It is something the English haven’t witnessed on these shores for more than 500 years. The sight of long queues outside churches, convents and cathedrals to see a wooden box containing the bones of a saint – in this case St Thérèse of Lisieux, a 19th-century French nun.

As pilgrims have waited in line at some of the venues on Thérèse’s “tour”, some have been sold roses and holy candles to place near the relics. Others have been entertained by giant screens showing sugary accounts of the saint, who died young in 1897 of intestinal tuberculosis, and of her “little way” of finding spirituality through small, everyday things. The whole spectacle has given a glimpse of what Catholic England might have been like had the Reformation never happened.

The Thérèse phenomenon, which has gripped us this past month, has arguably drawn back the veil on a hunger that is bigger than any of the 57 varieties of organised religion, and one that challenges the oft-repeated claim – by Richard Dawkins and senior Anglican clergymen, among others – that we now live in a scientific, sceptical and contentedly secular society.

Before Henry VIII was declared head of the English Church in 1534, the veneration of saints’ relics in England and Wales was commonplace. They were believed to have special powers to effect spiritual and physical cures, so abbeys would draw in crowds of pilgrims by making elaborate displays of the skeleton – or parts thereof – of a local saint. Shrewsbury Abbey, for example, showcased the remains of Saint Winifride, who had been decapitated and then restored to life on the spot of a healing well in Flintshire. Even more highly rated – as in the case of the body of the seventh-century monk and bishop, Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, exhibited in Durham Cathedral – was a corpse which miraculously had not decomposed.

With the Reformation, however, such “Catholic” practices were outlawed. Many of the relics were destroyed with the dissolution of the monasteries. Those that did survive – such as the eyeball of the Jesuit Reformation martyr, Edward Oldcorne, said to have popped out of its socket when the executioner’s axe cut off his head in Worcester in 1606, were hidden away for centuries and are still rarely seen.

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