The Story
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A video Story Thank you to LifeSite News and RK Studios
The Journey of One Man.
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William Price. Mr. William Price wrote a book on his experiences during the war in Vietnam. His experiences in war had an impact on how he saw the rest of his life and life in general. Which propelled him to restore this church. The link to the book is below.. ORDER HERE Below you can read his journey. The Journey to Restoring St Charles Borromeo Life’s journey for me began when I first became aware that a national philosophical struggle was in progress. One of my earliest memories concerning the political aspect of our culture came during the run up to the 1960 presidential race. Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy were competing for votes. The salient difference profiled in the media back then was atomic warfare with Russia and religion. Kennedy, a war hero came from a wealthy Catholic family and Nixon was a very experienced protestant politician. Worship, War, and lifestyle dominated the discussion. In other words, a different cultural accent may, depending on the outcome, punctuate America’s leadership style. I grew up in a Catholic family of ten, the oldest of five boys and I remember some discussion in our home about the candidates vying for the job as president of the United States. Kennedy won a very tight election and was inaugurated on January 20, 1960. He was subsequently assassinated in November of 1963. His short three-year nine-month reign as president recorded an unprecedented eighty percent job approval rating. JFK’s murder still causes tension among many today. Another milestone of understanding for me came after I read George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” in 1964. Back then Orwell’s book was still recommended reading. Also, back then newspaper accounts regularly reported on the world’s expanding communist “culture” as it started terrorizing Vietnamese peasants in Southeast Asia. For certain I realized… that our culture was in a violent state of change as it was artistically chronicled by popular music artists like Bob Dylon in his folk song “The Times they are Changing… and the “Eve of Destruction”, by Barry McGuire. It was in the air as they say. “Social Studies”, taught in schools and of course in political science college courses were adopting emotional driven trends in their curriculum. Academia’s collective intelligentsia had already morphed toward a more material “understanding” of life, claiming to have the real answers for the world’s escalating social problems. New absolutes were articulated and could be found by the genius in modern academia. “Progress” according to man’s social evolution in the 60’s took a “better more sophisticated”, look at the world’s current global crisis. Morality taught by the Church was deemed passe’. In 1966 with just a few years of this social revolution under their belts a preponderance of my Catholic school peers soldiered off to academies for some serious discussion and study about the real prospects and future of mankind. My journey came through a different route than most being tutored in higher education. Instigated by my reading disability, I decided to drop out of school in 1965. I was barely making it from one grade to the next anyway, and thought I’d be better off fighting for something achievable and that would ultimately mean a lot more than a high school diploma. So, I volunteered for service in the U.S. Marine Corps, that year (1966). I was taught the concept of “compliance to absolutes”. Those who had experienced Marine recruit training back then soon discovered the Corps’ absolutes for good living. The first lesson of their version on moral absolutes, came appropriately on a Sunday morning after a week of intense mental and physical indoctrination. Our drill instructor barked out an order: Drill Sergeant: “We have three lines ladies: Catholic, Protestant and Jew.” There are NO atheists in my beloved Marine Corps, so get your ass in one of those lines, NOW!” There was however an option, a place called Corrective Custody, where any selecting plan “B” were summarily escorted by two billy club toting guards. The destination, a cell, a change of diet and a regimen of copious extracurricular exercise, administered by personal “compliance chaperones”. I almost forgot… we were compensated once a month with ninety dollars. When we got to Vietnam it increased by another seventy-four. Not much to spend our monthly hundred and sixty-four dollars on in the jungle. After my discharge, an emerging difference between myself and those I went to school with became more and more evident as those years passed. I didn’t realize it at the time, but those years in the military separated me from most of my peers in ways I had never thought of. They had been assimilated and I was getting steady glimpses of the new culture with its loss of so many absolutes. It had metastasized and was now ubiquitous. For eight long years I tried to fit in. But it no longer looked like fun. I just couldn’t relate anymore to so many of these modern philosophies about life. In a smaller way military discipline and structure provided a measure of order. People, whether they know it or not, need boundaries. I frequently began letting my desires known in private silence. I was convinced something supernatural was blinding me. Not long after, my private prayers were answered with a couple of supernatural experiences, one such, the second one, involved a bolt of lightning. Faith is truly a gift! Ask and you shall receive. I’m Back Now, and Life is a Mission I was married within a year of that lightning bolt. My confusion evaporated, but frustration took over. my quest to return to the Faith got complicated. The Holy Sacrifice, the centerpiece of the Faith, that I knew in my youth and in the Marines had somehow disappeared. Though I witnessed some of the strange changes at the Mass right after my discharge, ten years later, I realized how profound these “changes” really were. There was virtually nothing organic in these new Mass renovations, so like Hansel and Gretel my wife and I looked for some breadcrumbs that would lead us back. I wanted to go home, but it appeared that my home, the Latin Mass, had been abolished from Catholic churches. The red sanctuary lamp was missing. the tabernacle lost its prominent place at the center of the high altar. Where is He, I wondered? Lay People in the sanctuary lined up behind a table serving as a makeshift altar after getting rid of those beautiful traditional ones. Then, casually dressed men and women distributed the sacred species into the hands of the other lay people filing up to receive such. We followed the crumbs and located that sacred edifice once again. By that time (1989) We had five children in tow, from twelve to two years old, later we adopted a boy, number six. We never looked back and today are expecting our eighteenth grandchild. Our mission as Catholic parents is to catechize our families. It’s our job first and foremost to know and then teach the faith to our offspring. We withdrew three of our children from a “Catholic” school that had deviated from Catholic teaching and the other three never saw the inside of any school. Father John Hardon retaught the faith to my wife and I starting back in 1988. He reiterated Church teaching and reminded us of our responsibility to teach it to our children. We presently have seventeen home schooled grandchildren. You Only Have a Mission if you are Willing to Fight for it! We Catholics must fight with sacrifice “a cruce Salus”. If we’re willing to surrender what would otherwise be prospered by relegating our families, if we prudently refuse the seduction of going beyond what is needed instead of chasing what isn’t, we will be serving God and our families. The mission at St. Charles Borromeo, Cheboygan, will succeed if God wills it to. God uses human instruments to accomplish his will. I believe I was chosen for this mission because God has inculcated the concept of mission into my psyche. I wasn’t chosen because I was the most qualified, or the best in any other category, but as a matter of fact I was God’s choice simply because I was willing to try and accomplish it. So, if this story moves your soul to help at St. Charles Borromeo, then God must have willed it. William Price, Semper Fi |
