Homily by Father Emmanuel Schwab

Readings of the celebrant’s choice

1st reading: Genesis 50,24:26-13,19; Exodus 21:24,32-XNUMX; Joshua XNUMX:XNUMX

Psalm: 129

2rd reading: 2 Corinthians 4,5-18

Gospel: John 19,38-42

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In our basilica, we have permanent relics of Saint Therese of the Child Jesus of the Holy Face. These are the three bones of her right arm, the humerus, the radius and the ulna… this arm with which she washed the dishes as well as prepared the chalices and ciboria for the mass, which wrote her letters, her manuscripts. And we are sensitive to these relics. We have different reliquaries that contain this or that bone of Saint Therese and these reliquaries are requested here and there in the world. On Monday we will welcome the centenary reliquary, which is returning from 10 months spent in Brazil, where it traveled all over Brazil with large crowds and great fervor.

This veneration of the relics of the saints is something very ancient, we have heard the testimony of it with the bones of the patriarch Joseph, one of the sons of Jacob. The care given to the bodies of the deceased, the care given to the remains of the deceased has always had a great value in the people of Israel and even more in the Church. Behind this veneration for the relics, behind this care which is taken for the bodies of the deceased looms the hope of the resurrection.

Oh, of course… of course God who called us from nothing into being, who created us from nothing, of course God can resurrect us from the dust that, for the most part, we will have become again. But we also see how, surprisingly, some saints, when you visit their tomb, you discover that their body is intact. What does that mean?

In meditating on the dead body of a man, we are referred to the very meaning of the living body of a man. What is the status of our body? Our person, our self, our I is not something purely spiritual that would have a body as a vehicle on this earth, as we have a car or a railway carriage or an airplane as a vehicle. My body is part of my person. My body is me, as my soul is me. And we always experience death as a drama, even if our hope in eternal life allows us to continue on our path while keeping our eyes fixed on Heaven; death remains a drama. It comes to contradict head-on our hope for eternity, and what disconcerts us is precisely the passage from the state of living body to that of corpse.

It is at the same time always this same body, but it has become inanimate and can degrade. We are men, we are not angels; and our human condition is precisely to be at this point of junction of the purely spiritual world that is the angelic world, and of the carnal world that is the whole animal world. And we, we are at the same time of this carnal world and of this spiritual world. This is what makes the originality of our human condition and this is what makes the greatness of our human condition. We must love our human life in its carnal condition.

When we speak of resurrection, we mean that it is our own body that is concerned, even if we do not know what the resurrection will really be. But already when we contemplate the resurrection of Jesus, we see clearly that there is a continuity between the one who is put in the tomb and the one whom the apostles will find, living forever stronger than death. Otherwise, the sign of the empty tomb would have no meaning.

Today, for some decades, cremation has been taking up more and more space in our society. And I do not think that it is something indifferent. What does it mean to burn the bodies of the deceased and then crush the bones to reduce them to powder? What does it mean in relation to the respect for that dead body promised to the resurrection, that dead body which, in the sacrament of the Eucharist, received the Body of the resurrected Christ. We have ingested, we have digested the Body of the resurrected Christ in our mortal condition, as if there were within us the first fruits of the resurrection of the body, that resurrection of the flesh which we affirm in the Credo.

This is why Christians have always wanted to imitate the Lord even in his death, not only in offering my life out of love for God and for my brothers, going to the end of love, but also imitating Christ in his death, by depositing in the tomb, as we heard in the Gospel. Jesus was laid in the tomb and we lay our dead in the tomb in expectation of the resurrection. The visit we make to the cemetery undoubtedly has a different meaning from the visit of those who do not know the risen Christ, because we come to visit the tombs of our dead in this hope of the resurrection, in this certainty that life is not destroyed, but transformed as I will sing in a moment in the preface to the Eucharistic prayer.

The fact that the veneration of relics in recent years has taken up more space in popular devotion, in the life of the Church, is I believe an important sign for us. Saint Therese loved relics very much. She had a small bag containing relics. And when she speaks to us about her trip to Italy, she tells us:

In Milan:

Céline and I were intrepid, always the first and following Monsignor directly in order to see everything concerning the relics of the Saints and to hear the explanations well; thus while he offered the Holy Sacrifice on the tomb of St Charles we were with papa behind the Altar, our heads resting on the reliquary [which] contains the body of the saint dressed in his pontifical robes, it was like this everywhere… (MsA 58v°)

And in Rome:

The visit to the church of St. Agnes was also very sweet for me, it was a childhood friend that I was going to visit at her home, I spoke to her at length about the one who bears her name so well and I made every effort to obtain one of the relics of the Angelica patron saint of my beloved Mother in order to bring it back to her, but it was impossible for us to have any other than a small red stone that came loose from a rich mosaic whose origin dates back to the time of St. Agnes and which she must have often looked at. (MsA 61v°)

In the last month of his life, at the beginning of September, in his bed in the infirmary:

Bring me the relics of Mother Anne of Jesus and of Théophane Vénard, I want to kiss them. (CJ September 11, 5)

Yes, this veneration of relics invites us to rethink the way we look at our own body and the body of the deceased. Relics tell us that the person really existed. Relics tell us that it was really in his human body that he lived the holiness of God.

To conclude, I will tell you this anecdote that Father Sangalli, who handled the cause of beatification of Saints Louis and Zélie Martin, told me three days ago. The miracle that was chosen for the beatification of Louis and Zélie was the healing of a newborn baby, a truly miraculous healing attributed to the intercession of Saints Louis and Zélie. This little boy is called Pietro. When the bodies of Louis and Zélie were exhumed, as is always done for beatification processes, the little boy was there, he must have been a few years old — it was not immediately after the miracle of course — and he was present. He was there and he saw what remained of the bodies of Louis and Zélie. When someone asked him afterwards, but what did you see? He replied: “Non ho visto tutto perché he resto é in cielo” ... I haven't seen everything because the rest is in Heaven.

Well, I think that little boy understood everything! These very concrete relics that remain to us of the saints tell us that the rest is in Heaven, that is to say, they are like a sign that points to Heaven. When we come to venerate relics, we are always at the gate of Heaven. Let us love our bodies, let us love with great respect the bodies of our deceased. Let us place them in the tomb in imitation of Jesus who was himself placed in the tomb.

Amen

Father Emmanuel Schwab, Rector of the Shrine