A Roman Catholic cathedral in Germany is dusting off a shrine to St. Corona to display for the first time in 25 years during the coronavirus pandemic.
“We have brought the shrine out a bit earlier than planned, and now, we expect more interest due to the virus,” Daniela Loevenich, a spokeswoman with Aachen Cathedral, told Reuters on Wednesday. The cathedral had originally planned on bringing out the St. Corona shrine later in the year to display its gold craftsmanship.
St. Corona is believed to have been killed at the age of 16 by the Romans in the second century after declaring her Christian faith.
The cathedral claims, according to Reuters, that St. Corona was the patron saint of resisting epidemics, but fact-checkers doubt that’s true. A review by Snopes noted that articles about St. Corona did not start tying her to infectious diseases until March, as the coronavirus spread across the world, and concluded that St. Corona “is not the officially designated patron saint of plagues.”
Still, Brigitte Falk, the head of Aachen Cathedral’s Treasure Chamber, said, “Like many other saints, St. Corona may be a source of hope in these difficult times.”
Falk added that the legend of St. Corona being tied to two palm trees and torn apart when they were released is “a very gruesome story and led to her becoming the patron of lumberjacks.”
The relics of St. Corona, which are kept in the shrine, came to Aachen in 997 A.D. The Aachen Cathedral was built in the ninth century.
