Tour of relics `a watershed for Irish Catholics'

The marathon tour of the relics of St Therese of Lisieux reaches the Pro-Cathedral in Dublin today, with organisers hailing it as a "watershed" for Irish Catholicism.

As huge crowds turn out everywhere the reliquary stops, the tour's national co-ordinator, Father J. Linus Ryan, believes the event has become a turning point after a decade of material success and of trauma for the church. "People are making a statement, to the clergy and each other. There is a deep yearning in the human heart for the transcendent, for God."

He was speaking at Ballinteer, Dublin, yesterday, where thousands of devotees filed into a Carmelite chapel to pay their respects. An estimated 25,000 people visited the relics in Delgany, Co Wicklow, on Saturday.

In Ballinteer as elsewhere, many carried roses in honour of the saint's association with the flower, pressing them to the glass case in which the reliquary rests. Others simply touched the glass as they passed.

While Father Ryan concedes that many find the idea "ghoulish", the church is "very comfortable" with the tour. "Some people shudder at the idea of a box of bones, but relics are as old as the New Testament."

Asked if the tour - which takes in Northern Ireland during the final days of the general election campaign there - had attracted any protests from the Rev Ian Paisley, he said: "No, but maybe he doesn't know about it yet."

The relics will spend the next two weeks at venues in and around Dublin, including Mount joy prison on Friday. From mid-May, they travel north, continuing a roughly anti-clockwise tour of the country which ends in late June. The reliquary will be at the Pro-Cathedral from 2 p.m. today until noon tomorrow.