> Human remains of Catholics are buried until

Until your family stops paying for the grave. Then someone else will get the place.

I don't know where you live, but this is not the case worldwide. I have heard tell, yes, of places in Germany or somewhere else in Europe, where it is customary for a family to pay installments/subscription for a temporary grave, where the remains are left to decay down to bones. And then the remains are extracted and placed in a more compact crypt or charnel house, and the family stops payments on the full-size grave, which can then be reused for other occupants.

But in my part of the world, remains are "permanently" housed in cemeteries, crypts, colmbariums, etc. The family pays once for the interment and the plot. The cemeteries themselves are self-sustaining businesses which typically have a large endowment so that they can operate in perpetuity, with assurances of maintenance and upkeep far beyond any family's ability to sustain payments.

I think we can all agree that it would be absolutely absurd to expect families to continue paying in perpetuity for a burial place for their ancestors. Can you imagine the exponential financial burdens that would result?!

Personally, I find a lot of truth in what you say but I vehemently disagree with the premise that we should accept death as the price of life.

Of course, we need to be realistic and acknowledge that everyone living will all almost certainly die one day but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't strive for a future without death.

I think that CGP Grey's video, Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant, does a wonderful job arguing this viewpoint.

I admire striving to not die.

Statistically, I fully expect to die. Never dying would be a fantastic surprise.

I think acceptance is a lot healthier and more likely to produce happiness in life than thinking one may be an exception.

Why not both?

There's a difference between "thinking one may be an exception" and realizing that, no matter how small, there is a chance that one day we'll invent the technology that will make us immortal (to some extent).

If we had the same stance for all the other things that never happened before and were considered impossible, we would have never went to space and achieved many other great firsts.

To the extent that thinking something is possible influences the outcome, sure. For me, at my age, with my expertise, I am aware that there is a tiny possibility I could live forever the same way I am aware I could win the lottery: I accept that neither will happen, but I’ll still buy a lottery ticket every now and then.

All things have an extent, the urge to forget this is regressive imho.Books/TV shows that never ended seemed highly desirable when I was young, but infinite potential arguably means nothing matters.

I disagree with the idea of trying to defy death itself, as it is a physical impossibility due to the law of entropy. All things eventually reach a state of chaos, including our bodies. Death comes for us all one way or another. That being said, I DO see trying to extend our lives as long as physically possible as a worthy cause.

I don't know about you but seeing a big pile of skeletons in a basement mainly serves to confirm the ideas about death that I already had.

It's also kind of misleading because they're not complaining but dying is actually pretty awful unless you're really, really lucky.

Wait, is it lucky if you’re aware of your last moments or lucky if you’re not?

It depends on the moments, really.

Naturally dying is unpalatable to the individual living brain, evolved for survival and reproduction!

Doesn't it seem to be that death and life are mind-made abstractions of an unfathomable process of eternal continuity and change?

In our minds it's all very binary because of evolution, and we conflate our evolved perception with true reality.

If we peel back those layers then what is remaining?

>If we peel back those layers then what is remaining?

A really miserable process of being sick.

You can be sick when you're dead?

It sounds like you're entirely missing GP's point.

Paris Catacombs are also amazing for this. First few skeletons are yikes. Next 50 are unsettling. Next 500 are sobering. Next 5,000 start to be kind of interesting, starting to notice variations in bone and joint shapes. Next 50,000 start to resemble the other people walking with you, just more naked. It’s a good experience.

> death as the price of life

IMO this is still casting it in an uncomfortable way. IMO it is much healthier to think of death as the reward for life, the final rest from the toils of living. The idea is to put them on equal footing as they are part of the same process and you should look forward to death as much as you look forward to living.

> digital silicon upload

What is this a reference to?

ghost in the shell?

Beautiful place. The crypt includes a quote that really resonates with you - translated to English - "you are what we were; you will be what we are"

Reminds me of some lines in the final stanza of Tennyson's Ulysses:

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' / We are not now that strength which in old days / Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

“Look alive, see these bones

What you are now, we were once

But just like we are, you'll be dust

And just like we are, permanent”

-Nada Surf “See These Bones”

"Wherever you go, death follows, as a body’s shadow." (in the Paris catacombs)

Truly beautiful place, and one of the more interesting museums I visited in Rome in terms of artifacts and such on display.

I've heard a perhaps more poetic version: as you are, so was I; as I am, so will you.

Beautiful

The previous skeletons, which were rendered in traditional HD, have been moved to a less expensive media market.

Related tip for submitters: When HN's title processing inadvertently adds ambiguity, you can edit it immediately after to improve it.

(Original title is, "Decorated With 4,000 Skeletons, This Roman Church Will Have You Pondering Your Own Mortality", too long for HN)

James Cameron would be proud as they're even in 3D

Let's hope there's no ghosting though

From Marcus Aurelius's Meditations:

  Mortal man, you have lived as a citizen in this great city. What matter if that life is five or fifty ears? The laws of the city apply equally to all. So what is there to fear in your dismissal from the city? This is no tyrant or corrupt judge who dismisses you, but the very same nature that brought you in. It is like the officer who engaged a comic actor dismissing him from the stage. 'But I have not played my five acts, only three.' 'True, but in life three acts can be the whole play.' Completion is determined by that being who caused first your composition and now your dissolution. You have no part in either causation. Go then in peace: the god who lets you go is at peace with you.

I find the idea frightening but at the same time soothing: life is something one returns, like anything else one could have, one day it will no longer be there; it needs to be returned.

  46.  Keep death daily before your eyes.

Rule of St Benedict

https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/50040/pg50040-images.html#c...

This has helped me a lot to (what it feels like) take care more about what I spend my time on.

As extra help, I have a printed page from https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html of the final "Your Life in Weeks" image which I fill out every week. Puts yet another perspective on the very same thing.

Some people when they see it feel like it's macabre or stressful but it has the opposite effect on me, especially when dealing with problems that in hindsight are trivial.

Personally, I hang a "memento mori" near every mirror in the house, to remind him who would regard himself that what he sees will one day inevitably return to the earth.

That seems rather anxiety inducing. "Remember that you will die" is the saying, not "be obsessed with it".

Mostly they're just cool as works of art :). Still lifes with skulls and such.

5:00AM every morning I receive a reminder on my phone: "You will die someday."

I get text messages like that. Still don’t know who it is.

Stoic praemeditatio malorum.

Why is it a different number in the Sqlite Code of Ethics?

https://sqlite.org/codeofethics.html

I would encourage everyone to visit here or one of the similar places mentioned in this thread.

I visited the Sedlec Ossuary a couple of years ago and it was the most visceral personal emotional reaction I have ever had to seeing something. There is something mind-shifting about seeing thousands of human skulls in a pile ala Terminator that I cannot describe with words. I can only relate it to visiting the Vietnam War Memorial and realizing how those overwhelming 60,000ish names are a mere footnote in the casualty record of human conflict.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedlec_Ossuary

The Sedlec Ossuary is, or probably should be a great VR experience if you can't go in person (I have). The shock wears off and then you realize how human the place is. We whisk our dead out of sight, having the bones of your dead relatives be so visible, would be like having a time compass directing the path of the rest of your life.

It’d be kind of weird to bring someone there, count down the eleventh skull from the top right and then say “this here is grandpa”.

Agreed. I wanted to keep my post brief so I didn't elucidate. Once that feeling had passed, I didn't posses the sombre semse of mortality that others expressed in this thread. My thoughts were not carpe diem. I didn't update my bucket list.

Rather it gave me a stronger awareness of human connectedness. These are the bones of relatively few people in the grand scheme collected over several hundred years. This is just the tip of an iceberg of all human remains, most chucked into the ground and eventually forgotten but at the same time not without consequence. Because every moment of today is stamped indelibly by these peoples' existence. The crops they grew and things they built and lessons they taught marked the generations after them. It is a permanent mark in the continuity of human culture.

For lack of a better term, it brought me a deep sense of solidarity as a human. It was somewhat radicalizing.

My wife and I visited this place about 20 years ago.

I remember a woman from Wisconsin laughing and proclaiming, "We Lutherans would never do anything like this!"

Similar story, when I visited there was a school group from Northern Ireland talking about "The catholics were brutal weren't they!"

There are plenty of chapels and crypts filled with bone/skull walls throughout catholic Europe, the author makes it look like this is quite unique and limited to three locations which is not entirely true.

Excuse me sir, but now you're making it look like they are ubiquitous.

Pretty sure that's not the case either.

So I appreciate this post, first time I hear of this.

Found one in Poland as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_Chapel

EDIT: and in Portugal https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-europe/story-...

And in Czech Republic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedlec_Ossuary

And in Peru: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica_and_Convent_of_San_Fr...

And another list with 40 entries: https://www.atlasobscura.com/lists/definitive-guide-to-ossua...

The crypts under Stefans Dom in Vienna are well worth a visit. To cite a kid during my visit: "Is grand pa looking like thatvas well now?"

Also, there are the Parus catacombs.

If you're in Vienna you could also check out the Michaelergruft.

Paris, I hope.

There's a bag at the exit for visitors to return "souvenirs" if they change their mind.

Of course Paris... my fat fingering seems to get worse with age...

I've been to the Portugese Chapel of Bones in Évora. The two things that really struck me were the sheer size of it — I expected a tiny room, and instead it was a decently sized chapel — and how every skull essentially looked the same. A stark reminder of how similar we all are in the end.

If you want to see one of these places, I can recommend Sedlec Ossuary in Kutna Hora / Czech Republic. I contains about 50,000 skeletons, which basically make up all the interior decoration. It is interesting how you get used to being surrounded by skeletons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedlec_Ossuary

Edit: They also have a very nice gothic cathedral, a modern art museum and a silver mine that was turned into a museum in that city.

That chandelier is really something extra!

Kutna Hora is incredible. There are 2 large gothic cathedrals there, 1 km from each other. The first one (next to the ossuary) has many martyrs skeletons clothed in gold and jewels, offered to the church by the Pope back in the 1500s (these are supposedly dead Romans from late Empire; their martyrdom is probably questionable).

The other cathedral has the most bizarre roof, one third roof, one third domes, one third bell tower, and a wonderful organ well worth the visit, and many beautiful frescoes depicting the work that made this place so rich : silver mining.

The first time I ever visited Prague we took an unplanned (no research) day trip to Kutna Hora just to see the bone church. The other cathedral down the street was amazing as well, but then to just be stumbling through the town and coming upon St. Barbara's Church was truly an experience. It got me hooked to continue travelling outside the US.

On a similar vein, if you visit Milan, go see "San Bernardino alle ossa", little known but quite worth a visit!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bernardino_alle_Ossa#/medi...

Memento mori (Latin for 'remember that you [have to] die') is an artistic reminder of the inevitability of death. Helps me tremendously!

One of the more famous examples of this is the strange object in the foreground of The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger [0], which resolves as a skull when viewed from the correct angle.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Hans_Hol...

exactly, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori

Yep, great place, been there sooo many times, it used to be free, now there's a small fee to pay at the entrance which also includes a visit to the museum of the Capuchins. You'll find there the San Francesco in Meditazione (San Francis in Prayer) painting from Caravaggio. [1]

The English Wikipedia reports it as a copy, but it is still debated if the original is the one in Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini (Our Lady of the Conception of the Capuchins) or the other one in Palazzo Barberini.

Fun fact: both paintings are in Piazza Barberini, a few hundred meters from each other.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Francis_in_Prayer_(Carav...

Catholics believe in "incorruptibility" as a sign of potential sainthood. This is where the body does not decompose. You can see the bodies on display https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorruptibility

Catholics also believe in demonic possession, hell, and exorcism. Not the first things a priest will tell you though :)

They also believe in a three person god. Not sure in which lesson this comes up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church#Nature_of_God

God the son, God the father and God the holy spirit(The trinity). Also mention in pray and referenced in the bible I believe.

No, the Trinity is never referenced in the Bible - God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are always treated as separate entities. The doctrine was made up by the Church to avoid the obvious polytheistic implications in the straightforward interpretation of canon.

Jesus and the Father are equated in the very first verse of John.

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" isn't exactly straightforward.

It's more straightforward if you read a few more sentences.

Not really. It could just as easily be interpreted as referring to two separate beings of equal power and status than one being in two persons.

John 10:30 mentioned above seems more clear, but just prior to that you have "My Father who has given them to Me", which makes no sense if they are literally the same being. Neither does Christ on the cross asking why God has forsaken him.

The problem is the Biblical canon manifested out of what were countless differing philosophies and schools of thought in early Christianity, and John seems to be one of the more mystical books to make it in. But Christianity couldn't even agree on the nature of Jesus' divinity at first, and went to war against itself for centuries over details like this.

> Neither does Christ on the cross asking why God has forsaken him.

He's quoting Psalm 22. Jesus very frequently quotes the psalms, probably more than any other book, and "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me" is the opening line. Given the number of "coincidences" between the psalm and the events then occurring, he is either deliberately making his claim as a messiah or the redactor inserted the quote, depending on your beliefs. ("They have pierced my hands and feet", "They divide my garments among them, and cast lots for my clothing", "all who see me mock me, they sneer and shake their heads, he trusts in the Lord, let the Lord deliver him.")

https://biblehub.com/psalms/22.htm

I don't really see how it's possible to read John 1 as implying two separate beings, unless we start quibbling about what a "being" is. There are similar statements in the other gospels.

> The problem is the Biblical canon manifested out of what were countless differing philosophies and schools of thought in early Christianity, and John seems to be one of the more mystical books to make it in. But Christianity couldn't even agree on the nature of Jesus' divinity at first, and went to war against itself for centuries over details like this.

It's true the early churches were divided but it's important not to overstate that division, as you're doing here. The earliest post-apostolic writings we have are already referencing all for gospels and nearly all the epistles. There were divisions in theology on things like the exact nature of Jesus's divinity, but except in the case of niche sects, it was over what most people now would regard as hair-splitting. It's just people used to be much more fanatical and willing to go to war over things like "the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father" vs "the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son" or "The logos/Jesus/Son was co-eternal with Father" vs "the Father created the Son before Time and he's divine but not as divine as the Father."

I think the most productive way to view this aspect of Christianity, unless you're addicted to obscure theological disputes, is to simply say that the Christian idea of God is as an omnipotent transcendental being whose nature is therefore obviously something beyond the powers human comprehension, which would make sense if you want to posit the idea of a capital-G God even as a non-Christian.

Philippians 2:5,6 clears it up nicely.

The conception of the trinity as co-equal persons of the same substance is a later development in Christianity. The earliest Christian writings (Paul’s letters) never mention the trinity; you could even argue Paul was a sort of binitarian

The Catholic Church has never claimed the Bible is the sole source of religious revelation. Sacred Tradition is regarded and an additional (and not contradictory) source of revelation of the mysteries of God.

I am by no means well versed in the deep trinitarian studies and reflections from the past 2000 years, but I am inclined to feel that verses like John 10:30 defy a simple explanation....

The trinity is a fundamental Christian belief, not just Catholic. If one doesn’t believe it than most won’t consider them Christian. This is a huge reason why Mormonism is it’s own thing.

I don’t believe anymore as an adult, but this was taught right away when I was a kid going to the Catholic Church. I don’t think you could find a catholic who doesn’t know what the trinity is.

It's an interesting historical and political question though, since it was the core question of the First Council of Nicea which Constantine used to establish an orthodoxy for his empire. That single church lasted for almost 700 years before splitting in two.

> That single church lasted for almost 700 years before splitting in two.

It…didn’t, though; there was a schism (Macedonian) within 7 years, not 700, of Nicaea, and there were even schisms that created separate long-lasting Churches on the side rejecting the view of the part of the Church that survived in union until the Catholic/Orthodox split much sooner than 700 years (e.g., the Nestorian schism in 431 and the Church of the East which survives to this day; the Chalcedonian/Monophysite schism in 451, from which the Oriental Orthodox churches still survive, etc.)

There was already split when Paul joined the church. Just those original Jewish branches (like Ebionites) did not survived to this age.

Not religious in any way - from this perspective the trinity (as nailed down by the council of Nicaea) sounds like a triumvirate of gods + mental acrobatics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_Nicaea#Agenda

The trinity is the Orthodox belief. The history of Christianity is full of “heretical” beliefs about the Godhead. Also there is solid evidence that first century Christians did not hold a trinitarian position

In any sort of Catholic education, this is learned immediately.

I mean this stuff is literally laid out in the Creed which is recited at every mass and various times besides. There are various other Creeds used that make things even more explicit such as the Athanasian Creed. And nothing really is unique to the Catholics, the Orthodox are onboard for this stuff.

I believe in one God,

the Father almighty,

maker of heaven and earth,

of all things visible and invisible.

I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,

the Only Begotten Son of God,

born of the Father before all ages.

God from God, Light from Light,

true God from true God,

begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father;

through him all things were made.

For us men and for our salvation

he came down from heaven,

and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,

and became man.

For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate,

he suffered death and was buried,

and rose again on the third day

in accordance with the Scriptures.

He ascended into heaven

and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

He will come again in glory

to judge the living and the dead

and his kingdom will have no end.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,

who proceeds from the Father and the Son,

who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified,

who has spoken through the prophets.

I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.

I confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins

and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead

and the life of the world to come. Amen.

Yeah, non-trinitarian Christianity is Mormons, Jehovas Witnesses, and it gets much more obscure from there.

Neither Mormons nor Jehovas Witnesses are considered Christians.

Probably because they're non-trinitarian.

Why wouldn't they tell you they believe in hell? It is mentioned in pray it was used to scare me into not misbehaving as a child by my teachers who were priests and nuns. This is not a secret nor did they try to hide it.

The demonic possession and exorcism parts not hell itself

Everyone knows Catholics believe in that stuff, it's why they show up so often in horror movies.

> by my teachers who were priests and nuns

The Catholic Church has always believed in Hell. Jesus himself made reference to Gehenna (which was literally a valley of death back when he was alive, the Valley of Hinnom, where the Bible also documents child sacrifice to have occurred), as well as symbolically with the parable of the wedding feast. For this reason, many Catholic saints were themselves quite afraid of it and worked to avoid it.

Common misunderstanding though comes from "how could a good God sentence anyone to hell?" Well, to put it one way, he doesn't. Imagine if your teenage son violently doesn't want to attend your Christmas gathering. Would it be loving of you to force him to attend? Or, more graphically, imagine your son is a drug user who has lost home, family, girlfriend, and yet obstinately resists rehab - and you'd love for him to come, but he'd have to lay off the drugs, and he refuses any effort. Thus, the Catholic understanding is that the souls in Hell are obstinate in their sin and obstinately do not want to be in Heaven, for eternity because they will never change their minds. "The doors of hell are locked on the inside." They will, within Catholic thought, know they are in the wrong, but they would sin immediately again if they were permitted another second on Earth. This obstinacy in sin is mainly caused by refusal to repent for grave sins that have been committed.

This also explains, in a way, the reason why the Catholic Church in particular has very little hope in salvation for those who are atheist or similar.

>the Catholic understanding is that the souls in Hell are obstinate in their sin and obstinately do not want to be in Heaven

It sure is easy to answer questions when you can just make things up... "Oh, they're just expressing their preferences."

Similarly, one could believe that Catholics are never destined to escape samsara in their lifetime.

> Catholics also believe in demonic possession, hell, and exorcism. Not the first things a priest will tell you though :)

Because the first thing anyone will tell you is almost always a greeting, their name, or "excuse me."

There is also the classic "what are you doing in my home!"

I mean "The hell you devil doing in my home!" would satisfy both.

> Catholics also believe in demonic possession, hell, and exorcism. Not the first things a priest will tell you though.

It pretty literally is one of the first things a priest (or a layperson acting on their behalf) will tell you, in that it is a routine part of preparation for the entry into the Church, and, in fact, a (minor) exorcism is performed as part of baptism.

Moreover every Catholic diocese must have a trained exorcist.

Remember to have your antiques regularly exorcised to avoid tsukumogami.

Would that make Lenin a saint? I mean his body has been around wearing away clothes for good while.

They have put a lot of effort into keeping him looking incorrupt (he's mostly wax now) to try to elevate him to the status of an atheist/communist "saint", basically mocking the traditional Orthodox views on incorrupt relics of saints.

Incorruptible bodies are not proof of sainthood. Also, I assume Lenin's body had something done to it?

Most people who identify as Catholic in developed countries today don’t believe in any of those (demonic possession and exorcism would be particularly fringe, but in surveys in many countries the majority identifying as Catholic don’t believe in hell or sometimes transubstantiation either)

There certainly are plenty of cultural Catholics who don't believe much of if anything that the Church teaches. The example of possession is particularly interesting though, because it's so overt. Unlike transubstantiation, where we have to take it on faith, there are documented cases of demonic possession that really defy natural explanation. Things like knowing secrets, speaking unknown languages, levitation, feats of strength, and so on have all been observed. Here[1] is one example and you can find many more, including from non-Catholic or even non-Christian specialists who have been retained to rule out mental illness and other natural explanations. Unfortunately it is a rather sensationalized subject, so there is a lot of garbage out there too.

[1] https://www.ncregister.com/blog/christ-s-power-shines-even-i...

I wasn’t critiquing Catholics. I am Catholic and believe in demonic possession and ghosts. I was trying to make HN aware of this Catholic trivia.

True, but Catholicism isn't a democracy. Catholic beliefs aren't determined by what self-professed Catholics say they believe in, but what the Catholic Church itself professes.

I mean, that's one way to look at it. But in practice Catholics aren't, and never have been, a monolith, belief-wise, unless you define it so narrowly that the only Catholics are, well, maybe some of the cardinals.

(Or not even those, if you take the view of some post-Vatican-II breakaway sects who consider the Pope to be illegitimate)

That's true, there is a great deal of theological diversity within the Catholic Church, and to an extent that diversity is actually encouraged. But the Church also sets bounds on what beliefs can acceptably be called "Catholic" and those bounds are Catholic dogma. (And over the centuries theologians have actually constructed quite a baroque hierarchy of degrees of theological certainty attached to various beliefs. [1])

The actual dogmas are fairly narrow. They include things like the doctrine of transubstantiation, Jesus being both God and man, Mary being conceived without original sin. But a lot of other things aren't dogmatic. For example, it's perfectly acceptable to argue that Roman Catholic priests should be permitted to be married or that Limbo doesn't exist.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theological_notes

Self-professed Catholics are the Catholic church. That's what's meant by the phrase, not the bishops.

"You will become what I am." (https://death-to-the-world.myshopify.com/products/you-will-b...)

Oh man I thought it was 4K as in resolution and I was confused and intrigued.

Same here. I thought "wow, 4K skeletons? That's pretty hi-death."

I was really tired of putting up with those standard definition skeletons.

It's interesting how in less modern times, death was more ever present and yet they still went out of their way to remind people about it.

The modern world by contrast, one can go well into their 30s without personally being touched by it in your family/friends circle. We could use the reminder of it now more than then, and yet we sanitize & Disney-fy everything instead.

Im nearing 40 and the only person "close" to me that has died is my grandpa, but I barely knew him since I grew up half way around the world.

As an (immature) adult I saw him twice. Twice as a teen. Once as a child post-migration.

I loved him so dearly as a young child yet, when he passed, it barely registered.

Visited it by accident the first day in Rome, just happened to walk by. They have a museum before the crypt where each room had some theme and used different bones. Not particularly religious but it was interesting to see. Seemed like someone spent time in their crypt and had too much time and bones on their hands.

The Paris catacombs, while lacking the Catholic aspect really resonated with me. There is something so incredibly humbling in looking at literally million of skulls and realizing that we are ultimately as insignificant as they were.

Not being able to comprehend their significance is not the same as them being insignificant.

... missing the point entirely.

That’s an optimistic take, in reality it’s proof of the fundamental truth that we don’t actually matter and that nothing we do will ultimately matter.

You couldn't even know the name of a person who had one of the skulls, much less know anything they ever did. Their lives were, like ours, completely irrelevant long term. This has to be one of the hardest things for a living human to accept.

Interesting thing about this place is that's it's illegal to decorate with Human Remains in Italy now, so if a bone falls off the wall, they legally can't put it back!

though there is a convenient loophole known as the 'five second rule'

Milan has its own:

> In 1210, when an adjacent cemetery ran out of space, a room was built to hold bones. A church was attached in 1269. Renovated in 1679, it was destroyed by a fire in 1712. A new bigger church was then attached to the older one and dedicated to Saint Bernardino of Siena.

Some pictures here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bernardino_alle_Ossa

I went to a Catholic school growing up, my parents weren't religious and I largely had no relationship to the faith but one thing that always fascinated me growing up was the old, imposing Gothic church that the students celebrated mass in, which as a kid always was a little bit scary to me.

This church with death on display reminds me of that and to me what's always been striking is that there's almost a pagan or occult undercurrent in Catholicism. I think Midnight Mass, a great show btw, captures this as well. Trying to show how much of an actual blood ritual the Catholic Eucharist is. (in Catholicism bread and wine are taken to be transformed into literally(!), not figuratively the blood and body of Christ).

Also wherever Catholicism mixes with folk traditions this is visible, with figures like Santa Muerte in Latin America. And while the Catholic church usually distances itself from this, it's always interesting how easily these traditions blend.

Similar church in Czech Republic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedlec_Ossuary

The Sedlec Ossuary is a Roman Catholic chapel, located beneath the Cemetery Church of All Saints, part of the former Sedlec Abbey in Sedlec, a suburb of Kutná Hora in the Czech Republic.

The ossuary is estimated to contain the skeletons of between 40,000 and 70,000 people, whose bones have, in many cases, been artistically arranged to form decorations and furnishings for the chapel.

Another church decorated with skeletons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capela_dos_Ossos

Been there great place. It's also my desktop wallpaper...never again got interrupted by colleagues and junior developers during my coding sessions.

A former primary school colleague (we met 50 years ago next year!) and his daughter wrote a pretty decent book on death anxiety - "Mortals: How the Fear of Death Shaped Human Society" https://good-grief.com.au/mortals-with-ross-and-rachel-menzi...

I have been there as a kid. I might have been too young to process the experience like something related to death, but I recall I didn't feel anything in particular; it left me with absolutely nothing but thinking "why on earth would someone cover a place with skeletons?". It probably contributed much later to my aversion to horror movies.

The article presents so much mystique around the origin of the artful arrangement.

All I could think while reading is this is what happens when the head friar tells the new kid, “the crypt has become a complete mess, can you head down there and make it nice?” And then doesn’t check in on his progress.

There's a modern hotel in the attached original monastery. I attended a scientific conference there a few years ago. Very cool, very weird venue to spend a few days.

I've actually visited this place! It was a very informative visit and had a great museum attached. I found a lot of it beautiful

"It's too late to be scared, the skeleton is already inside you"

A very similar place:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedlec_Ossuary

The bones belong to about 40 thousand people. Realizing that this enormous boneyard is, by size, equivalent to 0,6 per cent of the Holocaust, is extremely sobering.

I wonder how they mount them to the wall and ceiling?

these photos make me anxious for unknown reasons

You know why.

do I

And here I am with 1080 skeletons in my house.

They should upscale these to 8K using AI.

So many metal album covers in this.

I would not sleep in that room.

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