Modern-day saint? Healing powers attributed to Cape Breton priest
For decades in the mid-1900s, the faithful in Inverness County struggling with a health crisis sought out a Catholic priest said to have special healing powers.
"I have often heard people say, "Father Archie was a modern-day saint," said Bonny MacIsaac, a local resident and columnist for The Inverness Oran who's researching the life of Father Archie MacLellan.
"In the stories over the years, he was always revered in our county and probably beyond."
MacLellan died in 1970, but his reputation — particularly for helping alcoholics and women experiencing difficult pregnancies — lives on.
A knack for helping alcoholics, new moms
"There were different stories. A lot of them had to do with alcoholics and healings where they would go to him and he was like a healing priest," MacIsaac told CBC's Information Morning Cape Breton.
"You spoke to him, he prayed with you.... They did not drink after that.
"Was it their faith or was it Father Archie?"
MacLellan was also called upon by women experiencing troubles during childbirth.
"Those babies born, a lot of them bear his name," said MacIsaac. "Archie or [his] second name, Peter."
Healing in death
After the priest's death, people seeking help would visit his grave in Broad Cove in Cape Breton taking jars of earth.
MacIsaac said she found containers of mud from MacLellan's gravesite when she was cleaning out her father's house after his death in 2002.
She hasn't thrown them out.
"I saved it, I couldn't get rid of it," she said.
"I always do carry one small, tiny little bag with me."
'Father Archie has the answer'
MacIsaac said she recently saw MacLellan's healing powers firsthand.
"I had a friend who was having a really hard time," she recalled. "I woke up in the morning and something told me 'Father Archie has the answer.'"
She asked for his intercession and went to his gravesite. Her friend is "much better," she said.
That experience led MacIsaac to begin writing about MacLellan, who was known for his great generosity and sense of humour, even playing pranks on the nuns and hospital nurses back in the day.
"He was a very kind and extremely generous person from stories I heard. It wouldn't matter if it was midnight or 1 in the morning, if something happened ... he would be there."
Much loved in community and beyond
In the 1940s, the Antigonish Casket printed this account: "There is no clergyman in this diocese or in any other diocese for that matter, who is more loved and more deservedly loved by his people. Besides being a man of prayer, he is the soul of kindness and the peak of gentlemanly propriety in all possible respects."
MacIsaac is still looking for stories from others about MacLellan. Anecdotes can be emailed to orancolumnist@gmail.com.
