At the Motherhouse of the Sisters of Charity of Our Lady, Mother of the Church, an extraordinary collection of relics offers more than a glimpse into Catholic history. It makes tangible an ancient truth of the faith: the saints are not distant figures of the past, but friends who remain very much a part of the Church today.

To walk the hallway leading to the chapel at the Motherhouse in Baltic, Connecticut, is to pass through centuries of Catholic history. Behind glass, reliquaries bear the names of men and women who lived in different countries, embraced different vocations and inhabited vastly different moments in the life of the Church.

It would be easy to look upon such a collection and see the past. The Sisters see friends.

Long before these men and women were saints, they were simply people living lives whose endings they could not yet see. They knew love and loss, weakness and temptation, uncertainty and fear. They sinned and needed forgiveness. They wondered what God was asking of them.

Relics associated with saints from across the centuries are safeguarded at the Sisters’ Motherhouse in Baltic.

Among the collection are relics associated with some of Catholicism’s most beloved saints, including St. Mary Magdalene, St. John the Baptist, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Maximilian Kolbe, St. John Vianney, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Maria Goretti, St. Rita of Cascia and St. Pius of Pietrelcina, better known as Padre Pio. Alongside them are lesser-known saints and blesseds, as well as a reliquary containing a fragment of the True Cross.

The Communion of Saints stretches across centuries, continents and circumstances, encompassing scholars and missionaries, priests and religious, mystics and martyrs. There has never been only one kind of saint, nor only one path to holiness.

Before Padre Pio became known throughout the world, he endured illness, suffering, scrutiny and misunderstanding. Before St. Maria Goretti became remembered as an extraordinary witness to forgiveness, she was a child born into poverty whose short life ended through terrible violence.

We know the conclusions of their stories, but they did not. Like us, they experienced life as it arrived, one sorrow, one decision and one act of faith at a time.

A reliquary associated with St. Pius of Pietrelcina, better known as Padre Pio.

A relic makes that truth startlingly concrete. Catholic devotion does not honor the material object for its own sake; the relic points to the person and, ultimately, to Christ, whose grace transformed that person’s life. Standing before something physically connected to a saint can communicate what pages of biography sometimes cannot: this person was real.

Holiness occurred in an actual human life, and that makes holiness seem a little less distant from our own.

A House Filled with Friends

To hear the Sisters refer to these saints as their “friends” is to understand something essential about the Communion of Saints. Friendship suggests more than a historical collection. It suggests a relationship.

Catholics believe the bonds formed in Christ are not destroyed by death. Those who have gone before us remain members of the same Body and intercede for those still making the earthly journey.

There is a particular appropriateness to finding this gathering of “friends” at the Sisters’ Motherhouse. These relics are not housed in a museum devoted to a faith of another age. They are entrusted to a living religious community seeking the same destination as the saints whose relics they safeguard.

Along the Way to Christ

There is something especially fitting about where the Sisters’ “friends” are encountered. The reliquaries line the hallway leading toward the Motherhouse chapel. The saints do not become the destination; they accompany the visitor along the way.

At the end of that path is not another reliquary, but the tabernacle.

In its own quiet way, the setting offers an image of what the saints have always done: point beyond themselves to Christ.

Every life represented within those cases finds its meaning in Jesus Christ, the One whom each sought to know, love and follow. Their lives differed dramatically, but the direction was the same: toward Him.

The collection includes relics associated with St. Mary Magdalene and St. Maria Goretti.

An Unfinished Life

Perhaps that is the invitation contained within every reliquary: not simply to marvel at what a saint became, but to consider what God can do with a human life.

Knowing the endings of the saints’ stories can obscure how uncertain those stories once were. They could not stand outside their own lives and see the finished story. The moments through which God was shaping them were simply the lives they were being asked to live, just as He shapes us through the lives we are living now.

Holiness does not require escaping the realities of human life. It is worked out within them: in homes and workplaces, convents and classrooms, hospitals and kitchens; in suffering no one else sees; in beginning again after failure; in forgiving when forgiveness costs something; and in remaining faithful when God’s plan is difficult to understand.

The person represented by a tiny fragment behind glass was not always the saint we know today. There was a time when that person was simply somewhere in the middle of the story, trying to discern what God was asking next.

The Distance Between Heaven and Earth

The Church does not venerate relics because death has made the remains of the saints interesting. She venerates them because the Incarnation tells us that matter matters, because the human body is sacred and because death does not have the final word.

A relic points not simply backward toward a life that has ended, but forward toward the resurrection. It reminds the faithful that those who belong to Christ remain united in Him.

A reliquary containing a fragment of the True Cross.

Every saint represented there once stood where we stand now, somewhere in the middle of an unfinished life. They did not know which suffering would change them, which failure would send them back to God’s mercy or which ordinary act of faithfulness would prepare them for what came next.

They could not see the whole story, and neither can we.

Perhaps this is why the name the Sisters give them feels so fitting: friends who have already traveled the road we are traveling, who remind us that holiness is not reserved for people in stained glass, and who accompany us toward the chapel, toward Christ, and toward the life for which each of us was created.