Theresa Rice is a third-year Ph.D. student in liturgical studies at Notre Dame. She spent four weeks in Trier, Germany, pursuing independent research on liturgical participation and material devotion, in conjunction with a summer course at the University of Trier on “Bible and Liturgy.”

If you make your way to the back of the Trier cathedral, some stairs lead to the chapel which houses the cathedral’s most precious relic: the tunic of Christ. But on the way to that chapel, there is a small room, behind a small counter displaying rosaries and pictures for sale: the cathedral treasury, where bright reliquaries in glass cases beckon curious pilgrims and tourists. A curious pilgrim myself, on my first day in Trier I found myself making my way around the display cases lining the walls. There, I saw the Trier Cathedral’s past spread out in liturgical implements and objects frozen and illuminated behind the glass: thuribles, chalices, reliquaries with relics still intact, monstances, and richly decorated manuscripts.

Under the glass of one case, tucked into a corner and lying flat, was a small white square of carved ivory: as I bent down for a closer look, I realized that it was an object that I had seen only in pictures--the “Trier Adventus Ivory,” a fourth-century Byzantine carving depicting the entrance of relics into a city. An object I had studied and cited suddenly took shape and contours before my eyes; it became real in size, shape, and context. This was not a unique experience. In my four weeks in Trier, I was constantly presented with living examples of what I study, always surprised by the past, living and unfolding throughout the city.

Examining the role of laity with centuries of context

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised--as a current doctoral student in liturgical studies at the University of Notre Dame, my research centers on embodied formation of early medieval Christian imagination, particularly through relics. I think quite a lot about the past in the wide range of research topics related to embodiment and religious identity, from art and architecture to popular piety and pilgrimage. But to study the material objects of the past is not the same as watching centuries of history unfold around you—and in Trier, it seemed that every corner held a new and fascinating way that the past came alive in the present.

Yet my time in Trier, despite the evidence of the photos collected on my phone, was not inspired primarily by seeing the relics and churches and material remains of late antique or medieval Christianity. Instead, I came to Trier to investigate how the Catholic Church has navigated the role and identity of the laity in the period leading up to the last major moment of reform: the second Vatican council, in conjunction with a four-week course on “Bible and Liturgy,” hoping to pursue a longstanding research question about lay participation in liturgy in the twentieth-century reforms of the Catholic Church. The course involved seminars (with a small class of about thirteen), access to archival materials and workshops with them, trips and tours in and around Germany, and ample time for my own exploration of Trier to see how medieval and modern lay bodies interacted with spaces (e.g., cathedrals and monasteries) and devotional objects, such as manuscripts, relics, public monuments.

I stayed at the guesthouse of the convent of the Sisters of St. Joseph and quickly settled into the daily routine of a quiet breakfast before mid-morning class before catching the bus to the university right outside the Porta Nigra (a second-century Roman gate which remained because it had been converted into a medieval church). Conversations from the morning’s class continued in the cafeteria before an afternoon class. This routine was interrupted by tours (of the city, of the Cathedral, of the museum) and trips. In Cologne, we climbed to the top of the bell tower and waited for the quarter-hour to see which, if any, bells would strike. We also visited Mainz, the birthplace of Gutenberg and the printing press, and Maria Laach, a Benedictine abbey at the heart of the liturgical movement in Germany and beyond.

Yet more than all the places and things I saw, the people were, by far, the most important part of the summer, particularly exemplified by the generosity of my fellow summer school classmates and the German students and faculty at the seminary and university. Those conversations and explorations of the past and present in Germany and beyond enriched my own perspective as an American Roman Catholic laywoman.

The past, alive in the present

I found myself marveling at how the present reinterprets the past to reveal how the contested memories at the heart of Christian self-identity are grounded in that past.

Indeed, in many moments of each very full day, I was struck by how the past and present overlapped in Trier. As we walked through the city center, you would see in the same view Roman or medieval worlds, remnants of modern history (from Napoleon to the statue commemorating Karl Marx to the Stolpersteine glinting in the pavement), and vivid reminders of contemporary concerns, such as a protest for Gaza outside Cologne cathedral and the constant leaflets handed out as the elections approached. But what I had not planned for was the sheer number of relevant spaces, things, and experiences that filled my time in Trier. Nearly every day saw a new and fascinating encounter with a relic, piece of art, challenging scholarly insight, or liturgy which forced me to rework assumptions about how the past related to the present.

Two moments stand out in this respect. Though I walked each day past the Porta Nigra, towering in its Roman glory, I was entirely shocked when I climbed inside and was shown renderings of what it had looked like when it was a medieval church. The lower half had been buried under dirt to create easy access to the upper part and the whole orientation was shifted. Remnants of that medieval church lingered in the stones, though the Porta Nigra had been restored to its current aspect of a Roman gate under Napoleon.

The other moment where past and present collided was in the Benedictine abbey of St. Matthias. Though it appears untouched from the early medieval founding, the current abbey is very young, only refounded in the 1920s, more than a century after the secularization of monasteries under Napoleon. The abbey holds the relics of St. Matthias, the only apostle buried north of the Alps as several monks and a tour guide of the previous day had been proud to announce, nestled into a niche in the heart of the church under a central altar. I arrived early for a liturgy and wandered through the silent church, descending into the chill of the silent crypt, where Matthias’s small reliquary faces two large sarcophagi of early bishops of Trier (Eucharius and Valerius). Though the space gives the impression that the church was built around Matthias’s relics and that they had been in this crypt for centuries, in reality, Matthias’s relics were only discovered in 1126 and only translated to the current crypt in 2007. In other words, the space and my own experience of the past in encountering this relic were entirely shaped by medieval and modern events.

Each moment of my time could demonstrate a similar lesson about how this dear city takes and reshapes the past. I’d set out to understand how the past and present intersect, in hopes of understanding how reforms of the Catholic Church were grounded in understandings of the past. Yet rather than finding myself capable of integrating distinct periods of Christian history into a coherent narrative, I found myself marveling at how the present reinterprets the past to reveal how the contested memories at the heart of Christian self-identity are grounded in that past.

Originally published by Theresa Rice at nanovic.nd.edu on November 12, 2024.