St. Clement Parish acquired, through the donation of a generous donor, a statue of St. Philomena.   The journey was quite eventful so we would like to share the story with you.  A video of the restoration of the statue can be found below. Fr. Breton had obtained the statue at the Shrine of St. Philomena in Mugnano, Italy (featured above).  The statue looked like this in the shop:

Much to our dismay, while in the hands of the Italian postal service, she ended up arriving like this :

The Italian postal service did not respond to our request for assistance and/or reimbursement.

Unsure of what to do next in what seemed to be an impossible circumstance, we contacted Pauline Furmanczyk-Winogron at Brushworks Ottawa (https://www.statuerestorers.com/), who began a restoration process — we were totally amazed:

We were pleased with the result :

A video of the whole restoration process can be found below:

St. Philomena is the patron saint of children, youth, babies, infants, priests, sterility, virgins, and apparently, lost causes.   Let us include her in our prayers — she will certainly pull together the pieces of the puzzle when things seem in disarray !

In Christo,
Fr. Erik Deprey, FSSP
Pastor