Joe come back to Publishamory. I'm well, Amish Hire. And in honor of April Fool's Day,

I thought I'd share something a little bit lighter, although it is paradoxically something a lot

darker. The gallows humor of the Catholic Church, our saints, and especially our martyrs,

are venerated and they're highly honored. They're brave in the face of evil. They had fortitude

and the greatest of trials. We looked to them, both in admiration and an aspiration. And then the church does things like

making St. Apollonia the patron saint of dentists because she was tortured by having all of her

teeth pulled out. And even the martyrs themselves were known to crack jokes amidst being tortured

and killed. So today, I want to focus on four particular times where we find the church's gallows humor

in the face of death in pretty epic ways.

But before we do that, I need to warn you.

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get that straightened out unless there be any confusion. So let's get into it. The quintessential example

of the church's gallows humor involves the death of St. Lawrence, we see it both in the martyr and in

the church. Now, St. Lawrence was a deacon of Rome. He was murdered in the year 258.

Historically, the Romans absolutely loved St. Lawrence. After Jesus married John the Baptist and St. Peter, Lawrence is the fifth most popular namesake for churches in Rome. There were

some 34 chapels and churches in the city named after him. That is a lot. And Christians in the

300s, people like the Bishop St.

...