Goa church to hold Spanish Mass during Xavier feast
November 27, 2012: The Goa Catholic Church would for the first time have a prayer
service in Spanish next month during the annual feast of St. Francis Xavier. "We have
so many brethren who come to pray in honor of St. Francis Xavier. Several of them
come from Spain, where the saint hails from. The Mass in Spanish is for them to feel
at home," said Fr. Savio Baretto, the church priest.
He said that prayers are
also held in Malayalam, Kannada and Tamil as “we have thousands of worshipers coming
from states where those languages are spoken." The annual feast, which is held every
year from Nov. 24 to Dec. 3, is attended by over a million devotees from India and
across the world. The saint, who hailed from Navarre, in the Basque region of Spain,
heralded Christianity in Goa. After his death in 1552 in Shangchuan in China, his
body was first ferried to Malacca in Malaysia and in 1553 stored in the grand Basilica
of Bom Jesus, one of the oldest churches in the Indian state. St. Francis Xavier,
incidentally, was among the first Christian missionaries to travel in Japan and Borneo.
Believers
regard it as a miracle that the body has not decomposed for nearly five hundred years.
Sceptics point out that the saint's mortal remains were embalmed to prevent decomposition.
Every year, more than a million believers throng the church complex in Old Goa, located
a short distance from the state capital.
Once in a decade, the devotees multiplies
manifold, when the church exposes the saint's remains in a glass-topped silver casket
to devotees, in an event known as the "exposition." The last such exposition occurred
in 2004.