Pilgrims from the Mission of St. Isidore the Farmer in Watkins will find two more Catholic church doors closed to them during their two-day, 48-mile trek to the mountaintop Mother Cabrini Shrine near Morrison.The pastors of the Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception and Holy Ghost Church late Wednesday asked pilgrimage coordinators not to have the breakaway Catholic group stop inside those two downtown Denver churches today.
Since 2002, the group making the Thanksgiving trek, part of a traditionalist Catholic movement at odds with papal authority, has not been allowed to celebrate Mass at their destination, the Cabrini-founded shrine to Jesus that overlooks Interstate 70.
Catholic Archbishop Charles Chaput has declined to give permission to St. Isidore members for Mass at the shrine because "they're not in communion with the Roman Catholic Church or the Archdiocese of Denver," spokeswoman Jeanette DeMelo said Thursday.
St. Isidore's parish is part of the Society of St. Pius X, a worldwide group not recognized by the Roman Catholic Church because its founder had defied the pope with respect to ordination of bishops and the preservation of the church's Tridentine Mass, an older version said entirely in Latin.
St. Isidore pilgrims received their latest rebuff in a letter from the basilica's pastor, Monsignor Thomas Fryar.
"The expression 'kicked to the curb' comes to mind," St. Isidore spokesman Grider Lee said of Fryar's request that pilgrims skip the cathedral and Holy Ghost.
"It came as quite a shock to us," Lee said.
DeMelo said that pilgrims may enter the churches as individuals, but they should not enter as a banner-carrying official group or leave behind proselytizing literature, as they did last year.
"We do hope the group returns to full communion with the church," DeMelo said. "There's still some work to be done. And we will gladly welcome them when it is."
The shrine, established in the early 1900s by St. Frances Xavier Cabrini is on acreage owned by the order of nuns that Cabrini founded to run schools and orphanages, the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart.
The nuns allowed St. Isidore's pastor to say Mass there for pilgrims in 1999, the year of the first pilgrimage, when the parish was seeking Mother Cabrini's help in building its $2.3 million church near Watkins.
However, when St. Isidore members undertook the pilgrimage again in 2002, that time to thank the saint, her order of nuns deferred to the archdiocese in refusing pilgrims'admittance. The nuns have done so ever since.
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