Finding the way past the devil in Kinkora by Judi McLeod over at Canada Free Press
Everywhere else in the world, statues of the mighty St. Patrick hold a shamrock symbolizing the Holy Trinity. In Kinkora, Ontario, it’s a tulip.
The tulip-bearing statue of St. Patrick in Kinkora is the bold face of a smoldering battle aimed at taking down the community’s single Sunday morning Tridentine (Latin) Mass, its humble pastor and talented cantor.
Somewhat cult-like in nature, it’s a battle being raged in the most surprising of places.
In all other ways, the crossroads of Kinkora, Ontario, truly lives up to its Irish Gaelic name, which translates to “a lovely place”. If Kinkora were a picture in a travel magazine, it would be ripped out and put up as framed pictures on living room walls.
Easy to give in to dreams of peace and plenty driving along pastoral roads leading to Kinkora and its hauntingly beautiful St. Patrick’s Church.
One could assume there is mostly good in the world when in postcard-perfect Kinkora, where physical threats of any kind seem so far away.
But like all who wanted to attend St. Patrick’s Tridentine Mass Sunday morning, I had to make my way to get inside the church through ‘protesters’ on the lawns and sidewalks. There was a homespun odor of horse manure at the scene, and I naively thought it was wafting from plentiful nearby farms. On hot, humid days, it’s sometimes the odor of pig or chicken excrement. Sulphur, it seems comes in many flavours.
Surely the Irish who built the neo-Gothic church in 1882 didn’t intend it as the someday scene of Occupy Wall Street-like hostilities where bad things are arranged in beautiful but off-public-radar places, too tiny to even be called villages.
No one making their way to the Tridentine Mass worries about having their best Sunday suit roughed up or their lace mantilla knocked to the ground. But most worry about physical attacks on innocent little altar boys by protesters incensed by church incense, threats of physical assault, or the threatened shooting of a 12-lb. pet mutt.
With the blessings of the Holy Father, the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite is celebrated each Sunday in only about two dozen Canadian churches.
In Kinkora, there is the ordinary 10 a.m. Mass, and two others in the nearby Town of Mitchell at St. Vincent de Paul Church.
No one is forcing anyone in Kinkora to attend the Latin Mass, but rabble rousers claim “This is our church!” and tell the Gregorian chant cantor “Go back to Toronto with your Latin Mass”.
It is worthy of note that friendly decent Kinkora people are many. The rabble rousers, who claim to represent the entire community, number only in the handful.
Even so, they create a scene more worthy of the past Black Donnellys of Canada or the Hatfields and McCoys of America than Sunday morning service celebrating the Eucharist.
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