Banished Priest Gets a Hero’s Welcome

ST. LOUIS —  At least 1,500 people attended Christmas Eve Mass presided over by an excommunicated Roman Catholic priest, despite warnings from the archbishop that participating would be a mortal sin.

Father Marek Bozek left his previous parish without his bishop’s permission and was hired by St. Stanislaus Kostka Church here this month. As a result, Bozek and the church’s six-member lay board were excommunicated last week by Archbishop of St. Louis Raymond Burke for committing an act of schism.

Burke said it would be a mortal sin for anyone to participate in a Mass celebrated by a priest who was excommunicated -- the Catholic Church’s most severe penalty. Burke, who couldn’t stop the Mass, said it would be valid but “illicit.”

Despite the warning, Catholics and non-Catholics from as far as Oregon and Washington, D.C., filled the church. An overflow crowd viewed the Mass by closed-circuit TV.

“I’m not worried about mortal sin,” said worshiper Matt Morrison, 50. “I’ll take a stand for what I believe is right.”

Many wore red buttons reading “Save St. Stanislaus,” and said they wanted to offer solidarity to a parish they believed had been wronged.

When Bozek entered from the rear of the church, the congregation rose and greeted him with thunderous applause.

“It was magic,” said JoAnne La Sala of St. Louis, a self-described lapsed Catholic. “You could feel the spirit of the people.”

The penalty was the latest wrinkle in a long dispute over control of the parish’s $9.5 million in assets.

The parish’s property and finances have been managed by a lay board of directors for more than a century. Burke has sought to make the parish conform to the same legal structure as other parishes in the diocese. As a result, he removed both of the parish’s priests in 2004.

Bozek, a Pole who arrived in the U.S. five years ago, said he agonized about leaving his previous parish but wanted to help a church that had been deprived of the sacraments for 17 months.

To be Polish is to be Catholic, he said, and to be Catholic is to receive the sacraments.

“I will give them the sacrament of reconciliation, the Eucharist. I will visit the sick and bury the dead,” he said. “I will laugh with those who are laughing and cry with those who are crying.”

Bozek said he did not believe that receiving sacraments at St. Stanislaus put a Catholic at risk of mortal sin.