Becoming Relics – The Catholic Thing

As you surely know, not least because it has been mentioned repeatedly in these pages, the bishops of the United States, in preparation of the celebration for the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence have consecrated the entire nation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

No doubt you also know, faithful readers of The Catholic Thing, that the image of the Sacred Heart was revealed by Jesus himself to a 17^th-century French nun named Margaret Mary Alacoque. If you didn’t know this before, you probably learned it just yesterday from Msgr. Charles Fink’s wonderful reflection on how holy images, including the Sacred Heart, can captivate the imagination and so move us toward greater devotion.

What you may not know, but should know, is this: the major relics of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, the Apostle of the Sacred Heart, are coming to our nation’s capital just in time for the Fourth of July. They will be available for public veneration at the Saint John Paul II National Shrine in Washington, DC, from June 29^th through July 4^th.

I mention this for several reasons.

First, I mention this because I work at the Shrine and I would like very much for everyone who is able to come venerate these relics. But I also mention it because, as Msgr. Fink observed in regard to holy images yesterday, I believe Catholic veneration of relics offers a path to deeper devotion. Venerating the holy bodies of the saints is a powerful antidote to the Gnosticism of our disembodied age.

Relics are a powerful reminder that we are all, as it were, in the same story.

Any ancient artifact can, on a natural level, remind us that we are all carried along in the same stream of time: you, me, George Washington, Cleopatra, and Nebuchadnezzar. We can throw in the mastodons and the dinosaurs while we’re at it. But saintly relics are more than mementos, more than fossils or museum pieces – as fascinating as those objects may be. 

Relics remind us both of the fact of our mortality and of precious exemplars of holiness and devotion. And they remind us of the promise of resurrection.

Relics remind us that the working of grace is neither sporadic nor sparse, but suffuses all of human experience across time and space. Relics remind us that we are bound together in the same great drama which has been unfolding, under God’s providence, through all of history. In this way, holy relics of the saints make present to us those who share our same mortal fate and immortal destiny.

Above all, relics are sacramentals, which is to say they are not merely reminders of something interesting or moving; they bring about spiritual effects in imitation of the sacraments themselves. 

Yes, there is something slightly weird, a little macabre, and even, dare I say, Gothic about our Catholic relics (as a recent visit to the Capuchin “bone church” in Rome reminded me). It’s also the sort of thing we who claim to believe in the reality of the Incarnation ought to do. And it’s precisely the sort of thing that we, who profess to “look forward to the resurrection of the dead” ought to do!

The saints, of course, are not disembodied abstractions or ideas. They are neither angels nor mere memories. Saints were flesh and blood and bone – just as God himself was in Jesus Christ. They were real people who lived and died in concrete times and places. Moreover, the saints, God’s holy ones, are very much alive in Christ for, as our Lord himself insisted, “He is not the God of the dead but of the living.”

This is why the veneration of relics is such a good thing. The bodies of the saints are the bodies of those who are united in Christ, who have died in Christ and who will rise in Christ. The saints, in their earthly lives, brought God’s love into the world through their bodies. And they continue to be instruments of God’s grace now that those saints have been raised to eternal life.

As Jesus said to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, His work is carried on through His servants, His love is spread by means of us:

My Divine Heart is so inflamed with love for men, and for you in particular that, being unable any longer to contain within Itself the flames of Its burning Charity, It must needs spread them abroad by your means, and manifest Itself to them in order to enrich them with the precious graces of sanctification and salvation necessary to withdraw them from the abyss of perdition.

Each of us is called to be such a conduit of God’s grace and love, to spread them abroad by our means. That is what it means to be a disciple. That is what it means to be a Christian. And, done faithfully to the end, that is what it means to become a saint.

You might even say that we should all aspire to become relics: to live this life so conformed to our Lord that, once we pass to the next life, our mortal remains are still occasions for the outpouring of God’s blessings and grace. 

If you can, visit the relics of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. Venerate them. And pray, through her intercession, for this great nation of ours.

The relics of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque (which are traveling under the custody of the Knights of Columbus) are currently available for veneration (June 24-June 27) at the Blessed Michael McGivney Pilgrimage Center in New Haven, CT. After their visit to the Saint John Paul II National Shrine in Washington (June 29-July 4), the relics will travel to Baltimore’s Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary (July 5-6) before returning to New Haven, where they will again be available for veneration until July 18.