Christians in both the East and West should not sweep away the relic tradition completely. The connection between relics and the altar is an ancient tradition, and as the current Roman discipline says, placing relics beneath a fixed altar is to be preserved (canon 1237 §2), although it is no longer mandatory. The Byzantine East celebrates the Divine Liturgy on an antimension, an altar cloth that ordinarily has a saint’s relic sewn into it. That is quite different, however, from extracting a jaw, hand, or foot and putting it on display.
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