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Today is the Feast of St. Sebastian, patron saint of Reitoca, F.M., Honduras.
Very little is known about Sebastian except that he was a Roman martyr in the 200s. In art, he is often portrayed as a handsome young man tied to a post shot with arrows.
The name of our parish is San Francisco de Asís and headquartered in Reitoca. So, you might ask, why is St. Sebastian the patron saint of Reitoca if the church is dedicated to St. Francis of Assisi. Nobody seems to know.
Unlike American parishes that usually have just one church where everyone comes to Masses at different times, here in Honduras, parishes can be huge and have many churches. Our parish covers 250 square miles and has 5 municipios, and each municipio has different villages. Most of the villages have churches of our parish. As of January 2023, we have 89 churches with four priests to cover them. Three of the priests are Archdiocese of Tegucigalpa priests, and I’m a missionary priest of the Diocese of Raleigh, North Carolina. Some of the Reitoca churches take an hour-and-a-half drive to get there.
Two weeks before the feast of St. Sebastian, priests take a statue of St. Sebastian to the various churches of our parish that are part of the municipio of Reitoca; of the 89 churches of our parish, about 23 are part of the municipio of Reitoca. In the photo above, we see a woman of the church in Azacualpa visiting St. Sebastian. If you look closely, you’ll see little items that look like objects you might see on women’s charm bracelets. These objects are in the shape of body parts – head, heart, leg, arm, or whatever. If a person has pain in their arm, for example, they take the arm symbol and pin it on St. Sebastian’s clothing. That alerts him to pray for the person.
In case you’re interested, the largest of our five municipios is that of Curarén which has more than 40 of our parish’s churches.
