A Former Protestant Learns about Relics: Part I

A few Sundays ago, my wife and I drove to a parish in the Woodlands to visit a traveling relic exhibit titled “Treasures of the Church.” I can tell you that when I was confirmed into the church over five years ago, I didn’t convert because I believed in the power of relics.

As a former Lutheran, belief in relics seemed to give credence to protestant frustration and abhorrence about Catholic superstition. After all, why, says the typical protestant complaint, would a Christian, instead of praying directly to God, pray to the bones, former objects, or even hair follicles of
dead people? A good question.

My wife and I knew enough about our faith to realize that the common complaint about relics was oversimplistic, but that’s about all we knew, so after grandma agreed to watch the kids for a couple of hours, my wife and I drove to the exhibit, excited to discover more spiritual wisdom from the endlessly fertile Catholic Church.

Now, an astute reader might immediately ask him or herself, why would you become Catholic in the first place if you didn’t already understand the church’s teachings about relics? Another good question. Well, I fell in love with the richness of the church, and its endless pathways to a deeper union with God, which is in stark contrast to the single “salvation-by-faith alone” path of some protestant sects.

For example, in a recent YouTube video a protestant friend shared with me, a fundamentalist pastor laments that the Catholic church has added so much superfluous nonsense that its gospel is now wildly distorted and therefore clouds the Biblical gospel’s true meaning. For proof, the pastor cites Paul’s early teaching that the gentiles did not need to be circumcised in order to enter the new covenant of Christianity. If Paul considered circumcision to be anathema, so the pastor’s argument goes, then any addition to the Gospel, like relics, saints, rosaries, or prayers to the dead, proves the church’s corruption of the Gospel.

I want to take a brief detour from my relic experience in order to discuss that pastor’s argument, so bear with me. My brief rebuttal will not solve the profound and perennial disagreements between protestants and Catholics, but I want to explain how the distinction between what the pastor believes to be the truth of Christianity and what the Church teaches about the Christian faith was a major reason I became Catholic. The brief detour will also be important later when I discuss our experience at the relic exhibit.

Anyway, I, of course, disagree with the pastor’s logic. He’s arguing the fundamentalist claim that salvation consists only of being born again by proclaiming Christ as your savior: in short, salvation by faith alone. Any addition to that message distorts the true meaning of the Gospel. And the pastor claims to know the true meaning of the Gospel through the lens of sola scriptura, the idea that the Bible is the only authority Christians should refer to in matters of doctrine. However, if that is the case, then the doctrine of sola scriptura should be found in the Bible itself, but it isn’t, so the doctrine is self-refuting.

Also, today we see over 30,000 different Christian denominations, which makes it clear that finding a simple, clear understanding of the Bible’s teachings is difficult, even improbable, given the subjective nature of how people read any text. Like I tell my protestant friends, I could read the Bible a certain way and tell you that Jesus wants you to be rich and successful, or I could interpret the Bible another way and tell you that Jesus wants you to give up everything you own and avoid money or wealth entirely. What authority says whether my interpretation is right or wrong?

Exploring Catholicism before my eventual conversion, I discovered the magisterium
(Latin for “teacher”), which is no less than the teaching authority Christ has given to the Church.
For example, Christ never told his apostles a book called the Bible would appear later after His
death, and Christ never explained the Trinity, but through the magisterium, the Church can
authoritatively declare what the books of the Bible are and discover and define what the Trinity
is. The Church has understood the magisterium to be an aspect of Christ’s command at the end of
Matthew’s gospel to teach all nations to observe what He taught them, “and lo, I am with you
always, to the close of the age” (Matthew 28:20).

As I mentioned earlier, I am not pretending my arguments against the fundamentalist
pastor are undebatable. Of course, I believe the Church is correct, but I wanted to discuss the
differences between the Church and the fundamentalist pastor because those differences helped
spark my conversion. Basically, the pastor advocates a single, stark interpretation of the
Incarnation’s purpose, whereas the Church’s interpretation can absorb the rich, profound, and
beautiful diversity of the 2,000-plus-year history of Christianity. With the magisterium, for
example, the Church set the canon of the Bible at the council of Rome in 382; with the
magisterium, the Church composed the Nicene creed in 325 and the Apostle’s creed earlier than
that; with the magisterium, the Church, in the council of Ephesus in 431, declared that Jesus was
fully God and fully man. Do Christians today know that Christ’s divinity was once
controversial?

I point this out to help show some reasons the Catholic Church began to intrigue me.
After all, if the Church was right about Christ’s divinity and the canon of the Bible, might they
also hold the truth to many other aspects of Christianity? As my wife and I entered RCIA and
started learning more, we began to think so.

As we continued RCIA and as the evidence for the truth of Christ’s Church mounted, we
placed our faith in it, sure that any questions we had as our faith continued to grow could be
answered by the same Church that canonized the Bible and authoritatively established Christian
belief through the creeds.

So even though my remnant Lutheran blood rankled at the word “relic,” my wife and I
knew we could learn a lot by attending the exhibit, and in fact, I learned something important
about relics before we even attended. In an article promoting the exhibit, the Texas Catholic
Herald interviewed a priest, Father Strieder, who offered words of comfort to people with
reservations about relics:

“They’re not essential. If you don’t sense that they will be of help to your spiritual life, you don’t have to go. We pray to the saints that they will intercede for us, not that they have any power in themselves.”

I liked reading this before attending, and it’s a truth I had already suspected. The Church understands this well. For example, Marian apparitions, the few acknowledged as true by the Church, can be spiritually moving, rewarding, even lifechanging, but Catholics are not required to believe in them. Relics work the same way. As my wife and I drove to the church, free of any pressure to “believe,” we were excited to learn a new dimension to our faith.

My wife and I arrived at the start of the exhibit, just as Father Carlos Martins, director of
the Treasures of the Church, began his presentation (attendees would be able to see the relics
after the presentation). You can tell my wife and I are relatively recent converts because we
assumed we could arrive at the 5 o’clock start time and find a seat. In fact, I naively expected the
crowd to be similar in number to the numbers attending at typical daily mass. Instead, we
struggled to find parking and discovered that the nave of the church was packed; my wife and I
found two spots near a back corner.

Father Martins delivered a powerful presentation. A former atheist, he had converted and
become a priest after learning about the powerful true story of Saint Maria Goretti and her
murderer, Alessandro Serenelli. He shared that story with us, but first he explained to the crowd
what relics are. Here is a quote about relics from Martin’s Treasures of the Church website:
“Relics are physical objects that have a direct association with the saints or with Our
Lord. They are usually broken down into three classes. First class relics are the body or
fragments of the body of a saint, such as pieces of bone or flesh. Second class relics are
something that a saint personally owned, such as a shirt or book (or fragments of those items).
Third class relics are those items that a saint touched or that have been touched to a first, second,
or another third-class relic of a saint.”

After this, he—-and here I would like our protestant brothers and sisters to have an open
mind—-quoted from scripture to prove the biblical justification for the power of relics. Here are
three:

1) “When the corpse of a man was touched to the bones of the prophet Elisha the man
came back to life and rose to his feet” (2 Kings 13:20-21).
2) A woman was healed of her hemorrhage simply by touching the hem of Jesus’ cloak
(Matthew 9:20-22).
3) The signs and wonders worked by the Apostles were so great that people would line
the streets with the sick so that when Peter walked by at least his shadow might ‘touch’ them
(Acts 5:12-15).