97. The recent history of relic-miracles in the United States is chiefly connected with the veneration of relics of St. Ann. Certain relics of St. Anthony venerated in the Troy Hill Church at Allegheny, Pa., have indeed won large fame for the miracles of healing wrought by their means, and doubtless the additional relic of the same saint deposited in the Italian Church of St. Peter, on Webster Avenue, Pittsburgh, has taken its share in these works. But St. Ann seems to promise to be the peculiar wonder-worker of the United States. The Church of St. Anne de Beaupre has, within recent years, become the most popular place of pilgrimage in Canada; until 1875 not over 12,000 annually visited this shrine, but now they are counted by the hundred thousand; in 1905 the number was 168,000. A large relic of St. Ann's finger-bone has been in the possession of this shrine since 1670; three other fragments of her arm have been ac- quired since, and it was in connection with the acquisition of one of these, in 1892, that the cult and its accompanying miracles of healing were transferred to New York. St. Ann seems to be one of those numerous saints too much of whom has been preserved in the form of relics. Her body is said to have been brought from the Holy Land to Constantinople, in 710; and it is said to have been still in the Church of St. Sophia in 1333. It was also, it is said, brought by Lazarus to Gaul, during the persecution of the Jewish Christians in Palestine under Herod Agrippa, and finally found a
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resting-place at Apt. Lost to sight through many years, it was rediscovered there in the eighth century, and has been in continu- ous possession of the church at Apt ever since. Yet the head of St. Ann was at Mainz up to 1516, when it was stolen and carried to Diiren in the Rhineland, and her head, "almost complete" — doubtless derived from Apt — is preserved also at Chiry, the heir of the Abbey of Ourscamp. Churches in Italy, Germany, Hun- gary, and in several towns in France "flatter themselves that they possess more or less considerable portions of the same head, or the entire head" (Paul Parfait, Le Foire aux Reliques, p. 94, in an essay on "The Head of St. Ann at Chiry"). Despite all this Euro- pean history, a relic of St. Ann was again brought from Palestine in the thirteenth century, and it was this that was given to St. Anne d'Auray in Brittany in the early half of the seventeenth cen- tury by Ann of Austria and Louis XIII. The origin of the pil- grimages and healings at St. Anne d'Auray was not in this relic, however, but antedated its possession, taking their start from ap- paritions of St. Ann (1624-1626). The relics which have been re- cently brought to this country are said to derive ultimately from Apt. Thence the Pope obtained an arm of the saint which was intrusted to the keeping of the Benedictine monks of St. Paul- outside-the-Wall, Rome. From them, through the kind offices of Leo XIII, Cardinal Taschereau obtained the "great relic" which was presented to St. Anne de Beaupre in 1892; and from thence also came the relic, obtained by Prince Cardinal Odeschalchi, and pre- sented to the Church of St. Jean Baptiste in East Seventy-sixth Street, New York, the same year (July 15, 1892). Another frag- ment was received by the Church of St. Jean Baptiste on August 6, 1893; and some years later still another fragment was deposited in the Church of St. Ann in Fall River, Mass., whence it was stolen on the night of December 1, 1901.
The "Great Relic" — a piece of the wrist-bone of St. Ann, four inches in length — was brought from Rome by Monsignor Marquis; and, on his way to Quebec, he stopped in New York with it. Monsig- nor O'Reilly has given us an enthusiastic account of the effect of its exposition at the Church of St. Jean Baptiste during the first twenty days of May of that year (see the Ave Maria of August 6, 1892; and The Catholic Review of the same date). Something like two or three hundred thousand people venerated the relic; cures were wrought, though apparently not very many. When Monsignor Marquis returned on July 15 with the fragment which was to remain at St. Jean Baptiste, the enthusiasm was redoubled, and St. Ann did not let her feast-day (July 26) pass "without giving
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