odour of sanctity BrE
odor of sanctity AmE

The odour of sanctity can be understood to mean two things:

Some canonized saints are said to have died in an odour of sanctity.

Hanging by his heels in the odour of sanctity.

They provided large, comfortable dwelling houses, if you didn't mind church windows and what Wexford called an 'odour of sanctity'.

The blood from the wounds is said, in some cases, to have a pleasant, perfumed odor, known as the Odour of Sanctity.

From this honourable gentleman emanates an odour of sanctity in this House which is quite nauseating.

Now here was one of them turning up in the odour of sanctity, so to speak, and claiming the traditional hospitality of the East."

Within the chapel, the great Bible was decorously removed and the windows thrown open, to dispel somewhat the odour of sanctity.

Her body was exhumed in 1910; not Incorrupted, but had the pleasant Odour of Sanctity.

Perhaps it was the scent of the oil, but the place had a peculiar odour of sanctity - and of safety - about it.

'The odour of sanctity,' he whispered.

The sorcerer then promptly gave all the profits of his sorcery to the saint's shrine and died in an odour of sanctity.

He accompanied the young king to France in the spring of 1430, and died six months later in the odour of sanctity at Rouen.

He died in the odour of sanctity, almost in the very exercise of his apostolic ministry, at the advanced age of eighty-five.

In Hard Times the victimized worker Stephen Blackpool dies in the odour of sanctity.

Brugman died in the odour of sanctity and is commemorated in the Martyrologium Minoritico-Belgicum on 19 September.

But there was no escaping the fact that, as Shaw wrote to Edith Sitwell, "I am in the very odour of sanctity after St Joan."

He died in odour of sanctity on February 20, 1820 in the patriarchal residence of Qannubin Monastery, into the Kadisha Valley.

He died at Madrid in 1617 in his fifty-eighth year in the odour of sanctity, being then President of the Council of Castile.

The term "odour of sanctity" appears to have emerged in the Middle Ages, at a time when many saints were raised to that status by acclamation of the faithful.

The blood flowing from the stigmata smelled of perfume or flowers, a phenomenon mentioned in stories of the lives of several saints and often referred to as the odour of sanctity.

Yet it was a lordly tome with an odour of sanctity about it, and lifting it with diffi- culty, I noticed on its cover a red stain of mouse's blood.

He died in the odour of sanctity, and was buried in the chapel of St. Benedict, with the epitaph:Haec tumuli fossa conduntur Praesulis ossa/Heliae miri mirificique viri."

It appears that the odour of sanctity occurring at the person's death carried some weight in convincing the local ecclesiastical authority to "canonize" the saint - to allow the faithful to venerate and pray to him or her.

No,--I exaggerate; I never thought there was any consecrating virtue about her: it was rather a sort of pastille perfume she had left; a scent of musk and amber, than an odour of sanctity.