THE PILGRIMAGE TO TREVES CATHEDRAL.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XIX, Issue 48, 4 September 1891, Page 7

THE PILGRIMAGE TO TREVES CATHEDRAL.

(Launceston Morning Star.)

Some of the cablegrams recently to hand announce the fact that there is a movement on foot in Europe, amongst Catholics, to make a pilgrimage to the ancient shrine in the Treves Cathedral in which tbe Holy Coat is preserved. This ancient relic is supposed to be identical with the seamless garment which our Blessed Saviour wore at the time of His Passion, and which tradition asserts was woven for Him by the hands of our Blessed Lady herself. That the relic is very old and dates back to a very early period in the Church, there ia little room to doubt. The Mother of Constantine the Great, tbe Empress Helena, is said to have given it to the City of Treves. She resided there for a considerable time, and in an old chronicle of Treves, which dates back to the 12th century, it is related that the relic was given to the Cathedral during the Episcopate of a Bishop who occupied the See from 314 to 334, A.D. Then there is an ancient ivory in tba Cathedral, on which is depicted the Empress Helena, awaiting at the Cathedral doors the arrival of the relic. This ivory was submitted to tbe Frankfort Archaeological Society in 1846 — whose members are of every form of religious belief — and the Society pronounced it to belong to the end of the fourth, or the beginning of the fifth century. Ihe Holy Coat was placed uuder the High Altar of the Cathedral in 1196, and some three hundred years or more elapsed before it was again exposed for public veneration. During the wars of the 17th and 18th centuries, it was placed for safety in the Castle of Ehrenbreitstein or at Augsburg but in 1810 it was again brought back to the Troves Cathedral. Over two hundred thousand pilgrims flocked to Treves to celebrate its restoration. In the year 1844, when it was exposed for public veneration from August 18, to October 6, more than a million pilgrims

visited the Cathedral, and many wonderful cures were reported. The devotion to relics, says the writer of the Catholic Dictionary, solemnly approved by the Council of Trent, rests on two great principles of Catholic belief. First, the Church honours the bodies of the dead who sleep in Christ. Our Lord has opened the Kingdom of Heaven, and given us the pledge and assurance of the ressurrection of the body. Hence Christians have lost that horror of dead bodies which was characteristic of the heathens, and even of the Jews. Bnt the Church specially venerates the bodies of the martyrs and other Baints, because while they were on earth their bodies were the temples of the Holy Ghost, and they themselves living members of Christ. Their souls are already in Heaven, their glorious resurrection is a matter of certainty, and therefore the Church joyfully anticipates the glory which God will give to these remains at the last day. She testifies at once the firmness of her belief in the resurrection and her love of the virtues which shone forth in the saints. For these were not virtues of the soul merely, they were proper to the whole man, body and soul, which toiled and suffered together. The same reasons which make the ressurection of the body credible, also tell in favour of the veneration due to relics, And so Christians have felt from the very infancy of the Church. They gathered the bones of St. Ignatius of Aatioch (anno 107; and placed them in linen " as a priceless treasure being left to the Holy Church by the grace which was in the martyr " (Acta Mart. 6). When 8. Polycarp's body was burned in 167, the Christians exhumed the bonce they could find "as more precious than costly stones and more valuable than gold." When in 258 St. Cyprian was about to bo beheaded, the Christians cast towels and napkins before him clearly that they might be soaked in his blood. Next, Catholics believe that God is sometimes pleased to honour the relics of the saints by making them instruments of healing and other miraoles, and also by bestowing spiritual graces on those who with pure hearts keep and honour thpm. For this principle the Fathers (eg., St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catech XVIII.) appepl to the Old Testament, which relates the resurrection of a deai body which touched the bones of Eliseus, and to the New which tells us that the sick were healed by towels which had touched the living body of St. Paul. Relics are usually venerated in public by being exposed in their cases with burning lights upon the Altar. They are often placed there at High Mass and incensed, and are also carried in procession and the people are blessed with them.