“Many Couples Have Opened Themselves Up to Life”

Father Heenan: We recently got another priest here. He’s a collaborating priest who came down to be a language teacher for our seminary candidates. So we actually have five priests in the house right now.

Our new priest is Fr. Brad Sweet, and he’s a retired Canadian military chaplain. He learned the traditional Mass at Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary (OLGS), and once he left the Canadian Navy, he wanted to come here and learn Spanish. So we worked out a deal with his diocese to allow him to come in and teach languages. He’s teaching English to our candidates, and we opened up some English classes in our homeschool group, too, with an eye towards fostering future vocations. We’ve seen some vocations come through our chapel lately, but they’ve tended to be a bit older, which makes it a little harder to learn a new language. So we want to try to start cultivating vocations from an earlier age and give young people some familiarity with English so they’ll have a head start. And then hopefully we’ll encourage some of them to make their decision about a vocation in their early twenties, rather than their early thirties.

Father H: Yes. Our men in seminary preparation are taking a heavy course of English. But we’ve had a couple of cases where one year of English hasn’t been enough to get them to a level that OLGS will accept them. Seminary consists of advanced studies in hard topics. If you’re struggling with the language, you’re going to get lost. So they need that preparation. We need to offer English for the young ladies, too. I have a couple of possible vocations amongst the girls, and they want to go to a traditional community in the U.S., but they have to learn English first.

Father H: Right now we have three candidates. They’re taking their full load of classes, and they’re getting ready to take the SAT. We’ll see, probably in the next month, which of them will apply to OLGS, and which might need another year of preparation. But we have several teachers now. So the men are taking a humanities course and an SAT prep course, as well as Latin, English, Spanish grammar, and Gregorian chant.

Father H: We’re starting to see that, but people tend to do things a bit more last-minute here. We’ve had some inquiries, but our vocations retreat isn’t until the second week of June, so it’s a little early to know how many men we might have in formation next schoolyear. I think we can take a maximum of eight men for a year without being too overcrowded in the house.

Father H: Unfortunately, things are moving slowly. But next week, we’re going to start painting a couple of the chapels and the sacristy. We’re planning on renovations to the main altar and two side chapels, and we’ll start with painting. The Sacred Heart chapel is smaller, so we’ll start there. Working with our architect, we’re going to make a Photoshop image where we divide up the altar area into a grid. People will be able to sponsor a square meter. That’s how things are often done here—when they build a new church, they ask each family to buy or bring a brick, and they build little by little. If we do it that way, we’ll divide up the whole cost. We hope to raise the money to do the altar restoration as well. We have two big paintings in our sanctuary that are probably 200 years old, but they desperately need a restoration.

Father H: Yes, I think so. Someone actually just donated the painting, which was a nice offer. So those three chapels that we’re going to paint, and the sacristy—that’s already covered. I can’t remember how much the paint cost in the quote, but we can subtract that. But we also sent for some quotes on a new tabernacle for the main altar, which will be part of the restoration.

Father H: We recently received a donation for replacing the first stained glass window, so we’re going to start that project soon. But we’re hoping to raise the rest of the funds soon because it makes more sense to do both windows at the same time. I think we need another $5,000 to get that done.

Father H: We’ve made some good advances there. We bought some new microphones, and today, as we speak, there are a couple of people here taking measurements to add more speakers. At some of our Masses, we have overflow seating in our two side chapels, but you can’t see the main altar from in there. So we’ve added video monitors and a sound system for the people who sit there. These enhancements will also help improve the quality of our transmissions on LiveMass.net.

Father H: We’ve maintained a pretty steady average of about 800 people on Sundays. Sometimes more.

Father H: Well, I’m delighted that we have a number of young people thinking about vocations. Actually, I just got back from a trip to the subdeacon ordinations in Nebraska, and a family from my parish came with me because their daughter is interested in entering a Carmel.

One of the most exciting things we have going on here is our marriage groups. We offer a program called Domus Christiani. It’s more popular in Europe, and it’s also in a few places in the U.S. It’s essentially prayer and study groups for married couples, with a maximum of 10 couples in a group. We have three of these circles in our parish now. These couples meet monthly. They have a rule of life and do different activities together. Those are great activities, because the people who participate are really united. Many couples have opened themselves up to life after a long time. Everyone in these groups is already Catholic, but I’m seeing people’s faith really deepening and they’re more and more committed. So that’s great news.

We’ve also planted a couple of these groups in other cities where we used to visit to celebrate Mass. Domus Christiani is kind of a little seed you can sow amongst traditional-minded people. Even if they don’t have a parish yet, they can start with this and do it without the priest, or maybe the priest comes only periodically.

Also, our homeschool co-op has been big this year, and we invest a lot of time in it. It meets two days per week and operates like a hybrid school, even though we’re in less than optimal conditions. The building we’ve been renting works well enough, but it has its deficiencies. Probably the biggest problem is that we’re renting the second floor in the center of a city, and when you have a bunch of kids in a closed space for a long time, they need to run. That makes it a little difficult. But besides that, it has gone well. We hope to continue to develop our curriculum because we want to export it to other cities. So if someone wants to buy traditional Catholic home study in Spanish, we’ll be able to send them everything so they can follow something similar from wherever they live. There aren’t many resources like this in Spanish. I have a very good friend who runs a hybrid classical school and he’s offering to help train our teachers. So I’m hoping I can take three of my teachers to Tulsa for a few days this summer to get them some training in this style of education.

Father H: Yes, and the outlay wouldn’t be that large. Maybe three tickets for about $600 each?

Father H: Yes, we have a lot of work to do there. We just got a donation to install new whiteboards in all the classrooms. And we’re going to install security cameras and a new front door with a buzzer. But we’ve proceeded cautiously because we’re evaluating the long term. How much do we really want to invest in a rented space?

With a mind for the future, we’ve looked at a couple of properties for sale. There’s a really nice old house for sale two blocks from our church. We started thinking, “Maybe we could figure out a way to buy this instead of paying rent.” Our big dilemma is we don’t like having our Cultural Center in the middle of the city. We’re exploring the possibilities. For this building down the road from us, they’re asking for 11 million pesos. We think we could get it down to about 10 million, and then we’d probably need 2 million pesos of renovations. That means 12 million pesos, or about $700,000.

Father H: Yeah. We’d have the full building. On the ground floor we could put a bookstore and a cafe. It would be a lot better than where we are. Right now we’re paying about $1,700 per month in rent.

Father H: We just had a great accomplishment in February. A bishop I met in Ecuador came to OLGS to ordain our subdeacons. He’s very enthusiastic about the Fraternity and the traditional Mass. He was so excited to come, and he celebrated the Mass very, very well. All the priests of the seminary noted that it was one of the best ordination Masses they’ve seen in terms of attention to detail. This bishop definitely wants to be a friend of the Fraternity.

Father H: Yes, we’re launching the St. Francis Xavier mission trips for youth again. They went defunct with COVID, but we’re trying to resurrect the program. We did a mission trip last year with Christendom College students. Unfortunately, they weren’t able to repeat it this year, but they want to try again next year. We’re going to have a new website up soon for the St. Francis Xavier mission trips so that everything can be done online, just like with the camps. Stay tuned because we hope that’s coming in December. There might be some other opportunities that open up for mission trips—for instance, with our friendly bishop in Ecuador. He’s very open to the idea of missions.

We also did a pilot trial of a Cristero tour here in Mexico. We had a travel agency organize it and about 30 people, mostly from the U.S., came to tour the Cristero site and have Mass every day. The priests here served as chaplains. So that was a big hit. I hope to make that a regular thing to have one or two tours per year where people can come down and see the great cultural and religious heritage we have here. And also see what we’re doing here.

This summer, our apostolate will put on boys’ and girls’ camps. We’ll have seminarians help with our boys’ camp in June and nuns help with our girls’ camp in August. We’ve had Latino families in the U.S.—especially California and Texas—send their kids down to our camps. Last year we had 116 girls, but we really shouldn’t have more than 100, so we’re thinking of dividing it up into two sessions this summer.

Father H: I think if I could ask for one thing it would be to buy that building to use as our Cultural Center. But $700,000 is a lot of money. More realistically, we hope to get the money to complete the renovations in our in our house chapel.

Father H: We’re very grateful to each of you! I mention to my parishioners often that we need to pray for our donors because to get so much help from people who have never even been here is a great grace. Mission Tradition donors should know that they’re making an impact on people’s lives. I hear the testimonies of people who stumble upon the Latin Mass and the community we have and they’re astounded that they’ve been missing out for so long. With the help of Mission Tradition donors, we hope to be able to reach more and more people every day. Thank you for your generosity!