I’ve observed that in English usage, we tend to use the French/Latin derived words for the higher, more refined or elevated usage (e.g. spirit) and the Saxon/German derived word for the more vulgar sense (e.g. ghost/geist). There are many other examples: pasta/noodle, people/folks.
Linguists attribute a lot of that to the 1066 Norman invasion - where you get a French speaking ruling class + an Old English speaking peasantry.
(This is also the root of why English often has separate words for animal / the meat you eat from that animal: Pig/Pork; Cow/Beef, Deer/Venison, Sheep/Mutton)
On relics and respect for the body: how I've seen it, we shouldn't justify the Church's position on scattering ashes, etc. as "we have to keep the body together" because that's patently false due to the long-standing practice of keeping relics. I think the teaching would be better explained as: "remains should be kept in a sacred place, where individuals can be remembered and their remains aren't at risk of being lost or forgotten."
See, for example, the 2023 document by the DDF explained that a place could be set aside for the common accumulation of ashes from multiple persons, so long as the individual names were preserved.
Another thing forbidden is keeping remains in an urn at your house: requiring remains be kept in a cemetery or other sacred place ensures they will be respected, and that it won't be lost, e.g. when someone dies without family and has one or more urns of now unknown relatives that are going to be thrown out with the rest of their stuff.
Keeping relics of Saints, and dividing up individual parts doesn't violate these principles because the remains are being respected (venerated), they aren't (usually) at high risk of being lost or forgotten, or misplaced, and more than likely they will be kept in a sacred place.
On that point: bone church, yeah maybe we should have kept a record of whose bones these are.
I think it's a little hard to square the circle here. Relics have gone from a large portion of a saint's earthly remains kept in limited locations to a multitude of tiny pieces of those remains spread far and wide.
Sadly, the division of these remains does come with a higher risk of their being lost or misplaced. Some priests or parishes keep beautiful collections of relics for veneration: wonderful! On the other hand, small reliquaries turn up frequently at thrift stores, pawn shops, or ebay. This is a real problem today.
Of course we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We should be able to venerate the relics of beloved saints. But I think we (the Church) needs to apply a stricter standard for the preservation of bodily integrity. That would better demonstrate our commitment to the standard which we do apply to the cremated remains of the faithful.
There is a related problem. I was previously assigned at one of the older parishes in the United States. We had maybe 50-75 relics that we could not do anything with except for safely storing them. It was difficult - but it some cases barely possible - to make a guess as to the identity of the relic. The writing was at least 200 years old. However, this was an educated guess, and there was nowhere near the level of certainty let alone the documentary trail required to publicly display them. So they sit in a vault.
For the bone church: I always assumed that there was a mass grave due to the plague which was later exhumed to have a proper resting place, and perhaps by that time they simply found a bunch of bones? I know many relics are typically retrieved during an exhumation of the body, so I figured it was something similar here- no vats of flesh eating bacteria are required
If Wikipedia can be trusted, there is no connection with the plague; the bones were dug up and relocated when the friars themselves relocated their priory from a previous location.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I was under the impression that in Europe they rent out grave sites (they are not permanent like in the US). After the lease expires, they reuse the gravesite for the next person. I thought that they dug up the bones (bodies decompose very quickly), and brought them to an ossuary or to the catacombs (presuming that they did not just bury the new body over the old remains).
Perhaps in older times they did something similar? I guess they have to do something with the bones?
Yes, I was going to make a comment to the same effect. As far as I understand it, temporary burial, and then transfer to a group ossuary or individual ossuaries (think those little niches in the walls of Spanish or Italian cemeteries) is the common practice. I have also been editing an academic work that made a passing reference to a lease in a graveyard along the lines you are referring to. All very odd from the perspective of U.S. practices.
Re: Bone Church. My understanding is they switched monasteries and exhumed the friars from the previous location. The exhumed friars once moved to the new location were used to create the Bone Church.
Is "Capuchins around a card table" Ed thinking of the guys around the poker table "Body World" exhibition (notably featured in the Daniel Craig's Casino Royale)?
JD and Ed, check out Peter Brown’s The Cult of the Saints: It’s Rise and Function in Latin Christianity if you haven’t read it before to get a sense of why the physical bodies of Saints were treated as they were in death. It’s a good read.
As far as the flesh removal goes, historically the bodies were buried for 10 or 15 years and when the mass grave was opened the bones which had no flesh on them were removed to make room for the most recently deceased.
I love Latin because it is so ambiguous. Many ablative adjectives and adverbs are the same, and since placement is irrelevant to meaning, Catullus in his poem on Cicero shows one can write a poem which can be taken in opposite senses. Classical Latin had an extremely small vocabulary which also contributed to the language's ambiguity. This may also explain why even the Romans used Greek with its much larger vocabulary and articles which allow the reader to understand it without such ambiguity.
There’s a podcast hosted by two Orthodox Christian priests called The Lord of Spirits. It helps provide Ancient Near East and Second Temple Judaism cultural background to the Scriptures and Christian teaching. Not everything conforms with Catholic orthodoxy, but it’s still a wonderful resource. The reason I’m bringing this up is because they did an episode on relics that I believe addresses most of Ed’s concerns. I’d recommend anyone with questions on this topic take a listen.
I really appreciated the conversation re: women and men relating socially and the tricky nature of it as it intersects with a clerical culture. As a (married) woman who supports priest friends and encourages their vocations, there are these invisible lines I walk, even as it regards texting a priest with or without my husband on the thread. You’ve put your finger on something very few people discuss. Also, Ed, you mentioned working “in the real world” with women and that it all went fine; I’d be interested to hear from the women you worked with as to their perspectives of what was hard and if there were challenges you were unaware of. (My experience tells me the challenges women face professionally often go unperceived by even the most well-meaning male colleagues.)
Thanks, Ed and JD, for a fascinating conversation on a very peculiar corner of Catholic traditions. How do you square the great emphasis on respect for the body, keeping it intact and handled with the greatest reverence....and all the wacky things which have happened to corpses in practice?
I have been to two ossuaries in Czechia. They are both easily accessible from Prague, which is where an overcrowding mass of tourists obviously turn up.
Take the bus to Brno, the second largest city in Czechia, and it is ten minutes walk from the bus terminus outside the rail station to the Church of St James. In 2001 a huge collection of 18th century bones were discovered in the crypt. No one knew they were still there.
Most were respectfully buried in a local cemetery; there was no way to identify them. Others were arranged along the crypt walls where you can still see them.
There is a Starbucks 100 yards away in Liberty Square if you need to steady your nerves.
There are organised tours from Prague to the Bone Church at Sedlec, in conjunction with Kutna Hora and the church of St Barbara, the patron saint of miners.
In Catholic Bavaria, there was the long established tradition of taking the monarch's heart to the major Marian shrine of Altotting, while the rest of him was entombed in the crypt of the Jesuit church in the center of Munich. Again, it seems like a bizarre violation of the body, even if the devotion to Our Lady is commendable.
I’ve observed that in English usage, we tend to use the French/Latin derived words for the higher, more refined or elevated usage (e.g. spirit) and the Saxon/German derived word for the more vulgar sense (e.g. ghost/geist). There are many other examples: pasta/noodle, people/folks.
Linguists attribute a lot of that to the 1066 Norman invasion - where you get a French speaking ruling class + an Old English speaking peasantry.
(This is also the root of why English often has separate words for animal / the meat you eat from that animal: Pig/Pork; Cow/Beef, Deer/Venison, Sheep/Mutton)
Chicken/chicken
On relics and respect for the body: how I've seen it, we shouldn't justify the Church's position on scattering ashes, etc. as "we have to keep the body together" because that's patently false due to the long-standing practice of keeping relics. I think the teaching would be better explained as: "remains should be kept in a sacred place, where individuals can be remembered and their remains aren't at risk of being lost or forgotten."
See, for example, the 2023 document by the DDF explained that a place could be set aside for the common accumulation of ashes from multiple persons, so long as the individual names were preserved.
Another thing forbidden is keeping remains in an urn at your house: requiring remains be kept in a cemetery or other sacred place ensures they will be respected, and that it won't be lost, e.g. when someone dies without family and has one or more urns of now unknown relatives that are going to be thrown out with the rest of their stuff.
Keeping relics of Saints, and dividing up individual parts doesn't violate these principles because the remains are being respected (venerated), they aren't (usually) at high risk of being lost or forgotten, or misplaced, and more than likely they will be kept in a sacred place.
On that point: bone church, yeah maybe we should have kept a record of whose bones these are.
I think it's a little hard to square the circle here. Relics have gone from a large portion of a saint's earthly remains kept in limited locations to a multitude of tiny pieces of those remains spread far and wide.
Sadly, the division of these remains does come with a higher risk of their being lost or misplaced. Some priests or parishes keep beautiful collections of relics for veneration: wonderful! On the other hand, small reliquaries turn up frequently at thrift stores, pawn shops, or ebay. This is a real problem today.
Of course we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We should be able to venerate the relics of beloved saints. But I think we (the Church) needs to apply a stricter standard for the preservation of bodily integrity. That would better demonstrate our commitment to the standard which we do apply to the cremated remains of the faithful.
There is a related problem. I was previously assigned at one of the older parishes in the United States. We had maybe 50-75 relics that we could not do anything with except for safely storing them. It was difficult - but it some cases barely possible - to make a guess as to the identity of the relic. The writing was at least 200 years old. However, this was an educated guess, and there was nowhere near the level of certainty let alone the documentary trail required to publicly display them. So they sit in a vault.
For the bone church: I always assumed that there was a mass grave due to the plague which was later exhumed to have a proper resting place, and perhaps by that time they simply found a bunch of bones? I know many relics are typically retrieved during an exhumation of the body, so I figured it was something similar here- no vats of flesh eating bacteria are required
If Wikipedia can be trusted, there is no connection with the plague; the bones were dug up and relocated when the friars themselves relocated their priory from a previous location.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I was under the impression that in Europe they rent out grave sites (they are not permanent like in the US). After the lease expires, they reuse the gravesite for the next person. I thought that they dug up the bones (bodies decompose very quickly), and brought them to an ossuary or to the catacombs (presuming that they did not just bury the new body over the old remains).
Perhaps in older times they did something similar? I guess they have to do something with the bones?
Yes, I was going to make a comment to the same effect. As far as I understand it, temporary burial, and then transfer to a group ossuary or individual ossuaries (think those little niches in the walls of Spanish or Italian cemeteries) is the common practice. I have also been editing an academic work that made a passing reference to a lease in a graveyard along the lines you are referring to. All very odd from the perspective of U.S. practices.
Re: Bone Church. My understanding is they switched monasteries and exhumed the friars from the previous location. The exhumed friars once moved to the new location were used to create the Bone Church.
Is "Capuchins around a card table" Ed thinking of the guys around the poker table "Body World" exhibition (notably featured in the Daniel Craig's Casino Royale)?
JD and Ed, check out Peter Brown’s The Cult of the Saints: It’s Rise and Function in Latin Christianity if you haven’t read it before to get a sense of why the physical bodies of Saints were treated as they were in death. It’s a good read.
https://a.co/d/civHG6F
As far as the flesh removal goes, historically the bodies were buried for 10 or 15 years and when the mass grave was opened the bones which had no flesh on them were removed to make room for the most recently deceased.
I love Latin because it is so ambiguous. Many ablative adjectives and adverbs are the same, and since placement is irrelevant to meaning, Catullus in his poem on Cicero shows one can write a poem which can be taken in opposite senses. Classical Latin had an extremely small vocabulary which also contributed to the language's ambiguity. This may also explain why even the Romans used Greek with its much larger vocabulary and articles which allow the reader to understand it without such ambiguity.
There’s a podcast hosted by two Orthodox Christian priests called The Lord of Spirits. It helps provide Ancient Near East and Second Temple Judaism cultural background to the Scriptures and Christian teaching. Not everything conforms with Catholic orthodoxy, but it’s still a wonderful resource. The reason I’m bringing this up is because they did an episode on relics that I believe addresses most of Ed’s concerns. I’d recommend anyone with questions on this topic take a listen.
https://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/lordofspirits/can_these_bones_live/
I really appreciated the conversation re: women and men relating socially and the tricky nature of it as it intersects with a clerical culture. As a (married) woman who supports priest friends and encourages their vocations, there are these invisible lines I walk, even as it regards texting a priest with or without my husband on the thread. You’ve put your finger on something very few people discuss. Also, Ed, you mentioned working “in the real world” with women and that it all went fine; I’d be interested to hear from the women you worked with as to their perspectives of what was hard and if there were challenges you were unaware of. (My experience tells me the challenges women face professionally often go unperceived by even the most well-meaning male colleagues.)
Thanks, Ed and JD, for a fascinating conversation on a very peculiar corner of Catholic traditions. How do you square the great emphasis on respect for the body, keeping it intact and handled with the greatest reverence....and all the wacky things which have happened to corpses in practice?
I have been to two ossuaries in Czechia. They are both easily accessible from Prague, which is where an overcrowding mass of tourists obviously turn up.
Take the bus to Brno, the second largest city in Czechia, and it is ten minutes walk from the bus terminus outside the rail station to the Church of St James. In 2001 a huge collection of 18th century bones were discovered in the crypt. No one knew they were still there.
Most were respectfully buried in a local cemetery; there was no way to identify them. Others were arranged along the crypt walls where you can still see them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brno_Ossuary
There is a Starbucks 100 yards away in Liberty Square if you need to steady your nerves.
There are organised tours from Prague to the Bone Church at Sedlec, in conjunction with Kutna Hora and the church of St Barbara, the patron saint of miners.
https://www.getyourguide.com/en-gb/prague-l10/kutna-hora-from-prague-the-bone-church-st-barbara-s-t76420/?ranking_uuid=da7957de-dc27-458f-b94c-c91c5b90838a&closeTabOnNavigationBack=true
In Catholic Bavaria, there was the long established tradition of taking the monarch's heart to the major Marian shrine of Altotting, while the rest of him was entombed in the crypt of the Jesuit church in the center of Munich. Again, it seems like a bizarre violation of the body, even if the devotion to Our Lady is commendable.
https://www.bavarikon.de/object/bav:BSB-CMS-0000000000006914?lang=en