St Bernie

Dr dear Dr: Why oh why do modern Christians especially in the catholic fold continue to conserve practices of a bizarre nature such as digging up the bodies of older christians and taking bones from those bodies to venerate on public altars?

Aha, like Jaws II, and just when you thought it was safe to be a Christian again?!? True, St Bernie is coming to a small country bumpkin diocese, she of the much suffering traumas of a young girl when faced with evil bishops and then even more evil nuns, so this question has arisen again in some local RCIA dynamic awareness groups. Though the theology seems complicated for a modern Empiriciste audience dominated by the imperialism of the young and the fit, as our own times are literally awash with gyms galore, where people punish themselves for eating a Sunday roast even after the usual punishments and vituperations and vitriolic venom of the Gretas of the Scandinavian Islands, still the simple answer to this question is simpler yet - because the early Christians did this in their search for healing in their then local national health service, and they found that certain bones of certain Christians, chiefly the fresh bones of the recent martyrs, and keep in mind when the much starved lions and tigers had finished with the children and the girls thrown to the beasts by order of the pagan magistrates, much like the way that less merciful modern secular magistrates throw young people and children to the lions of the mass media without mercy, there was nothing much left except bones, and the Christians after interring their bodies and exposed bones in the catacombs of the believers, noticed that these selfsame bones suddenly had healing properties and would supernaturally heal the afflicted and the sick without announcement. A marvellous fact of the catacomb Christians. It’s natural to seek healing from the holy and the brave and the invincible. Early Christians did so. So the Roman Catholics of the Church, despite the obvious imposed falsities of this misnomer, since they are the true Early Christians as the original believers of the Church without change or alteration, they feel they can be faithful to this tradition and so that is why they venerate the bones of the saints - an articulation of the early Magdalenic healing ministry. Cryptic but classic.