I have to confess when it comes to the veneration of relics I’m somewhat torn. On the one hand the historian within me is obsessive about provenance and authenticity – and elsewhere I wouldn’t consider engaging with – let alone venerating – any artefact unless there was an indisputable chain of evidence for its claims. However, my Catholic upbringing has also taught me that objects of veneration are not subjects in themselves but rather the conduit through which we journey into communion with our saints.

On Sunday the ancient shrine of St Winefride and Holywell in north Wales was busy with pilgrims who’d travelled from far and wide to celebrate the annual Pilgrimage of Thanksgiving to St Winefride. The shrine’s relic – a small piece of the 7th century saint’s fingerbone – is kept in a reliquary at the nearby church, but is brought to the shrine at midday most days for pilgrims to venerate.

Little is known about the historical journey of this particular relic but we do know that St Winefride was originally interred in north Wales at her death in around 660, but her remains were exhumed in 1138 and moved to an elaborate shrine in Shrewsbury Abbey. At the time of the Dissolution her shrine was smashed and her remains were presumed scattered, with the finger bones being the only known survival.

According to one account, the bone was discovered in Rome in 1852, when a priest from Shrewsbury researching in a register of relics came across mention of St Winefride, and asked permission if it could be returned. The story goes that this small, precious fragment was cut in half, with one piece going to Shrewsbury and the other to Holywell.

To many, the very fact that the only the smallest fragment of St Winefride survives to the present day makes this relic all the more precious. In 2009, the local Catholic priest and custodian of the relic, Fr Salvatore Musella, said: “The relic has a strong power of influence and some people say that they feel a heat from it in their bodies. It is very well venerated and people come from all over the UK, Europe and around the world.”

As anyone who attended the procession and Mass at Holywell last Sunday will have witnessed, the veneration of holy relics is one of the most enduring and robust practices in the history of Western Catholicism, and its popularity is increasing. In many respects this renewed reverence is symptomatic of a society that has increasingly eradicated the metaphysical from human experience, and diminished the importance of our shared history from its cultural narratives.

One of the theological failings of Reformation thinking was that the veneration of relics was conflated with idolatry, as few outside the Catholic Church understood the transitory and transformative nature of devotional objects a touchstone to the divine, and there was also little appreciation of the intimate proximity of the material and spiritual world in which the veneration of relics acted as a bridge. There was also particular contempt for the notion that such corporeal and inanimate objects could enact cures or miracles of any kind, even though the Gospels had told us otherwise: “Now God worked unusual miracles by the hands of Paul, so that even handkerchiefs or aprons were brought from his body to the sick, and the diseases left them and the devil spirits went out of them.” (Acts 19:11-12).

Thankfully the Anglican Church – which always regarded the veneration of relics as something medieval and distinctly distasteful – has begun to soften its ambivalence. In 2002 a shoulder blade reputed to be St Alban’s was recovered from a German monastery and placed inside St Alban’s restored 13th century shrine in the city’s cathedral.

In Durham cathedral millions of pounds have been spent creating an exhibition centre to house the relics of St Cuthbert, which were rediscovered in 1827 when his tomb was opened and, as well as the saint’s body, a number of rare and extraordinary objects were uncovered.

In 2016, a bone fragment believed to be from the elbow of St Thomas Becket, which had been taken to Hungary 800 years ago, was returned to go on display in Canterbury Cathedral, where Becket was murdered. In an unusual but highly symbolic gesture of historic reconciliation, the relic was the centrepiece of a week-long pilgrimage from London to Canterbury, beginning with Mass at Westminster Cathedral, celebrated by HE Cardinal Vincent Nichols, where he was joined by Hungarian President Janos Ader and the country’s Primate Cardinal Péter Erdő. In a further gesture of solidarity, the elbow fragment was reunited with a fragment said to be from Thomas Becket’s skull, normally kept at Stonyhurst College.

In his Homily at the Mass, Cardinal Erdő said: “It is with great joy that I have brought from Esztergom the relic of the martyr bishop, so in the coming days we can express our veneration for him together and also seek his intercession so that we can answer the challenges of today’s life in a truly Christian way.”

To an outside observer, or at least to a modern day one, such preoccupations with ancient human remains may seem obscure, if not unsettling. But times are changing, and the veneration of ancestors has increasingly migrated out from religious practice into popular culture, if indeed it was ever lost. For all our pretentions of modernity we do not actually live in a world that is qualitatively different from the one that our Catholic ancestors occupied. Be it a lock of hair, an item of clothing or a cherished object, we hold on to such treasures not because we have any delusion that they will bring back the deceased person, but because they provide a link through to what once was, and they serve to make the difficulties of the present a just little more manageable.

So to it is with saintly relics – in times when we can become preoccupied and overwhelmed with the small troubles that seem so significant in our lives, they serve to remind us of the greater reality that we were baptised into, and the historic family to which we belong. And if God grants the occasional miracle through the agency of such relics, this too is only natural, and what the Gospels have promised us.

Joseph Kelly is a Catholic writer and theologian

Pic: © Marcin Mazur/www.cbcew.org.uk