The visit of the relics of St Bernadette of Lourdes offers a moment of grace and new evangelisation in England, Scotland and Wales, the Bishop of Shrewsbury has said.
The Rt Rev. Mark Davies said he hoped the visit of the relics of the 19th century French visionary would invites pilgrims to answer the “universal call to holiness”.
He said recognition of the call to holiness “is going to be crucial to the experience of the pilgrimage of the relics in our own land”.
The call to holiness is the “crucial message of our time,” he said on the 16th episode of the Merely Catholic series for the Catholic Herald.
He said holiness was the only thing necessary in everyone’s life. “It’s the crucial thing that the Church proposes,” he said. “It’s what all the teaching, sacraments entrusted to her, all of her discipline, is for – to bring us to holiness, which in the end is to reach heaven – complete and everlasting happiness.”
This is the goal of the Church which does not seek popularity but proposes holiness in every age, he said.
“That’s what the Church is for and it is the saints who do this because the saints are the great evangelisers in every time and place and the saints show us the Gospel. They show the authentic face of the Church. That’s why turning to the saints is so important.”
He said: “We glimpse in the saints the exemplars of what we are striving for.”
The bishop said that the relics were tangible connections with the saints and had been part of the life from the Church from her earliest years.
“In this country we think of how relics were part of the first evangelisation of our land and indeed of the flourishing of Christian Catholic England where it awakened in people that longing for holiness and that sense of connection – what we call in the Creed ‘the Communion of the Saints’,” he said.
“I think too of the new evangelisation of our country,” he added.
St Bernadette offered a “great lesson” at a time when Britain faces a “radical attack on Christian morality and upon the sanctity of human life”, he continued.
“She stands in the midst of modernity for all those millions who would fall victims to the inhuman ideologies or our time, to the value of life the eternal vocation, the greatness of the vocation of every human person. I hope that this witness can be brought to our own land as well.”
The relics of St Bernadette arrived in England on Friday and will be in the Archdiocese of Westminster until September 6 before they are taken to the Bishopric of the Forces in Hampshire and then on to the diocese of Portsmouth, Plymouth, Clifton, Cardiff and Menevia.
They will arrive at Shrewsbury Cathedral at 1pm on Tuesday September 13 where they will remain until 9am the following day.
On departing from Shrewsbury Cathedral on Wednesday September 14, the relics will be driven to St Werburgh’s Church in Chester city centre where they will be made available for public veneration.
Members of the public will be invited to enter both venues to venerate the relics and offer silent prayers in their presence.
Overall, the relics of St Bernadette will be in England, Scotland and Wales, until November 1 as they continue their tour through all of the dioceses.
The relics involve fragments of two ribs, the saint’s kneecaps, muscle from the right thigh, and other muscle, skin and hair tissue, which are kept in a reliquary. The tour will give British Catholics the chance to make a personal pilgrimage to the French saint, to venerate her relics and to pray for her intercession.
In 2012 the relic of the heart of St John Vianney, the patron of parish priests, was brought to the Diocese of Shrewsbury, and neighbouring dioceses, in a highly successful tour aimed at helping young people to discern their vocations.
Three years earlier the visit of the relics of St Thérèse of Lisieux to Britain attracted a quarter of a million people to queue up to pray at the side of the reliquary of the “Little Flower”.
(Photo © Mazur/cbcew.org.uk)