True To Tradition Mount St. Michael Community Strives To Be Guardian Of ‘True’ Catholic Church

FROM NORTH VOICE page N2 (Thursday, March 20, 1997): Correction Our Lady of Guadalupe church holds a Latin Mass. An article in last week’s North Side Voice incorrectly stated that Mount St. Michael was the only church in Spokane to hold Latin mass.

Notes of organ music shiver and fall from the north Spokane mountain, drifting down to Hillyard like coppery leaves.

“The true holy Roman Catholic church” is again in session.

Parishioners scale the switch-back road, nosing toward the four-story Gothic building towering above Mount St. Michael. They’ve come here from the country’s furthest corners - east and south, Maine and Texas - to find one of the country’s most thriving communities for traditional Catholics.

“The true faith is still here,” said parishioner Ernie Cyr, a Maine transplant. “The true sacraments are here.”

The church is the only one in Spokane that maintains Mass spoken in Latin, the last to require women’s heads be covered, and the first to call Pope John Paul II a false prophet.

Members are a small but growing number of hard-core traditionalists who distance themselves from the 30-year-old Vatican II reforms, the Catholic Church’s modernization that did away with Latin liturgies, bans on interfaith worship and nun’s habits.

Those who worshipped on Mount St. Michael last Sunday say the handful of Latin-Mass churches hold true to St. Peter’s vestment and the church’s heritage.

“We don’t accept the authority of the pope, so that makes us renegades,” said the Rev. Louis Kerfoot, church pastor.

He leads Mass with his back to worshippers, chanting Latin in a peach-colored robe. Winter sun glances through the 30-foot stained glass windows, settling on the dozens of statues of angels that line the chapel. Freckled among the congregation are nuns in rich blue habits.

He chants: “Munda cor meum, ac libaia mean omnipotens Deus, qui labia Isaiae prophetae calculo mundatsti ignito.” Translation: “Cleanse my heart and my lips, almighty God, who cleansed the lips of the prophet Isaiah with a burning coal.”

The parish, which has between 500 and 600 members, is thriving, said Kerfoot. About 135 students attend the church school, and 40 nuns and three priests live on site.

Fifteen-year-old scandals involving child molestation, embezzlement of church funds and mental and physical abuse of parishioners and students left scars, but the church has confessed and absolved itself, said Kerfoot.

The church is now more concerned with growth. Dozens of couples bought property and planted their large families on and around Mount St. Michael.

It’s the largest parish of the 15 in the Church of Mary the Immaculate Queen, a traditionalist group governed by a bishop in Omaha, Nebraska. The nearest sister parish is in Rathdrum, Idaho, but the Mount Saint Michael parish is the training headquarters for the church’s priests and has the largest school.

There are plans to expand the community. A retirement home catering to traditional Catholics is in the works, and the church is working with Spokane County planners to develop some of its 400 acres of bare farmland atop the mountain.

Plans for the retirement home have been slowed by pinched budgets and the new, and very temporal, constraints of the Growth Management Act.

But when built, it could be advertised nationally as the only retirement home constructed specifically for retirees seeking easy access to Latin Mass.

Parishioners say living next to the church is convenience and conviction. Most families have students in the K-12 Mount Saint Michael Academy.

Some parishoners, such as Shelly Johnson, attend Mass almost daily. “There’s a beauty and mystery to the Mass,” she said.

Like many women in the parish, Johnson is a housewife, caring for her and husband Ron’s five children. The church emphasizes a traditional, conservative role for women, telling them to stay at home if the family can afford it. There is no academy girls basketball team, although boys can play basketball, baseball or wrestle.

Shelly and Ron Johnson are graduates of the Mount St. Michael Academy, both boarders sent by parents to the school. They now have four of their five children enrolled in their alma mater.

Ron Johnson lived in California briefly, but felt drawn back to north Spokane to raise his family near the church. “If you look at the history of the church, there is no doubt this is the true faith,” said Ron Johnson, a 34-year-old, goateed employee of Hewlett Packard. “It just makes sense.”

Ernie and Cathy Cyr uprooted from western Maine in 1991, after his brother, studying to be a priest, discovered the church. They bought a seven-acre patch of farmland within sight of the church, big enough for their five children, two cows, pigs and an enormous yellow lab named Ted.

Like many parishioners, Ernie Cyr willingly gives sweat to the church. He plows the church road in the winter, and teaches the nuns how to change the oil in their cars.

The Cyrs also enroll their children at the academy, and appreciate the school’s rigorous academic standards.

About 75 percent of the academy’s graduates go to college; the curriculum is humanities college preparatory, with a focus on Western culture. Students usually have an hour of nightly homework.

And it reinforces the Cyr’s strong, conservative faith. Religious study and daily Mass are required. Students recently brought home lessons on the 10 Commandments. There are no lessons in multi-culturalism.

“If you are going to bring up your children in the true Catholic faith, you have to live it, feel it, taste it,” said Ernie Cyr. “A community who thinks alike affirms that.”

Harold Flesland has been Mount St. Michael’s neighbor for 26 years, knows many priests, and has driveway conversations with parishioners. “I admire then so greatly,” said Flesland, 73. “You have to admire anyone who is so convinced about their convictions.”

The Mount St. Michael community was not always so affirming. In the early 1980s, the charismatic former church bishop, Francis Schuckhardt, was accused of molesting male students, beating other students, controlling parishioners lives like a cult leader and funneling church money to Swiss bank accounts.

Former church members also accused Schuckhardt of breaking up their marriages and hiding children on the mountain from religiously wayward parents.

Schuckhardt left the church in 1984, amid allegations of drug abuse. He was later convicted of drug charges. About 30 priests and nuns also left with him.

In 1991, after news reports detailed the scandals, Cyr, then working as a church security guard, found a group of young, late night thrill-seekers looking for the “human sacrifices” conducted on the mountain.

“It’s night and day compared to then,” said Cyr. “I would never have come out here then.”

Dr. Bud Hazel, a Gonzaga University communications professor and expert on cults, agrees. Under Schuckhardt, Mount St. Michael was a cult, he says. Now, it’s legitimate, and very similar to the Catholic church prior to reform. “In terms of their openness, they have mellowed out,” said Hazel. “They are very sincere.”

Living in a tight, even close religious environment can lead to problems, said Bishop William Skylstad of the Diocese of Spokane.

“When people isolate themselves in a religious community, there is always the danger of loss of perspective,” said Skylstad, adding that the church is open to reconciliation with the Church of Mary the Immaculate Queen.

Kerfoot, a priest during the Schuckhardt scandals, said the church learned from the troubles. The church today has no association with Schuckhardt, Kerfoot said.

There’s been no corporal punishment for years, he said, and the church offers only common-sense advice for daily living, far from the absolute ban on TV and movies under Schuckhardt.

“God uses trials to purify you and make the man, in a sense,” said Kerfoot. “Only when you go through trials of faith, it forces you to evaluate yourself.”

To polish the parish image and be more accessible, nuns sing at community benefits and student sports teams compete in a local league of religious schools. During these forays into society, people often are stunned to see nuns still in habits, said Sister Angelica.

“I think they are drawn, because they see something lost in society, a purpose, dedication, stability. They see someone who is obviously set aside for God,” she said.

Keeping traditional values now, in a society drifting through rapid, massive change, is both affirmation and challenge for the church. Nostalgia often draws members in, they say, a chance to return in body and spirit to old ritual.

Kerfoot himself was raised in the Catholic church, but his family refused to embrace the Vatican II reforms.

He sees more and more 30-something couples, born early enough to remember church before reform, drawn to the mountain. “It’s a relief of some to see something you used to know so well,” said Kerfoot, 43.

But modern life is also sifting though the church. The parish is preparing to launch a page on the Internet, and volunteers constantly work on the 80-year-old building to satisfy fire code inspectors.

Kerfoot recently read to students lyrics from the hard rock band Metallica to illustrate the potential spiritual pitfalls of pop culture. Rock music is banned from the campus.

In conversation, he again and again returns to the cornerstone of the church, the Latin Mass. “We live in an age when we say there is no absolute truth in religious, moral views … that religious, moral views are held as equal,” he said. “We think there is an absolute truth - the holy sacrament of the Latin Mass.”

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