Amazing article on forbes.com about the trade in Christian relics [souvenirs from Jesus or from the Saints - bone fragments, hair, items that touched a saint... you name it, you can buy it]. My favourite bit:
Some of Broomer's clients are people who have parted from the church or been shunned by it. "Perhaps owning a relic is a way back in," she speculates. Her typical customer is male, single, middle-class and gay. Priests and Catholic church parishioners make up the rest of her clientele.Extracts below - read them - it's good stuff, I promise:
Broomer sells the skulls of martyrs ($4,500 each). She sells the teeth of saints ($300). For $975 you can get what may be a tiny splinter from the cross upon which Jesus Christ was crucified. It takes a certain amount of blind faith to believe all the claims attached to religious artifacts.
Other items in stock include, ostensibly, pieces of the body of Saint Thérèse, the Little Flower, made into paste; clothing worn by Saint Anthony of Padua; and a "touched" nail, meaning a nail that once touched a nail from the Crucifixion.
Vendors have a lingo in which relics are classified into grades. "First class" pertains to body parts of saints--a fingernail of the Apostle Paul, say, or a strand of the Virgin Mary's hair. Items (supposedly) touched by Jesus often are first class. The second class encompasses the relics of lesser figures--Mother Teresa's tennis shoes. The third class has items that have touched something first class--the "touched" nail described above, for instance.
Some first-class relics come with a red papal seal (meaning they've been vetted by the Vatican) and papers, usually in Latin, describing the item and its history. But if saints' bones can be faked, so can pieces of paper. Broomer says that while her clients care about authentication, in the end, "They want to believe."
Trade in relics arose in the Middle Ages, when Catholic pilgrims returned home from the Holy Land with tokens of the burial places of martyrs or of the martyrs themselves. These relics were believed capable of working miracles. Predictably, copies began to flood the marketplace--the fake Louis Vuitton handbags of their day. Sixteenth-century Protestant theologian John Calvin once quipped that there were enough pieces of the True Cross to "form a whole ship's cargo."
Catholic canon law now plainly forbids their sale. But the door to buying them is left open by an injunction that Catholics "rescue" relics. If, for instance, a Catholic sees a relic in a pawnshop, he or she is obliged to buy it, so that it won't be used for blasphemous purposes by a nonbeliever.
The Vatican itself owns what it believes to be a fragment of the table from the Last Supper and marble stairs that are the same ones Jesus ascended on His way to appear before Pontius Pilate. Asked if the Vatican's collection is one of the best in the world, a spokesman says, "Yes, it is that."
Broomer, a native Londoner, opened her antique store in Manhattan in 1987, selling mainly ceramics. Two years later a friend brought her some relics. "I loved them at first sight," she says, especially the ornate reliquaries. Soon afterwards she began selling relics almost exclusively. She's built up a small (300) but active list of clients. Being Jewish, she does not believe in the holiness of the objects. But, she says, "I very strongly believe in my clients' experience with them." One customer told her that while he lay in bed one night his relic emitted a strange sound. He got up to inspect it and was thus saved from being crushed when a wall collapsed upon his bed. Other customers report relics with palpable heartbeats.
Some of Broomer's clients are people who have parted from the church or been shunned by it. "Perhaps owning a relic is a way back in," she speculates. Her typical customer is male, single, middle-class and gay. Priests and Catholic church parishioners make up the rest of her clientele.
Father Paul Halovatch, chaplain at Southern Connecticut State University, is a customer. He has 100 relics and likes to use them during Mass. "I pick out a favorite saint of mine, and when his feast day comes up, I'll lay out some relics." He has ten purported to be from the True Cross. "I'm confident that with ten, at least one is the real deal," he says.
ames Jackson, owner of Jackson's auction house in Cedar Falls, Iowa, first wandered into Broomer's shop a decade ago. "I thought it was sacrilege," says Jackson, who describes himself as a devout Catholic. "I bought a whole shelf of stuff, to get it out of circulation."
Later, however, he began selling relics himself, through his auction house. How was he able to circumvent the church's prohibition? What the winning bidder would be buying (stated the catalog) were reliquaries, not the relics they contained. The relics would be given to the winning bidder "as a gift." Jackson's December 2006 catalog, for example, offered a pair of gilt bronze reliquaries containing relics of the Apostle Paul for between $6,000 and $10,000. Buy the box, and you got Paul gratis. Jackson has since had a crisis of conscience and no longer sells relics.
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