The Confraternity of St. Peter is a sodality of members who wish to unite themselves to the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter and aid in the work of our fraternity, primarily by their prayers.
The Confraternity of St. Peter is spread throughout the world, and is divided into three regions: The English-Speaking Region, the French-Speaking Region and the German-Speaking Region. For more information on these regions and the Confraternity in general, please visit the international website at :
Join fellow parishioners and friends at our annual parish dinner, an excellent opportunity to socialize with friends old and new, raise money for our parish hall building project, and listen to a wonderful talk by the renowned Monsignor Andrew Wadsworth, Provost of the Washington Oratory, longtime friend of the FSSP, and strong promoter of the Sacred Liturgy. Children are welcome.
Last year’s dinner was a great success and a very enjoyable evening, so don’t delay in getting your tickets here:
The dinner will take place on the Feast of St. Clement: Saturday, November 23rd, at the St. Elias Centre, 750 Ridgewood Avenue, Ottawa.
In addition to purchasing tickets for you and your family, we invite you to make a charitable donation to the parish to help parishioners who would like to attend but who are unable to do so financially. A tax receipt will be issued for the amount of your donation, which can be put in the Sunday collection labelled “Parish Dinner Donation”.
(please ensure that you write “Parish Dinner donation” in the memo line for both credit card and e-transfer).
If you are unable to buy a ticket online, you can place cash or cheque made out to “St. Clement Parish” in an envelope in the collection basket – be sure to clearly mark on the envelope that it is for payment for the “Parish Dinner” and for the number of seats desired. Do not forget to include the first and last names of those coming with you, as well as your phone number!
Please include the parish dinner committee volunteers in your prayers — your support will help ensure that this year’s dinner be another great success.
Providing for the financial needs of our parish Our parish continues to incur expenses for such items as electricity, heating, repairs, insurance, etc. Although our financial statements show a very solid financial position for our parish, we can very quickly deplete our resources without access to our regular collections. If you are in a position to do so, we invite you to support our parish financially and on a regular basis.
The following options are available for donating to our parish:
1) By obtaining a parish collection envelope box through our parish office, which can be dropped off during Mass or sent in the mail. The parish will produce a tax receipt for any donations made using it:
2) Through a monthly direct transfer from your bank account to the parish bank account (Pre-Authorized Giving). The form used to initiate PAD is attached below. If you would like to use this process for your donations please complete the form and mail (or drop it off) to the parish office. If you do not wish to continue this method of giving, it can be terminated upon written notice to the parish. The parish will produce a tax receipt for any donations made using PAD:
3) Using your credit card by going to the St. Clement Parish Web Page stclement-ottawa.org and clicking “Donate to the Parish” link and filling out the required form at the link below. Regular donations using this credit card method can be cancelled at any time at canadahelps.org. Canada Helps itself will send you the tax receipt :
4)E-Transfers: The parish can now accept Interac e-transfer payments by email at finances@saintclement.ca. The answer to the question that you provide when you create the transfer with your bank must be “Clement“. You must specify the reason of the payment in the comment area when you create the transfer. Please be sure to provide your full name and address. The parish will then be able to provide a tax receipt.
5) Donations of Securities and Mutual Funds may also be donated using the link below: Canada Helps will send you the tax receipt:
Thank you to those already using one of these options for your donations. You can be assured that the confidential personal information you provide, particularly for online giving, will be kept in a secure place in our parish office.
If you have any questions or require further information please contact our parish secretary, at 613-565-9656 or emailoffice.st.clement@rogers.com
Our 10th annual golf event fundraiser on August 13th was a huge success! We had 167 people at the dinner with 98 golfers and raised $32,357 after expenses. Deo gratias!
Thank you for all your support – to all the volunteers, to those who contacted sponsors, to all the sponsors, to those who provided auction items, to those who made financial donations, and to all who were able to join us for the day.
We would like to especially thank the many businesses and professionals who were sponsors for the tournament and all the donors who contributed to this year’s silent auction. These are identified in the programme below :
The Real Estate Committee of the Archdiocese of Ottawa-Cornwall met and passed a motion allowing our parish to continue to the Design Development phase of our Parish Hall project with the Architect. The approval of the Design Development phase is an important step forward in the architectural design process. We would like to thank the Archdiocese for their continued support and encouragement.
Providentially their approval comes as we begin our Pledge Drive for 2024. Your pledges are essential to the process of securing a good mortgage with the Archdiocese, something we hope to work out as soon as possible. So if you have not yet made your pledges, we encourage you to do so now. Our electronic form can be submitted using the following link:
We have received $415,000 in pledges and donations so far. Additionally, our recent parish dinner raised a further $15,137. 114 parishioners have submitted pledge forms and a further 103 parishioners have already donated to the campaign.
This is 46% of our goal which is a good start. We need to build on this momentum.
We appreciate the support from those who have contributed to the campaign so far. Initially, our pledge drive was seeking pledges for 2023, 2024 and 2025; however, since the pledge drive started late in 2023, we are extending the deadline for submitting your pledge form to Sunday, April 28, 2024. Additionally, we are adding 2026 to the pledge period.
If you have any questions or require additional information regarding either the parish hall project and/or the capital campaign, contact John Fennelly @ 613-867-0144 or send an email toinfo@saintclement.ca.
FORMED is a Catholic resource with thousands of Catholic movies, programs, audio, and books. Through your donations we have been blessed to have been able to offer a one-year subscription accessible to all parishioners free of charge.
There are 3 ways to access our parish subscription:
1) Click on this link using your computer and follow the prompts. Choose St. Clement Parish and indicate your email address. The rest is self-explanatory:https://signup.formed.org/
2) Download the app to your smart TV (search “Formed, Catholic”. Formed is usable on Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV, and Chromecast. (note: you will need to first register atformed.org/signupbefore logging into the app).
3) Download the Formed app to your mobile device (iOS or Android) via App Store or Google Play Store.
We are grateful for the donations which made this one-year subscription possible ! If everyone contributed just $10 toward this service, we can continue offering it on a yearly basis.
Your donation can simply be placed in the Sunday collection, earmarked “Formed”. Or you could do the same using our Canada Helps platform under the “Weekly Offering” link, just adding a comment that it would be for Formed:
St. Clements has several hand missals for the Traditional Mass available in our bookstore, in English-Latin and in French-Latin. These may be purchased in our bookstore on Sundays before & after Masses. We also have smaller missals for children and several used missals at reduced prices .
In English:
The Roman Catholic Daily Missal(Angelus Press)
Features include: 1,980 pages, all liturgical texts in Latin and English, all readings both in Latin & English (Douay-Rheims), music of the Ordinary in Gregorian notation, gilt edges, five liturgically-coloured ribbons, sewn binding, rounded back with durable, and leather-like gold embossed flexible cover.
In French:
Missel Quotidien Complet(Éditions Ste-Madeleine)
Entièrement recomposé et conforme au code des rubriques du bienheureux Jean XXIII, ce missel latin-français comprend, avec l’Imprimatur de l’archevêque d’Avignon, Mgr Jean-Pierre Cattenoz, l’année liturgique au complet.
Grateful to the Holy Father, the members of the Fraternity of St. Peter are in thanksgiving for this confirmation of their mission. They invite all the faithful who feel close to them as a spiritual family to attend or join them in prayer, and to pray especially for Pope Francis.
Restoration of the sanctuary windows is completed ! The exterior glass and wooden frames also needed repair. We discovered that they had been installed backwards at some point in their history, perhaps when the exterior windows were replaced at some point.
The photo above shows the previous arrangement (in black and white); the colour photos show how they are now arranged. The PDF file here can show you in more detail on your computer: Sanctuary Windows
This means we have restored them to their proper orientation, having the faces of the saints facing Our Lord, and Our Lord blessing us with his right hand, as is proper:
Before:
Restored:
We thank you for your donations which helped pay for this restoration work. May God reward you for your generosity !
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 !
Below you will find a video describing the work which took place for the restoration of our adoring angels. Many thanks to Steve and Pauline Winogron for making this possible !
Fr. Deprey has asks that all families consider praying the 15 decades of the rosary every day as a means to obtain a positive resolution to our current coronavirus crisis.
To many of you this may seem daunting ? If your days are quite busy, consider praying a morning rosary for your morning prayers, then a 2nd rosary spread throughout the day (i.e. pausing from your activities to pray a decade each hour), closing with a family rosary in the evening. This can be done.
I would also encourage you all to wear the Miraculous Medal of St. Catherine Labouré which was first produced by the Daughters of Charity. During the cholera outbreak in Paris in 1832, which claimed 20,000 lives, the first medals were being produced. The sisters started to distribute the first 2,000 of them, especially to infected people who filled the hospitals. The healings increased, including a lessening of emotional distress. So great was the effect that the people began to call it the “miraculous medal”. We need all the help we can get !
Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee ! Amen.
In this troubling time, you should know that God and His Church have not abandoned you. Even with the prohibition of public Mass and Communion Services, there are still many sources of grace which are open to you. I would like to discuss two of them here – Spiritual Communions and the General Fruits of the Mass.
Following the teachings of the Catechism of the Council of Trent(1), also known as the Roman Catechism, there are three ways in which one can receive Communion: (1) Sacramentally-only; (2) Sacramentally-and-Spiritually; and (3) Spiritually-only.
Those who receive Communion while knowing they are in a state of Mortal Sin are said to receive Sacramentally-only. This is because, while they truly receive the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Christ under the appearances of bread and wine, they do not receive any spiritual benefits. On the contrary, they incur an additional sin.
Those who receive Communion Sacramentally-and-Spiritually receive the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Christ under the appearances of bread and wine and do receive spiritual benefits.
Those who receive Communion Spiritually-only receive the spiritual benefits of Communion without receiving the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Christ under the appearances of bread and wine.
The Catechism goes on to explain that those who receive Spiritually-only “are those who, inflamed with a lively faith which worketh by charity (Gal. 5:6), partake in, wish and desire of that celestial bread.” There are several things that should be noted from this passage.
The first is that in order to receive Spiritually-only, one must be in a state of grace, as the theological virtue of charity and Sanctifying Grace always exist together. So, one must have Sanctifying Grace, or be in a state of grace, in order to make a Spiritual Communion. If you are not in a state of grace, receive sacramental absolution as soon as you can (and be praying Acts of Contrition in the meantime). Editor’s Note: Even in the absence of public Masses, many parishes are still offering Confessions. Check with your parish for details.
Next, it is important to note that a Spiritual Communion must include a wish and desire to receive Sacramentally-and-Spiritually even though such a reception at the current time is not possible. It would be enough, then, when beginning to make a Spiritual Communion to pray, “Lord, I wish to receive You in a sacramental and fruitful Communion, but, as I can’t right now, I wish to receive You spiritually,” and then continue to pray as you would when receiving Sacramentally-and-Spiritually. There are prayers which are recommended by the Church for making a Spiritual Communion (Editor’s Note: St. Alphonsus Liguori’s version is included at the end). They do not necessarily need to be used, and one can draw phrases and ideas from them, based on one’s own dispositions, to prepare one’s own.
Spiritual Communions can be made at any time during the day or night, and as many times as one wants. One does not need to be in a church, in front of the Tabernacle, or even in front of a holy image. Spiritual Communions can be made anywhere, although clearly, it would be unfitting to make them in places ill-suited for virtue.
Spiritual Communion offers us many graces, even if we cannot receive Our Lord sacramentally (Corpus Christi at FSSP Dallas)
We should not worry that our sanctification is in some way impeded by receiving Spiritually-only and not Sacramentally-and-Spiritually during this time. As the Catechism states, those who receive Spiritually-only “receive, if not the entire [spiritual benefit of a Sacramental-and-Spiritual Communion], at least very great fruits.” So, the graces received from Spiritual-only Communions can be as great as the graces received in a Sacramental-and-Spiritual Communion.
But, in order to receive as many graces and fruits from a Spiritual Communion as one can, or even from a Sacramental-and-Spiritual Communion, one must be properly disposed. The better disposed one is, the more graces one is able to receive. To properly dispose oneself, one should pray preparatory prayers before receiving Sacramentally-and-Spiritually. These prayers can be found in hand Missals and elsewhere, or one could pray using one’s own words. How long one should spend praying such prayers will depend on the other duties one has to fulfill. This is why it is important to arrive with time before the start of Mass so that one can pray these prayers, if one is planning on receiving (remember that one is only required to receive Communion sacramentally once a year from the First Sunday of Lent to Trinity Sunday in these United States). One could also pray these prayers at home before departing for the church if doing them at the church would be difficult. To make a Spiritual Communion fruitful, one should dispose oneself in the same manner, adjusting the texts of the prayers as necessary. Preparations before receiving either Sacramentally-and-Spiritually or Spiritually-only should include some form of an Act of Contrition.
We know, however, that we attend Mass for more than just receiving Communion. When we attend Mass, we give God the worship due to Him as our Creator and our Redeemer by offering up to Him in an unbloody manner the bloody Sacrifice of Christ on the Cross. The two-fold Consecration of the bread and wine makes the Sacrifice of the Cross sacramentally present. As Christ’s Sacrifice is present, the fruits from that Sacrifice are made available to the faithful. These fruits are placed in four groups – (1) Ministerial Fruits, (2) Very Special Fruits, (3) Special Fruits, and (4) General Fruits.
The Ministerial Fruits are those fruits which are offered to those on whose behalf the Priest is celebrating the Mass. The intention listed in the bulletin for the Mass, for example, would be the recipient of these fruits (if the intention is one who can receive them).
The Very Special Fruits are those which are offered to the celebrating Priest Himself. As he is offering the Sacrifice of the Mass in persona Christi for others and for himself, these fruits are made available to him.
Special Fruits are for those who participate in
or contribute to the Mass (Holy Thursday at
FSSP Minneapolis)
The Special Fruits are those offered to those who are cooperating in offering up the Sacrifice of the Mass by any external act (besides the Priest). This cooperation includes being physically present at Mass, but also by contributing materially to the celebration of the Mass. Those who have donated flowers, candles, vestments, liturgical vessels, and other such things being used in a Mass – including the church building itself – are all offered Special Fruits from that Mass. The amount of fruit offered to each is proportional “to their closeness of cooperation”(2) to the Sacrifice. So, the Altar Server in the Sanctuary will be offered more Special Fruits than that which will be offered to those in the pews.
Note, however, that there is a difference between the fruits being offered and the fruits received. The amount that is received is dependent upon one’s disposition. So, while the Altar Server might be offered more fruits, he may receive less than some in the pews as they, while offered less, were better disposed and thus actually received more than the Server. This is why, again, prayers of preparation before Mass are so important, not just for the reception of Communion, but also for receiving the fruits that will be made available and for worthily offering the Sacrifice of the Mass through the hands of the Priest.
Be sure to avail yourself of the General Fruits produced by all Masses (FSSP Philadelphia)
Lastly there are the General Fruits. These fruits are offered to all members of the Church, and even to those outside of the Church for their conversion. In order to gain these fruits, again, one must be properly disposed. This is why morning prayers and offerings are so important and why one should include in one’s morning prayers words to the effect of “Lord, during the course of this day, bestow upon me any Indulgences whose requirements I may fulfill and all fruits available to me flowing from all of the Masses said throughout the world today.” As Masses will continue to be said privately during this time, you should avail yourselves of these General Fruits which are produced. Additionally, if you feel that you qualify for Special Fruits due to any contributions you may have made, be sure to ask for those fruits also.
Hopefully you are able to see that the practices explained above are not to be used only during this unhappy time. These lessons should be integrated into the spiritual life of every Christian so that each may draw from all of the abundant sources of grace available to him. +
Spiritual Communion by St. Alphonsus Liguori:
My Jesus, I believe that You are present in the most Blessed Sacrament. I love You above all things and I desire to receive You into my soul. Since I cannot now receive You sacramentally, come at least spiritually into my heart. I embrace You as if You were already there, and unite myself wholly to You. Never permit me to be separated from You. Amen.
(1) Part II: The Sacraments – The Eucharist
(2) O’Connell, The Celebration of the Mass (1964), p. 39, n. 6.
You will find more general information on the project itself here:
