The Catholic monastery church of Banz near Bad Staffelstein, in southern Germany, has a display that can stop visitors in their tracks: four complete skeletons, draped in silk and brocade and decorated with precious stones, ornate filigree work, gold and silver details, and lace. The figures are kept in glass coffinlike cabinets and are identified as catacomb saints—also called “Holy Bodies”—a tradition that can still be found in baroque Catholic churches and monasteries across Bavaria and beyond.
For many people, the first reaction is surprise, and sometimes unease. Church custodian Anita Gottschlich said it felt “a little creepy,” describing how one skeleton seemed to look back at her through its hollow eye sockets. She also said the enduring appeal is not limited to the young—older visitors who saw the display as children still come back to look for the Holy Bodies, she said, because they can remember them.
The skeletons on display are named Vincenzius, Valerius, Benedictus and Felix Benedictus. They are the remains of so-called catacomb saints, which were brought from Rome to the Benedictine monastery church of Banz in the late 17th and 18th centuries, according to the account in the display’s description. Similar relic displays are also described as appearing in churches in neighboring Austria, Switzerland, Czechia and in Italy.
The priest overseeing parishes around Bad Staffelstein, Walter Ries, said the story of how such relics were labeled in Rome dates back to their discovery. He said that, at the time, “the church simply designated them all as saints,” and he linked the later popularity of such relics in Germany to how people perceived their significance. Ries said that in many countries, including Germany, people wanted to have such holy remains and relics because it “enhanced the status of their own church or monastery” and “perhaps turned it into a place of pilgrimage.”
Ries also placed the relic tradition in the longer history of the Banz monastery. He said the monastery was founded by Benedictine monks in 1070 and flourished for centuries before being dissolved in 1803. Today, Ries said the church remains actively in use, while the monastery is home to a political foundation—leaving the relic display as a surviving part of a past religious landscape.
The display’s veneration is tied to the way Europe’s baroque religious culture responded to hardship, particularly in the wake of the Thirty Years’ War. Ries said the veneration of the catacomb saints during the late 17th and 18th centuries came as much of Europe, including Bavaria, was still reeling, and he described Baroque art as an attempt to “open the gates of heaven.” In his account, the ornate design was also meant as “an escape from the present,” which he said was often “so terrible,” and that is part of why the skeletons are “so beautifully draped and depicted as lifelike as possible.”
Banz monastery’s abbots and the church sent emissaries to Rome in 1680 and again in 1745, and the relic skeletons were brought home and later decorated by nuns in nearby Bamberg, the report said. For the faithful, the viewing is structured so that the figures are not constantly on view: wooden panels are attached to the front of the display cases for most of the year, and the covers are removed on special occasions such as All Saints’ Day so that the Holy Bodies are shown to believers.
A historian, Günter Dippold, said the ornate decoration is meant to convey something beyond the raw fact of death. He said the elaborate decoration “is not meant to show the dead body of a saint,” but instead is meant to show “his glorified body,” describing the intention as pointing worshippers toward what they will look like after resurrection—raised from the dead into a state of “glorified ones.” For visitors moved by the religious meaning, the skeletons are therefore presented as a bridge between past relic veneration and the promise of what believers expect to come next.