So who's hiding the body of Fr. Jacques Marquette SJ - Remembering the Body

A small, recent example: My father maintained a deep devotion to Père Jacques Marquette, the great French missionary of the 17th century. It was personal to him. Before he died he desired to visit Marquette’s grave in Michigan but he became too ill, and it proved impossible.

Some correspondence later fell into my hands. They were letters, brown and brittle, from Fr. Edward Jacker, written in 1886 and told the story of finding Marquette’s remains at Point Saint-Ignace some years earlier.

In 1675 Marquette died and was buried there. In 1677, the Kiskakon Indians were hunting nearby and wished to visit their spiritual father. Like the Israelites, they gathered his bones and solemnly took him home to be buried beneath the Saint-Ignace chapel. His body mattered. It was important to them as a community. Fr. Jacker selected the larger fragments to give to the newly founded Marquette College and reburied the rest at Saint-Ignace.

article at The Catholic Thing

Marquette University bans ‘proselytizing’ on campus

Pere Marquette and the Indians [at the Mississippi River], oil painting (1869) by Wilhelm Lamprecht (1838–1906), at Marquette University[4]

Marquette University students are free to “evangelize” on campus, but may not “proselytize.”

The restriction is part of the Catholic university’s Religious Activities Policy, which is intended to serve as a rule book for religious organizations on campus, but also operates as a sort of pledge to the school community.

“The university welcomes in its midst students of varying religious backgrounds and persuasions, respects the individual religious commitments of students, and in no case attempts to proselytize them through its programs or sponsored activities,” the school explains. “Similarly, the university does not allow any other individual or organization internal or external to the university to proselytize its members using facilities, programs, or activities controlled by the university.”

continue at Campus Reform

Father Marquette’s Heroic Virtue

In the December, 1984, issue of American Heritage magazine, historical novelist Walter D. Edmonds wrote that he wished he had been present on 18 May, 1675, when Father Jacques Marquette, S. J., breathed his last. Edmonds (1903-1998) had an eye for the dramatic moment: In 1936 he secured his literary reputation with Drums along the Mohawk, a novel that sold almost as many copies as that year’s runaway best-seller, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Like her novel of the American Civil War, Edmonds’, about the American Revolution, became in 1939 a major motion picture, in this case one that was directed by John Ford and that starred Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert.

As Edmonds noted, at the time of his death Marquette had been working as a missionary among the Indians of what is now Michigan, and on Easter Sunday of 1675, he had celebrated Mass with some five thousand of them present. Not all those assembled were Christian, but all held the priest in high regard, even reverence. All knew that the austere, balding young man (he was thirty-seven), so selfless and brave, was gravely ill.

When Marquette died, another Frenchman followed Marquette’s final instructions and rang a hand bell. “I wish I might have been there,” Edmonds wrote, “to hear those small and lonely notes.” To his way of thinking, the ringing of that bell “marked the end of the most spiritual and also down-to-earth of all the Jesuit missionaries,” and all can agree that those words aptly describe Marquette, although one hopes they applied to others as well.

continue at St. Austin Review 

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