As churches close, relics hidden in altars face an uncertain fate

The heart of any Catholic church is the altar around which parishioners gather to worship.

And in the heart of almost every altar lies a hidden treasure -- a stone containing tiny fragments of saints' remains, known as relics.

But what happens to that heart of hearts when a church building is decommissioned?

The ancient fragments represent a web of continuity stretching from the earliest days of Christianity to the present, including the final days of the 40 church buildings closed by the Archdiocese of Boston since 2004.

Now, in the archdiocesan archives, the altar stones are literally piling up.

These remnants of local history face an unknown destiny -- but their days of sacred use have seemingly come to an end.

Altar stones are heavy slabs about half an inch thick, ranging from the size of a paperback book to slightly bigger than a placemat. Some have a cross design carved into the surface, but most are plain. Many are made from marble, but the composition varies.

The slab fits into a socket in the center of an altar. On the face of the altar stone is another, smaller socket, a little larger than a matchbook. The relics are literally cemented into that space.

"The relics we're talking about would be a tiny thing, inside a piece of lead foil that is used to contain the ground portion of a bone," says Kathleen Heck , lay coordinator of the Boston Archdiocese's parish reconfiguration program.

Among other duties, Heck is responsible for making certain altar stones are not abandoned with the building.

Because the stones are the surface on which the Mass is celebrated, Heck says, they are considered among the most sacred objects in Catholic tradition.

The presence of the saints' remains adds a layer of importance to the objects, and a layer of complication to disposing of them. For religious reasons they can't simply be discarded, and for practical reasons they can't easily be destroyed.

After Heck retrieves an altar stone, she takes it to the archdiocese office complex in Brighton, where it is placed in the custody of chief archivist Robert Johnson-Lally . The stones are cataloged and put into storage in a climate-controlled room.

Johnson-Lally records the parish of origin for each altar stone, but records are scarce as to which saint's relics are interred within any given piece. Most relics are embedded along with a certificate of authenticity from the Vatican, which is written in Latin and contains information on the relic itself and the church in which it was placed.

But when the documents have been sealed into an altar stone with concrete, it's nearly impossible to take them out without destroying the stone.

"This is an odd thing, but parishes don't necessarily know which relics are in there," he says. "It's not necessarily the one for whom the parish is named."

The standards for altar relics changed in the late 1960s, says the Rev. Brian Mahoney , director of the archdiocesan Office for Worship, and in most cases, the old altar stones are no longer appropriate for new churches.

"In the past, you could use a little chip from a bone or something for a relic," Mahoney said. The current standard requires a larger piece that is an identifiable part of the body.

Such large relics are much harder to come by in modern times, says Mahoney, so church officials also lifted what had previously been a requirement that altars contain relics.

Most of the local churches that have closed were built when altar relics were mandatory. A previously used altar stone can be grandfathered in for a church that intends to preserve its old altar in a new building. But such occasions are rare.

The fate of the altar stones in the archdiocese's archives remains unclear. Johnson-Lally says a determination will probably not be made until it's clear that the reconfiguration program is completely finished.

If some other devotional use is not found for the relics, church guidelines mandate a formal burial in a Catholic cemetery. Either way, the change in practices effectively ends a tradition that originated in the earliest days of Christianity.

"The early, early, early Christians . . . celebrated the sacraments in the catacombs, on the tombs of the catacombs in Rome," says Heck. "That was their altar surface. The sarcophagi that held the bodies or the bones of the saints in the catacombs are where they celebrated Mass."