Recently, Pope Leo tweeted:
In recent years, many young people have approached the faith through social media, successful programs and popular online Christian witnesses. The danger is that a faith discovered online is limited to individual experiences, which may be intellectually and emotionally reassuring, but never “embodied.” Such experiences remain “disembodied,” detached from the “ecclesial body.”
Leaving aside the irony of this message about the dangers of the isolating effects of social media going viral, the pope’s message about young people’s experience of the faith lacking embodiment had me thinking about one of my earliest memories of what it meant to be specifically and uniquely Catholic.
I was in fourth or fifth grade and was messing around with my friends up in the choir loft of the cathedral. Our choir director, in an attempt to get a group of rowdy preteens to pay attention and sing, rather than flick each in the ears and surreptitiously trade baseball cards (this was the early 90s), told us, “You all need to remember that you’re here in the presence of St. Peter and St. Paul, St. Patrick and Francis of Assisi!” This was met with blank stares and perhaps a few eye rolls, as one might expect. “Sure, sure,” we responded, good Catholic school kids, “we know we’re always in the presence of the Trinity and the saints.” But our director meant something different. He pointed down at the altar and told us that there was a box under it containing bits of the bodies of all these saints and dozens more — that they all were literally present in this space with us.
I’m not sure if we truly believed him, but it made a lasting impression, and a couple of years later, when the cathedral was undergoing a massive renovation, some of us got to see these relics for ourselves. By that point, we had had the three classes of relics drilled into us in our religion classes: first-class relics are physical remains of a saint (bones, hair, blood, etc.); second-class relics are objects owned or touched by a saint; third-class relics are ones that have touched a first or second-class relic.
The reliquary under the altar in my childhood parish of St. Peter’s Cathedral in Erie, Pennsylvania, really did (does) hold first-class relics of Sts. Peter, Paul, Patrick and Francis (and Teresa of Avila, Thérèse of Lisieux, Elizabeth Ann Seton, Ignatius of Loyola and dozens of others). I have no real memory of what we actually saw — having seen a fair number of relics in the years since, I imagine the relics themselves were pretty unremarkable — but the experience of seeing them stuck with me: being part of a group of 12-year-old kids sitting around staring at a bit of bone chipped from the corpse of St. Patrick was definitely something that our friends in public schools didn’t get to do!
But even then there was some whispering: “How do they know this bit of bone is really from St. Paul? Or St. Patrick?” I’ve never really been able to shake this kind of skepticism, but over the years I have come to believe it doesn’t actually matter all that much if a relic is authentic or not.
The church might define three classes of relics, but I tend to think of them as being of two distinct types: There are relics that clearly could be real — where a person was recognized as saintly in their own lifetime, and the tradition of relics was already well established, so it’s not hard to understand how first or second-class relics from that person could be collected and tracked (of course, it’s also easy to imagine how enterprising medieval fraudsters could manufacture fake relics of famous contemporaries, and over time the real and the fake might become impossible to differentiate).
Over the years I have come to believe it doesn’t actually matter all that much if a relic is authentic or not.
The second type of relics are the ones that aren’t just of questionable provenance, they are the ones that seem impossible — like all of the ones dating back to Christ‘s own time: his crib, his father’s cloak, pieces from the table of the Last Supper and, of course, the Holy Foreskin.
For many years I found there to be something slightly, well, embarrassing about Catholicism’s embrace of this second type of relics. John Calvin once claimed that there are enough pieces of the True Cross floating around to fill a ship, and while it’s not often that I find myself agreeing with Calvin, his critique struck me as valid. The stories of how people in the Middle Ages found relics from Christ’s lifetime are all fantastical and more than a little hard to believe, so the fact that many of them are kept and displayed in the church’s most sacred sites can be a bit hard to swallow for a rational 21st-century believer. They feel like holdovers from a different time (which, of course, they very much are!).
The first time I was in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, our tour guide told us about the relics housed in the columns surrounding the altar: Veronica’s veil with the image of Christ’s face, the lance that pierced his side and pieces of the True Cross. One of my fellow travelers was genuinely overcome with emotion by being in the presence of these significant items from Christ’s life. At the time, I couldn’t really understand her response and felt it must be, on some level, performative. But (as is so often the case!) my cynicism was wrong.
I now can see these types of relics as being key links in the chain of faith — embodying the stories we like to tell about our church history — and they physically demonstrate how enduring these stories truly are. Sure, it seems unlikely (at least to me!) that St. Helena really found the True Cross in the Holy Land in the 300s, but as a church we’ve been telling and retelling this story for over 1700 years, and some remnant of what she found is still physically present in one of the alcoves of St. Peter’s in Rome. That’s pretty incredible.
So while I wasn’t personally moved by being in the presence of the Holy Lance of Longinus, I can understand why others might be. And over the years I have had my own encounters with relics that did feel sacred and mysterious. One of the more profound prayer experiences of my life was in the crypt under the basilica in Assisi, which houses St. Francis’ remains. We couldn’t see his body, but there was still something extremely moving about being in the physical presence of this exemplary, practically mythic, human — knowing that his body was literally present in the room with us (minus the small chips of bone distributed around the Catholic world, including the bit under the altar in my childhood parish) — and that people had been gathering and praying in his presence for hundreds and hundreds of years.
I now can see these types of relics as being key links in the chain of faith — embodying the stories we like to tell about our church history — and they physically demonstrate how enduring these stories truly are.
And I have also had meaningful encounters with the less plausible type of relics. When I was an undergrad I spent a semester studying abroad in Ireland, where it feels impossible to enter a church or museum, or even cross a field, without encountering objects or places connected to St. Patrick. While I didn’t find his bell or his well all that moving, we did travel to the Hill of Slane, where tradition teaches that St. Patrick lit a paschal fire that the pagans couldn’t extinguish. This is more legend than historical fact, but as we stood in the specific place where he supposedly stood (which I guess isn’t technically a relic — though sometimes footprints and even knee prints are indeed honored as relics), there was still a strong sense of being part of an extremely long and rich Catholic lineage.
My ancestors were from Ireland, and they had almost certainly told stories of St. Patrick going back generations; some may have even made a pilgrimage to this very spot (and had, perhaps, rolled their own eyes at the blending of history and myth and faith). And in that moment, standing on a windswept hill, I thought back to the relic under the altar of my childhood parish — that bit of bone purportedly from St. Patrick himself, which found itself, 1500 years later, across an ocean, carried by the faithful from one world into a new one. It might not be any more authentic than the story of the inextinguishable paschal fire, but both represent a very real truth: that the church endures across time, in both the stories carried by tradition and in the long line of faithful witnesses who have gone before us.
As Pope Leo’s tweet indicates, we are all moving ever more rapidly into a virtual, disembodied existence. The phrase “touch grass” gets thrown around a lot as a reminder to get offline and go outside and experience the real world. As Catholics we might say “touch bone” to get at a similar, but maybe deeper reality: We are flesh and we are spirit, and it’s important to honor both.
The church’s tradition of relics serves as a concrete reminder of our mortality, and also of our connection to the communion of saints, helping us to be mindful of both the physical and the spiritual. So yes, when seen in a certain light, the church’s practice of taking a bit of bone or hair from a saint holding onto and venerating them, and going so far as to embed them in or under every church altar, is a bit macabre and strange, but this kind of weird Catholicism is one of the aspects of the faith that resonates most strongly with me. I love that we do things that don’t entirely fit with our contemporary age, particularly when these things literally embody the mysterious nature of our faith.
Top photo: Relics in St. Anthony’s Chapel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (Addie Mena/CNA)