Knowing nothing about Father Alphonse Mascherino, other than what I read this morning from CWN and the link to the Johnstown, PA, paper, I was saddened, even more than usual, which is what happens when you read the news today. This was very disturbing. He was a priest who built a chapel to honor the victims of Flight 93, which went down in a Shankville, Pennsylvania, field at the hands of terrorists on 9/11. It’s a chapel (actually just a memorial chapel, for prayer and reflection) to honor those heroic passengers who decided if they were going to die, they’d die fighting. Now he wants to be a bishop so he can turn his chapel into a “cathedral,” so he’s leaving the one true Church to get episcopal orders from schismatics. Anglicans are coming into the Church, and this priest is not only leaving, but extending a schism by usurping the power to generate validly ordained priests outside the Church. It always boils down to the pope, whether it be schism or heresy, ultimately the issue is authority, the supreme authority on earth of the Vicar of Christ. It’s not even “infallibility” — as these Old Catholic schismatics pretend — it’s the authority that defined papal infallibility.
CWN reports: Father Alphonse Mascherino, a priest of the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown for 31 years, has become a bishop of the schismatic North American Old Roman Catholic Church. Father Mascherino is founder of the Flight 93 Memorial Chapel in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, which commemorates victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. An Old Catholic pastor since 2003, he will make the chapel into his cathedral. Read more of this sad story with link here. And so a prayer for this poor priest that he opens up to grace and comes to his senses.
