1st time out of Italy: Relics of St. Francis are in San Francisco
An exhibition of relics and artworks associated with St. Francis of Assisi opened October 16 at San Francisco’s Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption, running through November 28 with free admission. The relics and masterpieces have left Italy for the first time in 800 years; visitors can venerate a bloodstained bandage from Francis’s side wound, and see a portrait painted on his coffin. The display also includes works depicting St. Clare and St. Francis by artists including Cimabue and Dono Dori. The exhibition marks the 800th anniversary of Francis’s death, the 2026 Franciscan Jubilee Year, and the 250th anniversary of Mission San Francisco de Asís.
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An exhibition in San Francisco brings St. Francis of Assisi’s relics and artworks from Italy to the United States for the first time in 800 years. It also marks the Franciscan Jubilee Year and the 250th anniversary of Mission San Francisco de Asís.
Relics and Masterpieces of St. Francis of Assisi opened October 16 at the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption and runs through November 28. Admission is free, with visiting hours from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily, except during Masses.
Visitors can venerate a bloodstained bandage from the wound in Francis’ side, kept at La Verna, where he received the stigmata. The bandage is a first-class relic; a portrait of Francis painted around 1290 on his coffin lid is considered a second-class relic.
The exhibition also includes paintings of Francis and St. Clare, Renaissance works by Dono Dori, a 17th-century painting of Francis watched over by angels, and an illuminated manuscript of Francis’ Canticle of the Creatures. A piece of cloth associated with Clare’s veil is displayed, though the relic has not been verified.
The exhibition coincides with the 2026 Franciscan Jubilee Year, proclaimed by Pope Leo XIV, and the 250th anniversary of Mission San Francisco de Asís, commonly known as Mission Dolores. Founded by Franciscan St. Junípero Serra, it is the city’s oldest surviving building and remains a parish.
Father Saul Tambini, a Franciscan from Assisi who accompanied the exhibits, said the city was chosen because of the deep influence of Franciscan presence there. To mark the mission anniversary, the exhibition also displays scale models of California’s 21 missions, built for the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition and later rescued from auction by the Cline family.
The Knights of St. Francis of the Archdiocese of San Francisco helped make the exhibition possible. Pilgrims visiting may receive the plenary indulgence associated with the Franciscan Jubilee Year, subject to the usual conditions; group reservations and tours are available through the Knights.
Relics and Catholic understandings of holiness and sacred memory
Catholic veneration of relics holds together three convictions: the human body is part of the person God makes holy; the Church remains united across death in Christ; and Christian hope looks toward the resurrection of the body. A relic is therefore not merely a keepsake from a revered past. It is a material witness to a life transformed by grace, and a reminder that holiness belongs to embodied human beings and is fulfilled in communion with God.
The Church chiefly calls the bodies—or notable parts of the bodies—of saints “relics.” The term also includes objects that belonged to saints and objects that touched their bodies or tombs. The Church’s Directory describes saints as people who, during earthly life, were distinguished members of Christ’s Body and temples of the Holy Spirit; honoring their relics recognizes that bodily history of holiness.
This matters because Catholic faith does not regard the body as a disposable shell, unrelated to the person’s spiritual life. The body is involved in a person’s acts of love, prayer, endurance, and service. A 2017 Vatican instruction describes the bodies of saints as having been “the living temple of the Holy Spirit and the instrument of their holiness,” and emphasizes that they are destined for the resurrection.
A relic thus recalls holiness as something lived: a particular person followed Christ through the conditions of earthly life. It also points beyond death. The Catholic meaning of a saint’s remains is not simply that a good person once lived; it is that the person belongs to Christ, and that bodily life is destined for resurrection and glory.
Relics preserve memory, but not only in the sense of helping people remember an absent individual. They make the saint’s embodied life present to the Church as an example and a call: the saint’s fidelity, courage, or charity is remembered so that the faithful may be strengthened in their own lives. The Ukrainian Catholic catechism expresses this dimension through a saying attributed to St. John Chrysostom:
“God shared the martyrs with us. He took to himself their souls and left their bodies to us so that their holy bones might remind us continually of their virtues.”
That reminder is not meant to stop at admiration. Christian memory of a saint directs attention to God, whose grace made the saint holy, and toward the virtues that the saint embodied. A scholarly study of Augustine’s thought describes relics in a similar way: like an image, they point beyond themselves to Christ, rather than treating the material object as holy by its own independent power.
This also gives relics a place in the Church’s shared memory. The Ukrainian catechism recalls that Christians in early centuries celebrated the Eucharist at the graves of martyrs, joining the memory of their witness to the Church’s worship. The significance is not simply that a community gathers around an important grave: Christian remembrance is ordered toward Christ, in whom the living and the dead belong to one Church.
Catholics venerate relics; they do not adore them as God. The distinction is essential. Adoration belongs to God alone. The honor shown to a relic is directed through the relic toward the saint and, ultimately, toward God, who sanctified the saint. A scholarly account of St. Thomas Aquinas explicitly distinguishes the veneration of relics from the adoration called latria, the worship owed to God alone, and explains that the honor concerns the saint’s body, soul, and relation to God.
Nor does Catholic teaching make relics magical objects or promise that touching one will produce a miracle. The Ukrainian catechism says that relics can be occasions through which God grants healing or strengthens faith, drawing on biblical accounts of God working through bodily contact and material objects. The point is God’s action, not a power possessed by the relic independently of God. A person may approach a relic prayerfully without receiving a bodily cure; the Church’s understanding of veneration is not a guarantee of a particular outcome.
Because relics are honored as sacred, their authenticity and respectful preservation matter. The 2017 instruction says that relics of Blesseds and Saints may not be displayed for public veneration without a certificate from ecclesiastical authority guaranteeing authenticity. It also directs that relics be preserved in ways that protect their safety and sacredness, and warns against superstition and illicit trade.
The same instruction distinguishes relics of canonized or beatified persons from the mortal remains of Servants of God and Venerables whose causes are still underway: those remains may not receive public cult or the privileges reserved to the beatified or canonized. These safeguards help ensure that devotion remains connected to the Church’s judgment and avoids reducing sacred memory to spectacle, commerce, or rumor.
The Catholic understanding of relics is therefore neither a rejection of material things nor a worship of them. It is a way of remembering that grace works in embodied human lives, that death does not sever the Church’s communion in Christ, and that Christian hope includes the body. A relic recalls a saint’s past, but its deeper message is about the present and future: holiness is God’s work in human beings, and the faithful are called to follow that path toward the resurrection.