Saint’s arm goes on cross-country tour
The holy and uncorrupted arm of an ancient saint is crossing the country in a two-week tour that began this week in Ottawa and Quebec City.
The relic of St. Francis Xavier will be viewed and venerated by tens of thousands of Catholics as it makes its way from St. John’s to Victoria as part of a tour conducted by Catholic Christian Outreach, a university campus-based religious organization. The arm will also spend a day at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia.
“St. Francis is the patron saint of our organization. We just really love him,” said Angèle Regnier, the co-founder of CCO. “We want to keep the Catholic faith alive for university students. So many young people go to university and in that freedom and all that university life has to give, they walk away from the Catholic faith.”
It’s a path similar to that of St. Francis, himself.
“That’s what St. Francis was in his day. He was an athlete, good-looking, he dressed well, he danced and partied more than he studied,” Regnier said. “Thanks to the witness of his roommates, after a few years, he came to the realization that not everything that was meaningful was found in just the pleasures of life.”
St. Francis would eventually take a vow of poverty and join the nascent counter-reformation movement in the Catholic Church.
After he died in 1552, St. Francis’s uncorrupted body was returned to Goa, India, where it remains 465 years later.
“What’s remarkable about the body itself is that it did not decompose over the last centuries,” said Ottawa Archbishop Terrence Prendergast. “Obviously it shrivelled up and dried but it didn’t go through the normal decaying process and that’s a sign of special status.”
Other miraculous deeds attributed to the saint include numerous cures of strange maladies and delivering holy communion while levitating. By one account, a crab recovered his crucifix after he dropped it into the sea.
“They don’t divide up bodies anymore, but they did in that era,” said Archbishop Prendergast. The holy man’s arm was delivered to Rome, where it is normally displayed in an elaborate gilded case. The relic rarely leaves the city, but the church granted special permission to mark CCO’s 30th anniversary.
The arm will travel between cities in a padded duffel bag in a seat of its own on Air Canada.