Our Lady of Fatima Chapel
Nearly Fifty Years in Sanger
August of 2024 will mark the 50th anniversary of the first Mass offered in the Dallas-Fort Worth area by a Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) priest. As with past anniversaries, the faithful of Our Lady of Fatima will celebrate the momentous half-century anniversary of this early SSPX mission with a display of documents and items relevant to its history.
These faithful over time purchased the entire city block on which the church stands. Upon one of the lots was a house which was adapted to serve as a rectory.
The Dallas–Fort Worth chapel group came into existence when an Ecône seminarian, who was a Dallas native, arranged for Fr. Gregory Post to pass through the area and celebrate a Sung Mass in Richardson during August 1974. Overjoyed, Tradition–minded Catholics begged Archbishop Lefebvre to send them priests, and in April 1975 he sent Fr. Hector Bolduc to establish their chapel. For years Fr. Bolduc and Fr. Carl Pulvermacher O.F.M. Cap. came regularly to the Dallas–Fort Worth area. During the decades that followed, countless priests belonging to or associated with the SSPX have continued to come regularly to succor the faithful.
For the first four years, the group had to set up for the Mass in various public buildings, chiefly in Denton. But in 1979 the group bought a run–down protestant church in Sanger, which they gradually converted into a beautiful church. Over the years the church has been remodeled several times, classrooms have been added, etc. The last renovation of the interior of the church took place in 2015.
These accomplishments have been achieved at great cost in money, labor, and fatigue because of the devotion of Our Lady of Fatima’s faithful to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the source of the supernatural sustenance of which every human creature has the acutest need, the point at which heaven and earth meet, the hub around which the whole of the spiritual universe revolves.