It was Halloween when Jane Bernardel, a homeschooling mom of 11, was hauled away by police for praying in an empty church without a mask.
It’s a Bernardel family tradition to attend Vespers and recitations of the litany of the saints on Halloween, the eve of the great feast of All Saints, to sanctify a day they see as having been secularized. On Halloween 2020, Bernardel and some of her children prayed at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church in Kansas City, Missouri.
“We went in and got in our pew and it was empty, no one was there. It was really dark,” Bernardel told LifeSiteNews in an exclusive video interview. The family prayed the rosary and Divine Mercy chaplet for about 30 minutes. Then, Bernardel saw Father Gary Ziuraitis, CSsR, staring at her from the sacristy.
“There was just something about it that was odd,” she recalled. “Then he went to the other side of the altar and came out to tell me to mask.”
Ziuraitis, however, wasn’t wearing a mask himself, Bernardel noted.
“I did not want to mask,” she said, “and my children definitely were not going to mask. None of us were ill, we were all well, we were all very far from anybody in the church, so it seemed more authoritarian [of the priest] … it didn’t make sense to me.”
Bernardel told Ziuraitis that they weren’t going to wear masks.
That’s when he called the police. Read more…
