Father regularly gets calls about taking on the furnishings of churches that are closing. Sometimes the altars are not usable but they still contain the relics of martyrs. As a renowned expert on relics, he routinely deals with these precious remains, in this case removing them carefully as part of the process of decommissioning the altar.

 

A few months ago he brought some of them to us and asked us to convert them to Antimensions (without table). An Antimension is a waxed rectangle of linen that has a relic stitched into one corner. It is used as the required relic that must be on the altar during Mass when Mass is offered outside of a church; in homes, on the road, when going on mission trips, when the furnace in the Canadian church isn't working, on the battle front, on the parish walking pilgrimages.

 

Father used red sealing wax to encase the relics. They’re about the size of a penny and they have a really nice liturgical seal pressed into the wax. The disks were then sewed into small pockets and attached to rectangles of carefully hemstitched linen. You can’t run an Antimension through the wash if it gets soiled, so after the stitching was finished the linen was saturated with beeswax to protect it, making it somewhat cleanable with a damp cloth. The sealing wax does have a higher melting point than the beeswax so we didn’t run into any problems using a hair dryer to work the beeswax into the linen, but we were careful to not push our luck with it. We melted the wax first in a double boiler and painted it on the linen. Then we placed it on blotter paper and heated it with the hair dryer. It worked like a charm and smelled heavenly.