It is time for a FIRST Wild Card Tour book review! If you wish to join the FIRST blog alliance, just click the button. We are a group of reviewers who tour Christian books. A Wild Card post includes a brief bio of the author and a full chapter from each book toured. The reason it is called a FIRST Wild Card Tour is that you never know if the book will be fiction, non~fiction, for young, or for old...or for somewhere in between! Enjoy your free peek into the book!
You never know when I might play a wild card on you!
Today's Wild Card author is:
and the book:
Saints Preserved: An Encyclopedia of Relics
Image (July 12, 2011)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
THOMAS J. CRAUGHWELL is the author of Saints Behaving Badly, Urban Legends, Alligators in the Sewer and 222 Other Urban Legends, Saints for Every Occasion: 101 of Heaven's Most Powerful Patrons, and Do Blue Bedsheets Bring Babies? Every month he writes a column on patron saints for Catholic diocesan newspapers. In addition, he has written about saints for the Wall Street Journal, St. Anthony Messenger, and Catholic Digest and has discussed saints on CNN and EWTN. His book Stealing Lincoln's Body was made into a two-hour documentary on the History Channel.Visit the author's website.
SHORT BOOK DESCRIPTION:
In Saints Preserved: An Encyclopedia of Relics, author Thomas Craughwell takes us on an exhilarating journey through the life and death of over three hundred saints and enlightens us about the bits and pieces that were left behind (for example, a finger or a lock of hair) that are honored and revered by Catholics around the world.
Product Details:
List Price: $16.00
Paperback: 336 pages
Publisher: Image (July 12, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0307590739
ISBN-13: 978-0307590732
AND NOW...THE FIRST CHAPTER:
Introduction
Anyone who thinks that the cult of relics of the saints is itself a relic of the Middle Ages should log on to eBay. On any day of the week the online shopper will find a thriving business in the sale of relics, ranging from dust from the tomb of Christ to splinters of the True Cross to bone fragments of countless saints.
Among the faithful relics have an enormous appeal. In 1999-2000, when relics of St. Therese of Lisieux (1873-1897), popularly known as the Little Flower, traveled across the United States, millions turned out to touch or kiss the reliquary. The scene was repeated in 2003 when a tiny fragment of the cloak that bears the miraculous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe was carried from parish to parish throughout the country.
Believers will go out of their way to see famous relics. An online search of Catholic travel companies turns up dozens of itineraries designed specifically to visit churches that exhibit renowned relics, such as the incorrupt body of St. Bernadette in her convent’s chapel in Nevers, France, and the basilica in Padua, Italy, where St. Anthony lies buried.
Though many of the most famous relics like [give a couple more examples] are associated with saints, relics are not limited to the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Buddhists venerates teeth of the Buddha; Islam venerates the sword, the robe, and even strands from the beard of Mohammed. In ancient times, when a farmer or an excavation crew unearthed dinosaur bones, the Greeks and Romans took them for the remains of the Titans, or a legendary hero such as Theseus.
Even secular society prizes relics: at the Lincoln Museum in Springfield, Illinois, I saw crowds press around a display case that contained the gloves Mary Todd Lincoln wore to Ford’s Theater, stained with the blood of her assassinated husband. No doubt morbid curiosity played a part, but I believe the desire to see Mary Lincoln’s blood-stained gloves represents something deeper—the longing to have a physical connection with one of the greatest men, and one of the most tragic moments, in American history. It is that same longing to connect on a physical and not just a spiritual level that draws the faithful to the tombs of the saints, the houses where they lived, the altars before which they prayed, even the prisons where they were tortured.
In the Catholic Church relics fall into one of three categories: a first class relic is the physical remains of a saint such as bones, hair, and blood; a second class relic is the personal possessions of a saint, such as clothing, devotional objects, handwritten letters, even furniture; and a third class relic is an object, such a cloth or a holy card, that is touched to first class relic.
Reverence for the remains and belongings of saints is rooted in Sacred Scripture. In 2 Kings 13:20-21 we read of a dead man being restored to life after his corpse touched the bones of the prophet Elisha. In Mark’s gospel we find the story of a woman who suffered from a hemorrhage for twelve years and was cured when she touched the hem of Christ’s garment (Mark 5:25-34). And the Acts of the Apostles recounts how Christians touched handkerchiefs and other cloths to the body of St. Paul; when these cloths were given to the sick or the possessed, “diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of them” (Acts 19:11-12).
Even in times of persecution the early Christians made an earnest effort to recover the remains of the martyrs so they could be given a proper burial and their martyrdom commemorated annually with Mass celebrated at their tombs. A letter from about the year 156 A.D. describes the martyrdom of the elderly bishop of Smyrna, St. Polycarp. His body had been burned, but the Christians of Smyrna searched among the ashes for any trace of the saint that had not been consumed by the flames. “We took up his bones,” the anonymous author of the letter wrote, “which are more valuable than precious stones and finer than refined gold, and laid them in a suitable place, where the Lord will permit us to gather ourselves together, as we are able, in gladness and joy, and to celebrate the birthday of his martyrdom.”
After Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire, great basilicas were built over the tombs of St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. Lawrence, to name only a few. In 386 St. Ambrose discovered the relics of the proto-martyrs of Milan, Sts. Gervase and Protase, and had them enshrined in his church where the faithful could venerate the relics and ask for the martyrs’ intercession. In the City of God, Book 22, St. Augustine bears witness to the many miracles that were wrought by the newly discovered relics of St. Stephen. In Tibilis, during a procession with a relic of the proto-martyr, “a blind woman entreated that she might be led to the bishop who was carrying the relics. He gave her the flowers he was carrying. She took them, applied them to her eyes, and immediately saw.”
There was always the danger, of course, that some Christians in their enthusiasm might treat the saints as if they were little gods and the relics as if they were magical. St. Jerome, in his letter to Riparius, writes of the proper veneration of saints and relics, “We do not worship, we do not adore [saints], for fear that we should bow down to the creature rather than to the Creator, but we venerate the relics of the martyrs in order the better to adore Him whose martyrs they are.”
During the Middle Ages a pilgrimage to a shrine was a popular expression of religious devotion as well as a kind of vacation or road trip. Journeys to the Holy Land, Rome, or Compostela in Spain could be dangerous (St. Bridget of Sweden was shipwrecked on her pilgrimage to Jerusalem), but there were many shrines closer to home where one could venerate relics. Cathedrals, monasteries, and convents began to build up impressive relic collections, the better to attract throngs of pilgrims. Pilgrims were an important asset to local economies: they needed food and lodging, they would make gifts to the church, they would purchase a badge, a holy card, or some other souvenir to recall their journey. In time, aristocrats began to amass private relic collections to which they gave the public access on certain days of the year. In Wittenberg Frederick the Wise kept his collection of thousands of relics in the Wittenberg Castle Church. It was on the door of that church in 1517 that Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses, an early step in the religious revolution known as the Protestant Reformation.
The Protestants reformers attacked the veneration of relics, but the Catholic bishops at the Council of Trent responded by explaining and defending the practice, saying, “The holy bodies of holy martyrs and of others now living with Christ—which bodies were the living members of Christ and 'the temple of the Holy Ghost' (1 Corinthians 6:19) and which are by Him to be raised to eternal life and to be glorified are to be venerated by the faithful, for through these [bodies] many benefits are bestowed by God on men.” Nonetheless, during the Reformation period vandals smashed countless shrines, burning or otherwise destroying the relics they contained. In Lutheran Scandinavia such violence was rare; typically the relics of a saint were removed from its shrine and buried in an unmarked grave in the same church. As a result, the relics of St. Bridget and her daughter St. Catherine of Sweden, as well as the relics of the martyred king St. Eric, have survived. In England, Scotland, and Wales the reformers destroyed almost every shrine, but in recent years some Anglican bishops have attempted to restore the shrines in their cathedrals. In Winchester Cathedral for example, a small contemporary shrine marks the spot where the shrine of St. Swithun stood during the Middle Ages. The shrine is empty, all of the saints’ bones were destroyed during the Reformation. But at St. Alban’s Abbey a bone of the martyr lies within the new shrine, the gift of the Catholic archbishop of Cologne who had a relic of St. Alban in one of the churches of his archdiocese.
As a rough estimate, the Catholic Church venerates about 40,000 saints. Most of these are local holy men, women, and children, virtually unknown outside the region where they lived and died. To try to catalogue the location of the relics of all of these saints would require the labor of several lifetimes. And to track down the tiny fragments of saints’ bones, the snippets from saints’ clothing, would be impossible. So I have been obliged to narrow my focus. This volume contains approximately 350 entries of the Catholic world’s most important, interesting, unusual, or rare relics. Most but not all of the entries describe the relics of saints. I have included Old Testament relics such Noah’s Ark and the Ark of the Covenant (said to be hidden in a church in Ethiopia); Holy Land relics such as the house where Jesus, Mary and Joseph lived and the stairs from Pontius Pilate’s palace; relics of Jesus Christ, including the Manger, the True Cross, the Shroud of Turin, the Crown of Thorns, Veronica’s Veil, the Pillar of the Scourging, and the Holy Sepulcher; relics of the Virgin Mary such as her veil (at Chartres Cathedral), her portrait (Poland’s Black Madonna and Mexico’s Our Lady of Guadalupe), and in her belt (at Prato Cathedral). For easy reference, the book is arranged in an A-to-Z format. Each entry includes the location of the relic, it history, a brief biography in the case of a saint, and the feast day.
The relics of all saints and blessed of the United States (current at time of this book’s publication date) are included, as well as the relics of many saints and blesseds of Canada and Latin America. I have also included entries for the two largest relic collections in America, Maria Stein in Ohio and St. Anthony’s Chapel in Pittsburgh.
Every year Maria Stein and St. Anthony’s Chapel welcome many visitors, who tend to be an amalgam of the devout and the curious. Probably very few have the level of enthusiasm for relics their ancestors knew during the Middle Ages, when monasteries, convents, cathedrals, and even nobles and kings succumbed to a kind relic-collecting mania. The craving to possess an important, even an exceptional relic, led to all types of abuses, from theft, to relic peddling, to the manufacture of bogus relics—hence the multiple heads of St. John the Baptist. Sadly, some churches claimed to possess relics that were spurious at best and at worst sacrilegious—a feather of the Holy Sprit, for example, or the shield of St. Michael the Archangel. Such “relics” I have not included. In most cases the churches that possessed these items disposed of them or retired them long ago.
Nonetheless, some of the relics included in this book may raise eyebrows. It is true that not all relics that are still publicly venerated can be authenticated with one hundred percent certainty. But if these relics are well-known and the church that possesses them has not put them away, I felt that they ought to be included here.
Every Catholic church and chapel contains at least one relic—it is a requirement of the Church under what is known as canon law that every altar consecrated for the celebration of Mass must contain the relic of at least one saint, preferably a martyr. This requirement links even the most contemporary church with the earliest practice of the Church, when priests offered Mass using the sarcophagus of a martyr as the altar. In addition to the fragmentary relic in the altar, most churches possess other relics, which are sometimes brought out for veneration on a saint’s feast day. On a recent Good Friday it was my privilege to venerate a relic of the True Cross—one of the treasures of the Church of St. John the Evangelist in Stamford, Connecticut.
In some cases years after a saint’s death, his or her grave was opened and the body found to be in a remarkable state of preservation. Generally speaking, the term applied in such a case is “incorruptible.” However, incorruptibility is often in the eye of the beholder. Gazing upon the bodies of some of these saints, the terms “mummified,” “embalmed,” or “desiccated” may also come to mind. The body of St. Bernadette is usually described as incorrupt, and her face is exquisitely beautifully. But the case becomes more complicated when one learns that the saint’s actual face has darkened over time, and so it has been covered with an lovely, utterly lifelike wax mask. The translation of the body of Blessed Pope John XXIII from his sarcophagus in the grottoes beneath St. Peter’s into a side chapel of the basilica set off a debate whether his body was supernaturally incorrupt, whether it had been embalmed at the time of his death. The question has never been resolved definitively. It is possible that Blessed Pope John’s body is so well-preserved because it had been enclosed inside three coffins, and then sealed in a stone sarcophagus.
No one should feel uneasy visiting a shrine or venerating a relic. In many respects it is similar to visiting the grave of a beloved member of the family, or cherishing a family heirloom—but on a much higher level. The shrine or relic is a physical link with someone who was so faithful to God in this life that he or she is now glorified in the Kingdom of God forever. Bringing out Grandma’s china for Christmas dinner stirs the emotions and makes us feel connected once again to someone we loved but who has since died. Relics work in the same way, but more intensely because in the case of sacred relics the connection is not only to someone we love, but to someone who was genuinely holy.
The Aachen Relics (1st century). According to Charlemagne’s biographer, Einhard, in 800 the patriarch of Jerusalem sent a monk to Aachen with four extraordinary relics for the newly crowned Holy Roman Emperor: the dress the Blessed Virgin Mary wore when she gave birth to Jesus Christ; the Infant Jesus’ swaddling clothes; the loincloth Christ wore as he hung upon the cross; and a towel in which was wrapped the head of St. John the Baptist. All four relics are kept in a golden chest that was made for them in 1238; the reliquary is on display in the Treasury of Aachen, Germany’s Cathedral of St. Mary. Once every seven years the relics are exposed for public veneration—the next exposition will be held in 2014.
Aachen’s Kornelimunster, or Church of St. Cornelius, has three precious relics: the cloth Christ tied around his waist when he washed the feet of his apostles at the Last Supper; the shroud in which St. Joseph of Arimathea wrapped the body of Jesus for burial (this is a different shroud than the much more famous Shroud of Turin); and the sudarium, or cloth that was laid over the face of Jesus at the time of his burial.
St. Afra (died 304). The bones of St. Afra are preserved in a simple stone sarcophagus in the crypt of the Basilica of St. Ulrich and St. Afra in Augsburg, Germany. The church is an important historic site: in 1555 the Peace of Augsburg was signed here, putting an end to religious warfare in Germany and establishing the right of individual princes to choose if they would be Catholic or Lutheran. The basilica is split between the Catholic half dedicated to St. Afra and the Lutheran half dedicated to St. Ulrich.
Before her conversion to Christianity Afra had been a prostitute in Augsburg’s temple of Venus. During Emperor Diocletian’s persecution of the Church she was arrested. “You were a prostitute,” the judge reminded her. “The God of the Christians will reject you.”
“Not so,” Afra replied. “Jesus Christ forgave the adulterous woman because her repentance was sincere. And he will forgive me, too.”
The judge sentenced Afra to be suffocated. Guards took her to an island in the middle of the Lech River, bound her to a stake, and built a large smoky fire around her. She choked to death in the fumes.
St. Afra is the patron saint of converts and is one of the patron saints of Augsburg. Feast day: August 7.
Anyone who thinks that the cult of relics of the saints is itself a relic of the Middle Ages should log on to eBay. On any day of the week the online shopper will find a thriving business in the sale of relics, ranging from dust from the tomb of Christ to splinters of the True Cross to bone fragments of countless saints.
Among the faithful relics have an enormous appeal. In 1999-2000, when relics of St. Therese of Lisieux (1873-1897), popularly known as the Little Flower, traveled across the United States, millions turned out to touch or kiss the reliquary. The scene was repeated in 2003 when a tiny fragment of the cloak that bears the miraculous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe was carried from parish to parish throughout the country.
Believers will go out of their way to see famous relics. An online search of Catholic travel companies turns up dozens of itineraries designed specifically to visit churches that exhibit renowned relics, such as the incorrupt body of St. Bernadette in her convent’s chapel in Nevers, France, and the basilica in Padua, Italy, where St. Anthony lies buried.
Though many of the most famous relics like [give a couple more examples] are associated with saints, relics are not limited to the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Buddhists venerates teeth of the Buddha; Islam venerates the sword, the robe, and even strands from the beard of Mohammed. In ancient times, when a farmer or an excavation crew unearthed dinosaur bones, the Greeks and Romans took them for the remains of the Titans, or a legendary hero such as Theseus.
Even secular society prizes relics: at the Lincoln Museum in Springfield, Illinois, I saw crowds press around a display case that contained the gloves Mary Todd Lincoln wore to Ford’s Theater, stained with the blood of her assassinated husband. No doubt morbid curiosity played a part, but I believe the desire to see Mary Lincoln’s blood-stained gloves represents something deeper—the longing to have a physical connection with one of the greatest men, and one of the most tragic moments, in American history. It is that same longing to connect on a physical and not just a spiritual level that draws the faithful to the tombs of the saints, the houses where they lived, the altars before which they prayed, even the prisons where they were tortured.
In the Catholic Church relics fall into one of three categories: a first class relic is the physical remains of a saint such as bones, hair, and blood; a second class relic is the personal possessions of a saint, such as clothing, devotional objects, handwritten letters, even furniture; and a third class relic is an object, such a cloth or a holy card, that is touched to first class relic.
Reverence for the remains and belongings of saints is rooted in Sacred Scripture. In 2 Kings 13:20-21 we read of a dead man being restored to life after his corpse touched the bones of the prophet Elisha. In Mark’s gospel we find the story of a woman who suffered from a hemorrhage for twelve years and was cured when she touched the hem of Christ’s garment (Mark 5:25-34). And the Acts of the Apostles recounts how Christians touched handkerchiefs and other cloths to the body of St. Paul; when these cloths were given to the sick or the possessed, “diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of them” (Acts 19:11-12).
Even in times of persecution the early Christians made an earnest effort to recover the remains of the martyrs so they could be given a proper burial and their martyrdom commemorated annually with Mass celebrated at their tombs. A letter from about the year 156 A.D. describes the martyrdom of the elderly bishop of Smyrna, St. Polycarp. His body had been burned, but the Christians of Smyrna searched among the ashes for any trace of the saint that had not been consumed by the flames. “We took up his bones,” the anonymous author of the letter wrote, “which are more valuable than precious stones and finer than refined gold, and laid them in a suitable place, where the Lord will permit us to gather ourselves together, as we are able, in gladness and joy, and to celebrate the birthday of his martyrdom.”
After Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire, great basilicas were built over the tombs of St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. Lawrence, to name only a few. In 386 St. Ambrose discovered the relics of the proto-martyrs of Milan, Sts. Gervase and Protase, and had them enshrined in his church where the faithful could venerate the relics and ask for the martyrs’ intercession. In the City of God, Book 22, St. Augustine bears witness to the many miracles that were wrought by the newly discovered relics of St. Stephen. In Tibilis, during a procession with a relic of the proto-martyr, “a blind woman entreated that she might be led to the bishop who was carrying the relics. He gave her the flowers he was carrying. She took them, applied them to her eyes, and immediately saw.”
There was always the danger, of course, that some Christians in their enthusiasm might treat the saints as if they were little gods and the relics as if they were magical. St. Jerome, in his letter to Riparius, writes of the proper veneration of saints and relics, “We do not worship, we do not adore [saints], for fear that we should bow down to the creature rather than to the Creator, but we venerate the relics of the martyrs in order the better to adore Him whose martyrs they are.”
During the Middle Ages a pilgrimage to a shrine was a popular expression of religious devotion as well as a kind of vacation or road trip. Journeys to the Holy Land, Rome, or Compostela in Spain could be dangerous (St. Bridget of Sweden was shipwrecked on her pilgrimage to Jerusalem), but there were many shrines closer to home where one could venerate relics. Cathedrals, monasteries, and convents began to build up impressive relic collections, the better to attract throngs of pilgrims. Pilgrims were an important asset to local economies: they needed food and lodging, they would make gifts to the church, they would purchase a badge, a holy card, or some other souvenir to recall their journey. In time, aristocrats began to amass private relic collections to which they gave the public access on certain days of the year. In Wittenberg Frederick the Wise kept his collection of thousands of relics in the Wittenberg Castle Church. It was on the door of that church in 1517 that Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses, an early step in the religious revolution known as the Protestant Reformation.
The Protestants reformers attacked the veneration of relics, but the Catholic bishops at the Council of Trent responded by explaining and defending the practice, saying, “The holy bodies of holy martyrs and of others now living with Christ—which bodies were the living members of Christ and 'the temple of the Holy Ghost' (1 Corinthians 6:19) and which are by Him to be raised to eternal life and to be glorified are to be venerated by the faithful, for through these [bodies] many benefits are bestowed by God on men.” Nonetheless, during the Reformation period vandals smashed countless shrines, burning or otherwise destroying the relics they contained. In Lutheran Scandinavia such violence was rare; typically the relics of a saint were removed from its shrine and buried in an unmarked grave in the same church. As a result, the relics of St. Bridget and her daughter St. Catherine of Sweden, as well as the relics of the martyred king St. Eric, have survived. In England, Scotland, and Wales the reformers destroyed almost every shrine, but in recent years some Anglican bishops have attempted to restore the shrines in their cathedrals. In Winchester Cathedral for example, a small contemporary shrine marks the spot where the shrine of St. Swithun stood during the Middle Ages. The shrine is empty, all of the saints’ bones were destroyed during the Reformation. But at St. Alban’s Abbey a bone of the martyr lies within the new shrine, the gift of the Catholic archbishop of Cologne who had a relic of St. Alban in one of the churches of his archdiocese.
As a rough estimate, the Catholic Church venerates about 40,000 saints. Most of these are local holy men, women, and children, virtually unknown outside the region where they lived and died. To try to catalogue the location of the relics of all of these saints would require the labor of several lifetimes. And to track down the tiny fragments of saints’ bones, the snippets from saints’ clothing, would be impossible. So I have been obliged to narrow my focus. This volume contains approximately 350 entries of the Catholic world’s most important, interesting, unusual, or rare relics. Most but not all of the entries describe the relics of saints. I have included Old Testament relics such Noah’s Ark and the Ark of the Covenant (said to be hidden in a church in Ethiopia); Holy Land relics such as the house where Jesus, Mary and Joseph lived and the stairs from Pontius Pilate’s palace; relics of Jesus Christ, including the Manger, the True Cross, the Shroud of Turin, the Crown of Thorns, Veronica’s Veil, the Pillar of the Scourging, and the Holy Sepulcher; relics of the Virgin Mary such as her veil (at Chartres Cathedral), her portrait (Poland’s Black Madonna and Mexico’s Our Lady of Guadalupe), and in her belt (at Prato Cathedral). For easy reference, the book is arranged in an A-to-Z format. Each entry includes the location of the relic, it history, a brief biography in the case of a saint, and the feast day.
The relics of all saints and blessed of the United States (current at time of this book’s publication date) are included, as well as the relics of many saints and blesseds of Canada and Latin America. I have also included entries for the two largest relic collections in America, Maria Stein in Ohio and St. Anthony’s Chapel in Pittsburgh.
Every year Maria Stein and St. Anthony’s Chapel welcome many visitors, who tend to be an amalgam of the devout and the curious. Probably very few have the level of enthusiasm for relics their ancestors knew during the Middle Ages, when monasteries, convents, cathedrals, and even nobles and kings succumbed to a kind relic-collecting mania. The craving to possess an important, even an exceptional relic, led to all types of abuses, from theft, to relic peddling, to the manufacture of bogus relics—hence the multiple heads of St. John the Baptist. Sadly, some churches claimed to possess relics that were spurious at best and at worst sacrilegious—a feather of the Holy Sprit, for example, or the shield of St. Michael the Archangel. Such “relics” I have not included. In most cases the churches that possessed these items disposed of them or retired them long ago.
Nonetheless, some of the relics included in this book may raise eyebrows. It is true that not all relics that are still publicly venerated can be authenticated with one hundred percent certainty. But if these relics are well-known and the church that possesses them has not put them away, I felt that they ought to be included here.
Every Catholic church and chapel contains at least one relic—it is a requirement of the Church under what is known as canon law that every altar consecrated for the celebration of Mass must contain the relic of at least one saint, preferably a martyr. This requirement links even the most contemporary church with the earliest practice of the Church, when priests offered Mass using the sarcophagus of a martyr as the altar. In addition to the fragmentary relic in the altar, most churches possess other relics, which are sometimes brought out for veneration on a saint’s feast day. On a recent Good Friday it was my privilege to venerate a relic of the True Cross—one of the treasures of the Church of St. John the Evangelist in Stamford, Connecticut.
In some cases years after a saint’s death, his or her grave was opened and the body found to be in a remarkable state of preservation. Generally speaking, the term applied in such a case is “incorruptible.” However, incorruptibility is often in the eye of the beholder. Gazing upon the bodies of some of these saints, the terms “mummified,” “embalmed,” or “desiccated” may also come to mind. The body of St. Bernadette is usually described as incorrupt, and her face is exquisitely beautifully. But the case becomes more complicated when one learns that the saint’s actual face has darkened over time, and so it has been covered with an lovely, utterly lifelike wax mask. The translation of the body of Blessed Pope John XXIII from his sarcophagus in the grottoes beneath St. Peter’s into a side chapel of the basilica set off a debate whether his body was supernaturally incorrupt, whether it had been embalmed at the time of his death. The question has never been resolved definitively. It is possible that Blessed Pope John’s body is so well-preserved because it had been enclosed inside three coffins, and then sealed in a stone sarcophagus.
No one should feel uneasy visiting a shrine or venerating a relic. In many respects it is similar to visiting the grave of a beloved member of the family, or cherishing a family heirloom—but on a much higher level. The shrine or relic is a physical link with someone who was so faithful to God in this life that he or she is now glorified in the Kingdom of God forever. Bringing out Grandma’s china for Christmas dinner stirs the emotions and makes us feel connected once again to someone we loved but who has since died. Relics work in the same way, but more intensely because in the case of sacred relics the connection is not only to someone we love, but to someone who was genuinely holy.
The Aachen Relics (1st century). According to Charlemagne’s biographer, Einhard, in 800 the patriarch of Jerusalem sent a monk to Aachen with four extraordinary relics for the newly crowned Holy Roman Emperor: the dress the Blessed Virgin Mary wore when she gave birth to Jesus Christ; the Infant Jesus’ swaddling clothes; the loincloth Christ wore as he hung upon the cross; and a towel in which was wrapped the head of St. John the Baptist. All four relics are kept in a golden chest that was made for them in 1238; the reliquary is on display in the Treasury of Aachen, Germany’s Cathedral of St. Mary. Once every seven years the relics are exposed for public veneration—the next exposition will be held in 2014.
Aachen’s Kornelimunster, or Church of St. Cornelius, has three precious relics: the cloth Christ tied around his waist when he washed the feet of his apostles at the Last Supper; the shroud in which St. Joseph of Arimathea wrapped the body of Jesus for burial (this is a different shroud than the much more famous Shroud of Turin); and the sudarium, or cloth that was laid over the face of Jesus at the time of his burial.
St. Afra (died 304). The bones of St. Afra are preserved in a simple stone sarcophagus in the crypt of the Basilica of St. Ulrich and St. Afra in Augsburg, Germany. The church is an important historic site: in 1555 the Peace of Augsburg was signed here, putting an end to religious warfare in Germany and establishing the right of individual princes to choose if they would be Catholic or Lutheran. The basilica is split between the Catholic half dedicated to St. Afra and the Lutheran half dedicated to St. Ulrich.
Before her conversion to Christianity Afra had been a prostitute in Augsburg’s temple of Venus. During Emperor Diocletian’s persecution of the Church she was arrested. “You were a prostitute,” the judge reminded her. “The God of the Christians will reject you.”
“Not so,” Afra replied. “Jesus Christ forgave the adulterous woman because her repentance was sincere. And he will forgive me, too.”
The judge sentenced Afra to be suffocated. Guards took her to an island in the middle of the Lech River, bound her to a stake, and built a large smoky fire around her. She choked to death in the fumes.
St. Afra is the patron saint of converts and is one of the patron saints of Augsburg. Feast day: August 7.
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