Who are we?
St. Joan of Arc Roman Catholic Church is home to the Traditional Latin Mass Community in Post Falls, ID, operating with the approval of the Bishop of the Diocese of Boise and served by the priests of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter. All Masses and Sacraments at St. Joan of Arc are celebrated according to the Traditional Roman Rite.
St. Joan and the FSSP
In 2002 the Diocese of Boise invited the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter to establish a Latin Mass community in North Idaho. As a result of that invitation, 2007 saw the establishment of St. Joan of Arc Chapel as a personal parish for the Latin Mass in the area, which has been thriving ever since. We moved from Coeur d’Alene to Post Falls in 2019.
About the Fraternity
The Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter (FSSP) is a Clerical Society of Apostolic Life of Pontifical Right; that is, a community of Roman Catholic priests who do not take religious vows, but who work together with a common purpose. The mission of the Fraternity is two-fold: first, the formation and sanctification of priests in the cadre of the traditional liturgy of the Roman rite, and secondly, the pastoral deployment of the priests in the service of the Church.
The Fraternity serves the Catholic Church by means of its own particular objective, which is the sanctification of priests and the souls of the faithful through the legitimate and devoted celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and Sacraments according to the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite. The FSSP instructs and trains priests to preserve, promote, and protect the Catholic Church’s authentic doctrinal and liturgical traditions.
The FSSP was founded on July 18, 1988 at the Abbey of Hauterive, Switzerland by a dozen priests and a score of seminarians. Shortly after the Fraternity’s foundation and following upon a request by Cardinal Ratzinger, Bishop Joseph Stimpfle of Augsburg, Germany granted the Fraternity a home in Wigratzbad, a Marian shrine in Bavaria that now lodges the Fraternity’s European seminary. In the same month of October there arrived a handful of priests and some thirty seminarians ready to start “from scratch.” Today, there are over 200 Fraternity priests worldwide and more than 150 seminarians in its two international seminaries, located in Bavaria, Germany and Denton, Nebraska.