Relics in the Shrine of All Saints at St. Martha of Bethany Church in Morton Grove, Illinois

By Fr. Dennis B. O’Neill

A relic can be anything from the past that has survived to the present. In some branches of the Christian Church, relics are more specifically either the bodily remains of the saints or their clothing, items they used, things they touched or which were touched to their remains, or things associated with the life of
Christ or of his blessed mother. Throughout history, many people have venerated holy relics because the saints bodies were temples of the Holy Spirit, through which each of them, in their own individual ways, channeled the presence of Christ to their contemporaries. In the early Christian era and in the Middle Ages, people believed that the aura and the energy of the saints continued to exude from their remains, even after their deaths. Just as people who knew the saints personally during their lifetimes often experienced them as radiating Christs presence through the many ways they were a blessing to others, so honoring their remains and their images were considered valid ways of honoring them and of imploring their assistance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Aug 27, 2015
• ISBN: 9781490763163

Fr. Dennis B. O’Neill

Dennis O’Neill was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1947. He received his education in the seminary system of the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago and was ordained a priest in 1973. He graduated with a Bachelors Degree in English Literature from Loyola Universtiy in 1969 and a Masters of Divinity from St. Mary of the Lake Seminary, Mundelein, Illinois, in 1973. In 1974, he received an S.T.B and an S.T.L. from St. Mary of the Lake Seminary. Since ordination, he has served in four parishes in Chicago and is currently pastor of St. Martha Parish, in Morton Grove, Illinois. He is author of Lazarus Interlude: A Story of God’s Love in a Moment of Ministry (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 1982). And he has written either the introductions of the texts for several books published by British Celtic Artist, Courtney Davis: the Introduction to Celtic Illumination: the Irish School New York: Thames & Hudson, 1998); co-authored St. Patrick: A Visual Celebration (London: Blandford, 1999); and Celtic Beasts (London: Blandford, 1999), authored 101 Celtic Crosses (Newton Abbot, Devon: David & Charles, 2004), and Passionate Holiness (Trafford Publishing in 2005 and Second Edition in 2010).

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© Copyright 2015 Dennis B. O’Neill.

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ISBN: 978-1-4907-6317-0 (sc)

              978-1-4907-6316-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015911477

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CONTENTS

 I. About Relics

 II. Relics Of The Virgin Mary

 III. Relic Theft

 IV. France – Nuns Who Protected Relics

 V. Belgium – Holland – Monks Who Protected Relics

 VI. Why And How Have These Major Relics Become Available To St. Martha Church?

 VII. Italy – Closed Palace Chapels

 VIII. The Reformation

 IX. Great Britain And Ireland

 X. The Incorrupt Tongue Of St. John Nepomucene

 XI. What We Can Learn From False Relics

 XII. A Brief Walk Through St. Martha Shrine Of All Saints

 Endnotes

 Bibliography

This book is dedicated to the staff and parishioners of St. Martha, whose graciousness and welcoming attitude channel the hospitality of St. Martha herself, with special thanks to Archbishop Blase Cupich, Bishop Francis Kane, Father Ronald Kalas, Father Michael Bradley, Franco D’Ambrosio, Rien Van Zeeland, Jim Gregory, Dorothy Noel, Steve Steyer, who fashioned many of our reliquaries, Pat McKenna, who did the electrical work, and Brian Kabat, who took all the photos and Kevin Wood, for the music.

I guess I’ve never really seen the appeal of a few acres of stone, marble, and hidden-away bones.

Fair point, Garcia said. He angled them down a narrower path. Most come here to see more than that, though. To them, this place holds not just the mortal remains of people they love and admire, but their spirits. A place where so many gifted people, so many… he waved his hands as he sought the right word. "So many geniuses lie sleeping. It’s as if death could not possibly destroy all they have to offer, as if a reduction to mere bones in a tomb is impossible."

So the ghosts of the famous roam these little streets at night? Hugo tried not to sound mocking.

"Non, mon ami, I don’t mean ghosts. I mean the essence of these people, all who are gathered here, can exert a powerful influence on those who visit. Ask yourself, why else would so many come? As you point out, there is nothing to see, just stone graves. So perhaps they come to feel."

About the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris

The Crypt Thief, by Mark Pryor

This book is about the joining of heaven and earth, and the role, in this joining, of dead human beings.

Opening sentence of The Cult of the Saints,

By Peter Brown

 I

ABOUT RELICS

A relic can be anything from the past that has survived to the present. In some branches of the Christian Church, relics are more specifically either the bodily remains of the saints, or their clothing, items they used, things they touched or which were touched to their remains, or things associated with the life of Christ or of his Blessed Mother. Throughout history, many people have venerated holy relics, because the saints’ bodies were temples of the Holy Spirit, through which each of them, in their own individual ways, channeled the presence of Christ to their contemporaries. In the early Christian era and in the Middle Ages, people believed that the aura and the energy of the saints continued to exude from their remains, even after their deaths. Just as people who knew the saints personally during their lifetimes often experienced them as radiating Christ’s Presence through the many ways they were a blessing to others, so honoring their remains and their images were considered valid ways of honoring them and of imploring their assistance.

Considering that Jesus, his Mother, and his Apostles were all Jews and that, in his day, the mere touching of a dead body rendered one ritually unclean and unable to approach the Temple – and considering that they expected people to be buried by sundown on the day of death and left in sealed graves, how is it that the early Christians began to divide and to venerate bodily remains? For a short while, from the later first century until sometime in the second century, Jewish custom shifted a bit. Some wealthier Jews began exhuming the dead a few years after burial and placing their bones in special boxes called ossuaries. But there is little evidence that this had much impact on Christian customs. It seems rather that, with the Incarnation of Jesus and the realization that Jesus is truly God incarnate – the face of Jesus being the actual face of God – and with the growing Christian understanding that the Church is the mystical Body of Christ, rendering Christ present through the ages – both in the Eucharist and in the saints - Christians regarded each other as temples of the Holy Spirit and genuine channels of Christ to contemporaries. They revered the remains of their dead in a way which made it apparent that the remains were still somehow channels of divine life.

Why would God do such a messy thing as incarnating in the Person of Jesus? Divine Empathy is a big part of the answer. There is a difference between sympathy and empathy. A man may be able to sympathize with the pain a woman undergoes giving birth to a child, but he will never be able to empathize, because he will never go through the experience himself. With deep gratitude, Christianity revels in the fact that God loves humankind so very much that it was not enough for God to sympathize with the messy, frustrating, painful, often tortuous, sometimes violent, glorious, joyous hope-filled, deeply rewarding human struggle to get it right about living and about loving. God wanted to empathize. And the only way to do that was to become one of us and personally to go through the whole messy human process, even to the point of experiencing the violent death of an innocent Person. No matter how low life can get at times, no one can say that God doesn’t get it. God’s Incarnation in Jesus rendered all of creation sacred. So it was considered a blessed act to cherish reminders of the many people and the places in whom and through which Incarnate God manifested to humankind. It was also, therefore, not only permissible but absolutely encouraged to attempt to depict Christ, Our Lady, and the other saints in icons, frescoes, and mosaics and to venerate their relics. Through fashioning representations of the Incarnate Christ, it was possible now even to visualize and to depict God.

The Incarnation continues throughout all of human history. St. Paul writes both about the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist and about all Christians together being the Body of Christ, from generation to generation. The great gift the Church continues to give the world is the real, tangible, consumable, transforming Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. And we are what we eat. We too become the tangible Presence of Christ to the world. So our bodies are sacred – most especially the bodies of the saints – those who got it so right about living and about loving – those who beautifully channeled Christ to their contemporaries.

One of the Apostolic Fathers of the Church perfectly understood the parallel and intimate relationship between the Eucharist and the bodies of the humans who constitute the Body of Christ on earth. St. Ignatius was the third bishop of Antioch, after St. Peter and St. Babylas. As a young man, he actually knew John the Evangelist, who spent his last years in Ephesus. And he carried the Johannine style and tradition in his writings. In the year 107, the Emperor Trajan visited Antioch and forced the Christians there to choose between death and apostasy. Ignatius refused to deny Christ; so he was condemned to die in Rome. During his journey to Rome, he wrote seven epistles. In his letter to the Romans, he wrote this, when he heard that there was a plot afoot to stop his martyrdom:

The only thing I ask of you is to allow me to offer the libation of my blood to God. I am the wheat of the Lord, may I be ground by the teeth of the beasts to become the immaculate bread of Christ. ¹

Only one of Ignatius’ seven epistles was addressed to an individual – his young disciple, Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna. The first recorded full account of a trial and martyrdom is that of the same Polycarp, who was burned at the stake in the year 156 in the amphitheatre in Smyrna (now Izmir). Through a letter written in 156 from the Church of Smyrna to the Church of Philomelium in Greater Phrygia, we possess a detailed account of Polycarp’s heroic martyrdom which occurred probably February 22, 156. The author also recalls that

We afterwards took up his remains, more precious than costly stones, and more excellent than gold, and interred them in a decent place. There the Lord will permit us, as far as possible, to assemble in rapturous joy and celebrate his martyrdom – the day of his birth! (18:2)²

The anniversaries of martyrs’ deaths were among the first holy days celebrated by Christian communities.

The greatest of Polycarp’s students was Irenaeus, who became bishop of Lyons, France, and was the most important of the theologians of the second century. His home was in Asia Minor, probably Smyrna. In his Ecclesiastical History (5,20,5-7), Eusebius of Caesarea quoted a letter Irenaeus sent to the Roman presbyter Florinus:

For when I was a boy, I knew you (Florinus) in lower Asia, in Polycarp’s house, when you were a man of rank in the royal hall, and endeavoring to stand well with him. I remember the events of those days more clearly than those which happened recently, for what we learn as children grows up with the soul and is united to it, so that I can speak even of the place in which the blessed Polycarp sat and disputed, how he came in and went out, the character of his life, the appearance of his body, the discourses which he made to the people, how he reported his intercourse with John and with the others who had seen the Lord, how he remembered their words, and what were the things concerning the Lord which he had heard from them, and about their miracles, and about their teachings, and how Polycarp had received them from the eye-witnesses of the word of Life, and reported all things in agreement with the Scriptures. I listened eagerly even then to these things through the mercy of God which was given me, and made notes of them, not on paper, but in my heart, and ever by the grace of God do I truly ruminate on them.³

Irenaeus was so convinced of the Real Presence of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist, the he derived the resurrection of the human body from the fact that the body has been nourished by the eternally alive Body and Blood of the Lord. He wrote about it extensively in his five volume Adversus Haereses. Irenaeus was the last in a chain of witnesses who were raised on the teachings of John the Evangelist. His love of the Incarnate Savior and his appreciation of God’s unconditional love for humankind led him to declare that

The Glory of God is a human person fully alive: moreover a person’s life is the vision of God: if God’s revelation through creation has already obtained life for all the beings that dwell on earth, how much more will the Word’s manifestation of the Father obtain life for those who see God. ⁴

It is unknown when Irenaeus died. It was some time after the year 200. There are substantial relics of Ignatius of Antioch, Polycarp, and Irenaeus in the St. Martha Church.

These Fathers of the Church lived and died during the period of persecution, which extended from the Emperor Nero’s blaming of the Christians for the burning of a good portion of the city of Rome in 64 A.D. (something for which he himself was responsible) to the Edict of Milan, issued by the Emperor Constantine I in the year 313. This is the period which produced most of the great, universally revered martyrs of the Church. In the city of Rome, most of them were buried in the catacombs. St. Peter was buried in the cemetery on Vatican hill, and St. Paul was buried outside the city walls.

A significant development in the middle of the third century, which, at the time of the Reformation, would be related to the veneration of relics, was the practice of issuing indulgences. In the first place, indulgences were living Christians obtaining reprieve of the punishment decreed for also living fellow Christians. It had nothing to do with the dead. The reason the custom began is this.

Persecution was not something that went on continually. It depended upon who was sitting on the Imperial throne and upon the whim of local authorities throughout the Roman Empire. Persecutions flared up periodically. When they did flare up, they were often severe and produced a lot of suffering and death. The martyrs were the men and women who bore heroic witness to their faith by giving their lives for Christ. Many others were imprisoned and tortured. But they were not the majority of Christians. Many others either hid successfully, or pretended they had denied Christ, or persuaded officials to give them tokens of verification that they had denied Christ or even, actually offered public sacrifice to the pagan gods and goddesses. When the persecutions toned down, many of these people regretted what they had done and begged their bishops to forgive them and reconcile them to the Church. This occasioned the problem of what impact quick reconciliation would have on the other fellow Christians who had been faithful had often suffered greatly either from the loss of property or of loved ones, from torture, and from spending time in prison. They were likely to resent the dispensing of cheap, easy grace to the guilty. Also there was the question of how sincere the regret was in the hearts of the penitents. So the bishop imposed upon them severe public penances, which could go on for years, or, in some places, for the duration of their lives. These penitents would fast for years and kneel outside the churches, begging fellow Christians to pray for them. Eventually, by their manifestly sincere regret, some of these penitents had made it clear to everyone that they were truly, deeply sorry. Then, sometimes, a Christian who was known to have personally suffered or to have lost loved ones during the persecutions would write a letter to the bishop, begging him to lift the penance and restore a particular penitent to the community of the faithful. The bishop would then read the letter to all present during the liturgy and announce that, for the sake of the heroism of the writer of the letter, he would remit the sentence of the penitent. This letter brought about the indulgence (i.e. the remitted sentence).

The earliest recorded intentional quest for holy relics – indeed the first archaeological dig in recorded history - involved the search for and recovery of the True Cross of Christ and of other relics associated with His Passion and death. Eusebius of Caesarea, in his Life of Constantine, describes how the site of the Holy Sepulchre, originally a place of veneration for the Christian community in Jerusalem, had been covered with earth, and a temple of Venus had been built on the top. Although Eusebius does not say so, this was probably done as part of Hadrian’s reconstruction of Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina in 135, following the destruction during the Jewish Revolt of 70 and Bar Kokhba’s revolt of 132-35. After ending the persecutions of the Church, in about 325-26, Emperor Constantine ordered that the site be uncovered and instructed Saint Macarius, Bishop of Jerusalem, to build a church on the site. Eusebius does not mention the finding of the True Cross. However Socrates Scholasticus (born c. 380), in his Ecclesiastical History does tell the full story, which was repeated by later historians Sozomen and Theodoret. It was St. Helena, Constantine’s mother, who had the temple of Venus destroyed and the Holy Sepulchre uncovered, whereupon three crosses and the titulus (sign board) from Jesus’ crucifixion were uncovered as well. Socrates mentions that Macarius had the three crosses placed in turn on a deathly ill woman. She recovered at the touch of the third