St. Kateri Relic Rescue: The Most Catholic GoFundMe Campaign Ever

Catholic “materialism” causes strange conundrums and very interesting GoFundMe campaigns.

For example, the Catholic cult of the saints sometimes gives rise to causes such as this one:

Rare St #Kateri reliquary found at liquidation sale! Donate to rescue b4 lost to the world. https://t.co/NUFA6P5uyWpic.twitter.com/MCAwPv6cWf

— Saint Kateri Center (@SaintKateriCtr) January 23, 2016

The Saint Kateri Tekakwitha Conservation Center’s GoFundMe campaign looks legitimate and earnest:

Help us “Bring Saint Kateri Home”! An extremely rare Saint Kateri reliquary has been found at a liquidation sale! We need your help to take this precious relic off the market forever!

This reliquary is going back on the profane market (i.e., secular as compared with the sacred or divine)
unless YOU help stop it. Time is running out.

The Saint Kateri Tekakwitha Conservation Center needs your help to rescue this Saint Kateri Tekakwitha reliquary, containing a large 1st class relic of our beloved Saint Kateri. The reliquary comes with supporting documentation.  The names, dates, and other information on the documents are historically accurate.

Read the rest of their appeal here.

I’m not sure what the complexities involved in such exchanges of relic might be. I suspect I will find out in the combox. This is something I’d like to learn more about since the physical aspect of Catholicism is so fascinating to me.

The Saint Kateri Tekakwitha Conservation Center is a non-profit Catholic faith-based conservation organization that promotes authentic Catholic teaching on ecology, conserves nature, and protects life. Promoting the veneration of Saint Kateri, a patron saint of ecology, is an important part of their mission.

Consider helping them after discerning whether this is a worthy cause. They are presently about 1/3 of the way to their goal.

You might think that 1st class relics would be easy to recover and hardly ever find their way onto the market. However, you would be wrong, there is actually a thriving black market for relics. The Hobby Lobby probe into relic purchases from ISIS are just the tip of the iceberg. There are also websites that specialize in selling supposed relics. I’ve decided against linking them.

Whether the GoFundMe Kateri Campaign turns out to be legitimate (as I suspect) or not, its presence demonstrates, either way, the viscerally messy nature of Catholicism.

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If you are interested in the Catholic “materialism” of the cult of the saints, then Peter Brown’s The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity is the place to go. Caroline Walker Bynum’s The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity is another fine scholarly book on the topic.