December 1, 2015, Update: Prayer Request for the Repose of the Soul of the late +Father Robert E. Mason, R.I.P.
As I am in the process of recovering from hernia repair surgery yesterday a superb surgery center which is operated on Catholic principles and staffed by physicians, surgeons, nurses and administrative personnel who treat patients as human beings and not cash cows, I must get some rest prior to driving back to my family.
I did, however, want to ask the readers of this site to pray for the soul of my dear friend, the late +Father Robert E. Mason the Pastor Emeritus of Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Massapequa Park, New York.
Father Mason, was born on September 24, 1931, the Feast of Our Lady of Ransom, was ordained a priest for the Diocese of Brooklyn on June 2, 1956, and his first assignment was at Saint Aloysius Church in Great Neck, New York, and it is there that I met him three months later when I entered Kindergarten at Saint Aloysius School. His love of prayer, especially before the Most Blessed Sacrament, his tender love for and filial devotion to Our Lady, and his pastoral zeal for souls, exhibited by hearing confessions for many consecutive hours, inspired many children at Saint Aloysius School. (The Diocese of Rockville Centre, which consists of the Counties of Nassau and Suffolk on Long Island, was created out of the Diocese of Brooklyn on April 6, 1957. Father Mason became a priest of the new diocese at that time.)
Father Mason also had a great love for baseball, which he would play in the boys’ schoolyard during recess and after school hours. That very habit of playing baseball, usually dressed in a blue sweater, impressed one young boy enough to say the following when asked by other children on his school bus what he wanted to be when he grew up: “I want to be a priest just like the one who plays baseball with the boys.” I did not know this young boy at the time as he was ahead of me nor of what he had said at the time in the late-1950s. It was in 2014, though, that the boy, then sixty-four years of age, related the story to me. That boy has been known since June 29, 1978, as Father William Jenkins, who, unbeknownst to me prior to 2012, was a year ahead of me at Saint Aloysius from 1956 to 1959 before his family moved to Pennsylvania. It is a very small world.
Father Mason touched thousands of souls over the course of his fifty-nine years, five months, twenty-three days of priestly life, returning to the Mass he had offered in the early years of his priesthood after his retirement in 2007, after suffering mightily under “Bishop” John Raymond McGann in 1983 in a series of events that I have discussed before on this site.
I kept in close contact with Father Mason over the years, also sending him packages of articles from this site, and visited with him last on Friday, July 27, 2012, when we were back on Long Island for a few days.
Father Mason had quintuple bypass surgery in 1997, and was hospitalized again in 2010 with more heart problems. No, he did not see the full picture of the state of the Church Militant on earth in this time of apostasy and betrayal, but he sees it in eternity.
Father Mason is survied by his brother, Donald Mason, who suffers very badly from osteoperosis. Indeed, Father was assiduous in providng care for his brother even after his own bad fall in September.
Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.
May his soul and all of the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.
I will write a fuller reflection about Father Mason and his many sufferings within the Diocese of Rockville Centre within the next week after completing an article that I began writing on Sunday about the killing spree of Robert Lewis Dear at a killing center run by Planned Barrenhood in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Murderous acts committed by men such as Robert Dear, which in this instance resulted in the death of a pro-life Protestant police officer, a married man who was the father of young children, have been few and far between in the nearly forty-three years of “legal” baby-killing on a national level (and longer in several states), and they only wind up generating sympathy for Planned Barrenhood and its own murderous, exploitative.
The despicable crimes of Robert Dear, however, no more invalidate the truth about the American genocide of the preborn, whether by chemical or surgical means, than the bad example of a Catholic invalidates the truths of the Holy Faith. Truth does not depend upon human acceptance for their binding force and validity. Truth is. It is exists, and the truth is that Planned Barrenhood does the work of the devil, which is why we must pray for the conversion of all involved in its bloody “services” to women. We pray also, of course, for the repose of the souls of those killed and the consolation of their families.
There is much work for me to do after I return home from the city where the surgery center is located. As the surgery went very well, I might have that next article posted for you by Wednesday morning, followed by one about Bergoglio’s saying that the ban of the use of a certain type of contraceptive device does not matter, a belief that marks him as a support of the Anglican sect’s Lambeth decision of 1930, not Casti Connubii, which was issued by Pope Pius XI on December 31, 1930, in direct opposition to the Anglican sect’s permission for the use of contraceptive by married couples in some circumstances.
Let’s say this all together now:
Jorge Mario Bergoglio is a heretic.
I want to thank those of you who prayed for the success of my surgery. I greatly appreciate your prayers. Thank you so very much.
Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us.