(LifeSiteNews) — Parishioners in the Archdiocese of St. Louis appealed to the Vatican’s highest court of canon law to stop the archbishop’s closure of a parish church with a thriving Latin Mass community.
St. Barnabas in O’Fallon, Missouri, on the outskirts of metropolitan St. Louis, was a flourishing parish that exclusively offered the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) when it was closed last year by the decree of Archbishop Mitchell Rozanski. Despite zero debt and a “vital and growing” community by the Vatican’s own admission, the parish was slated for closure among 33 others in the archdiocese as part of a severe downsizing project titled “All Things New.”
These closures prompted several appeals to the Vatican to keep open various targeted churches. However, the shuttering of St. Barnabas last year has come as a particularly heavy blow to its parishioners, who must now travel to traditional oratories 40 minutes away from their former parish in order to attend the TLM. Some of these parishioners have stopped attending the TLM altogether due to travel difficulties, such as the 89-year-old mother of parishioner Susan Cooke.
Jason Bolte, a former parishioner of St. Barnabas who is leading efforts to appeal the closure decision to the Vatican, told LifeSiteNews that to deprive Catholics of the Traditional Latin Mass is “like taking our food away.”
“The focus of canon law is the salvation of souls,” said Bolte, noting that to further this end, the Catholic Church spiritually feeds her flock “the way they need to be fed.” Therefore, abolishing a TLM is akin to “starving” Catholic souls.
“We can’t eat anymore. So now you’re starving us and you’re depriving us of what we need to be able to further our faith and our relationship with God,” Bolte said.
He explained that after Archbishop Rozanski had denied the parishioners’ initial appeal against the closure of St. Barnabas, they had recourse to the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Clergy. However, in June, they learned that the Dicastery had rejected their appeal as well. According to the Vatican body’s decision, a copy of which has been viewed by LifeSiteNews, per Pope Francis’ TLM-suppressing motu proprio Traditionis Custodes, “the continuation of the celebration of the Missal of 1962 at a parish church was not permitted.”
Therefore, in order to comply with this “superior norm,” the TLM at St. Barnabas would need to be suppressed, regardless of whether it was “extinctively merged” with another parish or not.
Furthermore, despite the Dicastery’s agreement that St. Barnabas was a “vital and growing” parish, the Vatican body considered this irrelevant to considerations justifying its continued operation since “the growth of the Parish was due almost entirely to the celebration of the Missal of 1962.”
The recently submitted appeal to the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura argues that St. Barnabas does not fall under Traditionis Custodes’ stated prohibition of the TLM in parochial churches because about two years before its closure the Archdiocese of St. Louis ordered that the church would exclusively celebrate the TLM. In this regard, St. Barnabas was effectively converted from a “territorial parish serving all the faithful within its territorial boundaries” to a “personal parish, serving those who expressly wished to participate” in the TLM, according to the appeal.
Bolte maintains that both Traditionis Custodes and the Vatican’s application of the document with regard to St. Barnabas contradict the spirit of canon law by disregarding the salvation of souls.
“The very last piece of canon law basically states that the salvation of souls supersedes any one of these other canons,” Bolte told LifeSiteNews, referring to Canon 1752, which states that “the salvation of souls, which must always be the supreme law in the Church, is to be kept before one’s eyes.”
The restriction of the Latin Mass, in opposition to this end, “translates to the loss of souls because it upsets people to the point that they just leave,” Bolte noted. “And that doesn’t keep the salvation of souls at the forefront of all of this.”
“I don’t understand why any bishop would want to eliminate the Tridentine Mass altogether unless they’re truly against the traditional rite, in which case, why is that?” said Bolte, pointing out that its usage spans the greater part of the history of the Church.
Bolte is co-founder along with Brody Hale of Save Rome of the West, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of Catholic sacred spaces, which have been increasingly under threat in recent decades across the globe. The organization was inspired by the closure of St. Barnabas, according to Bolte.