Saints alive!

BRIGHTON -- In a non descript cardboard file box, in an ordinary cabinet, inside the modest building that houses the archives of the Archdiocese of Boston, is a manila folder with a name written in small, neat letters on its tab: Matthew.

The folder contains an aged document and a small tarnished metal ornament, displaying a fragment of bone about the size of the capital O in this sentence.

The certificate, signed by a long-forgotten Vatican official, asserts that the chip is a relic, nearly 2,000 years old and taken from the body of St. Matthew -- one of the 12 Apostles of Jesus, and one of the three with a Gospel bearing his name.

The unassuming cabinet seems an unlikely resting place for the mortal remains of some of the church's most beloved historical figures -- St. Ignatius of Loyola , St. Catherine of Siena, and the celebrated missionary to the Irish, St. Patrick, among many others.

"They run the gamut literally from A to Z of different saints," said Robert Johnson-Lally , chief archivist for the archdiocese. At least 170 relics of Catholic saints are cataloged and stored in these blue archival boxes.

The vast majority are tiny fragments of bone displayed in amulet-sized containers. Some are strands of hair, pieces of cloth from a saint's clothing, fabric soaked in a saint's blood. Some of the containers are simple, while others -- such as those for the four relics of a papal saint, Pius X -- are quite elaborate.

But all of them have one thing in common -- they remain in a sort of administrative limbo, their future uncertain.

Despite the great personal significance they can have for the faithful, relics have declined in prominence as part of Catholic practices in recent years. The relics stored here come from various sources -- donated to the archdiocese by private individuals, left behind in wills, or removed from churches, convents or other facilities that have fallen into disuse.

The archdiocese has, on a handful of occasions, requested relics from the archives for distribution to local parishes or convents, said Johnson-Lally, but most of these artifacts are expected to sit in their carefully arranged folders for the foreseeable future.

The situation around the country is similar. In the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, several hundred relics have accumulated in its archives, which is associated with a museum and historical research center.

"In the 16 years I've been here, I can probably count on one hand the number of requests we've had to view the relics," outside of those from seminarians and other people working within the church, said Shawn Weldon , Philadelphia's assistant archivist.

Which is not to say that, in the life of the church, relics have gone completely out of style. In Boston, they can be found throughout the archdiocese, sometimes on display in places of honor within churches and convents. For instance, Cardinal Sean O'Malley wears a cross-shaped pendant that serves as a reliquary, holding a trace of St. Padre Pio.

"The relic of St. Padre Pio that I wear was given to me as a gift this past March when I became a cardinal from a friend," O'Malley wrote in an e-mail. "The relic is a piece of cloth that was touched to the blood of St. Pio's stigmata when he was alive in Italy." Pio was considered to be the first Catholic priest to develop stigmata, wounds resembling those of the crucified Jesus, when they appeared in 1918.

Like O'Malley, St. Pio was a member of the Capuchin order, giving the artifact special meaning for him. But relics also serve a broader purpose in the church, as tangible reminder s of those who went before in the faith.

"Relics remind us that the saints were human and walked this earth living out their vocation as religious, married persons, students, doctors/nurses, parents, poor, rich, and everything in between," O'Malley wrote. "The relics of saints connect us with those who persevered in holiness to do the will of the Lord each day."

It's relatively rare that relics are held by private individuals, although some still remain in circulation, and there are even some small private collections.

More commonly, local parishes maintain relics on their grounds, often enshrined in elaborate reliquaries. The archdiocese reconfiguration plan has occasionally displaced such relics, but Kathleen Heck, the reconfiguration coordinator, has helped find new homes for the sacred objects.

"In the church of the Blessed Sacrament in Jamaica Plain, there was a relic to St. Tarcisius," a fourth-century Roman Christian associated with the Eucharist, Heck said.

After Blessed Sacrament closed in 2004, the relic was relocated to a Framingham church named for the saint, where it awaits installation in a reliquary.

"We have two relics of his," said the Rev. Joseph Pranzo, pastor of St. Tarcisius. The other arrived 100 years ago at the Framingham church's founding.

St. Tarcisius also hosts and displays relics of St. Anthony of Padua.

"On Tuesdays, we have novena prayers and a benediction, and at the end we venerate the relic of St. Anthony," said Pranzo, who noted that veneration is not the same as worship, which is reserved only for God.

"These people," he said of the saints, "were as human as we are."

The most prominent relic in Boston is a splinter of wood believed to be a piece of the cross on which Jesus was crucified. It's displayed in the base of a large crucifix-shaped reliquary in a chapel within the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, the archdiocese's mother church.

The relic was a gift from the church's founder, Abbé de la Poterie, according to the Rev. John J. Connolly Jr., the parish's rector.

"When the parish was formed, they took the name for it from the relic," Connolly said.

Connolly said the parish has no record of the relic's pedigree prior to its arrival in Boston. La Poterie, who deserted the French Navy in 1788 to found the parish, left Boston in disgrace after a financial scandal.

From the earliest days of Catholicism, fragments of the "True Cross" have been among the most treasured relics -- and also among the most widely faked, since one tiny piece of wood looks much like any other.

The Philadelphia archdiocese also claims a relic of the cross, as do at least a half-dozen other locations in the United States alone.

Sixteenth-century Protestant reformer John Calvin famously wrote that if all the alleged relics of the True Cross were brought together in one place, they would fill a large ship.

"Whether or not the relic that we have here in the Cathedral of the Holy Cross is indeed a small piece of that means of our salvation is not as important as the fact that it is our faith, that it was by means of the True Cross that our salvation was effected," said Connolly.

Such questions of authenticity have always dogged the church's relationship with relics, and the modernizations of Vatican II, the churchwide council of the 1960s, only deepened the disconnect. And in the 21st century, the idea of cherishing an ancient chip of bone seems anachronistic to many.

"The idea that sacred presence can reside in some way in an object is pretty unamenable to the modern world and the modern consciousness," said Robert Orsi, a professor of the history of religion at Harvard Divinity School.

But, for many Catholics past and present, relics still pack a powerful emotional and spiritual punch.

Heck's first encounter with a relic hearkens back to her childhood and her mother's devotion to St. Therese of Lisieux, a 19th-century Carmelite nun known as "the Little Flower."

"My mother had a relic of the Little Flower on her chest of drawers, in a little reliquary that my father had gotten in Rome," Heck said. "My mother was devoted to the Little Flower and felt as if she partnered with the Little Flower to raise nine kids. . . . She had a little tiny reliquary about 4 inches high and that was like . . ."

She paused. "None of us ever took that lightly."

The church has deemphasized relics in recent years, partly the result of the modernization initiative of Vatican II. Because of (or in addition to) those changes, the faithful and even many clerics have generally become less interested in relics.

"To me, you know, the relics are important in the life of the church more for what they represent than what they are," said the Rev. Brian Mahoney , director of the archdiocesan Office for Worship, who acknowledged that the artifacts hold no special fascination for him.

As a result, volunteer efforts have arisen to try to arrange for the proper disposition or repurposing of relics that have been removed from their original context. Some relics have ended up being offered for sale on eBay, violating the rules of both the church and the auction website, which does not allow the sale of human remains.

"The church has been responsive to the fact that there are a lot of abuses going on with these relics," said Andrew Walther, East Coast representative of the International Crusade for Holy Relics, a volunteer organization that works to promote devotion to relics and to prevent their sale. A recent search on eBay produced at least 40 alleged relics of the True Cross alone.

Walther said there are religious orders that specialize in producing authentic relics, but they have clamped down on distribution. "They now require people who want relics to have a letter from a bishop authorizing them," he said.

But these stricter standards -- combined with dwindling interest among the faithful -- also mean there is no simple resolution for the scores of relics resting in those neatly arranged boxes at the archdiocesan archives. No one contacted for this article could even identify a church authority who might be master of the relics' fate.

It's difficult not to feel a twinge as the tiny relic of the Apostle Matthew slips back into a white acid-free envelope and into its carefully labeled manila folder, where it will remain for the foreseeable future, with its scores of companions here and uncounted hundreds more around the country.

"It's a question of supply and demand," said archivist Weldon in Philadelphia, who says only very devoted people express an interest in the relics in his archdiocese's collection, and even then, only rarely.

"It's my impression that the idea of relics, of this aura about them, has kind of faded over the last 40 or 50 years," he said. "When I started going to school, relics were these sacred objects. And now they've just kind of lost the luster that they had."

J.M. Berger can be reached at jmberger@egoplex.com.