The Bone Churches

There are churches in Catholic Europe whose walls, ceilings, altars, and even chandeliers are constructed from human bones. Not painted to look like bones. Actual bones. The Capuchin Crypt under Santa Maria della Concezione in Rome contains the skeletal remains of approximately 3,700 Capuchin friars, arranged into intricate decorative patterns: ribcage arches, vertebrae chandeliers, walls of skulls. The Sedlec Ossuary in Kutná Hora, Czech Republic, holds the bones of an estimated 40,000 to 70,000 people, including a chandelier composed of every bone in the human body. The Capela dos Ossos in Évora, Portugal, is lined with the bones of approximately 5,000 monks. The Catacombs of Paris hold the remains of approximately 6 million Parisians.

The Western tourist tends to find these places either macabre, kitsch, or fascinatingly transgressive. The editorial office holds with the older view, which the bone churches themselves announce in their inscriptions: these are not curiosities. They are working churches. The bones of the faithful departed are arranged into the architecture of continuing protection, and the visitor is not in the presence of death but in the presence of the communion of saints, materially manifested.

The principle

“What you are, we once were; what we are, you will be. Pray for us, that the dead and the living may form one Church through the mercy of Christ.”Inscription common to Catholic ossuaries, including the Capuchin Crypt in Rome; ancient formula in continuous use

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. ... And God will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death.”Revelation 21:1, 4 (NIV) — the eschatological frame in which the bone churches read their own work

The bone churches, named

The Sedlec Ossuary at the Cemetery Church of All Saints in Kutná Hora, Czech Republic. The remains in the ossuary are those of pilgrims who came to be buried in Sedlec after Abbot Henry brought back a handful of earth from Golgotha in 1278 and sprinkled it on the cemetery, making it “sacred ground” equivalent to the Holy Land. Pilgrims from across Bohemia and Moravia requested burial there, and the plague years and the Hussite Wars filled the cemetery beyond capacity. In 1511 the bones were exhumed and stacked. In 1870, the woodcarver František Rint was commissioned to arrange the bones decoratively; he created the chandelier (containing at least one of every bone in the human body), the coat of arms of the Schwarzenberg family in bone, the bone garlands, and the four great pyramidal mounds beneath the chapel’s side vaults. Mass is still celebrated at Sedlec; the chapel remains consecrated.

The Capuchin Crypt under Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini, Rome. The crypt holds the remains of approximately 3,700 Capuchin friars who died between 1528 and 1870. The remains are arranged into six small chapels: the Crypt of the Resurrection, the Mass Chapel, the Crypt of the Skulls, the Crypt of the Pelvises, the Crypt of the Leg Bones and Thigh Bones, and the Crypt of the Three Skeletons. The inscription at the entrance reads (in the standing folk formula): “What you are now, we once were; what we are, you will be.” The crypt is open to the public; the order maintains it as an active site of meditation on the four last things (death, judgement, heaven, hell).

The Capela dos Ossos at the Church of St Francis (Igreja de São Francisco) in Évora, Portugal. A small chapel approximately 18 metres by 11 metres, with walls and pillars constructed of the bones of an estimated 5,000 monks from the cemeteries of Évora. The inscription above the chapel entrance reads (in Portuguese): “Nós ossos que aqui estamos pelos vossos esperamos” — “We bones who lie here, await yours.” The Franciscan brothers who constructed the chapel in the 16th century arranged the bones not as decoration but as a permanent memento mori for the city of Évora.

San Bernardino alle Ossa in Milan. The bone chapel attached to this church holds the remains of patients who died at the medieval Brolo Hospital. The chapel was constructed in 1210; the bones are arranged into wall niches, with the surface bones (skulls, femurs) facing outward and the larger structural bones supporting the patterns. The interior is small and intense; the visitor stands in a four-walled chamber lined floor to ceiling in human bone.

The Paris Catacombs. Not strictly a church, but the largest ossuary in the world. The remains of approximately 6 million Parisians, transferred from the overflowing cemeteries of the city beginning in 1786 and continuing into the 19th century. The underground galleries extend for approximately 2 kilometres, with bones stacked in walls of femurs and skulls, organised by parish. The catacombs are a working cemetery (consecrated ground); they are also one of the most visited tourist sites in Paris. The inscription at the entrance reads: “Arrête! C’est ici l’empire de la Mort” — “Stop! This is the empire of Death.”

The Capela do Senhor dos Ossos (Chapel of the Lord of the Bones) in Campo Maior, Portugal. A smaller cousin of Évora, also Franciscan, also 16th-century, also lined with the bones of the local cemetery. The chapel’s ceiling fresco shows the souls of the dead rising at the General Resurrection while the bones themselves remain in the chapel below — a precise visual statement of the bone-church theology.

The Skull Chapel of Czermna in Poland. The chapel’s walls and ceiling are formed from the skulls and bones of approximately 3,000 people who died in the plagues and wars of Silesia in the 17th and 18th centuries. The chapel was conceived and constructed by a parish priest, Wacław Tomaszek, who personally collected the bones over a period of years and arranged them himself.

The editors’ position

The bone churches are not gothic tourism. They are the lived working out of a theology the modern reader has forgotten: that the body matters, that the dead are not absent, that the communion of saints is not an abstraction but an actual relationship in which the living and the dead together form the body of Christ. The Capuchin friars in Rome did not arrange the bones of their brothers for shock value. They arranged them so that the surviving friars, in the church above, would worship in proximity to the brothers who had gone before, and so that the worship of the living would join the worship of the dead in one continuing prayer.

The site holds that this is correct theology and correct practice. The bone church is not a memento of death; it is a memento of the resurrection. The visitor who can travel to one of these places and stand in the bone chapel for the time it takes to pray a Rosary or to say the Office for the Dead is participating in the same continuing prayer the friars participated in. The site recommends the pilgrimage. The site also notes that the bone churches are increasingly being treated by their custodians as places of meditation rather than as photo opportunities; the reader who goes should go in that spirit.

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