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Relics: The Shroud of Turin, the True Cross, the Blood of Januarius...History, Mysticism, and the Catholic Church
Joan Carroll Cruz Since the early days of the Church, the remains of a saint or holy person were called relics (from the Latin Reliquiae, meaning remains). The Veneration of relics is practiced by Christians and non-Christians alike. It is in no way restricted to the Catholic religion but is, to some extent, a primitive instinct with origins that predate Christianity. It is known that relics of Buddha were distributed soon after his death. The relics of Confucius have been venerated by the people of Asia since the year 195 B.C., and the relics of Mohammed, who died in A.D. 632, are similarly revered. In the Old Testament the relics of the prophet Elisha are mentioned (2 Kings 13:20-21), and the New Testament notes the relics of the Apostle Paul and the wonders the Lord worked through them (Acts 19:11-12). From early Church history there was no extravagance or abuse in honoring relics and, indeed, the practice was taken for granted by writers such as St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, St. John Chrysostom and other great doctors of the Church without exception. In Relics, Joan Carroll Cruz, author of the bestseller The Incorruptibles, describes in vivid detail the stories, history, and theology of Catholic belief surrounding the veneration of many of the major and active relics that are revered by the Catholic Church - the Shroud of Turin, the True Cross, the Blood of Januarius, the relics of the Blessed Mother, and many more. The role of relics in Catholic life and what the Church teaches about them are revealed and carefully documented in this unique and engrossing account.
308 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1984
About the author
Joan Carroll Cruz
18 books38 followersMrs. Cruz is a native of New Orleans, LA, and was educated by the School Sisters of Notre Dame. She was a member of the Discalced Carmelite Secular Order for 50 years and received the Mother Teresa Award in 2005.
Mrs. Cruz was the author of 15 Catholic books, all of which received the imprimatur. She was perhaps best known for her writings on miraculous occurrences of faith which she compiled through meticulous research of foreign shrines, churches, convents and monasteries.
Mrs. Cruz was the author of 15 Catholic books, all of which received the imprimatur. She was perhaps best known for her writings on miraculous occurrences of faith which she compiled through meticulous research of foreign shrines, churches, convents and monasteries.
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September 2, 2019
Eucharistic Miracles, etc.
It's roughly 740 A.D. We're in the Church of St. Longinus, in Lanciano. A monk of the Order of St. Basil is celebrating Mass, but is having some doubts about the true presence of Christ in the sacraments. He says the words of consecration and, behold! -- the host is miraculously transformed into flesh, the wine into blood (i.e., not just the substance is changed). The monks rush to the altar; there is much celebrating; the miracle is certified by the Pope at the time, and the transformed host is safeguarded by various religious orders over the course of the next thousand years and finally placed into an ivory reliquary in 1713, where it remains today (here's a recent photo).
A nice story, an edifying moral parable . . . but (you may be thinking) this is likely just a pious fraud, meant to convince the gullible. You might be interested to learn that there were Vatican-authorized authentications over the years, but it's not as if an actual scientist looked at it, right? Well . . . Dr. Edoardo Linoli, head of the Laboratory of Pathological Anatomy at the Hospital of Arezzo took a look in 1970, concluding that (p. 13 of Relics)
So this 1,300-year-old relic contained fresh myocardial tissue and fresh human blood, of blood type AB+, commonly found among Middle Eastern men (and virtually never found among Europeans), which is also precisely the blood type found in all other eucharistic miracles that have been analyzed by scientists. But this study was carried out by an Italian doctor, and he's probably Catholic, so odds are high that he's making it up; and yes, he published a peer-reviewed article on the lab results (see here for the PubMed citation, here for the article itself); seems unlikely that he would risk damaging his career to publish a fraudulent article, but, maybe. It's also surprising that this would be the case for two Polish scientists (Maria Elizabeth Sobaniec-Łotowka and Stanislaw Sulkowski) who published their analysis of a different Eucharistic miracle in 2013 . . . or another team of scientists in Buenos Aires in 1996 . . .
And I suppose, for the skeptics, that this must also be the case for thousands of other miracles/relics, many of which are covered in this book -- every single one of them is somehow a pious fraud? St. Bernadette is one of the more interesting ones; she died in 1879 and the Church exhumed her corpse in 1909 (standard for the canonization process) and it hadn't decomposed. It was exhumed again in 1925 (to take relics) and a series of pictures were taken, which we still have today; dozens of people were there that day, including non-believers, scientists who analyzed the body, etc. It seems unlikely that they were all lying, and I'm not quite sure how there would be a natural explanation for this, given that it has never happened in other contexts.
To give a more recent example, I have personally seen the incorruptible body of St. John Maximovitch in a cathedral in San Francisco (and many similar things in Greece and other places, but let's stick with St. John for now). People are alive, right now, who knew Fr. John personally -- I have talked to a few of them in California and elsewhere. Fr. John died in 1966, so this isn't exactly ancient history, and his incorruptible body can be seen quite easily, here's a Google Maps link, you can go there yourself to see, just walk in the front door of the cathedral and turn to your right.
In other words, miracles and relics are not (or at least are not entirely) "pre-modern people misunderstanding science" or "gullible people believing pious frauds." With Fr. John, for this to be a fraud, it would have to be the case that ALL of the monks and priests involved -- again, including some that I met personally, who did not exactly strike me as liars -- are making it all up, and sneakily hired an embalmer to make it look like St. John wasn't decomposing. And also somehow mysteriously actually prevented the decomposition, with, uh, science?
Despite various Church authorities having no problem declaring that plenty of supposed miracles are frauds and also stating that such miracles aren't required for faith -- indeed, Aquinas's third way is actually sufficient for anyone who understands logic and the meaning of basic nouns -- let's say, for the sake of argument, that there are no hints here of a reality beyond a blind materialist/physicalist universe (whether holy, demonic, or otherwise), that ALL of these thousands of cases are pious frauds, that all scientists who have studied such relics in the past couple centuries have been lying and/or that there's a natural explanation for a 1,300-year-old piece of fresh myocardial tissue, and that no one involved ever had a guilty conscience or came out with the truth eventually.
Thankfully it turns out that there have, in fact, been many scientific studies on the topic of one of the more convincing refutations of physicalism/materialism as a worldview -- near-death experiences / out-of-body experiences. (I realize this is somewhat of a shift in topics, but stay with me!)
NDEs/OBEs
The concept of NDEs/OBEs may sound vaguely familiar -- they're typically associated, culturally, with astral projection, New Age spirituality, healing crystal websites, and/or terrible books like Heaven is for Real!. What you may not know is that NDEs/OBEs are a very real thing with mountains of scientific data supporting them. Out of the many hundreds of articles on the topic, let's go with one of the more interesting recent studies, a 2017 article from an international journal of medicine published by Oxford University Press, entitled "Understanding the Cognitive Experience of Death and the Near-Death Experience."
This article finds that the vast majority of OBE observations during NDEs were accurate -- which is to say, the patient's body was clinically dead and yet they were able to accurately describe their resuscitation and related events.
To say the least! But maybe anyone who is supposedly clinically dead could make such observations; perhaps there's a level of brain consciousness that is retained even when a body is clinically dead, in certain cases? Maybe the NDE/OBE had nothing to do with it?
Well, not exactly; there was a very clever study on this, where a team of researchers asked people who didn't have NDEs to guess what their resuscitation looked like, which was almost always completely wrong, whereas descriptions by people who had NDEs were almost always completely accurate.
So apparently NDE patients are just really, really good at guessing! Or they're all engaged in a vast conspiracy of people who want to risk their livelihoods by looking crazy -- including the doctors who verified their claims. And it's an interesting coincidence that the exact same phenomena happen to people who drown, overdose, are in car accidents, have terminal diseases; whether they were given anesthesia or not; including atheists, children with no religious training, ardent materialists, etc. Certainly a strange series of coincidences.
Again, let's be as generous as possible -- let's say that, okay, the brain is a mysterious thing, physical causes could still explain it. Maybe these NDE patients used blindsight? Or somehow, in some cases, they interpreted a low level of visual perception / consciousness as an NDE? This doesn't explain how a clinically dead brain can somehow view its own resuscitation from 10 feet above with complete accuracy, but let's leave that aside for now.
It turns out, no, insofar as we have multiple accounts of accurate, extensive NDE/OBE observations made by people blind from birth. And let me tell you, there are few things more interesting than a blind NDE patient trying to describe sight ("I could somehow tell the thing was there without touching it . . .", etc.). To be clear, some of these people literally do not have eyes; they have never seen anything before. And even in cases where they do have eyes, these eyes have never been used to see; and, in any case, the person involved is clinically dead.
So it quickly becomes quite difficult to explain, within a materialist framework where we are only our brain, how blind people could describe their resuscitation with complete accuracy, including elements that could only be perceived visually (rather than heard/touched/etc.). Dozens of people blind from birth decided to lie to others and to themselves that they were correctly reporting visual descriptions which were later found to be accurate? I guess these non-religious clinically-dead blind people hired a private investigator beforehand to take secret photos of their lifeless body being resuscitated so they could lie to people afterwards?
Ockham's razor is very straightforward here, especially when you consider that physicalism is a belief system, rather than 'Science!' To be exact, it is a touchingly naive faith that the methodological epoche of early modern natural science (i.e., bracketing final causes to make it easier to figure out efficient causality) can be reified into a metaphysical position, which has now become the unreflective 'common sense' of many educated 21st-century Westerners.
But purely in terms of scientific observation, the non-materialist or substance dualist position has MORE EVIDENCE than the materialist position; it can explain qualia, for one thing, as well as OBEs and a hundred other phenomena -- including, of course, relics!
(Also, entirely apart from the empirical evidence, there are many convincing ways to refute physicalism within metaphysics . . . there's a reason that very, very few philosophers have been materialists.)
Now, one might conclude from all this -- "sure, okay, I guess there seems to be some sort of immaterial self, of some kind? Who cares?" But you can't close your accounts with reality quite that easily; if we are more than just our bodies, and if NDEs/OBEs prove (beyond a reasonable doubt) that the soul/self exists in some way even when the body is dead, then this reality -- no matter what your exact religious beliefs or lack thereof -- demands a response of some sort, and cannot be so easily dismissed.
It's roughly 740 A.D. We're in the Church of St. Longinus, in Lanciano. A monk of the Order of St. Basil is celebrating Mass, but is having some doubts about the true presence of Christ in the sacraments. He says the words of consecration and, behold! -- the host is miraculously transformed into flesh, the wine into blood (i.e., not just the substance is changed). The monks rush to the altar; there is much celebrating; the miracle is certified by the Pope at the time, and the transformed host is safeguarded by various religious orders over the course of the next thousand years and finally placed into an ivory reliquary in 1713, where it remains today (here's a recent photo).
A nice story, an edifying moral parable . . . but (you may be thinking) this is likely just a pious fraud, meant to convince the gullible. You might be interested to learn that there were Vatican-authorized authentications over the years, but it's not as if an actual scientist looked at it, right? Well . . . Dr. Edoardo Linoli, head of the Laboratory of Pathological Anatomy at the Hospital of Arezzo took a look in 1970, concluding that (p. 13 of Relics)
as a result of the histological studies the following facts were compiled: the flesh was identified as striated muscular tissue of the myocardium having no trace whatsoever of any materials or agents used for the preservation of flesh. Both the flesh and the sample of blood were found to be of human origin, emphatically excluding the possibility that it was from an animal species. The blood as well as the flesh were found to belong to the same blood type, AB. The blood was found to contain the following minerals: chloride, phosphorus, magnesium, potassium, sodium in a lesser degree, but calcium in a greater quantity. Proteins in the clotted blood were found to be normally fractionated with the same percentage ratio as those found in fresh and normal blood . . .
So this 1,300-year-old relic contained fresh myocardial tissue and fresh human blood, of blood type AB+, commonly found among Middle Eastern men (and virtually never found among Europeans), which is also precisely the blood type found in all other eucharistic miracles that have been analyzed by scientists. But this study was carried out by an Italian doctor, and he's probably Catholic, so odds are high that he's making it up; and yes, he published a peer-reviewed article on the lab results (see here for the PubMed citation, here for the article itself); seems unlikely that he would risk damaging his career to publish a fraudulent article, but, maybe. It's also surprising that this would be the case for two Polish scientists (Maria Elizabeth Sobaniec-Łotowka and Stanislaw Sulkowski) who published their analysis of a different Eucharistic miracle in 2013 . . . or another team of scientists in Buenos Aires in 1996 . . .
And I suppose, for the skeptics, that this must also be the case for thousands of other miracles/relics, many of which are covered in this book -- every single one of them is somehow a pious fraud? St. Bernadette is one of the more interesting ones; she died in 1879 and the Church exhumed her corpse in 1909 (standard for the canonization process) and it hadn't decomposed. It was exhumed again in 1925 (to take relics) and a series of pictures were taken, which we still have today; dozens of people were there that day, including non-believers, scientists who analyzed the body, etc. It seems unlikely that they were all lying, and I'm not quite sure how there would be a natural explanation for this, given that it has never happened in other contexts.
To give a more recent example, I have personally seen the incorruptible body of St. John Maximovitch in a cathedral in San Francisco (and many similar things in Greece and other places, but let's stick with St. John for now). People are alive, right now, who knew Fr. John personally -- I have talked to a few of them in California and elsewhere. Fr. John died in 1966, so this isn't exactly ancient history, and his incorruptible body can be seen quite easily, here's a Google Maps link, you can go there yourself to see, just walk in the front door of the cathedral and turn to your right.
In other words, miracles and relics are not (or at least are not entirely) "pre-modern people misunderstanding science" or "gullible people believing pious frauds." With Fr. John, for this to be a fraud, it would have to be the case that ALL of the monks and priests involved -- again, including some that I met personally, who did not exactly strike me as liars -- are making it all up, and sneakily hired an embalmer to make it look like St. John wasn't decomposing. And also somehow mysteriously actually prevented the decomposition, with, uh, science?
Despite various Church authorities having no problem declaring that plenty of supposed miracles are frauds and also stating that such miracles aren't required for faith -- indeed, Aquinas's third way is actually sufficient for anyone who understands logic and the meaning of basic nouns -- let's say, for the sake of argument, that there are no hints here of a reality beyond a blind materialist/physicalist universe (whether holy, demonic, or otherwise), that ALL of these thousands of cases are pious frauds, that all scientists who have studied such relics in the past couple centuries have been lying and/or that there's a natural explanation for a 1,300-year-old piece of fresh myocardial tissue, and that no one involved ever had a guilty conscience or came out with the truth eventually.
Thankfully it turns out that there have, in fact, been many scientific studies on the topic of one of the more convincing refutations of physicalism/materialism as a worldview -- near-death experiences / out-of-body experiences. (I realize this is somewhat of a shift in topics, but stay with me!)
NDEs/OBEs
The concept of NDEs/OBEs may sound vaguely familiar -- they're typically associated, culturally, with astral projection, New Age spirituality, healing crystal websites, and/or terrible books like Heaven is for Real!. What you may not know is that NDEs/OBEs are a very real thing with mountains of scientific data supporting them. Out of the many hundreds of articles on the topic, let's go with one of the more interesting recent studies, a 2017 article from an international journal of medicine published by Oxford University Press, entitled "Understanding the Cognitive Experience of Death and the Near-Death Experience."
This article finds that the vast majority of OBE observations during NDEs were accurate -- which is to say, the patient's body was clinically dead and yet they were able to accurately describe their resuscitation and related events.
Of the case reports reviewed, 92% were considered to be completely accurate with no inaccuracy whatsoever when the OBE observations were later investigated . . . The high percentage of accurate out-of-body observations during near-death experiences does not seem explainable by any possible physical brain function as it is currently known.
To say the least! But maybe anyone who is supposedly clinically dead could make such observations; perhaps there's a level of brain consciousness that is retained even when a body is clinically dead, in certain cases? Maybe the NDE/OBE had nothing to do with it?
Well, not exactly; there was a very clever study on this, where a team of researchers asked people who didn't have NDEs to guess what their resuscitation looked like, which was almost always completely wrong, whereas descriptions by people who had NDEs were almost always completely accurate.
So apparently NDE patients are just really, really good at guessing! Or they're all engaged in a vast conspiracy of people who want to risk their livelihoods by looking crazy -- including the doctors who verified their claims. And it's an interesting coincidence that the exact same phenomena happen to people who drown, overdose, are in car accidents, have terminal diseases; whether they were given anesthesia or not; including atheists, children with no religious training, ardent materialists, etc. Certainly a strange series of coincidences.
Again, let's be as generous as possible -- let's say that, okay, the brain is a mysterious thing, physical causes could still explain it. Maybe these NDE patients used blindsight? Or somehow, in some cases, they interpreted a low level of visual perception / consciousness as an NDE? This doesn't explain how a clinically dead brain can somehow view its own resuscitation from 10 feet above with complete accuracy, but let's leave that aside for now.
It turns out, no, insofar as we have multiple accounts of accurate, extensive NDE/OBE observations made by people blind from birth. And let me tell you, there are few things more interesting than a blind NDE patient trying to describe sight ("I could somehow tell the thing was there without touching it . . .", etc.). To be clear, some of these people literally do not have eyes; they have never seen anything before. And even in cases where they do have eyes, these eyes have never been used to see; and, in any case, the person involved is clinically dead.
So it quickly becomes quite difficult to explain, within a materialist framework where we are only our brain, how blind people could describe their resuscitation with complete accuracy, including elements that could only be perceived visually (rather than heard/touched/etc.). Dozens of people blind from birth decided to lie to others and to themselves that they were correctly reporting visual descriptions which were later found to be accurate? I guess these non-religious clinically-dead blind people hired a private investigator beforehand to take secret photos of their lifeless body being resuscitated so they could lie to people afterwards?
Ockham's razor is very straightforward here, especially when you consider that physicalism is a belief system, rather than 'Science!' To be exact, it is a touchingly naive faith that the methodological epoche of early modern natural science (i.e., bracketing final causes to make it easier to figure out efficient causality) can be reified into a metaphysical position, which has now become the unreflective 'common sense' of many educated 21st-century Westerners.
But purely in terms of scientific observation, the non-materialist or substance dualist position has MORE EVIDENCE than the materialist position; it can explain qualia, for one thing, as well as OBEs and a hundred other phenomena -- including, of course, relics!
(Also, entirely apart from the empirical evidence, there are many convincing ways to refute physicalism within metaphysics . . . there's a reason that very, very few philosophers have been materialists.)
Now, one might conclude from all this -- "sure, okay, I guess there seems to be some sort of immaterial self, of some kind? Who cares?" But you can't close your accounts with reality quite that easily; if we are more than just our bodies, and if NDEs/OBEs prove (beyond a reasonable doubt) that the soul/self exists in some way even when the body is dead, then this reality -- no matter what your exact religious beliefs or lack thereof -- demands a response of some sort, and cannot be so easily dismissed.
April 14, 2010
A fascinating look at the relics of the saints throughout history, from the blood of St. Januarius to the veil of Veronica. A very comprehensive book. The type is fairly small and that can cause some difficulties reading. But the information is solid. This makes a good reference work for anyone interested in the saints.
February 15, 2011
Truly currious book. Makes one wonder gow serious one should take some one who still believes that most relics are not fakes. But certainly a fun read. Must have made the author a lot of money and fed a lot of believers
June 16, 2007
I think this book would be a good one for Catholics to own. It has descriptions and some photos of many of the relics that I've heard of, but didn't know much about.
December 15, 2025
Joan Carroll Cruz provides a thorough description of numerous relics of Saints, our Blessed Mother, and Savior by exploring Church history, Biblical stories and Catholic theology. She explains the role relics play in Catholic Church teaching, documentation of Miracles associated with these holy remains.
April 14, 2018
Fantastic
October 18, 2019
A great primer and reference.
December 1, 2023
Fascinating info about relics, but...Too much detail about apostles and saints and other background info about historic events and people. Some of that is relevant to the story of the relics, I understand, but too much of that info made for some dry spots.
*That being said*, the info about the actual relics, and especially details about testing of relic validity, made for a wonderfully interesting read.
*That being said*, the info about the actual relics, and especially details about testing of relic validity, made for a wonderfully interesting read.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews