Joan of Arc’s “relics” turn out to be Egyptian mummies (including a cat)!
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I’d say the whole relic thing period is one for the “really weird” book.
You don’t visit your mother’s grave, PE?
Assuming she isn’t with us anymore, of course. No harm meant.
She isn’t and no harm taken and no I don’t it’s hundreds of miles away.
But even if she were buried in the back yard, I for damn sure would not put a left great toe in a box for veneration or stick some hair or bone chip in the altar at church about them!
Yes, but there are people who do keep their loved one’s ashes with them, on the mantle shelf, for eg.
Cremation being one of the many things once condemned by the Catholic Church and now allowed, but of course nothing has changed, the Catholic Church, the Catholic Church, the Catholic Church!
Leaving aside the usual broken record…
The Church is to be commended for checking these relics out, and for withdrawing them from veneration now they’re shown to be fakes.
Something similar happened in Rome back in the 1930’s – relics purporting to be of the Maccabeean martyrs were withdrawn from veneration when pioneering scientific tests found they were animal bones.
(And of course, Scripture itself teaches the power that God is pleased to manifest through the agency of the bones of the saints – a dead man thrown into a well holding the bones of the prophet Elisha sprang back to life.)
When the Church was flooded with relics back during the Crusades, the Medieval popes made an heroic effort to police them and require certification, and to forbid their trade. All to no avail, of course. One can see the an example in Elector Frederick the Wise’s collection at Wittenburg which so got under Luther’s goat.
The church would be to be commended it it would stop putting body parts of saints out for macabre devotions, and allow them a Christian burial.
The veneration of the bodies of the saints is a witness to the sanctifying power of Christ, who sanctifies not only souls but material bodies also. Christian burial is a witness to this. SO is the veneration of relics. We do it because we believe that “The Word Became Flesh and Dwelt Among Us”. Good reason, methinks.
I cannot believe the Incarnation would be reduced to defending whacking off parts of saints’ bodies and “venerating” them.
Utterly grotesque.
Even grotesquer in that I used to buy all that macabre superstitious crap.
What soured you? Did you ever really have a real reverence for holy (authentic) relics?
Actually, there were plenty of “civilised” folk back in the days of the Apostles and Antenicene Church Fathers who thought the whole idea of “Incarnation” was pretty grotesque. That’s what gave us the more “civilised” religion of gnosticism. You have to admit, you can’t be a Gnostic AND venerate relics!
Ah, Roman logic again: veneration of relics is “like” the Incarnation, therefore, since the Incarnation is true, so is the veneration of relics.
Except the Incarnation is not a theological principle, it is an event regarding Jesus Christ.
Except the veneration of relics is a fairly common feature in religion across the board, religions which know nothing of the Incarnation as regarding Jesus Christ, therefore it has no essential connexion to the Incarnation at all.
Except a “virtus” is found to be possible in all these, and rather than reject the whole superstition we instead just say well ours isn’t, just theirs.
It is one of those things that, even if one grant an original pious intent, has become so entangled in misunderstanding and abuse that the original intent is long lost, if it were there at all.