Martyrs' Relics in Your Local Catholic Church

One  of  the  really  intriguing  things  about  your  local  Roman  Catholic  Church  is  that  if  you  get  your  pastors'  permission  to  do  so,  you  can  go  up  to  the  altar   and  lift  up  the  altar  cloth  and  you  will  see  one  or  more  small  drill  marks  in  the  stone,  plastered-over.

Why?

The  reason  for  them  is  fascinating.     Holes  were  drilled  in  the  altar  stone,  and  martyrs'  relics   pushed  into  them,  and  then  they  were  sealed  with  plaster.

Why?

Because  nearly  2,000  years  ago,   the  Catholic  Church  was  bathed  in  martyrs'  blood  in  the  time  of  its  formation.   Before  the  Roman  Emperor  Constantine   fully  legitimized  the  Church,   the  emperors,  who  did  not  like  this emerging  new  sect,   would  authorize  persecutions,  to  force  members  to  publicly  forswear  their  allegiance.  Soldiers  would  be  dispatched  to  the  homes  of  those  known  to  be  followers  of  "Christus"   and,  like  the  Nazis  of  World  War  II  going  door-to-door  hunting  for  hidden  Jews,   threaten  loss  of  life  and  property  if  they  did  not  say  the  right  thing.    Many  were  murdered  in  response.     (I  believe  that  this  shall  happen  again,  in  the  not-too-distant  future.)   Soldiers  were  shocked  as  men,  women  and  children   voluntarily  stretched  out  their  necks  for  execution.  Nothing  spread  Christianity  faster  through  the  ranks  of  the  Roman  army   than  asking  them   to  participate  in  hunts  for  Faithful  followers  of  "Christus."  Membership  in  the  Church  boomed.

Many  of  the  martyrs  were  buried  in  the  underground  cemeteries  on  Rome  and  environs,  called  "catacombs."     The  faithful  would  sneak  into  the  catacombs  for  Mass,  which  would  frequently  be  held  on  top  of  the  stone  sarcophagi  of  the  more  prominent  martyrs.

It  was  this  practice  --  consecration  on  top  of  the  martyrs  stone  graves,  an  appropriate  site  since  the  body  and  blood  of  Christ  at  Mass  is  the  body  and  blood  of  Christ  sacrificed  --  which  gradually  mutated  into   a  rule  requiring  that  martyrs'   relics  be  place  into  altar  stone  assemblies.

At  St.  Martin  of  Tours  Catholic  Church  on  Oxford  Circle   in  Philadelphia,  where  I  went  to  Mass  when  I  was  a  kid,  they  used  to  have   a  portable  altar  --  a  rolling  metal  frame  with  a  small  stone  slab  on  top  for  consecration,    and  a  rack  beneath  for  the  metal  reliquary  box  which  held  a  saint's  relics.

One  of  the  more  famous  ancient  stone  structures  in  New  England  is  the  Newport  Tower,  in  Newport,  Rhode  Island.

I  have  been  to  it.  The  local  consensus  is  that  it  was  a  windmill  belonging  to  Benedict  Arnold's  grandfather.

In  fact,  it  is  one  of  the  most  astonishing  stone  structures  in  the  United  States.     It  is   the  tower  portion  of  a  fortified  Roman  Catholic  Church   built  in  Newport  by  Roman  Catholic  Vikings   around  the  year  1357.   The  public  records  dispatching  the  mission  from  the  united  kingdom  of  Sweden  and  Norway  to  "Vinland"  --  the  Viking  name  for  America  --  in  1354,  almost  150  years  before  Columbus,  have  been  located.    The  design   of  the  Newport  tower  is  the  same  as  the  design  for  fortified  church  towers  in  the  joint  kingdom  of  Sweden  and  Norway  constructed  around  that  time.  The  mortar  between  the  stones  is  of  the  variety  in  use  in  that  era.  In  the  second  story,  there  is  a  fireplace  on  the  inside,  with  a  chimney  built  into  the  wall  --   a  feature  in  Scandinavian   construction  during  that  era.    On  the  outside  of  the  building  is  a  stone   bearing  the  Norse  runes  for  H-N-K-R-S ...

 ...  meaning  "hinikirs,"   the  Norse  term  meaning  "chair  church,"    which  is  what  "cathedral"  actually  means  --  "church  of  the  [bishop's]  chair."

On  the  inside  wall  of  the  second  story   there  is  a  slot  in  the  stone  wall  for  their  altar  stone  for  Roman  Catholic  Mass,   and  beneath  that  altar  stone  slot  is  a  square  niche   for  their  reliquary  box ...