Is there a list anywhere of what holy relics in Catholicism there are and where they are housed? Are there any in the United States? And finally what does it take to have an object declared a holy relic?
I’ve heard that every Catholic church in the world must have a holy relic. Usually it’s something very minor, like some unknown saint’s jawbone.
Every Catholic Church does not have a relic. There are a lot of Catholic Churches and there aren’t that many pieces of the True Cross to go around.
The church I attended growing up didn’t have a relic of any kind. I was an altar boy and I got to look all around that church. No relics.
Catholic churches do need to have things like altars and tabernacles and crucifixes, but no relics AFAIK.
Yes, they all need to have relics. The relic is usually a tiny chip of bone or cloth from a saint, and it’s usually sealed in a glass disk embedded in the alter.
I’m not sure if it was a line of bull, but I went to a Catholic grade school in a medium sized town in Wisconsin and at some point in time one of the priests took us on a behind the scenes tour of the church next door. Just your average Catholic parish church, hardly the nicest or biggest in the area. As I recall, and my memory might be wrong, we were told that there was a hidden compartment in the altar that held a sliver of the “True Cross”.
Not sure if this was just a line to put the fear of God in us impressionable 8 or 9 year olds. I never heard of it being mentioned again.
You only need a relic in fixed altars, not portable ones- yes there are portable ones.
As for a list of all the relics, that would be REALLY hard because there are probably millions (billions?) in the world.
First Class Relics- a part of the saint’s body.
Second Class Relics- An item worn or used by the saint.
Third Class Relics- An item touched to a first class relic.
Well I’ll be damned on this one. (And it may be literal, not figurative dealing with this subject matter.)
I went and consulted my Catholic Encyclopedia and it didn’t say anything about it being a requirement, but it had a picture of a small reliquary with its certificate of authenticity before it was embedded in the mensa of the altar.
Hmm… I guess I should have paid more attention when the pastor pointed out the RELIQUARY to me.
[sound of head hitting desk repeatedly.]
That is just plain sick. Remains of dead people are now kept in churches as relics? How can someone pray peacefully while having Saint John’s dick staring them in the face? I guess bodily emanations count as relics too. Vomits, fart, saliva, semen, urine are to be eternally treasured if they were spontaneously secreted by a holy person’s corporeal manifestation. Oh, boy. What will they come up with next? :rolleyes:
Well, at least one can’t blame the Catholic Church for being unoriginal. I personally would have never thought of publicly displaying some dude’s balls at a place of worship. They display balls, don’t they? After all, testicles are a fundamental part of a man’s anatomy.
BTW, how did they get such “relics”? Did they go on a corpse-desecrating rampage from cemetery to cemetery to obtain those preciously coveted relics?
Sick, sick, sick!
Note that that’s from 1913 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia; I suppose it’s possible that the post-Vatican II Church has changed the rules or something.
IIRC, one cathedral in the middle ages had the foreskin of Jesus. It was proud of it too.
Third class relics? An item touched to a first class relic?
Reminds me of what the Irish did during one of their famines. They could not afford meat and survived off of potatoes, but many families kept a jar of potted meat or fish on the table and when they would take a bite of spud on their fork, they would wave it at or touch the jar to get the ‘essence’ of the meat or fish to flavor the food.
There is a Nun somewhere who has a massive collection of relics at her church obtained, apparently, from other churches which were torn down. They showed her on television, during one of those gruesome documentaries about death, in the one where they have this church somewhere decorated with hundreds of thousands of human bones from the once over crowded catacombs below. (I found it repugnant myself. Everyone in the documentary called it a great work of art.) Apparently the artist mysteriously appeared on the doorstep when the priests were trying to determine to do with all of the human garbage they had accumulated, and proceeded to weave it into an LSD users dream version of art. They, he mysteriously vanished, taking no pay for his work.
The Nun has several hundred of those little glass things, some really ornamented and some plain. I wonder why they did not recycle them instead of chopping up parts of saints for new churches?
I don’t even like the Mummy Museum in Mexico!
beleive it or not- you can go to eBay right now, and bid on dozens of relics- mostly of the 3rd class (eBay will not let someone sell a 1st class relic- altho you can sell the reliquary, and throw in the relic for free). 3rd class relics are no big deal.
Quoth quasar:
Two issues here: First of all, the relics are seldom on display. Most typically, they’re completely surrounded by stone in the top of the altar. Secondly, they’re almost always bone, not soft tissue, for the simple reason that most saints have been dead a long time (The most recent canonization, Sister Drexel, died in the 30s, I believe). Although there are examples of saint’s bodies which (supposedly) have remained miraculously intact and free of decay, they’re rare and far between. Bodily secretions probably would be considered relics, but you’re not likely to find them, as nobody would have though to save them at the time. And, of course, there are a great many hoaxed relics around, too: I beleive there have been several thousand claimed Foreskins of Jesus, for example.
Excuse my hijack, but isn’t this Roman Catholic reverence of “holy relics” and “holy icons” a breach of one of the Ten Commandments? Specifically, the bit that forbids bowing down to graven images, or idols or false gods etc.
Tomanddeb caould say this better than I, and I hoope he comes along nd does so, but i will give it a shot.
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Christianity, especially medieval christianity, is not a dualist religion–“In the begining, God created the heavan and the earth”; "In the begining there was the Word [Spirit] and the word [spirit] became flesh. The material world is sacred in christianity. This is in rather sharp contrast with the other mystery religions that prospered in the middle east around the first century: most other mystery religions professed the belief that the material was evil, and that salvation lay in the spirit. Chrisitanity held that in the end the world–this world–would be restored, not magically elevated into pure spirit. Thus, the material remains of holy people are holy–the flesh as well as the soul enjoys a particularly close relationship of god. Christianity has had a tendency to backslide into dualism (manacheism) from the beginning. To theologians, the veneration of relics served as an important reminder of the holiness of the flesh.
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I am not going to discuss the “vereration of saints is Idolatry/false gods” issue. It’s been done here upteen times, though not recently. Others here can explain it better than I, if they care to try.
Not to mention, that after JC died on the Cross, Christians had a “new covenant” which did not include the 10 C, per se.
According to a story about relics, I found in a newspaper article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, relics haven’t been a requirement in permanent altars since the 1960s and when used, they are supposed to be recognizable as some sort of body part.
The adoration of relics has been the subject of debate in the Catholic Church for a very long time. If you find a copy of the Catholic Encyclopedia you can read about it in great detail.
Let me clarify. When I said that a first class relic was a part of the saint’s body, I wasn’t referring to a preserved finger in a jar, or anything. It’s usually a sliver of bone, or even sometimes a bit of dried blood. YUCK!
As for the graven images argument, I was told by a devout catholic that it wasn’t any different from keeping something belonging to a close relative who had died out of sentiment. I’m not sure I agree with that, but I think it’s how the catholics skirt the idolotry issue.
You need to read a science fiction book called ‘Coventry,’ written by Heinlein or Clarke. (It’s been years.) The whole story is based around a warped view of the Catholic Church, though the Church is not mentioned in it. The author had a real good grasp of the Church and if he was Catholic, he certainly was excommunicated after it came out.
I wonder who it was who decided in the first place to start hacking up old bodies of Saints and passing the pieces out? It seems that so many of these things are generated by humans who are ‘inspired’ and in a power position. They write and interpret the inscriptions. The scriptures of the time sure seem to follow the morals, traditions, social order, and general beliefs of the then current society in many areas.
Someone once told me that there actually were more than the 10 Commandments God etched into the Tablets. Apparently over a hundred more, ‘interpreted’ by men who were ‘inspired’ later.
Still, who would have been warped enough to decide to start ripping apart corpses to use as holy symbols?
I don’t know if any other religion does that, but I’m not sure.
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IIRC, one cathedral in the middle ages had the foreskin of Jesus. It was proud of it too. **
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…yea’, I heard that they eventually made it into a wallet,
once a year they rub it… and it turns into a suitcase
:eek: