Fr. Daniel Powers was born and raised by loving parents in a devout Catholic home in the South Suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. When he was young, his father would bring him along with his brother to morning Mass every Friday and instruct them afterward in the catechism or the Sacred Scriptures. He was taught from a young age to love the Catholic Faith, to have great love and reverence for the Blessed Sacrament, and to practice devotion to the Blessed Virgin.

While attending the second grade at a local Catholic school, he saw a picture of a priest offering Mass in his religion textbook and was struck with the idea of becoming a priest. This idea never left him, despite his desire to be the third baseman for the Chicago White Sox. After high school, he decided to work and attend a local community college in order to get some real world experience and further prepare himself intellectually for seminary studies.

By God’s grace and mercy, he was accepted into Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary in the fall of 2012. He greatly enjoyed his time in seminary and is deeply grateful for the formation which he received there and for all of the work and sacrifice on the part of the priests, faculty, and staff of the seminary. After completing seven years of seminary formation, he was ordained a priest on May 24th, 2019 by His Excellency the Most Reverend Fabian Bruskewitz, Bishop Emeritus of the Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska, at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Lincoln.

Fr. Powers would like to thank all of those who throughout his life aided him in the pursuit of his vocation with their prayers or sacrifices. He would like to assure you of his prayers, and earnestly asks that you continue to pray for him. May God reward you! +

Fr. Powers is currently serving as the assistant pastor at Our Lady of Fatima Chapel in Pequannock, NJ.

His Excellency the Most Reverend Athanasius Schneider, Auxiliary Bishop of Astana, Kazakhstan, will confer the Sacred Priesthood on Mr. Rock today, October 26th, at 10:30 a.m. at St. Mary’s Church, our apostolate in Providence! First blessings and a reception will follow. Mr. Rock’s first Mass will be tomorrow, Sunday, October 27th, at 10 a.m. at the same location.

St. Mary’s Catholic Church
538 Broadway
Providence, RI 02909

We are excited to welcome Bishop Schneider to confer the Sacrament of Holy Orders for us for the second time – he ordained seven FSSP priests in 2014 at St. Cecilia Cathedral in Omaha. It is also particularly joyful for us to see an FSSP priest ordained at one of our own apostolates, the beautiful church of St. Mary that came under the care of the Fraternity last year. God’s blessings upon our Fraternity continue to be abundant, and we hope you can join us in giving thanks to Him and celebrating the ordination of Deacon Rock this weekend.

For more information, please visit St. Mary’s website here.*

*Please come, even if you did not RSVP in time!

On Saturday, November 16th, at 10 a.m., His Excellency the Most Reverend Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco will celebrate a Solemn Pontifical Mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. The event is hosted by the Benedict XVI Institute as part of a tour introducing the Mass of the Americas, a newly-composed Mass setting in the sacred music tradition of the Church. A free conference comprised of workshops and discussions with the composer and other Catholic artists will follow the Mass.

For more information or to RSVP for the Mass (an RSVP is encouraged but not required), click here. You can register for the conference (registration includes attendance at the Mass) by clicking here.

Archbishop Cordileone is a great friend of the Latin Mass and will be conferring our diaconate ordinations on March 28th, 2020 at the chapel of Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary. We encourage you to attend the DC Mass if you can – it’s not often that you get to experience a Solemn Pontifical Mass, let alone at the high altar of a church that is a minor basilica, the largest Catholic church in North America and a place of particular importance to the Faith in this country. Even if you cannot attend, perhaps take a moment on that day to pray for our country, which is entrusted to Our Lady under her title of the Immaculate Conception, that America’s holy Patroness will guide her in the truth and make the Faith flourish here more strongly than ever.

The upcoming Mass brings back memories from April of last year, when the Most Reverend Alexander Sample, Archbishop of Portland, Oregon, celebrated a Pontifical Mass at the Basilica in honor of the 10th anniversary of Summorum Pontificum. The Fraternity was greatly involved with the planning of that Mass and several of our priests assisted at it. We posted about it here. +

Today the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter gives thanks to God for 31 years of service and fidelity to God, His Church and the Holy Father. On this day in 1988, our Fraternity was officially erected as a Clerical Society of Apostolic Life of Pontifical Right by Pope St. John Paul II. Starting in Switzerland with just 12 priests, 1 deacon and 20 seminarians, the Fraternity has since grown to 315 priests and 14 deacons working in 133 dioceses worldwide, with 165 seminarians studying at 2 flourishing seminaries. We have the privilege and blessing of offering the traditional Latin Mass every day and of serving thousands of God’s faithful people at our parishes, chaplaincies and missions scattered across 5 of the 7 continents. We have seen incredible growth this year in our North American District (more on that here), and we have every reason to hope that our best days are yet to come.

Of course, we could never have done it but for the grace of God and for you, our friends and benefactors, and are so grateful for your faithfulness to Him and your continued support of the Fraternity. Please continue to pray for us, that we might remain always true to our calling and serve Him ever more faithfully every day.

Members of the Confraternity of St. Peter, our lay sodality, can gain a plenary indulgence on this day under the usual conditions. If you are interested in becoming a member of the Confraternity, click here! +

Ego vos elégi de mundo, ut eátis et fructum afferátis: et fructus vester máneat.

I have chosen you out of the world, that you should go, and should bring forth fruit; and your fruit should remain.

– from the Alleluia for October 18th, the feast of St. Luke the Evangelist

Halfway through the FSSP’s annual October census, Fraternity parishes and chapels around the country report major increases in Sunday Mass attendance compared with last year.

Newer apostolates have seen dramatic growth, some doubling their numbers over the last year, such as Los Angeles, which went from 250 per Sunday to 500. The apostolate did not even have its own church until 2018, so finally settling down in a small church in San Fernando provided needed stability, contributing to the significant increase it saw this past year.

“The main obstacle right now is a lack of space,” said Fr. Federico Masutti, assistant pastor of St. Vitus, talking to the Missive over the summer. His words echo the sentiment of so many other FSSP apostolates that find themselves outgrowing their buildings, but it’s really a great problem to have.

“When we were at 200 people,” said pastor Fr. James Fryar, “we decided to add the fourth Mass, and just adding that one Mass, from one week to the next, another 200 people came.”

“The growth was amazing,” confirmed Fr. Masutti.

In Naples, Florida, the FSSP has been operating for less than two years, and is at nearly 400 people per Sunday, up over 20 percent from last year.

“A plethora of young families are coming, attracted by the sacred beauty and reverence of the Mass, the traditional catechesis and true parish family life,” said pastor Fr. Jonathan Romanoski.

He and assistant pastor Fr. Joshua Passo do not have their own church, but offer Mass in two locations, one in Naples and one in Fort Myers. He pointed out that it is not only the liturgy that draws the growing congregation.

“It’s more than just the Latin Mass—they’re coming for the community life and all of the groups we have—for adults, for kids, for catechesis,” he said. “They come because we are two priests, we are a small community where everybody can get to know each other and the families can truly bond.”

Two new apostolates established last year—in the dioceses of Philadelphia and Providence, Rhode Island—have started off strong and now have 400 and 300 parishioners, respectively. Both locations have inherited magnificent churches that should accommodate their communities for a long time.

Fr. Carl Gismondi of St. Mary’s in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, in the archdiocese of Philadelphia, said that his church is perfect for their needs. “Archbishop Chaput has been very generous in supporting the Latin Mass community,” he said. “The church here in Conshohocken, St. Mary’s, is in an ideal location.

“It’s a beautiful Neo-Gothic church built in 1950. It’s probably one of the last grand churches built in the archdiocese of Philadelphia.”

Even apostolates that have been established for a long time (by FSSP standards) have seen significant increases, but most report constraints of space that inhibit their growth and they look forward to building or buying new churches.

St. Anne Parish, our apostolate in San Diego, for example, was established in 2008, and despite having a small church that can seat approximately 200 adults, had reached more than 800 parishioners by 2018 with three priests offering five Sunday Masses. Now, they are averaging over 1,000.

“At some of our Masses we will have as many as maybe 350 people and so not everyone fits and so people are actually sitting outside the doors looking in through open doors,” said pastor Fr. John Lyons.

Other long-established FSSP parishes that have seen strong growth include our first North American apostolate, Mater Dei in Dallas, established in 1991, which has seen its Sunday congregation grow 24 percent from 1250 to 1550 in the last year.

St. Joan of Arc Parish, our apostolate in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, has gone from 650 to 840 in the past two years, an increase of about 29 percent. Likewise, St. Francis de Sales in Atlanta, established in 1995, has grown 30 percent over the last year. In October of 2018, it averaged 460 people each Sunday; so far this month, it has over 600. +

From August 31st – September 2nd, 2019, priests and parishioners from St. Clement Parish, our apostolate in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, participated in the 16th annual pilgrimage to the shrine of Notre-Dame-du-Cap, Our Lady of the Cape, located in Cap-de-la-Madeleine, Québec. Marie Reine du Canada, a lay group based at St. Clement Parish, has organized the pilgrimage every year since 2003, when seven parishioners from St. Clement embarked on a pioneering pilgrimage to pave the way for the next group that would participate in larger numbers the next year, when it officially began.

The chaplains this year were St. Clement assistant pastor Fr. Jacques Breton, FSSP and Fr. Peter Do, Diocese of Pembroke (neighbouring diocese to the west of Ottawa). The parish has one English chapter, one French, one for the scouts from St. Clement Parish, and the St. Joseph Workers Chapter, with about 115 pilgrims total (including volunteer worker pilgrims) participating this year. Pilgrims come from all over North America – mostly Ottawa, Toronto and Montréal. This year one pilgrim flew in from British Columbia, and some came from Michigan, New Brunswick (home province of the recently ordained Fr. Luc Poirier) and Québec City. In years past, pilgrims have traveled from Manitoba, New York, Pennsylvania, California, Michigan and Washington.

The pilgrimage is 100 kilometers or 62 miles in length (roughly the same as the Chartres pilgrimage). It begins in Lanoraie, Québec, which is approximately where St. Isaac Jogues was first captured by the Iroquois (in fact, pilgrims stop and pray near a monument marking this event). They walk “in the footsteps” of the North American Martyrs along the St. Lawrence River, attending Mass in beautiful old Quebecois churches and saying Compline together each night. Pilgrims walk only with small packs, while their luggage is transported by a large truck from campsite to campsite. Meals are simple: bread and peanut butter, nutella, jam, and coffee or hot chocolate for breakfast; bread for lunch; bread, soup and a little red wine for dinner.

The closing Mass was a Solemn High Mass, celebrated by Fr. Do, assisted by Fr. Breton and Fr. Alex Marchand, FSSP, recently assigned to Québec City.

Our Lady of the Cape Shrine is Canada’s national shrine to Our Blessed Mother, and the old fieldstone church, the oldest church in Canada in which Mass is offered daily, was party to not one but two miracles in the later 19th century. When that church, dating from 1720, was becoming too small, the parishioners planned to construct a larger one with materials from across the St. Lawrence River, which usually froze over and offered a means to transport the materials. But that winter, the winter of 1879, was a mild one and the river did not freeze. The parishioners prayed the Rosary for the freezing of the river, and the pastor, Fr. Désilets, promised Our Lady that he would dedicate the fieldstone church to her instead of demolishing it if she interceded for them. In the middle of March, the ice came and as promised, the old church was dedicated to Our Lady on June 22nd, 1888 and a statue of her, formerly in an alcove, installed above the high altar.

But an even more astonishing miracle occurred right then. On the evening of the day of the dedication, Fr. Désilets and a Franciscan priest, Fr. Frédéric, were helping a lame man into the church so he could pray. While they were there, the three men witnessed the statue of Our Lady above the altar open her eyes. The statue normally has downcast eyes, but they saw her look up, her dark eyes wide open, for five to ten minutes. The statue who “opened her eyes” remains enthroned in the old stone church, Pope St. John Paul II visiting the miraculous statue in 1984.

The pilgrimage is sure to continue next year, so join the parishioners of St. Clement if you are in the area round about the first weekend in September. There certainly does not seem to be a better way to spend the final days of summer than hiking along the beautiful St. Lawrence River, taking in the picturesque landscape of Québec and retracing the path of the North American Martyrs to pay a visit to the Reine du Canada, the Queen of Canada, at her chosen northern home. +

Our thanks to Ian Gallagher for his contributions to this article, and to Mr. Gallagher and Hannah Janek for their photos of the event.

In the Ask Father column of October’s Meménto, Fr. Dominic Savoie explains the nature and meaning of a pilgrimage. Read his article here!

What is a pilgrimage? – Anne from Sacramento

Many years ago, I went on a pilgrimage. At the beginning of my journey, I knew what a pilgrimage was; but after 40 days, 600 miles, two mountain ranges, cities, vineyards, Roman roads and a rooster in a cathedral, I reached my destination and wasn’t too sure anymore. The whole adventure was a series of swings between chaos and serenity. I sort of knew where I was going. I met many fellow travelers on the road, who started walking from different places and took different routes, and all were going to the same destination. Or were we? Very few walked for the same reasons.

This made me wonder: What exactly is a pilgrimage? Can pilgrims walk to the same destination while the internal motivations which move their feet are as varied as: “to live simply,” “to lose weight,” “to recover from a bad relationship,” “to see the rooster”? These disparate intentions made me ponder the true nature of a pilgrimage. I’ve yet to fully understand it, but I offer you my thoughts thus far.

A pilgrimage is a three-part journey: a beginning, a path and an end. The beginning is not so important and is unique to each person. The path is also unique to each pilgrim but only at the outset, for as a pilgrim draws nearer the end his path will join others, and eventually all paths coalesce into a single point on the threshold. Ultimately, the destination is essential to a pilgrimage and separates it from all other trips man can make: it must be a sacred place, and the sacred points to something beyond the earth.

Since the dawn of time, when God “planted a garden,”[1] sacred space was defined. God is everywhere, yet in some places He dwells in a special, personal way. The heavens and the earth cannot contain Him and yet He was in Eden with Adam. The moment man lost that first sanctuary he began wandering through earth[2] with an unquenchable longing to regain Paradise, to return home. Though in exile, man was not completely lost, as the heavens continued to touch the earth at different times and places, and in those places man set up a marker stone[3] and removed his sandals.[4] This constitutes a sacred place. It’s a location where the firmament between Heaven and earth is porous. It’s the place of theophany, a dim echo of the first sacred place where God and man walked together[5]; for this reason man frequents sacred places and by returning to them continually attempts to return to God. All sacred edifices man constructs serve this purpose—to commune with God. All seek to remind man of his ultimate destination and to serve as extensions of Eden. If one enters a sacred building with any other intention, he is an intruder or a charlatan, a tourist or simply lost. In no way can one be a pilgrim without the dual destination in one’s mind—the sacred shrine and to be with the God it serves.

The pilgrim must make a journey, he must move himself to a destination and not simply change locations. The journey must cause sweat and it must be long, perhaps the longest walk of one’s life. This is because the pilgrimage is a living symbol of one’s whole life, it reminds us that we must walk towards the heavenly Jerusalem (probably for this reason the medieval clergy gave it as a penance). By walking to a sacred place, the true pilgrim hopes to walk through the earth and leave it behind.

To go on a journey is not unique to any man; all life is a journey. What is rare is to seek the true destination. Sadly, what is common to almost all is to find oneself lost along the way. Human art has always related this theme of the wandering man. From the opening line of the Odyssey: “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns, driven time and again off course”[6] to that of the Inferno, “Midway along the journey of our life I woke to find myself in a dark wood, for I had wandered off from the straight path.”[7] Dante speaks for all of us, the journey of our life, and Homer ends his prologue with a similar perspective: “Launch out on his story, Muse, . . . sing for our time too.”[8] Man is on a journey through life, a homeless wandering vagrant, often ignorant of the path ahead and too weak to keep moving forward. But we can choose to be a pilgrim and not simply a vagrant, to acknowledge that we are “strangers and exiles on the earth . . . desiring a better country, a heavenly one” (Heb. 11:13-16). And there is no better way to run to Heaven than to focus one’s energies toward a heavenly destination on this earth, to deal with hardships, unknowns, lack of material goods, to progress down the right path, no matter the fatigue; literally, to subordinate all for the destination. To go on a pilgrimage is to practice what one must do throughout one’s whole life. +

Answered by:
Fr. Dominic Savoie, Assistant Pastor, FSSP Sacramento

1. Genesis 2:8.
2. Ibid. 4:12-14.
3. Ibid. 28:10-22.
4. Exodus 3:5.
5. Genesis 3:8.
6. Homer, trans. Robert Fagles, Odyssey, 1.
7. Dante, trans. Marc Musa, Inferno, Canto 1.1.
8. Odyssey, 1.11.

A happy and most glorious feast of Our Lady of the Rosary! This feast day has its origins in the famous victory at Lepanto on October 7th, 1571, when the Christian naval forces led by John of Austria defended Catholic Christendom from the invading Moslem Turks of the Ottoman Empire when the Rosary was prayed for victory. St. Pius V subsequently commanded that this feast, first called Our Lady of Victory, be kept on October 7th in commemoration of Our Lady’s intercession through her Most Holy Rosary.

About this time last year, FSSP pilgrims visited the beautiful Pontifical Shrine of the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary of Pompei in Pompei, Italy. It was built by Blessed Bartolo Longo (1841-1926), a lawyer and former Satanic priest who became the “Apostle of the Rosary.” After his conversion, Blessed Bartolo still suffered from terrible guilt and depression in regards to his previous life, unable to escape the idea that he was still consecrated to Satan. He was in such despair that he contemplated suicide, but then he remembered the words of a Dominican priest who had been instrumental in his conversion, that anyone who propagated devotion to the Rosary would be saved. So for the rest of his life, that’s just what Bartolo did. He commissioned the Shrine after an image of Our Lady of the Rosary, first installed in a smaller church, proved to be miraculous, and the Bishop of Nola recommended he build a bigger church for it.

We too should cultivate devotion to the Rosary in ourselves and our families. Our Lady of Fatima asked us to recite it daily, so let us endeavor to obey her and offer her this devotion which is most pleasing to her. Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us! +

This past Sunday, the priests and seminarians of Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary sang the Solemn Vespers of St. Michael the Archangel at the Cathedral of the Risen Christ in Lincoln, NE. Fr. Justin Wylie, the rector of the Cathedral, invited the Seminary to sing Vespers to begin the 40 Hours Devotion which the Cathedral held from September 29th through October 1st to commemorate their 60th year of Perpetual Adoration. 60 years of continual Adoration – what an extraordinary gift to God and a wonderful opportunity to celebrate with our friends at the Cathedral! +

Happy feast of the Guardian Angels! In celebration of today’s feast, of St. Michael’s last Sunday and of St. Raphael’s which will arrive in 22 days, we challenged ourselves to create a bullet-pointed, handout-worthy, Facebookable version of two articles on angels by Dr. David Arias, professor of philosophy at Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary. The consecutive articles, The Angelic Nature and The Understanding and Action of Angels, appeared in the September and October 2017 editions of Meménto, and gave a fascinating overview of who and what angels are, how their vastly superior minds work and what their role is in our own lives. Since you’re not a Catholic if you’re not an amateur (or professional) angelologist, we shall presume your interest in the subject matter. Here we go.

The Angelic Nature

• An angel is a created substance that is incorporeal and intellectual (St. Thomas Aquinas).
• Angels are persons, since everything with an intellect and a will is a person (Boethius).
• Although we’re both made in the image of God, angels differ from us insomuch as they are wholly incorporeal. Our souls are incorporeal, but the proper function of a soul is to inform a body, and hence it is not a complete substance without its body.
• Because they are immaterial, angels are naturally incorruptible.
• In addition, because, unlike us, they have no material as part of their nature (our bodies are created of material that can also be found in dogs, rivers, stars and other humans), they are irrepeatable. They are one-of-a-kind, possessing their nature so totally and completely as to exclude the possibility of another angel being of the same “species.” Each one is essentially unique.

The Angelic Mind

• Unlike us, angels have intrinsic and instantaneous knowledge of things. In order to form concepts of things, we have to first experience those things in our senses, then we can begin to understand their nature by considering what they have in common. Angels do not utilize this abstractive mode of thinking; they are infused with all the knowledge they need, and their knowledge of creatures includes knowledge both of a thing’s nature and of the particular examples of that nature. E.g., an angel with the knowledge of dogs understands the nature of a dog and Fido, Rex and Rover insomuch as they are possessors of the canine nature.
• Angels don’t reason. We humans move from a known concept to an unknown one using our reason, but angels’ knowledge is complete. An angel with the knowledge of triangles need not deduce that the sum of the angles of a triangle is always 180 degrees; he already knows everything there is to know about a triangle (if only, say the Euclidean geometry students).
• The angels bear a more perfect image of God than we do, due to their superior and more God-like intellect. Sorry, humans.

The Angels in Action

• Angels often put their angelic understanding of created things to work when they act in the natural world, as we see them do regularly in Scripture.
• Angels are teachers to us humans, and they do this in two ways, according to St. Thomas:
  • They act on our interior sense powers (such as our imagination) to help us form mental images that help us to better understand things than we would on our own. They can also help us recall things that we already have in our intellect more easily (another tip for the geometry students).
  • They unite their own intellectual understanding to ours to strengthen our intellect and help us perceive concepts better and more clearly. An analogy might be a pot of hot water (our intellect) that can heat pasta, but will do it an awful lot better with a fire underneath it (the angelic intellect).

And there you have it, angels in five minutes! Of course, there is much more to know about angels than we have room to discuss here, more, in fact, than we will have time to think about in this life, but fear not. The angels, and our Guardian Angels in particular, are fully invested in our salvation, and if we avail ourselves of their assistance and friendship, we can continue the conversation in Heaven. +

Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom God’s love commits me here, ever this day be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide. Amen.