If, God forbid, some disaster were to befall our church, what would we try to rescue before the building collapsed? Clearly, our first priority would be to move the Blessed Sacrament to a place of safety. Our second would be to remove our relics. The rest of it—the silver vessels, the handcrafted artwork, the musical instruments—would be expendable by comparison. The true treasures of a church are often hidden: in the tabernacle, in the reliquary beneath the altar, beyond our sight but ever present. Relics? People are often surprised when I point them out. Yes, as every Catholic altar should be, ours is built atop a reliquary that houses the bones of saints. (Our reliquary is the wooden box beneath the altar with a golden, pyramid-shaped lid). The questions that follow are typically who and why. I’ll address the who in a forthcoming article about the saints whose relics reside among us. For now, let’s spend some time thinking about the why. First, it must be said that preserving relics is a natural human instinct seen in both religious and non-religious arenas of life (sports fans pay fortunes for relics such as “game-used” equipment). In the face of death, this instinct takes on a heightened urgency. Most of us, I would guess, cherish the relics of a deceased loved one. A pair of glasses, perhaps; a well-used rosary; a lock of hair. A friend of mine even kept her father’s pacemaker— anything to affirm not just the memory but, in some sense, the abiding presence of the person. The earliest Christians maintained a strange and fierce attachment to their dead. Theirs was an “underground” church not just by legal restrictions but also by preference. They wanted to worship in the catacombs, surrounded by their beloved bones. And as the church grew and moved above ground, they continued to keep the bones close, building their altars on the bodies of saints. It’s important to remember that St. Peter’s Basilica is, for all its grandeur, a simple burial shrine, built atop the bones of a crucified apostle. Our ancestors venerated relics for the same reason we do today—because, as we profess every Sunday, we believe in the resurrection of the body. The bones or personal effects of a saint are not simply reminders of a life lived on earth. They are also tangible evidence of a heavenly reality. All of us who have been baptized “already participate in the dignity of belonging to Christ” and, in a mysterious way, our bodies already participate in his resurrection (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1004). The bodies of the saints are resurrected in the present tense, not simply the future—they are tokens of the destiny that awaits us to.