By JAMES MONTI
On June 25 I drove down to Philadelphia to meet two great men. The fact that they have been dead for almost five centuries did not dissuade me. For in Philadelphia’s Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul that evening, the English martyrs St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More were having a “meet and greet” of sorts — their relics, a bone fragment and tooth of More and a signet ring of Bishop Fisher, had arrived for the veneration of the faithful.
The turnout was not on the epic scale that was witnessed in so many places last year when the body of St. Maria Goretti was brought to America for a pilgrimage tour, but those who came this time were making the most of the occasion.
On the part of the waiting line where I was, there was a cluster of families with infants and young children. One mother when her turn came carefully touched her baby’s forehead to each of the martyrs’ reliquaries, much to the delight of the rest of us there to witness it.
Just a day later, Bishop Fisher and Thomas More arrived in St. Paul, Minn., where so many turned out to venerate their relics in the city’s cathedral that some were in line for an hour before getting their turn to “have a word” with the two martyrs.
A short time earlier, the relics had made a stopover at the Holy Family Residence, a home for the elderly administered and staffed by the Little Sisters of the Poor, the nuns whose modern-day battle for religious freedom has become a rallying cry for Catholics across the United States. Thomas More had been a loving caregiver to his aged father; how very fitting, then, that he and St. John Fisher should be brought to a facility where senior citizens are treated with so much love and respect.
Over the past year our country has been blessed with a succession of “relic tours,” opportunities to meet saints through their relics. In addition to those mentioned above, Saints Anthony of Padua, John Vianney, Charbel, and Faustina Kowalska have recently made their rounds in the U.S. After several decades that saw the images and relics of saints being exiled from all too many of our churches, the saints by the Providence of God are waging a very successful comeback.
Unlike certain Protestant denominations that would have us believe that the souls of those who have gone before us are in some sort of stupefying coma until the end of the world, deaf, dumb, and blind to the needs and troubles of Christians here on earth, we as Catholics know that the saints and citizens of Heaven are very much interested in our lives. They stand ready and anxious to help. And no long bound by the constraints of time on earth, they have “all the time in the world” to listen to our troubles and speak to God about them on our behalf.
The “particulars” of a saint’s relics often have a lot to say to us. The fact that in the case of the Franciscan priest St. Anthony of Padua it was his tongue and his vocal cords that have remained incorrupt serve to remind us of just what an amazing instrument the voice of a priest is in the hands of God. For not only does that voice liturgically proclaim and explain the Gospel to us, but it also brings Christ down upon the altar with the words of consecration.
At the outset of our lives it is usually by the voice of a priest that our journey as a Catholic begins as he pours the water of Baptism over us. It is the voice of a priest that absolves us from our sins in the confessional. And when death nears, it is the voice of a priest that will prepare us to see God face to face.
In May the incorruptible heart of St. John Vianney was at a church not far from me for three days of veneration. A little reflection upon just what made the heart of the Curé of Ars so extraordinary can teach us volumes about the spiritual life. For his was a humble heart, a chaste heart, a heart burning with love for God and men, a heart consumed with zeal for the salvation of souls — little wonder, then, that God would “immortalize” it with incorruption. It’s the sort of heart we all need to have and ask God for.
How appropriate it is that we should have in St. Thomas More’s reliquary a bit of his jawbone and one of his teeth. A friend of his, Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall, in urging him to undertake his great apostolate of Catholic apologetic writing, had hailed him as a champion of Catholic truth possessing the eloquence of Demosthenes. That eloquence rose to the fore when on July 1, 1535 More uttered his passionate defense of the Church, papal primacy, and the inviolable sanctity of marriage at his trial in Westminster Hall.
St. John Fisher’s signet ring, bearing the likeness of the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, attests to how he as well as More had employed their rich Christian humanist scholarship in the service of the Church. More important, it reminds us of the ring Fisher had received at his episcopal consecration, by which he was wedded to the Church and to his See of Rochester.
In the end he was to die for his bride, asking a servant to bring him his best suit of clothes to wear at his execution, for as he explained, “Dost thou not mark that this is our marriage day?”
Friendship With The Saints
Having noticed both similarities and differences in the various ceremonies that have been used from place to place to welcome and honor the relics that have been touring the U.S. in recent months, I decided to see whether there are specific rubrics for the veneration of relics.
The Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy (Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments, 2001, n. 237) simply mentions as suitable practices the customs of kissing relics, carrying them in procession, and placing lights and flowers around them.
The 1614 Rituale Romanum provides only a brief instruction on relic processions, stating that the priests and ministers in the procession should vest in white or red depending upon the particular saint’s identity (red for a martyr, white for a virgin, etc.), and that there should be lit candles in the procession, with the singing of the Te Deum laudamus, Psalm 148, and other chants suited for the occasion. As for the decoration of the church, the Rituale simply says that the church should be “fittingly adorned.”
A January 1701 decree of the Sacred Congregation of Rites (n. 2067 ad 9) adds that there are to be at least two lights kept burning during the exposition of a relic at the altar.
While neither the current liturgical books of the Ordinary Form nor those of the Extraordinary Form provide any detailed set of instructions as to how specifically relics “visiting” a church are to be received and venerated, it is clear that the ceremonies being employed for this purpose are loosely based upon the instructions for the arrival of relics for the altar in the rite of consecration of a new church in the 1977 edition of the Pontificale Romanum for the Ordinary Form and the 1961-1962 edition of the 1595-1596 Pontificale Romanum for the Extraordinary Form.
Both forms of the rite specify the keeping of a vigil beside the relics in the place where they await transfer into the church, with the recitation of portions of the Divine Office from the liturgical feast of the saint or saints whose relics are present. The older pontifical suggests that for the vigil the relics can be placed upon a decorated bier, with two lit candlesticks beside it, within a tent before the doors of the new church. The 1977 rite speaks of flowers and lights beside the reliquary in the place from which it is to be transferred.
When in the course of the church consecration rite the next day the time comes for the transfer of the relics to the altar, a procession is formed. In the 1977 rite, the bearers of the reliquary can be deacons vested in dalmatics, stoles and albs, or priests with chasubles, or other ministers of the altar vested in albs.
In the Extraordinary Form of the rite, the relics are carried in a procession led by a cross-bearer and two candle-bearers, followed by the clergy singing antiphons along the way. These are followed by the bier with the reliquary, borne by priests, with a thurifer continuously incensing the reliquary and with torch-bearers immediately preceding the bier. The bishop and his ministers follow behind the bier. Behind them, the faithful follow. At the end of the procession, the reliquary is set down, with lit candles round about it, near the altar.
In their humility the saints shunned any notice while they were alive. But now that they are in Heaven, they crave our attention, because they’re so very eager to bestow their friendship upon us. They see God now, and they want us to see Him too. They have learned how to get to Heaven, and so they want to show us the way there. Relics provide a very tangible way for us to experience their friendship.
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