August 2005
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GunSaint.com
This month's Site of the Month is taking a little trip back in history.
All the way to 1860, to Isola, Italy. That's the home of Gabriel Possenti, a young monk who was going to seminary when terrorists from the Army of Garibaldi took over the village in the mountains. According to legend (handily printed right there on the website), Gabriel grabbed not one but two revolvers from the soldiers, and held them off from the town's residents at gunpoint. And that's where the story gets interesting.
Apparently the young man of God, whilst being surrounded by angry soldiers, two of whom were suddenly missing their guns, saw a small lizard run across the road. He looked down at his hands holding the revolvers, looked up at the soldiers approaching him, looked across the road at the green, slinky sliver of God's great creation, who surely must have stopped and looked up at Gabriel with great big lizardy eyes and a little lizardy mouth pout. So Gabriel did what any man of the cloth would do, and used his dual pistols to blow that little green guy right out of existence and right off the face of the earth.
You can probably guess the rest of the story. Those evil soldiers were so taken aback by this random act of lizard massacre that they cut out all their raping and pillaging and murdering, put back all their knives and put out all their fires, and turned around at Gabriel's order, and marched their behinds right out of Gabriel's town!
Sounds great, doesn't it? That's why (flash forward to today and the amazing age of the Internet) John M. Snyder has started the Saint Gabriel Possenti Society, proprietors of our Site of the Month, Gunsaint.com. Snyder and his clan believe that for his anti-lizard actions, Possenti should be remembered by the Vatican (head of the Catholic Church, for those of you playing along at home) as a saint, particularly the patron saint of handgunners.
Now, our first question is, exactly what does it take to make a saint? It has to take a little more than a prayer or two, right?
According to How Stuff Works, you need five things to happen to become a saint:
1. A local bishop has to evaluate the candidate's life. We assume Snyder has already had this taken care of.
2. A panel of theologians has to investigate the candidate's life. We're assuming this has been done, too. What panel of theologians worth their Bibles wouldn't accept Gabriel the Lizard Shooter?
3. The Pope has to proclaim the candidate as "venerable." Maybe this is where Snyder's having trouble. There's a new Pope in town, and maybe he's just too busy to acknowledge Possenti.
4. Beatification must take place. This is a weird process, but basically, some kind of honest to God (sorry) posthumous miracle has to occur. Apparently, this is where "The Blessed Mother Teresa" currently resides in the sainthood cycle.
5. Finally, a second posthumous miracle has to happen for the candidate to be canonized.
We're guessing Snyder's having the most trouble with the last two steps. It's been more than a century since Possenti took his pistols up to that big shooting range in the sky, and still no miracle. Admittedly, you might say it's a miracle that a monk could hit a lizard at twenty paces without ever having touched a gun, but that's hardly posthumous, is it? Not to mention that you don't know what monks in Italy were like back then. Maybe they were walking around shooting the grace of God all over the place. It could happen.
What we really think is happening here is that Snyder just wants the Vatican to have a patron saint of handgunners. And when you think about it, why shouldn't they? There's practically a saint for everything else. Did you know that St. Valentine, in addition to being the patron saint of lovers, is also the patron saint of fainting, plague, beekeepers, and greeting card manufacturers? Or that St. Joseph, father of Jesus Christ, is the patron saint of cabinet makers, holy death, unborn children, social justice, Canada, and people who fight Communism? There's a patron saint for everything!
Except guns, apparently. If we were the Vatican, we might say it's because guns are weapons, meant only for bringing about the end of life, whether that life is of lizards or humans or purple green monsters. Guns, frankly, don't deserve to have a saint, even if beekeepers, cabinet makers, and people who fight Communism do.
Of course, we're not the Vatican (otherwise we would have chosen our cousin Larry to be the new Pope), so we'll just do what the real Vatican does to Snyder and ignore him. But his site does have a good story about the Gabriel and that poor lizard.
Gunsaint.com: Three out of Five lizard murdering bullets!
God Bless Gabriel Possenti and may he ever pass the ammunition!
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