Why relics catholic

Catherine was a Third Order Dominican who lived from to in Italy. She experienced frequent visions of Christ and would live for long periods of time eating nothing but the Holy Eucharist. Catherine encouraged him to return to Rome and to reform the Church. Five years before her death, Catherine received the stigmata. She was canonized in and declared a Doctor of the Church in Above is pictured the arm of St.

Thomas Aquinas, kept in the cathedral in Naples. Thomas was a Dominican friar who was born in or and died in in Italy. He was the son of nobles, his father being a count and his mother a countess, and was related to several European emperors and kings. He was educated by the Benedictines from the age of five, and then began studies at the University of Naples at approximately the age of ten.

When he attempted to enter the Dominican order, his family captured and held him prisoner for two years in an attempt to dissuade him from entering the religious life. Thomas persevered, however, and took his vows as a Dominican.

He studied under St. Albertus Magnus, and received his doctorate in theology from the University of Paris in Above is the incorrupt body of St. Bernadette Soubirous , albeit with the face and hands covered with wax, kept at the Convent of Gildard in Nevers, France.

Bernadette was born in in Lourdes, France, and died in When she was fourteen years old, the Virgin Mary appeared to her in a grotto while she was collecting wood. Eventually, many pilgrims flocked to the site and were cured by drinking the water that flowed from the grotto.

Bernadette later entered the religious life and died an early death due to tuberculosis. Cart 0. But, it always connects the person with the saint, and therefore God. Since the beginning, the Church has upheld the practice of venerating relics. This veneration is not offering adoration or worship which is due only to God. Veneration is the honoring, cherishing, respecting, and devotion of heart given to the saints.

Veneration is an expression of our friendship and love for the saints — our brothers and sisters in heaven. Sometimes this veneration has been abused and exaggerated. The Church has guarded against these abuses.

Various pious practices have developed in order to show appropriate veneration to a relic and the saint. Relics are placed in sacred and artistic vessels called reliquaries. The faithful often make pilgrimage to the shrine of a relic. Or, the relic travels to different places in order to allow for veneration.

The faithful spend time of prayer in the presence of the relic. Many times the faithful may be allowed to touch the reliquary or receive a blessing from the relic.

Contrasting the horror produced by an ordinary corpse with the veneration paid to the body of a saint the preacher expatiates upon the adornment lavished upon the building which had been erected over the martyr's resting place, and he describes how the worshipper is led to approach the tomb "believing that to touch it is itself a sanctification and a blessing and if it be permitted to carry off any of the dust which has settled upon the martyr's resting place, the dust is accounted as a great gift and the mould as a precious treasure.

And as for touching the relics themselves, if that should ever be our happiness , only those who have experienced it and who have had their wish gratified can know how much this is desirable and how worthy a recompense it is of aspiring prayer " col.

This passage, like many others that might be quoted, dwells rather upon the sanctity of the martyr's resting place and upon that of his mortal remains collected as a whole and honourably entombed. Neither is it quite easy to determine the period at which the practice of venerating minute fragments of bone or cloth, small parcels of dust, etc.

We can only say that it was widespread early in the fourth century, and that dated inscriptions upon blocks of stone, which were probably altar slabs, afford evidence upon the point which is quite conclusive. One such, found of late years in Northern Africa and now preserved in the Christian Museum of the Louvre, bears a list of the relics probably once cemented into a shallow circular cavity excavated in its surface. Omitting one or two words not adequately explained, the inscription runs: "A holy memorial [ memoria sancta ] of the wood of the Cross, of the land of Promise where Christ was born, the Apostles Peter and Paul, the names of the martyrs Datian, Donatian, Cyprian , Nemesianus, Citinus, and Victoria.

In the year of the Province [i. We learn from St. Cyril of Jerusalem before that the wood of the Cross, discovered c. Gregory of Nyssa in his sermons on the forty martyrs , after describing how their bodies were burned by command of the persecutors , explains that "their ashes and all that the fire had spared have been so distributed throughout the world that almost every province has had its share of the blessing.

I also myself have a portion of this holy gift and I have laid the bodies of my parents beside the ashes of these warriors, that in the hour of the resurrection they may be awakened together with these highly privileged comrades" P. We have here also a hint of the explanation of the widespread practice of seeking burial near the tombs of the martyrs.

It seems to have been felt that when the souls of the blessed martyrs on the day of general were once more united to their bodies, they would be accompanied in their passage to heaven by those who lay around them and that these last might on their account find more ready acceptance with God.

We may note also that, while this and other passages suggest that no great repugnance was felt in the East to the division and dismemberment of the bodies of the saints , in the West, on the other hand, particularly at Rome , the greatest respect was shown to the holy dead. The mere unwrapping or touching of the body of a martyr was considered to be a terribly perilous enterprise, which could only be set about by the holiest of ecclesiastics , and that after prayer and fasting.

This belief lasted until the late Middle Ages and is illustrated, for example, in the life of St. Hugh of Lincoln , who excited the surprise of his episcopal contemporaries by his audacity in examining and translating relics which his colleagues dared not disturb.

In the Theodosian Code the translation, division, or dismemberment of the remains of martyrs was expressly forbidden "Nemo martyrem distrahat", Cod. He professed himself sceptical regarding the alleged "customs of the Greeks" of readily transferring the bodies of martyrs from place to place, declaring that throughout the West any interference with these honoured remains was looked upon as a sacrilegious act and that numerous prodigies had struck terror into the hearts of even well meaning men who had attempted anything of the sort.

Hence, though it was the Empress Constantina herself who had asked him for the head or some portion of the body of St. Paul , he treated the request as an impossible one, explaining that, to obtain the supply of relics needful in the consecration of churches, it was customary to lower into the Confession of the Apostles as far as the second "cataract"—so we learn from a letter to Pope Hermisdas in Thiel, "Epist.

Gregory further offers to send Constantina some filings from St. Peter's chains, a form of present of which we find frequent mention in his correspondence St. Gregory , "Epist. It is certain that long before this time an extended conception of the nature of a relic, such as this important letter reveals, had gradually grown up. Already when Eusebius wrote c. Further, it is noteworthy that the Roman prejudice against translating and dividing seems only to have applied to the actual bodies of the martyrs reposing in their tombs.

It is St. Gregory himself who enriches a little cross, destined to hang round the neck as an encolpion , with filings both from St. Peter's chains and from the gridiron of St. Laurence "Epist. Before the year , St. Cyril of Jerusalem three times over informs us that the fragments of the wood of the Cross found by St. Helen had been distributed piecemeal and had filled the whole world Cat.

This implies that Western pilgrims felt no more impropriety in receiving than the Eastern bishops in giving. During the Merovingian and Carlovingian period the cultus of relics increased rather than diminished.

Gregory of Tours abounds in stories of the marvels wrought by them, as well as of the practices used in their honour , some of which have been thought to be analogous to those of the pagan "incubations" De Glor. Very significant, as Hauck Kirchengesch. Gregory himself. Bede records Hist. The Penitential ascribed to St. Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury , which certainly was known in England at an early date , declares that "the relics of the saints are to be venerated", and it adds, seemingly in connexion with the same idea , that "If possible a candle is to burn there every night" Haddan and Stubbs, "Councils", III, When we remember the candles which King Alfred constantly kept burning before his relics, the authenticity of this clause in Theodore's Penitential seems the more probable.

Again the relics of English saints , for example those of St. Cuthbert and St. Oswald, soon became famous, while in the case of the latter we hear of them all over the continent.

Plummer Bede, II, has made a short list of them and shows that they must have been transported into the remotest part of Germany. After the Second Council of Nicaea , in 7 87, had insisted with special urgency that relics were to be used in the consecration of churches and that the omission was to be supplied if any church had been consecrated without them the English Council of Celchyth probably Chelsea commanded that relics were to be used, and in default of them the Blessed Eucharist.

But the developments of the veneration of relics in the Middle Ages were far too vast to be pursued further.

Not a few of the most famous of the early medieval inscriptions are connected with the same matter. It must suffice to mention the famous Clematius inscription at Cologne , recording the translation of the remains of the so called Eleven thousand Virgins see Krause, "Inscrip d. Rheinlande", no. Abuses Naturally it was impossible for popular enthusiasm to be roused to so high a pitch in a matter which easily lent itself to error , fraud and greed of gain, without at least the occasional occurrence of many grave abuses.

As early as the end of the fourth century, St. Augustine denouncing certain impostors wandering about in the habit of monks , describes them as making profit by the sale of spurious relics "De op.

Isidore , "De. In the Theodosian Code the sale of relics is forbidden "Nemo martyrem mercetur", VII, ix, 17 , but numerous stories, of which it would be easy to collect a long series, beginning with the writings of St. Gregory the Great and St.

Gregory of Tours , prove to us that many unprincipled persons found a means of enriching themselves by a sort of trade in these objects of devotion, the majority of which no doubt were fraudulent. At the beginning of the ninth century, as M.

What was perhaps in the long run hardly less disastrous than fraud or avarice was the keen rivalry between religious centres, and the eager credulity fostered by the desire to be known as the possessors of some unusually startling relic.

We learn from Cassian, in the fifth century, that there were monks who seized upon certain martyrs' bodies by force of arms, defying the authority of the bishops , and this was a story which we find many times repeated in the Western chronicles of a later date. In such an atmosphere of lawlessness doubtful relics came to abound. There was always a disposition to regard any human remains accidentally discovered near a church or in the catacombs as the body of a martyr. Hence, though men like St.

Athanasius and St. Martin of Tours set a good example of caution in such cases, it is to be feared that in the majority of instances only a very narrow interval of time intervened between the suggestion that a particular object might be, or ought to be, an important relic, and the conviction that tradition attested it actually to be such. There is no reason in most cases for supposing the existence of deliberate fraud.