It’s not easy to smuggle stolen bones on a plane. The task is a bit easier, however, when the bone smuggler is a nun. 

It was Halloween, so it was altogether possible a person in a nun costume would be passing through customs and security. But there was no question Sister Victoria was a nun; she just seemed like a nun. Elderly, apple-cheeked, and bespectacled, her black habit was brutally starched linen instead of Halloween-party polyester. People smiled at Sister Victoria as she strolled through the airport, her beat-up maroon luggage trailing behind her, full of jumbled body parts. 

As Sister Victoria removed her orthopedic shoes to place in the gray plastic tray, a young mother holding an infant walked through the metal detector, which immediately started beeping. 

“You need to take off your belt,” drawled a surly TSA agent with greying hair and stubble. The mother was close to tears, struggling to both follow directions and comfort her crying infant amidst the chaos. When she wasn’t quick enough to reply, he snapped, “Jesus Christ, lady!” 

Sister Victoria straightened, dignified in her sock-feet, somehow imposing at four-foot-eleven. She shot the TSA agent a scolding look, and he froze, his face drained of color, as if the nun was about to pull a ruler from the folds of her habit and strike him across the knuckles. 

“Tuck in your shirt,” she commanded coldly. “And never take the Lord’s name in vain.” 

Sister Victoria walked through the metal detector herself. The pewter rosary beads around her waist set it off, but the chastened TSA agent waved her through, handing back her hastily scanned luggage with a mumbled apology. 

Sitting on a hard plastic chair in the waiting area to board her plane from Boston to Rome, Sister Victoria looked through the contents of her bag to make sure none of the saints’ bones she stole were damaged.

Everything had to be perfect for the resurrection.

When Sister Victoria’s taxi pulled up to her hotel outside the gates of Vatican City, preparations for the All Saint’s Day International Conference on Hagiography were in full swing. Red-capped cardinals mingled with tenured professors in cheap suits, sweating in Rome’s late-October sun. 

Sister Victoria fiddled with her rosary beads, a nervous tic she developed at age seventeen, right after taking her vows. Her life’s work had been done behind the scenes, organizing exhibitions of holy relics for the diocese and replacing the bones with copies under the bishop’s nose. She had never given a lecture, never published a paper in an academic journal. This would be her first time publicly sharing her research, and it would be in front of the Pope. 

“Sister Victoria!” a voice called as she exited the taxi. Professor Walton, a middle-aged academic from Harvard Divinity School, was rushing toward her. 

“Hi, Sister, here, let me help you with that,” he said, reaching for her bag. 

Sister Victoria hugged the luggage close to her chest. “No, no, thank you.” 

They walked together to the check-in desk. 

“Are you giving a talk, Professor?” Sister Victoria asked. They had worked together on a few projects authenticating relics, using DNA sequencing done in Professor Walton’s lab. Most of the samples Profesor Walton analyzed were counterfeit; the rest were in Sister Victoria’s bag.

Professor Walton nodded eagerly, his wireframe glasses slipping slightly down his nose. 

“I’m moderating a panel on the veneration of problematic saints,” he explained as they walked toward their respective hotel rooms. Children in Halloween costumes, witches and ghouls and other blasphemous creatures, raced through the hallways, laughing and screeching. 

“Since Mother Theresa was canonized, there’s been a lot of debate about the ethics of praying to saints who supported damaging institutions,” Professor Walton continued casually. Sister Victoria bristled slightly. Professor Walton was not a believer; he was raised Catholic, but went to church only on Christmas, and even then, only to make his aging parents happy. Sister Victoria, by contrast, was a true Catholic. She protested outside Planned Parenthood, said a full rosary every night, and believed in the power of resurrection. He had no right to criticize the saints; he didn’t understand them.

“This is my room,” Sister Victoria said instead, pausing before a plain wooden door. “I have a lot of work to do to get ready for my lecture tomorrow.” 

Professor Walton raised his eyebrows in surprise. “You’re giving a talk, Sister? What topic–” 

But Sister Victoria had already closed the door between them.

Sister Victoria didn’t stay in her room for long. Joining a tour through Saint Peter’s Basilica, she searched for a place to pray. 

In Vatican City, Sister Victoria’s habit made her invisible instead of conspicuous, unlike in the streets of Boston, where people stopped and stared. Slipping away from the tour group, she wandered through the marble halls until she found a private, tiny adoration chapel. She ducked inside and locked the door.

The chapel was small, more of a prayer closet, and almost sensual, its thick curtain drapes perfumed with the cloying scent of incense. On the humble wooden altar was a golden monstrance, an elaborate circular frame displaying the Eucharist wafer, which she considered the literal body of Christ, the bleeding flesh of God. 

She genuflected before the altar and got to work. 

Decades of effort had prepared Sister Victoria for this moment. Yet, that same training had also sabotaged her. Thousands of hours handling and cleaning miniature artifacts, casting and painting perfect plaster copies, had hastened the onset of arthritis in her knobbly knuckles. It took her several minutes to pull on her white cotton gloves. But this was her life’s work. The Lord’s work. She persisted through the pain.

She spread out a drop cloth over the carpet so no fragments of Saint Paul would be vacuumed up with the dust bunnies. Carefully, she set out the steel wire, cushions, and glue before arranging the bones like a grotesque e jigsaw puzzle. The array was as ancient and diverse as the church herself; each bone was a different color, a different texture, embodying the power and uniqueness of each holy man and woman from whom it had been taken. 

Examining the work before her, Sister Victoria began to sweat. The Communion of Saints needed to be perfect; the dental record exact, not a rib missing. 

With Good Friday reverence, she glued Saint Appolonia’s teeth to Saint Anthony’s jawbone, attached Saint Valentine’s shoulder blade to Saint Magnus’ spinal column. It was an arduous, precise process, a penance for a lifetime of sins. As the hours passed, the votive candles dripped onto the altar cloth.

Watery light streamed through the stained glass windows, and Sister Victoria rose from her knees to admire her creation. 

A complete skeleton, its bones spanning thousands of years, knelt before the altar. Its browned, strangely-sized hands were folded in prayer, its arms raised in ecstasy. And inside the ribcage was a blackened heart, taken from Saint John Vianney.

Finally, as dawn broke on All Saint’s Day, the Communion of Saints was complete.

Sister Victoria’s notecards shook in her hands as she took her place behind the podium. Used to dusty shoebox offices and grim convent cells, the vastness of the conference hall frightened her. She had never spoken before this many people, even when she read scripture passages at Mass. The audience was almost all men, and nearly all of those men were quite powerful. 

The presenters before her had used flashy slideshows, but Sister Victoria wasn’t very good with technology and felt morally opposed to it, though she couldn’t quite articulate why. She had nothing but her words, and, of course, the skeleton shrouded with a white shawl like Christ’s corpse in the tomb.

Sister Victoria cleared her throat, hoarse from fear and a night without sleep. The Communion of Saints beside her gave her strength. 

“In Matthew 10:8,” Sister Victoria began, her voice faint even with the help of the microphone, “Christ commanded his followers to ‘cure the sick,' 'raise the dead,' and 'cleanse lepers.’”

The believers in the crowd nodded along with her, a performative respect for her maternal role in their hierarchy. Feeling her confidence build, she opened her Bible, the leatherbound book she received as a Confirmation gift from her mother, to an earmarked verse. 

“‘The tombs also were opened,” she read. “And many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised.’” Sister Victoria closed her Bible with dramatic finality. “The Gospel of Matthew makes it clear. There is spiritual power in our bodies, particularly in the bodies of saints. We, as Catholics, are no strangers to praying for the intercession of saints. We love our relics, though the world seems to think kneeling before Padre Pio’s skeleton is some kind of Halloween idolatry.” 

The bishops in the audience chuckled, condescending to those nonbelievers who didn’t understand the importance of collecting bones and hair.

“Christ’s spiritual sacrifice was his body,” Sister Victoria explained, now walking toward the skeleton, feeling confident the crowd was on her side. “The martyrs followed his example and used their bodies to glorify God. Through countless hours of research and prayer, I have created something never before seen in the Church, but something I believe Christ himself intended us to have. I present to you: the Communion of Saints.”

Sister Victoria pulled off the white cloth, revealing her holy monster. 

Gasps rang through the room. The ancient skeleton, misshapen and gruesome, looked anachronistic in the modern, minimalist conference room. Sister Victoria mistook the crowd’s horror and confusion for excitement, even admiration. She began pointing to each bone and explaining its significance in turn. 

“The bones of saints are credited with countless miracles,” she said, stroking the skeleton’s patchy, multicolored hair, stitched together from hundreds of bodies. “They were so powerful, in fact, that medieval monks stole them and brought them to their monasteries. Bishop Hugh of Lincoln smuggled a finger from the hand of Saint Mary Magdelene in his mouth. I have that very same finger here.”

Whispers rang throughout the room; Sister Victoria believed they were excited comments, speculation about the sacred applications of her creation. She could never have guessed the bishops and scholars were discussing how to destroy her life’s work and lock her away. 

“The modern church has become squeamish about relics,” Sister Victoria concluded confidently; she didn’t notice her entire audience was squeamishly avoiding looking at the skeleton. “We hold out saints at a distance, seeing them behind glass and caged in gilded boxes. The Communion of Saints will change that. It is a living thing, a reminder of our Catholic heritage and our place in this world."

She folded her hands and bowed. "God Bless.” 

No one clapped. After a few moments of excruciating silence, Professor Walton climbed the stage, bearing a smile that looked more like a grimace. 

“Wonderful job, Sister,” he said, a firm hand on her shoulder. “If you’d please come with me, the Holy Father wants to speak with you.”

After the media coverage of Sister Victoria’s “Franken-saint” questioned the ethics of holy relics and the treatment of consecrated women in the Catholic Church, the Pope himself encouraged Sister Victoria to retire and enjoy a life devoted to prayer. Her humiliation only rivaled her indignation. To her, the Communion of Saints was continuing a long tradition of furta sacra, holy theft.

At best, her critics simply didn’t understand. At worst, they were led astray by Satan.

The skeleton was brought to a clean room in the bowels of Vatican City where art and artifacts were restored, including sacred items taken from "pagan" and "heretical" faiths. The head conservator was amused by Sister Victoria’s work, impressed by the delicate way she assembled the pieces. As Sister Victoria had done in the chapel on Halloween night, the conservator laid down a cloth and organized his materials.

But before he could begin dismantling the skeleton, the shriveled heart of Saint John Vianney began to beat.

This short story was a finalist in the 2023 Autumn Writing Battle