Greetings, self in the distant past!!
And now I think it’s getting appropriate once again. Google Search doesn’t seem to work as well as it did a few years ago.
This thread is like those saints you hear about with incorruptible corpses.
I learned about this only recently.
During the persecution of Christians ordered by the Emperor Valerian in the mid-200s, Saint Lawrence was the custodian of the Roman church’s funds which were intended for the poor. Seeing what was about to happen, he gave away as much of the money as possible, and when the prefect arrived and demanded that he hand over the funds, he brought forth instead a crowd of the poor to whom he’d already given away the money.
The enraged prefect ordered a gridiron to be set up over hot coals and Lawrence to be placed on it. After some time the saint announced, “I’m well done on this side, turn me over!”
And so Saint Lawrence is the patron saint of cooks, chefs, and comedians.
There are other traditions about similar miraculous images of the Face of Jesus, besides the legend of Veronica and the Shroud of Turin. I’ve stumbled a cross some in that Dictionary of Saints.