Catholic Church in England 'returns' relic of Catholic St. Chad to Anglican Cathedral

[Stone]

Saint’s relic returns to cathedral 500 years on

The Dean of Lichfield at the new shrine of St Chad, which contains a relic of the monk saved from Henry VIII’s men and passed from priest to priest for centuries

November 07 2022 The Times


Almost 500 years after the Reformation, a shrine to St Chad has been rebuilt in [the now-Anglican] Lichfield Cathedral thanks to a gift of a relic by the Catholic Church.

The donation, a piece of bone belonging to the seventh-century Anglo-Saxon monk, is to be returned to the Staffordshire cathedral, where the saint’s remains lay for almost 800 years. The relic was disturbed in the 16th century when Henry VIII began plundering the Church’s wealth.

It is hoped that the shrine, to be opened to mark the 1,350th anniversary of Chad’s death, will bring pilgrims to pray at the [Anglican] cathedral.

Chad was born in Northumbria about 634 and died in Lichfield in 672. He was the abbot of several monasteries and served as a bishop in Northumbria and Mercia. The Venerable Bede, an early historian, wrote extensively about him ... .

On his death, he was buried in Lichfield. His remains were moved in 700 to the site where Lichfield Cathedral now stands, with his body kept in a “little wooden house”, according to Bede.

The Dean of Lichfield, the Very Rev Adrian Dorber, said that in the Middle Ages his remains were placed in “a gorgeous mediaeval tomb chest” as part of a lavish new shrine.

When Henry VIII’s men came in 1538, Arthur Dudley, a canon, rescued the saint’s bones. They were passed from priest to priest for centuries.

About 200 years ago, Chad’s remains were divided between a site in France and St Chad’s Cathedral, a Catholic basilica in Birmingham. Relics are venerated more commonly in the Catholic tradition than in Anglican churches.

The relic has been given to Lichfield Cathedral as a gift from the Catholic Archdiocese of Birmingham as “a token of the growing friendship and quest for Christian unity between churches that have been divided since the 16th century”.

It will be brought to Lichfield today by Monsignor Timothy Menezes, the Dean of St Chad’s Cathedral. It will be taken in a silver reliquary to the Church of St Chad, a parish church in Lichfield.

The small fragment of bone can be seen through a glass panel in the cross-shaped reliquary.

It will then be moved to Lichfield Cathedral and installed tomorrow in the Lady Chapel in a new shrine.

Dorber said: “The cathedral was built as a pilgrimage church, a shrine church. In 1972, a memorial stone was placed where the shrine was [and] they commissioned a very beautiful icon of Chad in the 1980s which was placed where we thought the shrine was and it very quickly became a natural place for prayer and veneration.

“Given that the bones were moved from that very place, people began to think: ‘Would it not be nice or proper for some of [his remains] to be repatriated to Lichfield as part of our historical continuity?’ And there’s the fact that we’ve got a patron saint who was perhaps one of the most approachable, humble and delightful people in the whole communion of saints, according to the Venerable Bede.”