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

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Is this something local Catholics (and Marquette alumni) should be contacting the university about? Seeking to have Fr. Marquette's remains moved to a church? I wonder why the decision was made (even in the early years of the university) to just keep the relics in a forgotten file.