The Bones of our Saints

Some time ago, when the proposal was first made public, I was much disturbed to hear that the bones of the dead in the Mount Street Cemetery were going to be shifted to make room for a new building site.

At the time I kept quiet about it, chiefly because the project apparently had hierarchical authority, and it seemed that there were other issues with which I should occupy my pen.

But after reading Pat Lawlor’s public protest – Mr Lawlor’s continually developing insights are a sign that as a man grows older, within the household of the Faith, his mind may deepen and broaden rather than become narrower – I have pleasure in adding my own voice to his.

Let us not become too much swallowed up by a rational utilitarian age. There are other values besides the value of education and the value of property.

When I discussed the Mount Street Cemetery project with him, a Dominican priest said to me: ‘Ah, but they’re going to build a Catholic hostel on the site. The dead should not stand in the way of the living. The Church has a great need for educational facilities. . . .’

And I said: ‘Father, if a Breton peasant was in need of land to build a pigsty, he would not dig up his grandfather’s and grandmother’s bones to make room for it.’

‘There’s a big difference between a hostel and a pigsty, Jim.’

‘Only because we are inclined to regard Education as a god. Pigsties are communal necessities. So are hostels. But the Breton peasant’s instinct of reverence to the bones of the dead is something we are in danger of whittling page 531 away. Let’s stand up and let the world know that we Catholics feel that this principle of reverence is so important that we won’t even allow its shadow to be diminished.’

‘But there’s charity. . . .’

‘If our kids were starving, and there was no other ground available, and we needed to grow spuds in the cemeteries – all right, Father, I’d have no complaints. But what if the new educated generation have their technical knowledge but learn from our example to regard the bones of their ancestors as dispensable garbage?’

‘There will be due reverence in the exhumation and reburial.’

‘No doubt. But the Breton peasant wouldn’t do it. And the Maori who’d grown up in a pa wouldn’t do it. That’s because they love the dead and know who their ancestors were. . . .’

‘Maybe you’ve got a point there.’

I forget how the discussion ended. And I’m not actually sure whether at that juncture it was a hostel or a hall of residence which was going to be built on the cemetery site. I don’t really care much. There were some personal and subjective factors in my objection to the changing of the cemetery – I avoid the word ‘desecration’, since it states what I am trying to demonstrate.

Often, when I was an undergraduate at Victoria University in Wellington, I would walk across the path from the varsity and sit in that most peaceful place, among the gravestones, among the onion flowers.

You had a fine view of the harbour from there. Sometimes young couples would stray in. I don’t imagine that the dead are Puritans. It would certainly please me in Purgatory to know that two young people were canoodling on my grave.

Sometimes one might come across a drunk asleep with his meths bottle still within reach. He was in sanctuary (or I hope so) – temporarily out of reach of the cops, dead drunk among the dead.

My visits were made to clear a clouded mind and get perspective on a hundred then insoluble problems about which I care somewhat less perhaps these days. And the dead were my friends.

I composed what I think was my first demonstrably Catholic poem in that place. The names and the histories of the dead in my poem are wholly fictional. I intended them to stand for all people, the whole human race in need of the mercy of God and the prayers of their neighbours.

Therefore I had a personal reason for objecting to the removal of the one wild and sad and beautiful spot that I knew of in that vicinity. When people write poems in a hall of residence, they will be different poems – poems of the Atom Age, about the void inside the mind and the sputniks circling outside. It is an aspect of progress I think I can do without. And that old cemetery – thank the Lord – was not too well cared for. It taught the visitor that decay also is a manifestation of God’s bounty.

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But my personal prejudices are not the main factor. As Hilaire Belloc once said, all issues are ultimately theological. And the Catholic view of the bones of the saints is based squarely on the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection of the flesh.

Modern men may think nothing of committing the corpses of their relatives to an electric furnace, with a loudspeaker playing a hymn; or indeed of destroying ten thousand living bodies in the heat of a nuclear explosion. But we remember how a certain sacred Body was laid in a hillside tomb, and how the mourners came there in the early morning to find the graveclothes folded and an angel sitting beside them.

And we know that the same Body was reunited to its Soul – that Our Lord Jesus Christ rose and walked and ate fish and spoke to His disciples and blessed them and was joined, both Body and Soul to His Father.

For us death is a temporary interlude in the drama of human destiny. We know that our own poor bodies, though they will die and decay, are like seeds laid in the ground to wait for the intervention of the all-powerful will of God which will bring them to life again.

And though our glorified bodies may not contain precisely the same molecules that they had when first alive – since even in seven years of life on earth each of these molecules was replaced by another molecule, and in a sense we had new bodies nevertheless, the glorified bodies that God will give us will be our bodies, not someone else’s, and not a hair of the head or nuance of the voice will be lost. We will still be Tom Smith and Ann Jones, physical creatures, immortal and able to perceive what we had hardly hoped to perceive in this first life. The second life will be a continuation of the first.

‘Oh,’ says our Platonist neighbour, ‘you Catholics are superstitious people! You want to have your cake and eat it, too. The soul is immortal and the body is mortal. Why on earth do you hold on to this antiquated, grotesque doctrine of the Resurrection of the body?’

But we are not mistaken. In this matter, it is the times that are out of joint, not the Church. She has held fast to the doctrine of the Resurrection of the body because she remembers that Our Lord was resurrected and Our Lady was taken bodily into Heaven. She teaches that a human being is neither a pure spirit nor a material organism, but a hybrid combining both modes of existence, and that God blesses and gives His life to human beings, not to half-men.

The Resurrection of the body is her permanent refutation of Calvinism outside the fold and Jansenism within the fold. The body is the temple of the Holy Spirit and will share in the life of Heaven.

Though we may grow tired of lugging our weary, dilapidated carcasses over the face of the globe, God is not tired of those same carcasses – He does not see cadavers. He sees human beings, His beloved children first created by the process of human birth, then divided into separate souls and bodies by page 533 death, then united again in the life of Heaven after the final Resurrection. And what He sees He sees as a single perfect unity.

There are two aspects of natural religion which testify to the need of human beings for such a doctrine; though the need does not prove the doctrine true. We believe not because of our need but because God has answered that need with the example of His own Resurrection and the revealed doctrines of the Church.

The first aspect is the special reverence paid by all members of the natural religious communities to the bones of their ancestors. A Maori will say – ‘There are some of my bones in Taranaki’ – and by this he means both that his tribe is there – since the Maori word ‘iwi’ means both ‘tribe’ and ‘bone’ – and that the bones of his ancestors are buried there. The same comprehensive idea of tribal unity includes dead and living.

And the bones of Maori chiefs were laid to rest in caves where no enemy could come and desecrate them. Where those sacred bones rested was a hub and focus for the spiritual life of the tribe.

And the second aspect of natural religion was the special emphasis laid on the spiritual protection given by the dead ancestors to their living descendants. This idea has worn thin for us. How many Catholics nowadays will kneel before the physical relic of a saint – a portion of that temple which God inhabited and which He will inhabit again – and be convinced that virtue and a healing power will flow to them from that relic.

We are inclined to be diffident about such practices. We would prefer an airier religion, something nearer to Platonism, something which lays less emphasis on the body. We are forgetting that Our Lord was born from the physical womb of an earthly Mother; that His death was wholly physical and real; that after the Resurrection He permitted St Thomas to put fingers into the holes made by the nails and the centurion’s spear.

In the old fable, the fox who had lost his tail in a trap met the other foxes and tried to persuade them that to be without a tail was the height of fashion. So it is with modern Christianity.

I have no objection whatever to any developments and logical additions which theologians may care to make, or to dialogue with Protestants and also with non-Christians. But the moment when we are asked to abandon – or to lessen the original strength of – a Catholic doctrine or tradition is the moment when I begin to turn gently away.

It is so with devotion to Our Blessed Lady. It is so with the doctrine of the Resurrection of the body. These are our treasures, rich, ancient, yet never out of date, since the nature of man and the mercy of God is not changed by new theology or new technology.

The doctrine of the Resurrection of the body – your body and mine – is not only true; it is also appropriate and just. Our bodies share in the humiliating effects of the Fall of Man, to the ultimate degree of corruption page 534 and dissolution; it is fitting that they should also share in the triumph over death which God has chosen to share with us by means of His Passion and Resurrection. In the humblest of terms, we do not say – ‘My body has a toothache’ – we say – ‘I have a toothache’ – and so we implicitly recognise that our bodies are in a real sense ourselves.

But behind the doctrine, as behind all Christian doctrines, lies most of all a reality of Divine Love. When any of us stand beside the grave of somebody we have loved long and well, we do not refuse the truthful consolation that the soul is immortal and that our friend is still in the arms of God – but no true lover would accept the suggestion that there was in fact no cause for grief that the body in the earth was a mere assemblage of molecules.

The body was also part of the person we loved, and we grieve for a real death. So the sisters of Lazarus grieved for him; and Our Lord grieved along with them. He did not say ‘Your tears are foolish. Your brother is with God.’ No; He brought back the whole man from the grave, as He will in His own time bring us wholly to life.

This is a doctrine founded on love. All that belongs to the beloved is dear in the eyes of the lover. And we, who have a Divine Lover, have also His guarantee that no physical or mental part of us will be forgotten by Him at the time of the final Resurrection. How could it be so when He loves us better than we can ever love ourselves?

It may be expedient to shift the bodies of the dead from the Mount Street Cemetery to make room for a place where the living can eat and sleep and study and celebrate the Sacrifice of the Mass. But let us never suppose that they are irremediably dead.

The bones of the saints are part of the treasure of man and God. This is the unchanging Catholic belief. God still loves what we have ceased to remember. And we can hope to see those bodies alive and glorified in Heaven.

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