Though Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) lived and died in the thirteenth century, his skull recently completed a tour of ten U.S. cities in honor of the 750th anniversary of his death. One of these stops occurred five miles from Southern Seminary at St. Louis Bertrand Catholic Church in Louisville, Kentucky.

During the veneration time following a special Mass, the enclosed 750-year-old skull rests near the church’s altar. Throughout the day, Catholics on pilgrimage wait in line and venerate the skull by offering special prayers and seeking the spiritual benefits they believe are still attached to the skull of the renowned saint.

With the practice of relic veneration on display in our backyard, Michael Haykin, Church History Professor at SBTS, helps us think through the practice of relic veneration, how it originated, and how evangelicals should think about the practice.

What is relic veneration?

“Relics were usually reputed body parts of those regarded to have lived exemplary holy lives. These relics were so important and powerful in the Middle Ages that one historian has observed that this era is simply a thousand years of worship of these objects. Taking its rise from the pagan Roman idea in late Antiquity that holiness inheres and can be infused into physical objects, Christian churches had begun accumulating bodily bits of the saints by the fifth and sixth centuries. These bits included fingers, arms, and hair to entire heads and other holy objects, such as supposed pieces of the cross on which Christ died. Placed within the precincts of a church building, these physical items intensified the holiness of these structures and even encouraged pilgrims to travel from afar to see and touch them. The latter was especially important when these relics were housed within cathedrals, remarkable architectural structures that often took centuries to build. Understandably, financing such projects could be a financial nightmare.

Pilgrims traveling to see the relics within the cathedral were thus vital to the funding of these buildings. In other words, by the High Middle Ages (roughly 1050-1300 AD), the superstitious accumulation and veneration of relics was deeply interwoven with church finances.”

What should Evangelicals think about relics?

“Our Protestant forebears at the time of the Reformation had no doubts about the idolatry involved in such veneration. John Calvin, for example, wrote a satirical attack on this entire medieval practice entitled Le Traité des reliques (Geneva, 1543), in which he excoriated the superstitious folly of the whole business of relics and emphasized that it has no place in the Christian life. And while the desire to recognize the embodied nature of Christian truth needs to be affirmed—one possible spring for the development of relic worship—the employment of relics as a vehicle of piety has really no foundation in the Scriptures.

The recent circulation of the head of Thomas Aquinas—albeit one of the most significant theologians of the medieval era—is a sad holdover from the medieval world that our Reformation forbearers rightly rejected in toto.”