On the veneration of a saint's relics

[kaizen]

A Protestant (“Born Again”) once told me, “What if somebody happen to possess a saint’s dandruff flakes, feces, urine, phlegm, nail clippings, scabs, earwax, potato chips leftovers, blackheads, pus, tartar, snot, menstrual discharge, semen, sweat, vomit, spittle, and other similar stuffs that would normally disgust many people, WILL THE CHURCH ENSHRINE SUCH RELICS FOR PUBLIC VENERATION, OR WILL THE CHURCH DISPOSE THEM AND TREAT THEM AS MERE GARBAGE? What if we found a saint’s feces to be ‘incorrupt’, I mean it remained fresh and warm after hundreds of years? Will the Church enshrine such feces for the veneration of Catholics and perhaps devise a devotional prayer in honor of that saint’s holy feces?” He was laughing sarcastically at me while saying these things.

In response I told him, “Well if that’s the case, I guess there is nothing wrong in venerating a saint’s feces. Remember the time when the Lord Jesus Himself used his own spittle and mixed it with mud to heal a blind man? If God wants to communicate something to us through an ‘incorrupt feces of a saint’, who are we to reject such a gift?”

Do you think I gave the right answer? Should we really venerate an “incorrupt feces” of a saint? I never heard of a saint’s dandruff being venerated somewhere, but his questions really made me think about our Catholic practice.

 

[Streetdoc]

I think that you had the right response. Sounds like your friend was being a jerk and ridiculing your Faith…

However I would like to think that the incorrupt feces would be kept in a box and not in plain veiw

 

[CollegeKid]

I’m going to be honest here. I don’t think that was the right answer. The whole premise is ridiculous and the guy who said that stuff knew it, he was just trying to ridicule you. If my local parish kept just about any one of the bodily substances this guy mentioned, hidden in a box or not, I would be apalled. The point is that my local parish, or any good parish I think, would not do that. I think a more appropriate answer would have been no answer at all, or to ask him if he objected to the practice of keeping a deceased loved one’s ashes in an urn in one’s home, as many families do no matter what faith they practice, as a way of honoring a dead relative’s memory.

 

[Lazerlike42]

If God saw fit to preserve the feces, then, well… yeah. I mean, only God could do that, and it would show that He wanted us to venerate the, uh, feces.

But I don’t expect God would do that.

(Additionally, you may tell him that Martin Luther wrote most of his reformation theology while sitting on the toilet [this is true], so in a sense Protestants venerate feces every day! )

(I’m kidding, of course)