Debate: Does it matter if relics are fake?
by The Catholic Herald
posted Friday, 24 Jun 2011
Is the 'spiritual and emotive' power of relics more important than their authenticity?
This week Archbishop Nichols suggested that it didn’t necessarily matter if a relic was authentic or not.
Speaking about the British Museum’s Treasures of Heaven exhibition, he said:
[R]elics are a very important part of the expression of religious faith, as well as of cultural importance in the way that people cling to a souvenir from a person they’ve loved or a place that they’ve been to. And what that conveys is the connecting of this moment with the treasured moment of the past. And if that connection is made through an object which maybe forensically won’t stand up to the test, that’s of secondary importance to the spiritual and emotive power that the object can contain, and does contain."
