A Visit From Old St. Nicholas… And One Hundred Fifty-Three Other Friends From Heaven
By JAMES MONTI
An aging school gymnasium is just about the last place one would expect to find Heaven on Earth. Yet for two hours one Friday evening earlier this month, that is precisely what the school gym of my own parish became, thanks to a visit from an all-star cast of heroes — a collection of more than 150 relics of saints and blesseds, over 150 tiny corporeal mementos of the greatest men and women to walk the face of the Earth since the time of their Divine Master, with four relics of His earthly sojourn heading the collection.
Over the autumn of 2021 and on through December, Fr. Carlos Martins of the Companions of the Cross has been traveling from one church to another in the Northeast with his amazing “Treasures of the Church” assemblage of authenticated relics. And he and his relics have been changing lives along the way. In the talk with which he begins his parish visits, Fr. Martins tells of two sudden miraculous cures wrought by this very collection of relics during the pilgrimage.
But Fr. Martins doesn’t confine his talk simply to explaining the relics themselves and the remarkable things these relics as instruments of heavenly intervention have wrought. He turns his presentation into a teaching moment, something his haloed friends in all the reliquaries would very much want him to do. He promises his large audiences that they will most definitely receive something special from God that very day if they will resolve to rid themselves of what he calls four “handcuffs” standing in the way.
These “handcuffs” are namely missing Mass on Sundays, neglecting to go to sacramental Confession, the deliberate omission of one or more mortal sins when confessing to a priest, and the refusal to forgive.
Fr. Martins’ mention of the last of the four above “handcuffs” gives him the opportunity to enter into a very inspiring digression concerning the saint who is particularly close to his heart, St. Maria Goretti. As many of our Wanderer readers may recall, Fr. Martins was also the host of a stunning pilgrimage tour of the body of St. Maria Goretti across much of the eastern and central U.S. back in 2015. I was deeply moved to hear yet again Fr. Martins’ gripping account of Maria’s martyrdom, her deathbed forgiveness of her murderer Alessandro Serenelli and Alessandro’s subsequent miraculous repentance and conversion years later.
Conversion is something Fr. Martins knows all about, not only from the many Confessions he has heard, but also from his own personal journey, for as he tells his audiences, he himself twenty-five years earlier had been an atheist.
Another highlight of Fr. Martins’ presentation came in the midst of explaining how authentic relics are sealed in their “theca” reliquary cases complemented by the issuance of an accompanying certificate of authenticity.
He told the remarkable story of the perfectly incorrupt body of St. Bernadette Soubirous — how when her body was exhumed it was found to be totally intact despite a burial in soil so damp that the metal of the rosary beads with which she had been buried had rotted to the point that the beads were scattered about in the soil.
A photo of how Bernadette looks now, like a beautiful maiden peacefully asleep, over 140 years after her death, elicited gasps of amazement from the audience.
Citizens Of Heaven
Recently the question was posed to me as to why the Church permits the bodies of the saints to be “taken apart,” as it were, in distributing everything from tiny particles of bone to entire limbs from a saint’s earthly remains. The answer I would give is that the canonized saints in a unique way belong not only to their families and close friends but to all the faithful of the universal Church across the ages. From the earliest “catacomb days” of the Church, Catholics have cherished visiting the mortal remains of those who have gone before them as a tangible means of communion with the citizens of Heaven.
Just as in the administration of the sacraments there are sensible signs that by the power of God efficaciously confer what they signify (water, oil, etc.), so too, it is quite fitting that God has made direct physical encounters with the remains of the saints a key means by which prayers invoking the saints’ intercession are answered. Extracting and distributing little “portions” of the saints gives the Church the ability to send a saint anywhere and everywhere he or she is needed, including the bedsides of the sick and the dying.
There is also an important liturgical reason for sharing a saint’s remains. At a very early date it became the practice of the Church to celebrate Mass over the tombs of those who had suffered and died for the faith, and subsequently also over the remains of those who even without martyrdom had lived a life of heroic holiness.
As the Church spread far and wide and the number of Christian altars multiplied into the thousands, there arose the necessity of giving the remains of a particular saint to more than one church or monastery for enclosure in the altars. It should also be borne in mind that often enough, whether due to the manner of a saint’s martyrdom or simply the passage of time, the body of a saint was already no longer “in one piece” by the time of the body’s exhumation.
The utterly incalculable number of miracles wrought by such “particles” of the saints attest to Heaven’s approval of this physical sharing of the saints’ remains.
Fr. Martins delivered his introductory presentation in our parish church. The actual viewing of the relics themselves would come afterward, across the parking lot, in the old school gymnasium, where the relics had been carefully set out on tables draped in blue, with eight relics to a table, each accompanied by a small placard featuring a picture and succinct biography of the saint or blessed.
The most precious relics of all were enshrined on two tables draped in gold-colored cloth. One of these tables held three relics of the Passion: a large cross-shaped relic of the True Cross, flanked by a fragment of the Holy Lance, to the left and a particle from the Crown of Thorns to the right. As I myself have long been particularly fascinated by the Holy Lance, I was deeply grateful to have this first-time opportunity to encounter and venerate in person an actual particle of this instrument of the Passion.
The second gold-cloth table offered a comparable first-time experience — a relic of the Queen of Heaven herself, a particle of fabric from a veil worn by the Blessed Virgin during her life on Earth. It brought to mind the quite sizable piece of our Lady’s clothing enshrined in Chartres Cathedral, something I have only seen in photographs. The tiny but incalculably precious particle of Mary’s veil in Fr. Martins’ collection gives those of us unable to travel to Chartres our closest possible physical encounter with the Mother of God. And for those of us who have made the consecration to our Lady taught by both St. Louis de Montfort and St. Maximilian Kolbe, coming before this relic affords a one-of-a-kind opportunity to renew our consecration in a very tangible manner.
Quite fittingly, the veil of the Blessed Virgin was flanked by a relic of her beloved and most chaste spouse St. Joseph to the left and a particle of the Crib of the Christ Child to the right, an especially timely relic to see with Christmas so near.
The rest of the auditorium became the scene for a happy hunt in search of favorite saints; for me, almost all my favorites were there — Saints Thomas More, Gemma Galgani, Patrick, Cecilia, Maximilian Kolbe, and Kateri Tekakwitha. So were five favorites of my late mother — Saints Anne, Augustine, Monica, Therese of Lisieux, and Josaphat. And yes, children young and old looking to ask something special from Santa Claus for Christmas could find him here too — St. Nicholas of Myra.
There were so many “old friends” to visit and spend quality time with on the tables that I didn’t make it to all the reliquaries I had hoped to venerate before the end of the evening. Among those I particularly regret missing were five of the North American martyrs, Saints Jean de Brebeuf, Gabriel Lalemont, Charles Garnier, Rene Goupil, and Jean de Lalande, plus the early bishop-martyr St. Ignatius of Antioch and our Lady’s martyred “knight,” St. Maximilian Kolbe.
Yet just knowing that for two hours I had been in the same room with all these heroes and many more from across two thousand years of Church history is in itself a great consolation and blessing.
Earlier that evening, in the church, Fr. Martins had had his “teaching moment.” These two hours in the gym were the “teaching moment” for the great cloud of witnesses Father had brought with him.
Five sainted successors of St. Peter were there: Saints Leo the Great, Pius V, Pius X, John XXIII, and John Paul II. And if in light of recent events you find it challenging to imagine what a truly heroic and courageous bishop might be like, there are quite a few of them in Fr. Martin’s collection: Saints Irenaeus, Athanasius, Thomas Beckett, Charles Borromeo, Francis de Sales, Alphonsus Liguori, and more.
A Christmas Gift
But perhaps most poignantly, there is something extremely powerful about being in the presence of so many martyrs at one time — a quick head count tallies over sixty in Fr. Martins’ collection, not counting the apostles.
At a time when there is so much worrisome talk insinuating that the Church ought to turn away from her past and enter into some sort of a compromising rapprochement with the spirit of the present age, these men and women of Heaven who chose to face horrifying and agonizing deaths rather than compromise their faith attest that for the Church there can be no other path than that of her Lord and Spouse — that of being a sign of contradiction, a prophetic voice that speaks truth to power, come what may.
During the veneration in the gym, a friend commented to me that this exposition was a “Christmas gift.” Indeed, it is. The hallowed presence of all these heroes of God comes as a bright sign of hope amid so much darkness, like the Star of Bethlehem. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).
(Those interested in learning more about the “Treasures of the Church” collection and how a parish can host a relics exposition can visit Fr. Martins’ website, www.treasuresofthechurch.com.)
