This past week Providence College and St. Pius V Church hosted a unique event: A chance to see a relic of St. Thomas Aquinas. Typically, as Catholics when we think of relics, we have in our minds a small piece of clothing or bone from a deceased saint. If you went to the Dominican run college, instead of a small piece of St. Thomas Aquinas’s body, you would have discovered his entire skull.
From earliest days Catholics venerated the remains of the saints by placing them in reliquaries and in altars. Their remains served as a constant reminder of God’s power to transform us as shown by the great faith of the saint. Even more than that, however, it reminded Catholics then and now that our bodies are an integral part of us. Whereas many other religions and philosophies downplay or even denigrate the body, Christ’s resurrection from the dead teaches us that the body is essential. Jesus rose bodily; the same body that had been bruised and beaten on the cross, albeit glorified and transformed.
St. Thomas spent a lot of effort describing the importance of the body in his treatises. He described the “soul as the form of the body.” That is, each particular soul is configured to a particular body. Hence, like Christ, at the resurrection we will rise with the bodies we had on earth. Likewise, when we identify ourselves, we are not properly speaking souls. As people we are a composite of body and soul. Hence in heaven as souls separated from our bodies, we are incomplete and look forward to the resurrection.
So, St. Thomas’s relic is so much more than just a skull.
