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ADELAIDE MENA/CNA/EWTN NEWS, National Catholic Register
Albany, N.Y., Jan 30, 2016 / 04:13 pm (CNA/EWTN News)– Catholic faithful are banding together to help rescue a possible relic of St. Kateri Tekawitha in a strange – and thoroughly modern – way: by using a crowdsourcing internet forum.
“It’s my first GoFundMe,” said Bill Jacobs, co-founder and president of the Saint Kateri Tekakwitha Conservation Center.
Speaking to CNA about the center’s “Rescue Saint Kateri Reliquary!” campaign, he explained, “Our hope is to raise enough money and get it back into the hands of the Church.”
St. Kateri Tekakwitha was born in 1656 as part of the Iroquois confederacy in what is now upstate New York and Southern Canada. After converting to Catholicism at age 19 and dying at age 24, she was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012. She is the first Native American saint to be canonized, and is the patron saint of ecology and the environment, people in exile and Native Americans.
Jacobs said that the center was alerted to the sale of a reliquary – or special container holding a relic of the saint – through a discussion on Facebook, where users pointed to instances of relics and reliquaries that were being sold on the internet. According to the Code of Canon Law, it is “absolutely forbidden to sell sacred relics,” although they may be transferred with permission from the Apostolic See.
Through the conversation, Jacobs was alerted of a holder who had come into possession of a reliquary containing what appears to be a first-class relic coming from the bone of St. Kateri Tekakwitha, nearly 4 inches long.
The also has accompanying paperwork and seals that appear to verify the authenticity of the relic inside. “I checked out the names and the dates of the certificates for who was the archbishop at the time, and they all check out,” Jacobs said.
