Veneration
His tomb in the Royal Chapel in Villareal in the old province of Valencia, where he died, immediately became an object of pilgrimage. Beatified by Paul V in 1618, he was canonized by Alexander VIII on 16 October 1690. The saint is usually depicted in adoration before a vision of the Eucharist.
Forty years before he was canonized, an indigenous Guatemalan claimed to have had a vision of a sainted Paschal Baylon, appearing as a robed skeleton. This event became the basis of the heterodox tradition of San Pascualito.
Paschal Baylon was enlisted in the Church's struggle against Modernism, part of which was through increasing devotion towards the Sacrament of the Eucharist; Pope Leo XIII proclaimed Saint Paschal Baylon, the "seraph of the Eucharist", Patron of eucharistic congresses and all contemporary and future eucharistic associations. Christian art usually depicts him wearing the Franciscan habit and bearing a monstrance, signifying his devotion to the Holy Eucharist.
During the Red Terror at the time of the Spanish Civil War his grave was desecrated and his relics burned by anticlerical leftists.
Read more about this topic: Paschal Baylon
Famous quotes containing the word veneration:
“Erasmus was the light of his century; others were its strength: he lighted the way; others knew how to walk on it while he himself remained in the shadow as the source of light always does. But he who points the way into a new era is no less worthy of veneration than he who is the first to enter it; those who work invisibly have also accomplished a feat.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“It is evident, from their method of propagation, that a couple of cats, in fifty years, would stock a whole kingdom; and if that religious veneration were still paid them, it would, in twenty more, not only be easier in Egypt to find a god than a man, which Petronius says was the case in some parts of Italy; but the gods must at last entirely starve the men, and leave themselves neither priests nor votaries remaining.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)