St. Mary’s School in Platteville Wisconsin – a Valuable Lesson in Humility?

Fr. John del Priore

Fr. Faustino Ruiz

                                                 

You can sometimes judge a story by the way the local press deals with a story as in the case of St. Mary’s School in Platteville Wisconsin which I believe is now closed.  I say the local press has not gone much beyond the handed out press releases or public letters of Bishop Morlino of Madison Wisconsin, Paul Ryan’s local bishop, because there are no good visuals or images of St. Mary’s available on the Internet.

The skinny and or gossip is that Bishop Morlino imported some nice looking white boy priests from Spain, some sort of Jesuits to man the factory floor, mass factories in his diocese.  Looking at a diocese site there they actually have pictures of the clergy there and the parish listing and a limited work history.  Kind of like an Internet dating or religious meat rack.  I guess you want to see what color the priest is in the local Catholic church before you set foot in.  Want you to feel all comfortable in your warm comfort zones and prejudices. 

Well the skinny on the skinny of that is that I only count one or two dark faces and the rest of the priests of Madison County Diocese are white even if they have Hispanic and or Spanish sounding names.  It’s the visual that Madison Avenue has us trained on these past decades.

I have read about South Asian Priests and African Priests being imported to places like the Allentown diocese. I have to wonder if the mail order catalogues the bishops get their priests overseas from have their pictures posted or maybe the importation fees listed next to the pictures is a more important consideration, the money that is and not the look, on that in every diocese devoid of native son priests.

That is why celibacy is not an issue with the locals RC bishops. Priests are an interchangeable part even if you can’t decipher their fractured English or strange outlooks on life based on their native cultures. Celibacy is not an issue.  If Americans don’t want to be priests, plenty of starving third world types to fill in the personnel gaps.

With St. Mary’s they say that the imported priests would have none of the altar girls in the sanctuary thing. The cultural preferences or prejudices of the Spanish culture get put under labels or categories like Conservative Catholics? Etc.

The people in the pews rebelled and voted with their pocket books, even signed a petition to the bishop and the Bishop’s response was a typical these days in America – Fuck You.

The dissenters at St. Mary’s get threatened with excommunication or something close to it – “interdict” – and Paul Ryan gets a free pass on his temporary masturbation love, flirtation with Ayn Rand atheism.

No money. They close the school. The respect the landlord, the bishop, the guy with the deed gets goes a lot to do with the bishop’s generosity in extending financial help to keep a school open. 

No respect, no kissing of Morlino’s stinky toes and the local Catholics in Platteville Wisconsin are taught a valuable lesson about Christ – the golden rule – they that have the gold make the rules. 

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St. Mary's Catholic School Platteville Wisconsin

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