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This week probably marks a first for a saint. Part of the body of St Bernadette is going to travel beneath the sea via the Eurotunnel. It’s the start of a tour of the relics of the saint, housed in a portable shrine, around Britain.

Bernadette is one of the most popular saints of the Catholic Church, for she was the young French peasant girl whose visions of the Virgin Mary in the Pyrenees in 1858 led to discovery of a spring near the village of Lourdes. Since then countless people have visited Lourdes on pilgrimage and for its apparently healing waters.

While honouring the relics of saints remains a strong part of Catholic culture, it’s a tradition that remains controversial and even repellent to others. Recently Manchester Metropolitan University reportedly issued trigger warnings for students on a medieval history course which focuses on pilgrimages, shrines and accounts of saints enduring violent deaths. And during the Reformation, Protestants rejected shrines and relics as money-spinning enterprises. Sceptics pointed out that there were so many items that some saints must have had dozens of fingers. So violent did the opposition become that many of the great shrines of England, including those with the relics of St Thomas Becket of Canterbury and St Alban, were smashed to pieces.

Yet Catholics have continued to honour relics, sometimes mystifying others with their devotion to them. Perhaps a modern analogy would be the contemporary desire for mementoes of the famous: people want that connection to others they admire and respect. Think of the vast sums paid for the Beatles’ autographs and their belongings. And people still remain so fascinated by Princess Diana, that bidders fought to buy a Ford Escort that once belonged to her. It eventually sold on Saturday for an astonishing £650,000.

For Catholics, though, this is about more than admiration. The interest in relics began around the second century as the number of Christian martyrs increased and their tormented bodies were venerated. These bodies were also considered a link between heaven and earth, like lights leading the way. The name of Compostela in Spain, where the grave of Jesus’s apostle James is located, reflect this idea, for it means field of stars.

It was not so much theology that boosted this idea of the grave of a saint being a sacred place and the bones, or relics, of these holy people, being so precious, but the people’s own piety. As Christians, they followed Jesus, God made man, and so their faith was not just focused on heaven and the hereafter, but was rooted in the earth. Christianity is about body AND soul, not just the spirit.

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