It was so hot and the air conditioning was so feeble I almost bailed out of line at the Salvation Army. Instead, I passed the time by checking out the jewelry case.
Blue rhinestone earrings. Some plastic bracelets. A grimy jackknife. And two relics.
Yes, relics. They were unmistakable to the Catholic eye. Two round, brass cases the size of a half dollar, each with a glass window showing a scrap of organic material mounted on red cloth with a tiny paper label underneath. I didn’t have my reading glasses, so I couldn’t see who they were. But they were clearly somebody.
They were $3 each, so I bought them, tucked them into my wallet and drove home, trembling.
At home, I took a closer look, and nearly fell down. One said “s.Helen.Imp” and the other “S. Petri Ap.” St. Helen? St. Peter? Was this possible?
I opened the backs, and each one revealed a blob of red wax imprinted with a seal holding in place two thin red cords. These were starting to look very real indeed.
I took careful photos and sent them to Sacra, a Minneapolis-based private organization that restores and documents relics. Then I went back to the store to tell the manager it’s not her fault she didn’t recognize these things as relics, but if she gets any more, she should call a priest; these were very likely human remains.
Strange that they ended up at a Salvation Army in rural New Hampshire; but perhaps stranger that the Catholic Church is in the habit of saving little bits of bodies and bones and scraps of hair and cloth, putting them under glass, and praying before them in our homes and in our churches.
Why do we do this? What does it mean?
Pagan dread
Catholics have collected and preserved relics of their holy dead since the earliest days of the Church.
“Anywhere you have the authentic Catholic faith, you have relics,” Sean Pilcher, founder of Sacra, told me.
When Emperor Trajan threw St. Ignatius of Antioch to the lions around the year 110, Christians recovered what was left of his body, and now his arm, breastbone and possibly his head repose in various churches. When St. Cyprian was beheaded in 259, Christians spread cloths to sop up his spilled blood.
St. Polycarp, a disciple of the apostle John, was martyred by burning in the year 155, and the faithful collected his ashes and venerated them, calling them “more valuable than gold,” according to Deacon Tom McDonald, a teacher, hospice minister and author of the Weird Catholic Substack.
What Christians were doing was something new, and their pagan neighbors were baffled and sometimes horrified to see them so comfortable with death. It’s one thing to have keepsakes of the beloved dead, but it’s another to keep pieces of the dead themselves. The Jewish people considered dead bodies ritually impure, and even cultures that worshipped their ancestors generally did so with more fear than reverence.
“The dead are protected against, chained down, covered in amulets to keep them from walking,” McDonald told me. “(Stories about) ghosts in the ancient world almost uniformly are based on failure to properly care for the body.”
But Christians were not only unafraid of the dead, they believed the remains of the dead were a connection to eternal life.
“Relics are inherently sacred things. If you say St. Andrew is in heaven, what you really mean is the soul of St. Andrew is experiencing the beatific vision; but his body is really him. It’s still on earth. So there is some way that Andrew, who is beholding the face of God, is still connected to his body,” Pilcher said.
The bodies of the saints — especially the martyrs, who willingly followed Christ in death — have a particular relation to the the risen body of Christ.
“We believe those remains will participate in the resurrection, and we anticipate that moment by preserving them and venerating them,” McDonald said.
“We don’t kick someone out just because they’re dead. They’re still going to come to Mass. We’re going to put them close to the altar, because that’s the first place the dead will rise. We won’t be afraid of them anymore. In fact we’re going to put their heads in glass cases and process them around the church. Take that, pagans!”
If ancient people were afraid of making contact with dead bodies, modern people — even Catholics — often find it distasteful or disgusting. This unease is partly because modern people simply aren’t used to being close to death. We hide dead bodies away, and if they’re on view at funerals, they’re embalmed and heavily made up.
But even those who are comfortable with death might ask how Catholics can claim to respect the human body so highly, from conception to natural death, and then cut the best ones up into bits and send them around the world. … Read the rest of my latest and I guess my last for Our Sunday Visitor.
