Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine and I am a Dominican friar of the province of St Joseph.

I teach at the Dominican House of Studies and I work for the Tomistic Institute and this is Pines with Aquinas.

In this episode, I would like to talk about relics. That is to say the Catholic practice of accumulating and venerating relics.

Now to a lot of you, this practice seems strange or weird, and that might be an occasion to retreat from it,

or to conceal it, or to otherwise deny it.

But my experience has been with Catholic beliefs and

practices which seem stranger weird that if you inquire further you'll find that

the church has reasons and that they are good reasons and that those good

reasons bear life. So this is just to say that we can be certain and

confident in our belief in practice and need not be embarrassed or otherwise ashamed of what

seems to us like ill-founded or otherwise silly beliefs and practices.

So let's look a little bit at relics

and see what it is that the church understands

by her practice.

Here we go.

Okay, so the practice of accumulating and venerating relics is part of the

church's encouragement to worship. Now, the word worship we typically think of as associated exclusively with God, but in the ancient medieval,

I mean up until recently, the practice has always been that worship covers any respect or esteem or honor.

All right, and you can render it to God

or you can render it to not God.

That is to say creatures, specifically angels and men.

Now, recently, worship has come to be associated exclusively with God, and so people use

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