Hi ,
My husband asked me a question I am not sure about. We are practicing Catholics and love the Church very much. His question was about relics. We know that the Church teaches that when someone dies we respect their body by burial or cremation , not spreading of ashes but keeping the body together. So why are some Saints bones kept as relics apart from the rest of their body ?
Blessings
Marla
Because the two issues are not at all comparable, really. Except, I suppose, in a sort of superficial consideration.
In terms of the practice related to Saints and Blesseds…at the point the cause is moving toward a definitive favorable conclusion for beatification, there is an exhumation of the body for a canonical recognition of the condition of the body.
Frequently, this is a moment for an extraction of some quantity of the remains. Larger portions are used for placement in altars, preserving the ancient custom whereby a relic of a saint is enclosed in the altar. Contemporary legislation is that the relic used thus should be “notable,” so that it may be readily discerned to be from the body of the Saint/Blessed. Typically, it will be one of the smaller bones, such as from the hand.
Smaller relics, such as tiny fragments of bone, hair, and so forth, may be distributed in order to be enshrined for the public veneration of the faithful. The operative words being that these relics and their use form part of the Church’s official cult for the Blessed/Saint and are to be reverently treated and carefully conserved and are for the use of some quantity of the faithful.
A classic example of this would be the foundress of a Community of Consecrated Life, who is beatified. Houses of that community would be given a relic of the foundress to enshrine in their chapels, for the benefit of the members – as well a members of the laity to whom they minister, for example – who may visit and venerate the relic, seeing as they maybe far removed from her shrine and where her body rests.
There is the famous example of Saint Catherine of Siena. As she died in Rome, her body is there, enshrined as it is in the high altar of the Dominican church next to the Pantheon; the faithful may pray before it. The people of Siena were, of course, bereft that she was not with them and her head, actually, was sent home and is enshrined in a reliquary in the cathedral; the people of Siena and others may venerate her and pray before her there. Her remains are, as it were, in both places, that are so associated with her in history. But, in both cases, her remains are reverently enshrined in churches and are there for the public veneration of faithful who have come to those churches to honor her as well as to seek her intercession.
It must also be said here that there are also elements of the body that are treated in different ways. Hair, blood, nail clippings, for example, are on a different magnitude than the heart or other aspects more intrinsic to the “me”…although each and all of them would be considered as “a first class relic.” In Europe, we had the custom, more in times past, of extracting the heart of very notable people. Obviously, that aspect of the person’s body is viewed in a much different way than a lock of hair or clipping of nail.
Still in my generation, it was normal to conserve locks of hair from a person who had died and this would still be as acceptable today. They are of the deceased but in a much more incidental way. After all, when one’s hair or nails are cut in life, they are readily discarded without thought or ceremony and are much less part of “me” than something irreplaceable such as my head, my eyes, my hands.
The relics
ex corpore of a Saint or Blessed should be carefully preserved. They are normally not to be in the private possession of individuals. Relics familiarly called second class relics may be distributed much more readily for private use by individual members of the faithful and to promote devotion to the candidate for beatification/Blessed/Saint.
The other practice, in contrast, of scattering ashes so they they are completely dispersed and irretrievably lost is the opposite of the practice, which goes back to the days of the Church’s first martyrs, that the bodies of those killed for the faith were to be retrieved, even at risk to the community of the early Christians, in order to be given reverent entombment, in expectation of the Resurrection when the body will be reconstituted and glorified, so that the person – both body and soul – will live eternally with God.
In addition to the body’s eternal destiny, the body was consecrated in baptism, received various anointings, was the temple of the Holy Spirit, was united to the Eucharist through the Communions received…and for all these reasons also is to be treated, even in death, reverently and as a sacred thing.
The new instruction, recently released,
Ad resurgendum cum Christo, concerning the remains of the deceased made specific mention of abuses that the clergy are unfortunately seeing and encountering in these times.
To take one example: Apportioning the cremated remains among family members and placing them in jewelry and such is to expose those remains to being lost over time…whereas the burial or inurnment of those remains keeps them in a collected state and safely deposited in a place in view of the awaited general resurrection at the end of human history. Because the cremated remains are the very body itself.
There would be no objection, for example, to maintaining the older custom I spoke of earlier of using lockets that contain locks of hair of the deceased. Several members of my family had these. If they become lost or discarded with the passing of time, it is not the same thing as the entire remains of the deceased being discarded…which is a wholly different situation.
Peace. P. S. No old bones in MY house!
