We just put in some more sidewalk so parishioners can get to the chapel easily, without mud or water getting on their shoes, even in rainy weather.
As much as I wanted to upgrade the chapel's contents, this sidewalk seemed more necessary for now.
St. Dominic's Chapel is situated in the country, on rolling, open farmland. Between the parking area and the chapel is a "dry creek" of sorts, which flows with water whenever we get rain (1" or more). Spring 2015 was very wet, and we had so much water flowing -- including a couple of Sundays -- that the lumber we placed for people to walk on
actually floated downstream from the force of the water! That's why I say "dry creek".
We used to have 2 sections of sidewalk, totaling 16 feet. Now it's 36 feet long. That 20 feet of sidewalk cost about $550 for two tons of concrete (4,000 lbs) and labor. My son and I volunteered to help with the whole thing, to speed things up and reduce labor costs. We hired 2 Traditional Catholics to do the labor, and I would say their rate was well below the market rate for such hard, backbreaking work (mixing concrete by hand, etc.) I would also note that the men we hired are from a poor, large Catholic family and they were most grateful for the work.
If anyone out there in CathInfo Land has funds they want to donate to God/the Church and wants a "good cause" to send it to, please feel free to donate to our chapel. If you need a receipt for tax purposes, PM me and I can give you the name of the organization to make the check out to. Fr. Zendejas has a nonprofit set up in CT. You can donate through him if you need a tax receipt.
I only ask for donations, because I know that we need a new air conditioner (our smallest one died -- 12,000 BTU) and it will cost $367 to replace it. We won't need it until early March, when the temps start going into the 80's (yes, this is Texas!) But this sidewalk project wiped out our chapel's meager funds.
St. Dominic's Chapel
367 Stagecoach Hill Dr
Seguin, TX 78155
(You can make checks payable to "St. Dominic's Chapel")
We have a Paypal account set up:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=LHMPZNHJB6J8QAny funds donated will be used for the building up of an independent chapel that will serve San Antonio/Austin area Traditional Catholics. We are committed to being Traditional Catholic, not schismatic or sectarian, along the lines of Archbishop Lefebvre and his very Catholic position. We are friendly to any other Traditional Catholic priests and chapels in the area.
We strongly believe the area needs a chapel for WHEN the SSPX falls the rest of the way. We can no longer count on the SSPX to be the bastion of Tradition. But other than that, we've "moved on" from the SSPX. We don't waste effort (nor does Fr. waste sermon time) bashing SSPX priests or the organization. He covers current events and doctrinal issues in his "Blue Papers", which supplement his sermons.
We're just busy being Traditional Catholics, and trying to serve Catholics in the area as well as we can.
In the picture below, you can see where the "river" runs whenever it rains and we have runoff. To get an idea of the land scale, sidewalk sections 3 and 4 total 20 feet. It's a lot of land! It looks like we have a ways to go, but at least we can use the paver bricks (which we replaced) to extend the sidewalk much closer to the parking area now.
The thing is that the sidewalk is much better than walking on paver bricks. The bricks eventually separate from each other and tilt in various directions (especially with the soil we have here), making it challenging for older people to navigate. So bricks are better than nothing, but actual sidewalk is much better than bricks.
The second picture is from Mass a couple weeks ago.