Martyrologies attest that between the end of the first century and the beginning of the fourth, the Romans persecuted, arrested, victimised and martyred a large number of Christians, faithful to their belief in Christ. These Christian martyrs were the early saints and the first source of relics.
From the earliest times of Christianity, the Church has permitted and promoted the worship of these holy relics as a sign of love towards those who shed their blood for Christ.
The word relic comes from the Latin word relinqo, which refers to what remained from burnt corpses, diligently gathered and placed in funerary urns. When the relics consisted of the whole body, the reference was corpus; if a fragment from the body, the term used was ex ossibus. Fragments of fabric belonging to a saint were identified by the type of clothing, such as: ex velo, ex funiculo, ex tunica, and so on.
After the edict of Milan in AD313, whereby Emperor Constantine gave Christians freedom of worship, the cult of relics evolved rapidly. It reached its peak in the Middle Ages and successive centuries.
In Malta, the cult of relics began to evolve after the advent of the Order of St John in 1530. The first...
