Pints With Aquinas - What is the deal with relics? | Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P.

Episode Date: June 22, 2024

Fr. Pine explains one of the weirdest Catholic Practices, Veneration of Relics. Why do we keep all these bones? Why do we kiss them? It seems odd at first but in the end it makes sense. Support the Show: https://mattfradd.locals.com 📖 Fr. Pine's Book: https://bit.ly/3lEsP8F 🖥️ Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ 🟢 Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/pintswithaquinas 👕 Merch: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com 🚫 FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ 🔵 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd  

Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine and I am a Dominican friar of the province of St. Joseph. I teach at the Dominican House of Studies and I work for the Thomistic Institute and this is Pines with Aquinas. In this episode, I would like to talk about relics. That is to say the Catholic practice of accumulating and venerating relics. Now to a lot of you, this practice seems strange or weird, and that might be an occasion to retreat from it, or to conceal it, or to otherwise deny it. But my experience has been with Catholic beliefs and practices which seem strange or weird, that if you inquire further, you'll find that the Church has reasons, and that they are good reasons and that those good reasons bear life. So this is just to say that we can be certain and confident in our belief and practice and need not be embarrassed or otherwise ashamed of what seems to us like ill-founded or otherwise

silly beliefs and practices. So let's look a little bit at relics and see what it is that the church understands by her practice. Here we go. Okay so the practice of accumulating and venerating relics is part of the church's encouragement to worship. Now the word worship we typically think of as associated exclusively with God but in the the ancient, medieval, I mean up until recently, the practice has always been that worship covers any respect or esteem or honor. Alright, and you can render it to God, or you can render it to not God. That is to say creatures, specifically angels and men. Now, recently worship has come to be associated exclusively with God and so people use it in a more restricted sense and that's okay, you know, like we don't have to reclaim the language as if everything depended upon it, but you know, nevertheless, it's helpful for you to have the setting.

So, there's certain worship which is due to God alone and you know, got some Greek words you got some Latin words but we refer to this as Latria and you can think here of like adoration you wouldn't speak about adoration with respect to you know angels or men or sacrifice you know we can use the word sacrifice kind of loosely and saying like I made a sacrifice for this person or I made a sacrifice for that person but you wouldn't offer sacrifice to anyone other than God that is to say think here of the sacrifice of the Mass. It's offered to the Father, by the Son, in the Holy Spirit. And so the priest acts in the person of Christ, the head, and we, the people of God, unite

their sacrifices to that of the priest. So certain worship due to God alone, adoration, sacrifice, but then certain worship due to angels and men, and we'll speak here about dualia. And you can think here of veneration. So this is not saying, like, I subject myself or I submit myself to you as my creator and end, as we say with Latria, but it's more like, wow, awesome. So when talking about relics, we're talking about a kind of dualia. Now you've got hyperdulia for the Blessed Virgin Mary, you've got proto-dulia for St. Joseph, and then you've got dualia, just kind of generically speaking, for everybody else. And typically we think about it as referred to as saints and angels,

but in, again, an extended sense, it can be shown to other Men even if not the holiest of men So there's a kind of like veneration due to certain civil servants or due to certain heroes or even sports icons All right, so that'd be like low grade. All right, so this is just to say what am I trying to prove at this stage of the game? worship in this kind of more broad sense, is extended not just to God, but also to angels and men, as a way by which of referring respect or esteem or honor. Now, in the Christian practice, we typically refer to this as veneration. What is it that's going on when we talk about veneration? Basically, the most kind of fundamental instinct is God is glorious in his saints.

You see in this individual the work of God and you marvel at it. So, there's a kind of awe, and again here I'm using awe in the wider sense, not just like the gift of the Holy Spirit, but there's an awe at the work of God present in his creature. But it's not just to say, I am in awe of you because of what God is doing. I'm also in awe of you. Like there's a sense in which we can stop and say, you're great, okay? And we do that with the saints, all right?

So we don't need to be ashamed of that. We don't need to be embarrassed about that because we all do it. And not just as like a concession to sin or vice, but as a genuine human phenomenon you know you want to recognize the excellence of the other and not just simply in the sense of you know somebody else is doing something great in you but in the sense of like you're good all right I see you I know

you I love you again the Saints aren't clamoring for this they aren't feeling their own neediness and asking veneration from us as a way by which to complete their experience of heaven. No, no, but it's a good for us. It's a good for us to recognize what is excellent in this world and in the next, and to kind of shape our hearts or to order our hearts in recognition of that excellence so that we can enter into it, all right, so that we can have it impressed upon our own nature. So when we look at the saints, we have these kind of two movements of veneration and intercession. Intercession is probably the one with which we're more

familiar or more comfortable because we do it all the time, both with angels and saints in heaven and then with our brothers and sisters here on earth. That is to say we ask another person to pray for us. And when we do so, we're not saying like, I would ask God but he is busy. No, no. What we're saying is God wills that this thing take place. I believe God wills that this thing take place, or I hope that God wills that this thing take place. And it seems fitting that it would take place through the intercession of the saints, because God wants us as a Christian community to be invested in it and to be implicated

in it. And so I'm going to ask those angels and saints with whom I have a certain affinity or with whom I have a certain relationship so that they can intercede on my behalf, because it's cool, right, because it's awesome, because God has ordained that his effects come about through the intercession of the saints as a way by which to draw us together in bonds of fellowship because we go to God together and because this is just the life of the church and God likes using secondary causes or instrumental causes because it testifies to his power, it testifies to his generosity, testifies to his love. So again, we're thinking about relics. We're situating this in terms of worship, the worship due to not God, that is to say, creatures, that is to say, angels and men.

And God shows that He will work through the prayers of these individuals, through the lives of these individuals, because He wants to draw us together in bonds of fellowship, and because He wants to conduct us back to Him as a church, that is to say as a community. So already here you see where relics assume their place within the Christian community because even in a non-holy way, that's not to say like an evil way, but in a non-holy way, that is to say like a kind of normal everyday way, we like to have relics. We like to have mementos or reminders of past events in which we were with another person. I like to have mementos or reminders of past events in which we were with another person. Like on my shelf, what do I have back there? I've got like a little seashell from the Camino and then I've got like a little trinket that was given to me by a friend and another trinket that was given to me by a friend. You know they're like sweet things to just have in plain sight because they bring to

mind the other and in bringing to mind the other they make the other present. So they recollect me in the fact that my life is not my own, that it's God's and that God in giving me my life gives me my life within the setting of the Christian community. So we use these kind of non-holy relics as a reminder, as a way by which to make the other present, as a way by which to make the other presence, as a way by which to grow in the community which we hope to hold on to now and in the life to come. Alright, so then relics, they observe a similar function, albeit a holy function, in the setting

of Christian worship. So we have first-class relics, second-class relics, third-class relics. I think that we're probably most concerned about first-class relics, second-class relics, third-class relics, I think that we're probably most concerned about first-class relics because that would be parts of the body of the individual saint himself or herself. And it's a way of laying hold of their lives, a way of laying hold of their sanctity in recognition that what they did, you know, what God did in them during the course of their lives, but what they did is somehow at work in what we do. Not only their prayers, but their life and even their very body. So it testifies to the Christian belief that it all matters.

We are soul and body. We are one thing, a composite. And the holiness that God bestows upon us, it's principally a spiritual thing, but it also has bodily effects. And we come to an appreciation of it through bodily means, especially you think here of the sacramental life. And so we recognize that the body matters, what you do in your body, how you live in your body, that all has concrete effects in the spiritual order. So in laying hold of the relics of the saints, we're laying hold of the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ in the

flesh as it is communicated, as it's, you know, like manifested and communicated to subsequent generations of Christians through the sacramental order and as it transforms their very bodies and testimony to the power of the grace of God. And we say, I want that, you know, because God has seemed to reveal and to bestow that, right? Because God's good, because God's generous. Now, it's weird, you know, it's strange, but then again, you know, like mothers take little locks of their children's hair and, you know, like a beautiful woman will put on lipstick and kiss a whatever you call that thing, a letter when she sends it to her her lover I'm not making this stuff up but you know it seems to have happened at least in movies a thousand years ago you know like we show each other that we are

bound up or that we care in these concrete ways so you know from an early age the church has seen fit to at least permit and sometimes promote the practice of bestowing relics on various churches or sanctuaries or an even private person so that they can cultivate this kind of devotion with respect to the Individual in recognition that god is glorious and his saints that he has taken human flesh that he has sanctified the incarnate order And that he intends to conduct us soul and body back to him Now are there weird things that happen with the practice of relics? Certainly. There can be things that are just awful, macabre, like stealing relics and dividing relics up in bizarre world ways. But we trust that God will sort out the details.

When you think about the general resurrection at the end of the age and how these persons will be reconstituted, we don't want to be overly literalistic. We do want to be literal, but not overly literalistic in a way that makes us absolutely horrified at the prospect of St. Catherine of Siena tromping up the coast of Italy as she goes to reclaim her head from Rome to Siena. But yeah, you get it. So that's kind of what I wanted to emphasize in treating this particular thing. What we're talking about is worship, which is to say generically, respect, esteem, honor. Some is due to God alone, but we can also identify some due to angels and men. It's of a different sort, it's of a different kind, because angels and men are not our creator and end, and yet they are bound up in our salvation

because God has ordained that they be such. But not just bound up in our salvation in a vague spiritual sense, but also in a real bodily sense, because the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ is such that it infiltrates the whole created order. I mean, he's already present as its creator, but he is yet more present in the incarnation, in the bestowal of grace. I mean, in the reception of Holy Communion, you can think about all the ways in which Christ gets close, and he wants to transfuse it, I mean infuse it, with his divine life so that it can be born up unto him. And we recognize that God is glorious in his saints and so we lay hold of relics as a way

by which to be recollected in this fact, but also as a way by which to call us into their holy presence, as a way by which to facilitate their intercession, as a way by which to bring the Christian community together on its way back to God so that we can be constituted as one Worshiping body head and members unto ages of ages for the glory of God and the salvation of our souls So are there strange things about it? Yes. Should we be prudent in our explanation of it and practice of it? Certainly, but I think it's a cool feature of our Christian faith which shows just how far God will go and laying claim to us So that's what I wanted to share. This is Pines with Aquinas If you haven't yet, please do subscribe to the channel push the bell and get sweet updates when other things come out

Also, I contribute to a podcast called God's Plaining. I think we might have had a What do you call these things an episode about relics not too long ago and by not too long ago sometime in like the last five years because I'm losing my mind. Those are the things that I wanted to share. So know of my prayers for you, please pray for me and I'll look forward to chatting with you next time on Pines with Aquinas.