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Kamloops  

Touring holy remains make first-ever stop in Kamloops as part of Roman Catholic jubilee celebration 

Relics on display

Four hundred year old Roman Catholic relics were on display at the Sacred Heart Cathedral in Kamloops on Friday as part of a cross-Canada tour.

A skull and rib bone fragments belonging to four saints were all on display as waves of visitors were welcomed through the church.

Jesuit priest John O’Brien, who is travelling with the relics, said the tour gives Christians an opportunity to connect with the saints who lived at the time of the founding of the country.

“Just like people may preserve as mementos articles of clothing or pieces of hair, or something like that, the bones of the saints are that for us, and by coming to visit them and pray with them, it provides point of connection,” O’Brien said.

O’Brien — the rector of the National Martyr’s Shrine in Midland, Ont. — said the shrine sees about 100,000 people every summer, but many Canadians have never had the opportunity to see the relics.

For that reason, and because 2025 is a jubilee year for the Catholic Church, they decided to take the remains on tour across Canada — particularly the western provinces.

The tour’s next stops are in Prince George and then Edmonton.

The skull of St. Jean de Brebeuf and bone fragments of St. Charles Garnier, St. Gabriel Lalemant and St. Kateri Tekakwatha, the first Indigenous North American saint, were on display this week in Kamloops for the first time ever.

St. Jean de Brebeuf, St. Charles Garnier and St. Gabriel Lalemant were among a group of eight French missionaries credited with bringing the gospel to Canada in the 1600s.

O’Brien said Brebeuf came to Canada in 1625 to live amongst the Huron people who after about a decade asked to be baptized.

“They became Canada’s first Christian community, Indigenous to the country,” O’Brien said.

He said Brebeuf, Garnier, Lalemant and the four other martyrs were killed during the Iroquois invasion of the Huron in 1649.

St. Tekakwatha was a Mohawk woman and member of the Iroquois Confederation. O’Brien said she was a woman of great faith who became the patron saint of Indigenous peoples across North America.

She was venerated in 1943 and canonized in 2012.

Father Derrick Cameron, rector of the cathedral, said the last time Sacred Heart had relics on display was back in 2001.

“It’s not your everyday thing,” Cameron said.

He said the relics serve as a “tangible reminder” that these saints were real and can be honoured as “older brothers and sisters in the faith.”

“The Catholic Church is a big family. The saints are like our older brothers and sisters who have set an example for us,” Cameron said.



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