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The reliquary of St Therese of Lisieux is remarkably small. You don't see anything spectacular, just a finely carved wooden casket within, like Snow White's coffin, a glass case.
Yet this, the remains of a young nun who died in France at the end of the 19th century, is drawing crowds as it is borne through London: in the Carmelite church in Kensington where I saw it yesterday, at Wormwood Scrubs prison and in Westminster Cathedral.
This being England, there's no ostentatious devotion around the relics of the saint.
When I pitched up at the Carmelite church at around 6.30am, there was a steady stream of people going to kneel before the relics; most touched the glass surrounding the casket.
They were reflective, prayerful, quiet; a good number were from ethnic minorities.
Most, I would guess, were asking for help, for grace, because they believe the saint is now with God. But I can see why the spectacle might generate unease among non-Catholics.
For one thing, it arouses a barely latent Protestant suspicion of religious superstition.
One of the first casualties of the Reformation in England, after all, was the cult of relics.
Then there's the straightforward distaste for anything to do with dead bodies, which most of us, nowadays, never get to see.
St Therese of Lisieux is a curious saint, in any event, to attract mass veneration.
She never went outside her convent from the time she entered it at the age of 15 to her death from tuberculosis at the age of 24.
She would have loved to have been a missionary but, being a Carmelite nun, she remained in a small community.
But even from the photographs on display you get a glimpse of character: there's shrewdness and humour.
The point of Therese was precisely that she lived her life out in a small space.
Her particular take on holiness was that it can be manifest in small ways rather than grand actions - "the doing of the least actions for love".
So she'd go out of her way to be friendly to another nun who was regarded as a pain in the neck, she'd do humdrum work without complaining, she put up with the pain of tuberculosis cheerfully, so much so that some people never quite believed she was ill.
And that notion of charity in small things, what she called her "little way", plainly strikes a chord with lots of Londoners.
It's rather harder, after all, to love your immediate colleagues than feel goodwill to the Third World; it's more of a struggle to show charity in a bus queue than to profess a love of humanity at large.
Still, even given that Therese has something to offer a different age, why do people visit relics?
It's a patently primitive instinct, that wish to touch or see the bodily remains of someone who in life was holy; in a rather different spirit, communists visit the grave of Marx.
Granted, Catholics aren't meant to pray to the relics themselves but to the saint, and through her, to God.
But the sheer physical proximity to the remains of St Therese is still a curiously potent way of feeling a closeness to the saint.
And if that makes people try harder to be good in small ways, it can at least do no harm.
Reader views (2)
A "barely latent" Protestant suspicion of superstition? There is nothing latent about it, nor should there be. Surely Catholics ought to be suspicious of superstition too? You can believe in the power of God without being superstitious.
- Davidlondon, London UK, 13/10/2009 21:09
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It seems odd to me that protestants are suspicious of Catholic practice as "suoerstition". While it is true that the RC church has often been far too preocupied with its own traditions - sometimes to the detriment of the core message of the gospels - it has the saving grace if being steeped in mysticism and the power of prayer.
While the reformation was a necessary step in freeing the church from some of the more dubious practices that had built up over the centuries, it seems odd for followers of a religion based upon miracles and the teachings of as man regarded as the son of God, to affect a position of scepticism in the face of superstition. Christianity is, at base, a profoundly mystical religion and must be understood as such.
The resistance to this possibly explains why those on the wilder fringes of the protestant churches are so taken up with healings, miracles and direct godly intervention, as well as fears of possession and the works of satan.
- Andrew, Edinburgh, 13/10/2009 15:59
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