Priests and Religious at Immaculate Conception
The priests and sisters here at Immaculate Conception Church belong to the Society of Saint Pius V and the Daughters of Mary, respectively. Most of our priests were once members of the Society of Saint Pius X, an order of traditional clergy founded by the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who ordained them. Having left the SSPX in 1983, the priests founded the Society of Saint Pius V in order to continue the work of making the traditional rites of all the sacraments available to the faithful without any compromise or taint of modernism.
|
|
|
|
Having left the SSPX, the priests and their parishioners began to worry where a bishop could be found to ordain more priests. After investigating various possibilities, Bishop Alfred Mendez accepted the call to help these traditionalist clergy and faithful secure their future. Bishop Mendez was the retired Bishop of Arecibo, Puerto Rico, consecrated a Bishop himself in 1960 by Francis Cardinal Spellman. First, he ordained two priests for the SSPV, Father Joseph Greenwell and Father Paul Baumberger. Then, two years later, he consecrated Father Clarence Kelly as a Bishop. Bishop Kelly has since ordained three more priests for the Society and has founded the Daughters of Mary, a traditional congregation of sisters who teach in the schools of some of the SSPV chapels.
At this time, the Society runs chapels in several states including Ohio, Michigan, New York, Florida and Maryland. (Please see the Society of Saint Pius V web site for a complete listing of chapels). Because there are so few traditional priests and so many Catholics who want to come to their Masses (unlike the Novus Ordo, where there are few "presiders", but almost no one comes anyway) it is common for the priests of the Society to have to make a "Mass circuit", saying Mass in a string of cities each Sunday to get to all the people they can. Immaculate Conception Church is very fortunate to have two traditional priests who rotate saying Mass here every Sunday. We even typically have daily Masses as well. Many traditional chapels in the country, SSPV and others, are not so lucky. Sadly, the ratio of priests to groups of people that want traditional Masses is too great to cover every Sunday. Some chapels only get a priest once a month, maybe twice.
The parish pastor at Immaculate Conception Church is Father William Jenkins, who was ordained by Archbishop Lefebvre in 1978. He has been offering Mass in the Greater Cincinnati area since 1984. The associate pastor is Father Joseph Greenwell, ordained by Bishop Mendez in 1991. Both priests say Mass in several locations each Sunday, teach at the seminary in Round Top, NY., and engage in various other activities in their apostolates.
The Daughters of Mary, as noted above, teach here at Immaculate Conception Academy. Their superior is Mother Mary Bosco. As with having a priest every Sunday, most traditional chapels do not have such a large and vibrant congregation of religious sisters. Many have no religious at all, just the priest. They also have recorded several CD's of religious singing. They really are quite gifted voices and are a blessing to our church. We do not, regrettably, have a religious congregation of men. Maybe that will change one day.
Below is a collage of pictures of the priests and nuns with members of the parish.
