When St. Katharine Drexel is moved from the Bensalem motherhouse that she founded to the Philadelphia church she attended as a child, she will become the first American whose intact remains will be moved after achieving sainthood, according to one Catholic scholar.
“This does not happen every day,” said Patrick Hayes, archivist for the Redemptorist Archives of the Baltimore Province, whose office is across from the St. John Neumann Shrine in Philadelphia, where the 19th-century Redemptorist bishop is entombed.
The transfer of a saint’s remains is so rare that virtually no known protocols exist for how it should be done, said Hayes, with whom the Philadelphia Archdiocese consulted about the upcoming Drexel move.
“There is no manual. The prospect of moving St. Katharine Drexel into the basilica is kind of an ad hoc process,” he said Monday.
Details of how that process will take place will be revealed Tuesday when the Philadelphia Archdiocese unveils its plans for moving the founder of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament order to a newly constructed tomb at the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in Center City.
Hayes is familiar with the delicate handling of Catholic saint remains.
The body of St. John Neumann has changed locations about five times since his death in 1860, but always within St. Peter The Apostle Church on North Fifth Street where the Philadelphia native was buried, Hayes said.
Neumann was first exhumed in 1902 when he was under consideration for sainthood, which he achieved in 1977, he said. The casket was in bad shape after more than 40 years underneath the damp church basement floor, but Neumann himself had not deteriorated much, Hayes said. Among Roman Catholic beliefs is that divine intervention allows some human bodies, particularly those of saints, to avoid the normal decomposition process after death.
After Vatican officials confirmed his remains, Neumann was re-interred in the same place, below the church altar. On the eve of his beatification, he was exhumed again, but this time he was entombed in a glass encasement, which was turned into the shrine altar in 1964, Hayes said.
The only known rules for moving relics under Catholic canon law, which include the body or body parts of saints, is they cannot be moved if they are buried in an immovable altar, Hayes said. He added that to his knowledge Drexel’s tomb is not part of such an altar.
Typically, if a saint’s remains are moved at all, it takes place before the person is beatified, among the last steps toward achieving sainthood, Hayes said.
St. Marianne Cope is the only other American whose remains were transferred after achieving sainthood; Cope devoted her life to missionary work among leper colonies in Hawaii until her death in 1918.
She originally was buried in Hawaii but her remains were exhumed and transferred to a Syracuse, New York, motherhouse in 2005, after she was beatified. Her remains were returned to Honolulu in 2014 — two years after she was canonized — after her order announced plans to sell their motherhouse, which was in dangerously deteriorated condition.
But not all of Cope’s remains moved to Hawaii; some stayed with her religious order in New York for their new chapel.
Since Drexel’s body is intact, it is likely the crypt where she is buried will be moved as well. Hayes did not know if the tomb could be dismantled. He also did not know how Drexel was interred, but the order’s archives likely have those details. The Philadelphia Archdiocese now possesses those archives.
What is clear is that the process of moving Drexel will be a delicate one.
“Treating her body with anything but the utmost respect and reverence would fly in the face, (of the dignity accorded to saints)” Hayes said. “The sisters will want to see care given to their foundress.”
The Philadelphia-born heiress to the Drexel family fortune gave up her wealth to better the lives of the American Indians and African Americans in the western United States. She died at the Bensalem convent’s motherhouse at age 96 in 1955. The shrine officially closed to the public as of January 1.
The sisters of the Blessed Sacrament announced in May 2016 plans to reduce their financial burden by selling property including the 44-acre shrine property, which drew between 5,000 and 6,000 visitors to Bucks County each year. Havertown developer Aquinas has a tentative deal to purchase the land, but Bensalem council has yet to decide on a proposal to rezone the land from institutional to residential. Aquinas officials previously suggested building a 55-and-older housing development.
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