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| Tarcisius, Father |
Author who writes in The Vagrant that he doesn't believe the aggiornamento will remove the long-popular clubs and societies of the Church [St. Fidgeta and Other Parodies, 97].
There was a St. Tarcisius who was a Roman martyr during the early days of the Church. Bowen believes he was set upon by a mob while surreptitiously carrying the consecrated host (i.e., by Catholic belief, the body of Christ) from one secret Christian cell to another, and either died defending it or died rather than tell them where the Christians were hiding - "I forget which. I believe that he was sometimes held up as a model to altar boys, but I may be misremembering. I was willing to get up at 6:30 a.m. and ride my bike down to the church on a cold morning to serve the 7:00 Mass, but that's about as far as it went. I wasn't wishing that I could be dismembered by a bunch of bloodthirsty Romans. I don't think any of this is relevant; I think John just used the name."
Once again Bellairs is spoofing another a Catholic publication: there was - and still is, notes Myers - a fiercely conservative Catholic publication called the Wanderer. "Vagrant clearly parodies that name and Tarcisius's rant parodies what I imagine it contained, although I never saw a copy."
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarcisius
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wanderer_(newspaper)
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