Bones in Boxes

Down into a musty vault in the basement of Healy Building at Georgetown University in Washington went a little party of Jesuit officials one day last week. Rummaging around among half-forgotten bales and bundles they came across three small dusty wooden boxes which they lugged out to the light to open. Inside each box the Jesuits beheld 40 or 50 brown bits of bones. In the same basement of Healy Building were documents telling how in 1843 Pope Gregory XVI sent Georgetown University the holy bones of three Roman Catholic martyrs. Georgetown had tucked the boxes away without opening them. Out in the daylight for the first time in 91 years the bones--teeth, bits of jaw, tibia, femur--were placed in a handsome new relic room in St. William's Chapel. In each box was a time-yellowed "authentic" identifying the saints whose bones the relics once were: Theophilus, Vincentius and Aelius, pagan Romans who became Christian, were martyred about 200-300 A.D.

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