NEWS FEATURE: Pope to Beatify American Missionary Priest

c. 2000 Religion News Service NEW ORLEANS _ Pope John Paul II will beatify a 19th century missionary priest who worked with Roman Catholic immigrants in Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Detroit before dying of yellow fever in New Orleans. The Rev. Francis Xavier Seelos will be declared”blessed,”one step away from sainthood, on Jan. 27, said church […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

NEW ORLEANS _ Pope John Paul II will beatify a 19th century missionary priest who worked with Roman Catholic immigrants in Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Detroit before dying of yellow fever in New Orleans.

The Rev. Francis Xavier Seelos will be declared”blessed,”one step away from sainthood, on Jan. 27, said church officials in New Orleans.


A native of Bavaria, Seelos came to the United States in 1843 and worked as a Redemptorist priest largely among German immigrants. By the time of his arrival in New Orleans at the age of 47, he had a reputation for unusual piety and effectiveness as a parish priest, spiritual counselor and trainer of Redemptorist seminarians.

Popular biographies prepared to support his canonization cite a combination of zeal, piety, cheerfulness and ability to connect personally with those who came to him.

In 1860, retiring Pittsburgh Bishop Michael O’Connor considered Seelos his top choice to succeed him, but Seelos reportedly made clear he did not want the job.

Seelos died in 1867 after little more than a year in New Orleans. He is buried in a crypt at St. Mary’s Assumption Church, his last assignment.

Beginning in the 1960s, Seelos’s Redemptorist order revived a canonization effort that had stalled shortly after the turn of the century.

A nonprofit center to push the effort was established in New Orleans, where advocates kept alive stories of Seelos’s spirituality and virtue.

In 1966 a suburban New Orleans woman, Angela Boudreaux, said she and her family prayed to Seelos after learning she had only two weeks to live because of a fast growing and inoperable liver cancer.”I didn’t use those words, but I thought she was a goner, no question,”recalled her physician, Dr. Alfred Rufty, in an interview this week.”She was deep yellow. She looked like an escapee from Buchenwald. No one had any significant hope. We gave her some chemotherapy just to have something to do, and on the remote chance it might work.”We were astonished that in two or three weeks, she was back to normal,”he said.”It was incredible.” Years later, investigators from the Catholic church went over Boudreaux’s case in detail with Rufty.”I told them I don’t know whether there’s any such thing,”he said,”but as far as I’m concerned, that’s the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a miracle.” Vatican investigators eventually accepted Boudreaux’s healing as the first of two miracles needed to canonize Seelos.


Boudreaux, now 70 and in good health, attended the Seelos announcement in New Orleans on Thursday (Jan. 20) and said she expects to attend Seelos’ beatification ceremony April 9 in St. Peter’s Square.

The Vatican’s scheduled timetable also calls for a round of canonizations in the fall, perhaps including the canonization of Mother Katharine Drexel, a Philadelphia heiress who entered the convent and spent her life working among Native Americans and African-Americans.

Drexel was beatified in 1988; the Vatican notified her order last October that a second unexplained healing has passed medical review for acceptance as a miracle, clearing the last major hurdle.

If she is canonized, she will become the fifth American saint, joining Mother Elizabeth Ann Seton, Mother Frances Cabrini, Bishop John Neumann of Philadelphia and Rose Philippine Duchesne, a French missionary nun to Native Americans in the Mississippi Valley in the early 19th century.

DEA END NOLAN

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