The Bishop's Weekly Column from the Parish Bulletin

OUR LADY OF FATIMA

CATHOLIC CHURCH

Gunfight at the OK Corral

August 12th, 2006

What might have been (or still might be) !

The battle mentioned in the title of this column is almost synonymous with the legendary "Wild West" days of the US. Tombstone, Dodge city, have all become part and parcel of American folk lore. With lynch mobs, drunkeness, debauchery and general lawlessness, Hollywood of the 20th Century has largely sanitized and fictionalized the savagery that was the Wild West of the 19th Century.

Yesterday, our small but devout Mass attendees, felt very much as though a lynch mob had burst in on our prayerfulness. I was reminded after the gate-crashers had left, as suddenly as they had arrived, of two anecdotes recited to a group of us seminarians years ago about similar occurences in the small Brazilian diocese of Campos in the 1980s. Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer, that other unsung hero of 1988 who acted as co-consecrator of the 4 SSPX bishops, refused the Novus Ordo in his diocese. After his retirement, however, the new bishop did everything to stamp out Tradition.

In one case a priest came from swimming in the sea, walked across the sanctuary in his skimpy bathing attire, ignored the Blessed Sacrament, entered the sacristy only to re-emerge vested for "Mass" to the horror of his depleted congregation.

In another, just before Holy Communion, a girl rode into the village atop a moped. Stopping before the church she entered with the shortest of mini-skirts, no veil (of course), received Communion and left immediately on her moped as suddenly as she had arrived.

Now we experienced nothing as horrendous as this, but evident attempts to disrupt our personal piety have been made by lynch mobs of our own here in the diocese of St. Petersburg. Now that the sherrif and his deputy have regained control of "Dodge", reclaimed her from the lynching of yesterday, we can safely say we have avoided what might have become an equally famous part of American History: the battle of the OLF Corral !

Toodlepip old chap ! Sink the Bismarck !

+TF