Patron Saint of what?!
A break from my usual stuff — I’m working on a post that’s going to be a bit of a rant, so I thought it would be good to post something entertaining. This is one of those things that’s so strange that nobody could have made it up.
The other day I stumbled across the obscure fact that Saint Rosalia is the patron saint of the city of Palermo
on Sicily (I was doing a crossword puzzle — you learn all kinds of weird stuff when you do crosswords). While reading the wikipedia article about her, I found out that she had come from a noble Palermo family and lived the life of a hermit. She died in 1166 at the age of 36. In the early 17th century, when Palermo was in the midst of a plague, Rosalia allegedly appeared to a hunter, told him where to find her bones, and ordered that they be carried in procession through the city. He did as she commanded, and after the procession, the plague ended. That was a little odd, but still fairly typical of many stories that I’ve read about Catholic saints. The really serious bit of weirdness was at the end of the article, which I will quote:
Saint Rosalia was proposed as the patron saint of evolutionary studies in a classic paper by G.E. Hutchinson. This was due to a visit he paid to a pool of water downstream from the cave where St. Rosalia’s remains were found, where he developed ideas based on observations of water boatman [the insect]. The article, and its reference to St. Rosalia has lived on through the literature, often in the title of papers concerning biodiversity.
When I saw this, my initial reaction was that it was one of those wikipedia inaccuracies that crop up from time to time, so I looked up Hutchinson’s article. It’s true! He really did propose Rosalia as the patronness of evolutionary studies, and he did so out of gratitude. What the above text doesn’t say is that Hutchinson’s research wasn’t going anywhere — he had been unsuccessfully looking for a particular species of insect, and found it only when he followed the stream flowing from Saint Rosalia’s cave.
So far as I can tell, the Roman Catholic church has not formally declared Rosalia to be the patron saint of evolutionary studies, but it’s clear that she has a special place in the hearts of the scientists who study such matters — several scholarly articles published since Hutchinson’s 1959 article (available here) have mentioned her.