Catholic Contradiction

I’ll start this post with a disclaimer. It’s about relics- a Catholic practice you might call bizarre, freaky, ghastly or even grotesque. If that makes you squeamish, please just click onto the next post.

Relics are the mortal remains of a saint or more broadly, objects that were in direct contact with a saint. Catholics venerate relics and I grew up aware that there was a relic in the altar of every Catholic church. I think I also learned that the relic might be from the saint after whom the Church was named. I never really gave much thought to the little box with a bone or a piece of cloth buried in the marble of the altar.

Not so the relics in churches I have visited over the last few weeks. Here the relics are not hidden and out of sight. Quite the opposite- they are exposed and venerated by hoardes of the faithful or just gawked at by tourists with morbid curiousity.

Siena, the home of St. Catherine, a 14th century mystic who is patrion saint of Europe, may have the most well known relics. Encased in a glass dome at the Basilica of San Domenico is one of her fingers, a dainty pointer wih a nail. Nearby, over an altar is her mummified, severed head, framed in a silver veil, enshrined in an ornate case. I recently read that a piece of her shoulder blade is also somewhere in this church, her left foot is in a church in Venice and a rib is in Belgium. I spared you the photos but you can easily find them if you Google her.

In Padua, at the Basilica of St. Anthony (“St. Anthony, please come around, something’s lost and can’t be found”), there was the largest exposition of relics I have ever seen. A curving marble staircase winds up toward a wall of glass behind which was a dazzling collection of dozens of golden reliquaries. Of central prominence were those with relics of St. Anthony. His “incorrupt” tongue, his lower jaw and cartilage from his larynx, are displayed and labeled. All these are treasured because of his gift as a preacher. FYI, I also saw a sign as I walked past identifying a piece of his skin.

Then in another church Mary and I visited, there was an arm. Just an arm. It was the right arm of St James the Lesser if I remember correctly. I wish I could tell you where that was but I honestly don’t recall and can’t find it. I think the shock of seeing a suspended arm blocked out everything else.

Though I won’t be seeking out more relics, I have no doubt I’ll continue to encounter them. They hold special meaning for Catholics and many miracles are attributed to the intersession of the saints whose relics are venerated.

I don’t question the faith behind those beliefs. I just puzzle over what seems a strange contradiction. The Catholic Church has a long standing practice of dismembering saints to obtain relics yet had a strong prohibition against dissection of the human body for many years. Wasn’t distributing human relics a form of dissection and even desecration of the body?

While Popes were dividing up body parts to distribute to pious congregations, Michelangelo and DaVinci sought cadavers to understand human anatomy. Their efforts were surreptitious for fear of condemnation by the Church. Ironically, a well informed guide told us that there were friars at the Church of Santo Spirito in Florence who secretly allowed Micelangelo access to corpses, in flagrant disobedience to Church teaching. It seems they valued science and art as well as their religious dogma.

This is just my musing about the human condition and how religion has long been used to condone activities prohibited under other circumstances. It’s just interesting to note that activities conducted and condoned by the Church for religious purposes were allowed whereas science was mistrusted. After all, remember what the Church did to Galileo?