“Wondrous is God in His saints”
Recently, with the blessing of H.E. Metropolitan Vladimir, Holy Shrine with 55 particles of relics of Saints and a particle of the wood of the Holy Cross on which Lord Christ was crucified, were brought to the Holy Great-Martyr George Monastery of Suruceni village, Ialoveni district.
The Shrine contains particles of relics of the following saints:
“Behold we count them happy which endure… ” (Js. 5:11).
In the apostolic Church, all the remains of the “friends of God,” the righteous strugglers (I Cor. 9:25), were referred to as relics—bones, heads, hair, hands, feet, and sometimes entire bodies, if they were preserved, through which the Lord God is glorified by mysterious wonders. The Protestant Lutherans and all sectarians reject the veneration of the holy remains of Christian strugglers, and, like the heretics of times past, laugh at this pious custom and scoff at Orthodox Christians who call upon the friends of God in their prayers to Him. The sectarians, without any serious proof, maintain that it is nowhere proclaimed in the Bible that we should honor the friends of God (Jn. 15:14), to reverence the remains of the holy martyrs and ascetics, and to glorify in sacred hymns those who have suffered for Christ, shedding their blood.