Help Save St. Mary's Catholic Church in DBQ

Some months ago it was announced that St. Mary's Catholic Church in DBQ would be closing. St. Mary's was 1 of 2 downtown parishes within 2 blocks of each other. The other is St. Patrick's. The reasons for the 2 so close has to do with the German & Irish populations not getting along with the French at Cathedral or each other. Enough about that. But it has been obvious for a long time that 1 of the 2 would have to close. St. Mary's is the more historic, it is more beautiful inside etc. That & for other reasons that I won't go into here, I knew that the PC decision would be to close St. Mary's. I was right. The cover excuse was finances & the need for repairs being done to the Church building.

At the time, my 1st thought was that St. Mary's could be saved & should be turned over to the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest. I knew that they had gone in elsewhere & taken over other Churches like St. Mary's & kept them going successfully. I also knew that the mindset in our Archdiocese by the majority of the people at the Chancery & many DBQ area priests would be very cold to the idea. Why? Simply because the ICKSP promotes the Traditional Latin Mass. Need I say more?

However, it turns out I am not the only one who thought trying to get the Archbishop to let them in was a good idea. & they have organized an on line petition to ask Archbishop Hanus to do so. The website is entitled, naturally enough, Save St. Mary's Church.

Signing the petition is not limited to people in the DBQland area. Anyone in the USA, Canada or Mexico can sign. So, I am asking all of my readers from North America to please go to the website. There you will be able to sign the petition. You will also be able to go to a page with photos of the Church so you can see why it is worth saving as well as why having ICKSP taking over would be an ideal solution as well. (Note: the site is still under construction & not all pages are totally set up yet.) As of this post there are 286 signatures.

& please pray that Archbishop Hanus won't let the naysayers convince him to reject the idea. St. Mary's should be saved. & as I said, this is the ideal solution to not only save a beatiful historic landmark, this is an ideal solution to have it continue to be used in the way that it was intended by those parishoners who's money & efforts went into building it in the 1st place. (Boys & men of the parish did much of the construction.

PS to Cavey: this is the parish where Father Aloysius Schmitt was 1st assigned after his ordination.