REACHING OUT TO TOUCH A SAINT
Founder of Jesuit order remembered with cross-country tour of relic
Venerating the remains of a hand that has weathered more than four centuries requires a fair amount of faith. And when the relic of St. Francis Xavier was displayed at a downtown Toronto church Sunday, the faithful came out in droves.
Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church was packed like never before. The line of people waiting to touch the glass-covered reliquary containing the forearm and hand of the 16th-century saint snaked around the block. In the first hour of viewing alone, some 2,000 peo- ple came and slowly went.
“This is so magical and so real that it confirms the beliefs that we grew up with,” said Zeny Benedicto, 63, who viewed the relic with her three adult children. Her youngest son has been in a wheelchair, unable to speak or walk, since suffering a traumatic brain injury at birth.
“It’s a confirmation of the inner faith that kept my family together,” added Benedicto, who works at a City of Toronto shelter for the homeless.
The size of the crowd surprised Lourdes’ parish priest, Rev. John Sullivan, who joked that he quickly stationed volunteers with collection baskets when he saw the sea of people flooding in. The Sherbourne St. parish is the only English-speaking Jesuit church in Toronto. So Sullivan requested that the relic be displayed there during its cross-Canada tour; Francis Xavier, after all, co-founded the Society of Jesus in the 1530s, the Catholic order also known as the Jesuits.
Sullivan acknowledged that the practice of venerating body parts might strike some as “strange.”
Roman Catholicism isn’t the only religion that venerates relics. But it certainly displays some of the most striking, like the head of St. Catherine displayed in a basilica in Siena, Italy.
Xavier’s withered right forearm and hand is considered by the Roman Catholic Church as “incorrupt,” meaning it hasn’t experienced natural decay.
“When we were told it was going to come we got all excited and we did a Google image search and the ladies were like, ‘Oh my God!’ ” Sullivan said, referring to volunteers at his church.
“It’s pretty corrupted for an incorruptible relic,” he added, laughing.
Sullivan, who is 47, explained the Catholic veneration of body parts this way:
“It’s not a great comparison, but if you like baseball and you read about Babe Ruth and then you go to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown (N.Y.) and you see Babe Ruth’s bat — just being in the physical presence of it, even though you knew it was always true, makes it more real.”
For Sullivan, the hand makes the stories of Xavier’s struggles to follow God — he initially wanted to get a good job and make lots of money — come to life.
Angèle Regnier, co-founder of Catholic Christian outreach, used a hockey analogy instead. She compared it to people lining up to touch the Stanley Cup when it tours Canada.
“When you touch it, all this historical imagination comes into play — who touched this cup before me?” said Regnier, whose group organized the relic’s cross-country tour.
St. Francis Xavier baptized tens of thousands of people along the southeastern coast of India and in Japan, and died of a fever in 1552 at the age of 46. His body is entombed in Goa, India.
Canonized in1622 by Pope Gregory XV, Francis is the patron saint of missionaries.
Many who turned out were origi- nally from the geographical area where Xavier did much of his work.
“It brings back so many old memories,” said Sybil Lewis, who grew up in Goa.
She remembers being taken several times by her parents to touch the saint’s body when that was still being allowed.
Lorenzo Ruiz, a 59-year-old chemist from Toronto, made the pilgrimage to the relic hoping it would rekindle a faith battered by the sex abuse scandals that have rocked the church.
“I’m trying to find again my faith, literally. I was born a Roman Catholic. But along the way, you stray,” said Ruiz, who was born in Mexico.
Seeing the relic, he added, made a difference.
“You feel something. I cannot describe what I felt. It’s something different. We’ll see.”
Liam Farrer, a 29-year-old theology student at Regis College, a Jesuit school, described the large crowd venerating the relic as “bittersweet.”
It’s great that so many Catholics want to see a part of St. Francis Xavier, Farrer said. But Catholics also believe that Jesus is present in the tabernacle, yet “there’s no lineup to see the man himself,” he added, pointing to the lonely ornate box that holds the Eucharist.
When the relic tour ends in Ottawa on Feb. 2, it will have been viewed in 15 Canadian cities, from St. John’s to Victoria. It’s permanently kept at the Church of the Gesu in the heart of Rome.