"Mea Omnia Tua" (All Mine Is Yours): In Tribute to the Superior General of the FSSP

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As one of the youngest superior generals in the world, he has a herculean charge.

And with the FSSP, there is no low ebb of vocations. In fact, they have two full seminaries on two continents and half of their members are now native English speakers with many seminarians and priests "out of every nation under heaven," or just about.

The FSSP have a wonderful charge: they vitalize local communities through the liturgical, intellectual, spiritual and social expression of the Extraordinary Form of the Roman rite.

Results? Eucharistic fervor has grown. With the Extraordinary Form, the veiled Tenant of the Tabernacle, without question, is front and center and this brings a much needed spiritual regeneration (and increase of vocations) to Latin rite church communities today.

The pope has envisaged much with Summorum Pontificum and the FSSP supports him. A new impetus was divinely given with this 2007 motu proprio and already, in retrospect, it has helped to counteract sloppy negligence in the liturgy on the part of clergy and laity alike. In the nineteenth century came the revival of liturgical piety and, for example, the beginning of the Eucharistic Congress. Today, too, we live in a time of revival.

Fr. John Marcus Berg was ordained priest on September 6, 1997, at Scranton, Pennsylvania. Pray for him. Yours truly had the honor to attend his First Solemn Mass at the Church of St. Augustine, in in the city called for the Apostle of the Gentiles, St. Paul. He is a fine man and a holy priest.

Born in Minneapolis of a Catholic family of the Upper Mississippi, he is a native of the North Star State - a place where one can see the two most striking church edifices in the Northwest, the Cathedral of St. Paul and Basilica of St. Mary (the granite Cathedral, bulked against the sky on the brow of St. Anthony hill, is one of the most lovely structures on the continent). He was born in a city which was founded by a Franciscan clergyman, Fr. Louis Hennepin, a member of the expedition of the Cavalier de la Salle, who was on a mission to explore the upper waters of the Mississippi. Fr. Hennepin discovered the cataract there, naming it St. Anthony Falls, after the patron saint of his expedition, St. Anthony of Padua.

And the Commonwealth of Minnesota is a special place which has produced many fine Catholics and others. A lovely pocket of the world, it is a place that bulked large in the dreams of those who visioned the Northwest Passage. Minneapolis, the "Gateway of the West," opened and developed the long stretches of territory between the Middle West and the Pacific Slope.

But even before the rediscovery of the new world by the Europeans and the exploration by the French of its western parts, the presence in Minnesota in 1362 AD of Catholics of Scandinavian blood seems well attested by the Kensington rune stone.

In the year 1727, three hundred and sixty-five years after the runic inscription, and two hundred and thirty-five after the new world had been visited by Columbus, the first recorded Mass in Minnesota was said in the chapel of Fort Beauharnois, a French trading post on the shores of the Mississippi where it widens into Lake Pepin. The name of this chapel, St. Michael, is perpetuated in the oratory of the present Villa Maria convent near Frontenac. The settlers were French-speaking families, many of Canadian voyageur stock.

Every inhabitant of Minnesota must know that in 1680 the Recollect Franciscan, Fr. Louis Hennepin, at the suggestion of the Catholic explorer, La Salle, risked his life in order to find the source of the Mississippi River; but especially for the purpose of carrying the light of the Gospel to the tribes of native Indians, the Sioux, known to other tribes as emphatically "The Enemy."

Starting from what is now called Illinois, he and his two lay companions paddled their canoe day and night against the current of the Father of Waters, stopping only to say their morning and evening prayers and to beseech God that they might meet the fierce Indian in daylight. Finally, forty days after they had set out on their perilous journey, they were suddenly attacked by 120 Indians, hideously painted, shrieking like demons, and brandishing tomahawks; and were made captive, on the 11th of April, 1680. But in the long run it was Fr. Hennepin and his successors, who took the Indians captive in the bonds of charity and made the Black Robe dear to the heart of the one-time savages.