Religious relics and devotional merchandise can be macabre, thought-provoking, whimsical and, in some cases, downright entertaining. In Italy, one can visit reliquaries housing the mummified head of St Catherine of Siena or the uncorrupted tongue of St Anthony of Padua before buying blue plastic keyrings of the pierced St Sebastian – what my cheeky godson Dante calls “Catholic tat” – in the gift shops afterwards.
Relics are of course a means of entrenching belief, but also of recruiting new believers. Tat, or merchandise, makes the stories and their key players accessible to all. Like many faiths, Catholicism seeks to increase its followers, but perhaps we are more dedicated in our employment of merchandise to spread and bolster the Word.
