OUR LADY OF FATIMA AND MY PROUD PORTUGUESE-AMERICAN ANCESTRY..........

One year ago today, while I was still doing my post kidney transplant convalescing in Phoenix, Arizona, and just four days before I returned with my friend and caregiver, Jeremy Lipp, to Sacramento - the Right Reverend Monsignor Vito F. Mistretta, the forty one year, Founding Pastor Emeritus of Holy Family Parish, in Citrus Heights, where I served my first assignment as a priest for fifteen months in 1987-88; and and was his successor as Pastor, thrice removed, from November 24, 2000 - June 27, 2005; died in retirement at 92 years old.  I received word of his passing by phone in Phoenix, and remember thinking I was likely to miss his Funeral by a day or less, being he died on Tuesday, I expected he would be buried on either on Friday or Saturday, of that same week.  Alas, I was able to attend, as Msgr. Mistretta's obsequies were the following Monday morning, after my return home.  This morning I celebrated the 8 am Mass here at Our Lady of Lourdes Parish, for the happy repose of his soul on this his 1st Anniversary.  Having maintained a strong devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary all his life as a priest, including under her patronage as Our Lady of Fatima, during the past year it has caused me to reflect on how appropriate it was that Vito's call from this world should have come on Our Lady of Fatima day, as the apparitions of the Blessed Mother, by the three, young, poor, Portuguese children, occurred in the year of his birth - 1917.....

 Being of fifty percent Portuguese ancestry myself, since childhood I have been familiar in an up close way with the devotion to the Our Lady of Fatima.  Today as the Pastor of Our Lady of Lourdes Parish in Sacramento, I invoke the Blessed Mother's intercession under both titles, and pray God's choicest blessings upon all Portuguese American people in the Sacramento Diocese, I know and have been afforded the priestly, pastoral ministry to during the past nearly two dozen years.  And I am proud to be among a group of at least ten priests, who have been of Portuguese birth or ancestry, over the past century in the Sacramento Diocese.  May Our Lady of Fatima's 1917 apparitional pleas for Peace in the World, continue to be a part of all our pursuits as God's People.........Hail Mary, Mother Of God, Pray For Us, O Gentle Woman Of Peace,   Fr.  Troy