On its final day, St. Anna’s is almost full again. A choir is singing and the small organ is supporting them. But this is the last mass in the small Catholic church in Gildehaus, a district of Bad Bentheim near the German-Dutch border. In future, the building will no longer be a place of worship.
Towards the end of the service, the demise of this church becomes achingly real. Worshippers from the congregation open the altar and remove the relics. These are small relics of a saint, be they bone fragments or pieces of textile, which are always incorporated into the altar of a consecrated Catholic church.
