Many observant Catholics spent Friday’s All Saints’ Day holiday honoring the multitude of saints who are examples of faith and virtue for the religious. But the celebration will go on longer at one Southwest Side parish, where 17 relics of saints from the biblical era to the 20th century have been on display since Monday and will remain open to the public through Monday.
Among saint’s relics currently on display at St. Rita of Cascia Church in Chicago Lawn are remains from St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Thomas Aquinas. They are first-class relics, meaning that they come from the body of a saint.
Most of the relics are tiny fragments of bones, flesh or hair from the different saints. Father Samuel Joutras, the associate pastor for the St. Rita parish, said the oldest of the relics on display belonged to St. Jude, one of Jesus’ apostles. But a relic of the 20th-century St. Mother Teresa — specifically, a strand of her hair — was also part of the display.
Joutras said many parishioners would likely find it particularly meaningful to venerate, or pray before, a relic of St. Jude, who is the patron saint of impossible causes and an intercessor for workers.
“People living ordinary lives find him inspiring,” Joutras said.
Joutras said four of the relics, including those from the congregation’s two patron saints, were on permanent display in the congregation’s sacristy. The others spend the rest of the year in his care.
Parish leadership decided to display the entire collection of relics and do so for an extended period because they wanted to make the holiday more meaningful for congregants by making the saints themselves more vivid, Joutras said.
Chicago-area churches’ collections of relics vary depending on the interests of clergy and parishioners, according to Father Dennis O’Neill. O’Neill’s congregation, the Shrine of All Saints at St. Martha’s Church in Morton Grove, has one of the largest collections of relics in the world, numbering about 3,100. Other congregations could have hundreds of relics or none at all, he said.
Erin G. Walsh, a professor of early Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School, said many people misinterpret the purpose of relics in religious life.
“They’re venerated, they’re honored, but they’re not worshiped,” she said.
But All Saints’ Day is rooted in a tradition of “thinking about the saints as exemplars within the faith.” Interacting with saints’ physical remains reminds Catholics that “embodied life is a place where spiritual transformation happens,” Walsh said.
Joutras, standing between the display of relics and another altar holding photographs of congregants’ deceased loved ones for All Souls Day, celebrated the day after All Saints’ Day, said that displaying relics helped faithful people see how God worked in the saints’ lives and could do the same in theirs: “This saint actually walked through our same temptations and sufferings and joys, and yet they were guided by faith… if they can do it, we can do it.”
The relics will be on display for public prayer through Monday at St. Rita’s Church, 6243 S. Fairfield Ave.