Some new friends who have recently moved into the area visited St Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury. ‘Did I happen to know,’ they asked after Sunday Mass, ‘whether the bones of St Augustine are in the grave which is marked on the site?’ According to Father Nicholas Schofield, Archivist of the Archdiocese of Westminster, St Augustine’s body was interred in the north porticus of the Abbey where his immediate successors, Archbishops Mellitus, Justus, Honorius and Deusdedit, later joined him.

Bede records Augustine’s epitaph: ‘Here lies the most reverend Augustine, first archbishop of Canterbury, who was formerly sent hither by St Gregory, bishop of Rome; being supported by God in the working of miracles, he led King Ethelbert and his nation from the worship of idols to faith in Christ and ended his days of his office in peace: he died on the twenty-sixth day of May during the reign of the same king.’

Saintly relics represent sacrifice, remembrance, and continuity with our heritageIn 1091 the early Archbishops’ remains were solemnly translated to a new shrine inside the church. St Augustine’s bones were moved again in 1221, by which time a separate reliquary contained his head. St Augustine’s shrine was destroyed during the Reformation. According to Archdeacon Nicholas Harpsfield, the saint’s bones were burnt, although Father Schofield notes that there is a tradition that the body was saved by Edward Thwaites (of Easture and East Stour) and moved for safekeeping to St Mary’s church at Chilham. An ancient sarcophagus with a cross on its lid is sometimes identified as St Augustine’s, although the bones have been lost. Having answered my friend’s question, another formed in my mind: why did it matter?

Thousands of people visited the relics of St Thérèse of Lisieux during their month long tour of England and Wales between 16 September and 16 October 2009. The final stop on the tour was Westminster Cathedral, where the Cathedral staff had ordered 100,000 candles and 50,000 pink roses to meet the demand of the expected 2000 pilgrims per hour. St Thérèse’s relics have travelled as far afield as Brazil, America, Ireland, Italy, Australia, Iraq and Israel from their resting place in France. When the suggestion was first made in 1997 that the relics should cross the Channel, Cardinal Basil Hume vetoed the proposal. It is believed he felt that the time wasn’t right and that it would damage interfaith understanding by reviving the image of English Catholics as medieval, superstitious and a group apart – an image he had worked hard - and succeeded – to dispel.

In conversation with the Archbishop of Canterbury at Canterbury Cathedral last September, Frank Skinner said that, ‘I’m an informed believer. I went to the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico [where] I saw women in their 60s, crawling flat on their stomachs up this hill. And I was a bit embarrassed by it and appalled by it and I thought, this isn’t my kind of faith.’ This wasn’t Cardinal Hume’s kind of faith either; the veneration of relics is for some ghoulish and reminiscent of the same sort of ‘peasant’ Catholicism that made Frank Skinner feel uneasy. But after reflecting on what he had witnessed, Frank considered that this was the women’s style of Catholicism, it was how they expressed what they felt. The 2009 tour of St Thérèse’s relics attracted all kinds of Catholics. Why did they make this pilgrimage?

Relics have enormous appeal. And not only in the Church, in secular society pop and rock memorabilia attracts big sales; in 2008 the first guitar set alight by Jimi Hendrix sold for £280,000. At the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois, the gloves worn by Mary Todd Lincoln to Ford’s Theatre draw crowds keen to see the bloodstains of the assassinated President on his wife’s gloves. Thomas J Craughwell, author of ‘Saints Preserved: An Encyclopedia of Relics’, suggests this is about more than morbid curiosity. It represents a desire to have a physical connection with a man and a moment in history. And it is the same with the tombs of saints and the places where they lived and prayed.

During the Roman persecution Christians came together in secret for Mass in the Catacombs. The celebration of Mass amongst the bones of the saints served as a reminder that God worked through them in life and continued to do so after their deaths. In 2 Kings 13:21 we hear the story of a dead man being brought back to life through physical contact with the bones of a saint, ‘once while some Israelites were burying a man, suddenly they saw a band of raiders; so they threw the man’s body into Elisha’s tomb. When the body touched Elisha’s bones, the man came to life and stood up on his feet.’

It represents a desire to have a physical connection with a man and a moment in historySt Augustine of Hippo documented the miracles wrought by the newly discovered bones of St Stephen. He wrote that during a procession in Tibilis, ‘a blind woman entreated that she might be led to the bishop who was carrying the relics. He gave her the flowers he was carrying. She took them, applied them to her eyes, and immediately saw.’ In the Catholic Church relics fall into three categories: the physical remains of saints are first class relics; a personal possession of a saint is a second class relic; and an item touched by a saint is a third class relic.

During the first centuries the altar-table was often a stone slab placed over the tomb of a martyr, which is why today the altar in almost all Catholic Churches contains a relic of a saint. The origin of the custom of setting in the altar-stone a cavity (sepulchre) in which the relics of saints (usually a piece of bone) is placed links us to the early Church. Keeping the relics of saints in or beneath the altar is a reminder that when we celebrate Mass, we celebrate with the saints, and all those that have gone before us and are in heaven. Saintly relics represent sacrifice, remembrance, and continuity with our heritage. Relics provide a physical connection to something bigger. That is why it mattered whether or not St Augustine’s remains were in the grave at the Abbey.