By Fr. James Morin
Rector, St. Gregory the Great Seminary in Seward
In the cosmic rhythm, November is a time of dying. New life emerges in the spring and explodes in growth under the influence of long summer days. In autumn, the days grow short, the air gains a crisp edge, and the leaves, after a flash of color, drift to the ground and die.
This season of darkness and death is mirrored by the great liturgical feasts of November. On Nov. 1 we celebrate All Saints Day, recalling the glorious death of the martyrs and the beauty of every life laid down for Christ. We build our altars – literally – on the bones of these saints, whose relics remind us that if we die with Christ, we shall live with him in glory. On the following day, All Souls Day, we pray for all those who have ‘gone before us in the sleep of Christ.’ This feast of intercession is not only spiritually efficacious; it has real aesthetic power as well. We sense both the solemnity and ephemerality of life, as the priest, vested in violet or black, offers somber prayers for our loved ones who have, as we used to say, given up the ghost.
These ancient November feasts are powerful enough that traces of them remain even in our fully secularized modern world. Halloween is the holiday of skeletons and ghosts; for a brief moment, even the unbelieving world takes a sidelong glance at death’s leering face. If Halloween were all we had, perhaps such a glance would chill our hearts. But Catholics have held on to the great feasts: the dark Halloween night is followed with the triumph of the Saints and the hope of All Souls. Christ has conquered death by death, and we participate in His victory.
I mentioned above that we build our altars on the relics of the saints. This tradition goes back to the first centuries, when early Christians instinctively felt that the best place to offer the Eucharistic sacrifice was where the martyrs’ blood was shed or bones were buried. This often strikes the modern secularist or Protestant as macabre or creepy, but as Catholics we know that death is not merely an end. Death, rather, has become an instrument of glory. By the power of the resurrection, the death of Christ – and by extension, the death of His holy ones – is a new beginning.
Tertullian expressed this in his famous quote: “The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church.” A more literal translation of his original Latin would read, “We [Christians] multiply as often as we are harvested by you [the persecutors]: the blood of Christians is seed.”
In accord with the ancient tradition, the main altar at St. Gregory the Great Seminary contains the relic of a saint.
In our case, the principal relic is the pelvic bone of St. Columban, a missionary saint who lived at the very time when St. Gregory the Great was Pope in Rome (late 6th, early 7th centuries). St. Columban came from Ireland and travelled throughout continental Europe, founding new monasteries during a time of great political and cultural turmoil. The monasteries planted by St. Columban would grow into stable pillars of faith and culture in a time marked by chaos and collapse. His life stands as a fitting ideal to which our seminarians might aspire, since many of them will be called to preach the word of God in an uncertain and changing world.
We have more than just the bones of St. Columban in our altar, however. At the time of the construction of our chapel in 2000, the diocesan chancery had 39 altar stones which had been gathered from deconsecrated or renovated churches throughout the diocese. These altar stones are relics in a double sense: not only do they each contain the blood or bones of some saint, the stones themselves are remnants of a past life of the Church in Lincoln. While in some sense they remind us of death – parish communities which have disappeared, churches which no longer stand – in another sense, they recall the life-giving sacrifices of the faithful who built those parish churches in order to pass along the faith to future generations, to our generation.
Planting these double relics under the altar at the seminary, the seedbed where priestly vocations mature, was a symbolically brilliant decision. In this way, the life-giving sacrifice of Christ is connected not only to an extraordinary saint, but also to all the ordinary souls whose faith and love made our own faith and vocation possible. Nourished by the bones and the blood of such witnesses, we pray that our seminarians will grow into men capable of living – and even dying – for Christ and his Church.
Courtesy photos
