Local Tridentine Community Celebrates its First Confirmation
Jan 11, 2005
Twenty confirmands receive sacrament from Cardinal Schotte. Milwaukee’s Tridentine Community held its first Confirmation Saturday, Dec. 20. 2003.
(Milwaukee Catholic Herald, January 1 2004) Twenty confirmands, including two adult converts and students aged 11 to 18, received the sacrament at St. Mary Help of Christians, 1210 S. 61st St., where the community rents space, in order to celebrate the Old Latin Mass.
Cardinal Jan Pieter Schotte, secretary-general of the Synod of Bishops at the Vatican, conferred the sacrament. Fr. John Rausch, Fr. Robert Skeris, chaplain of the Tridentine community, and Fr. Joseph L. Cunningham assisted, along with Deacon Gerard Saguto, a member of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter.
The cardinal made the point in his sermon. “He said that the real true crisis, living in Europe, is … people living without faith,” Gerard Papa, father of a confirmand said. “They’ve moved away from concept of God and God centered civilization. (The cardinal) wanted all of the confirmands to thank their parents for getting them to this point.”
The ceremony was important, said Papa, since “it helps to get away from the idea that (Tridentines are) some sort of second-class Catholics.
“The 1984 indult (an exception to general church law) and the liturgical commissions ... have made clear traditional Catholics have a high place in the official church’s population,” he said.
But sacramental ceremony, with a cardinal, makes it clear to the local community that, “We do count.... We are here, we’re a vital part of this archdiocese … we’re growing obviously, and we’re going to need our own parish (and school) down the road.”
Papa’s daughter, Geralynne, said that she found the confirmation ceremony “amazing.”
“I was just amazed by the whole thing,” she said. “I felt really honored to be there in the presence of a cardinal. We were all expecting Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan to come, but then we found out there was a cardinal — that was awesome, a really great experience.”
Local Tridentine Community Celebrates its First Confirmation