After their journey up the east coast of Ireland, the relics of St Therese arrived in the Northern dioceses on Sunday, beginning with a visit to the Medical Missionaries of Mary at Drogheda. The ecumenical implications of her visit to Ireland may now take on an even greater significance than heretofore.
Some see the veneration of relics as an unecumenical, perhaps superstitious, vestige of "old-time" Catholicism which is best forgotten. It is therefore interesting to find an excellent ecumenical treatment of the question in the New Dictionary of Christian Theology, published by the SCM Press in 1983, in an article by Symeon Lash of the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
He points out that veneration of relics is linked with belief in the resurrection of the body, which is affirmed in the ancient creeds, common to all Christians. It goes back to the earliest days of the church. The Acts of the Apostles tell of miracles worked through the pious use of handkerchiefs and cloths which had been in contact with the body of St Paul. Accounts of the early Christian martyrs tell of miracles attributed to devout contact with relics.
Excesses and abuses crept in and, in the early centuries too, Christians were accused of idolatry and superstition. Quite a literature grew up in defence of the veneration of relics. The official teaching of the undivided church of the early centuries, and of the Catholic and Orthodox churches in modern times, while condemning excesses and abuses, insists that the veneration of relics is always relative and that it is not worship, for "the only object of worship is God, whose servants the saints are".
The Second Vatican Council teaches that true veneration of relics tends towards and terminates in Christ and through Him it "tends towards and terminates in God, who is wonderful in his saints and magnified in them" (Lumen Gentium 50).
In the lives of the saints, the council continues, "we are shown a more safe path by which . . . we will be able to arrive at perfect union with Christ, that is to say, at holiness." That is true in a special way in the life of St Therese.
She has a message for people in all walks of life and in all varieties of spiritual condition: those who find it hard to pray; those who find suffering hard to accept and hard to understand and who are irritated by pious cliches about suffering; women who feel hurt by the church; people struggling with faith; priests or religious tempted to discouragement in their ministry.
Like St Paul, she points to another and better way to think and to live, the way of love. That message is acutely relevant in Northern Ireland today.
But is the visit of her relics another blow to ecumenism, another affront to our Protestant neighbours, another display of "Catholic triumphalism"? Actually, an encouraging sign of the progress in inter-church relations has been the participation of other churches in some of the previous events of the visit, for example, in the ringing of church bells in welcome. Such gestures have been deeply appreciated.
Another article of the ancient creeds recited by all Christians expresses faith in the "communion of saints". The common name for Christians in early apostolic times was "saints". The church is a community called to holiness. Holiness is a distinctive mark of people reborn in Christ, the Holy One of God.
Since we all carry also so many of the marks of unholiness, we depend totally on God's grace for the holiness to which we are called. Our holiness can be only that of forgiven sinners. Karl Barth rightly says the church is proof of God's patience with humanity. The church is "the place given us for repentance, for conversion, for faith."
This is very close to the teaching of St Therese, whose whole life was one of total trust in God's merciful love. In a celebrated phrase, she said "everything is grace." Her own "works", her own "merits", she declares, are God's grace. She has no claim on God's grace except what He has given her.
She rejoiced at the thought of appearing before God "with empty hands". Much of her life and writing echoes the intensity of Martin Luther's cry for a gracious God. Another great theologian of our time, the Catholic von Balthasar, declared that "there are innumerable points of contact between Therese and the Reformers."
He instanced her rejection of "justification by works", and her insistence that faith is not merely intellectual assent to doctrines about God but also total trust in God's graciousness and mercy. There is, therefore, much about Therese which could resonate with Protestants.
Above all, there is Therese's manifest holiness. Christian holiness is not a monopoly of any one church; it is for sharing. Pope John Paul has spoken of the "great ecumenism of holiness." He says that holiness of its nature tends towards unity.
The Pope stresses the ecumenical importance for divided Christians of letting ourselves be silently drawn into the "completely interior spiritual space" of Christ.
It is a space of repentance and conversion, a place for reconciliation, a place of healing of hurt memories, a place of the peace which God alone can give, and which Northern Ireland so desperately needs.
Cahal Daly is the retired Catholic Primate of Ireland.