Photograph: Richard and Carrol Lafleur (Photograph by Bobby Ardoin.)
BOBBY ARDOIN
Editor/Consulting Writer
The itinerant story of an ordination chalice used in 1938 by Servant of God Father Joseph Verbis Lafleur, is expected to be told in depth Wednesday night during an annual commemoration Mass scheduled for St. Landry Catholic Church.
Father Carl Beekman pastor of a St. Anthony of Padua Church in the Rockford, IL.,Catholic Diocese will be the celebrant and homilist for the 6:30 church service which recognizes the 78th anniversary of Lafleur’s death on Sept. 7, 1944.
Lafluer used the chalice during his first Mass which was performed at St. Landry Catholic Church.
Beekman, according to Richard and Carrol Lafleur, was in possession of Lafleur’s gold and silver chalice for many years before Beekman donated the chalice to Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Ville Platte, where Father Lafleur first considered entering the priesthood.
Richard Lafleur is the nephew of Joseph Verbis Lafleur who along with his wife Carrol Lafleur, has for almost two decades supported an effort for Lafleur’s canonization by Church officials.
The Lafleur ordination chalice has remained at Sacred Heart in Ville Platte. Since its return the chalice has been used for specially-designated masses at Sacred Heart.
Carrol Lafleur during a Monday night interview, said ordination chalices are considered venerated objects by the clergy.
“An ordination chalice is like a man’s wedding ring for a priest,” Lafleur said following a weekly rosary ceremony held at the Father Joseph Verbis Lafleur statue in front of St. Landry Church.
After Beekman agreed to send the Lafleur ordination chalice to Ville Platte, Carrol and Richard Lafleur along with former St. Landry Pastor James Brady, drove to Illinois and brought the chalice to Sacred Heart Church.
Richard Lafleur explained that he and others did not want to have the chalice shipped back to Ville Platte.
“We left (Opelousas) and drove non-stop to Father Beekman’s church in Illinois with Father Brady and brought the chalice back,” Richard Lafleur recalled in a separate interview.
Richard Lafleur said Beekman obtained the chalice after members of the Lafleur family decided the chalice should be given to a seminarian.
Father Thomas Voorhies, pastor at Sacred Heart Church, had requested that Beekman, a former U.S. Marine Corps veteran, consider returning the chalice.
Lafleur, who served briefly as an assistant pastor at St. Mary Magdalen Catholic Church in Abbeville, volunteered to become a U.S. Army Air Corps chaplain at the outset of World War II.
Once overseas Lafleur was stationed at Clark Field in the Philippines before he and other servicemen became Japanese prisoners of war.
Lafleur and other captured servicemen were moved to several prison camps before they were loaded onto a prison ship that was torpedoed by a U.S. Navy submarine.
While in the prison camps, Lafleur, according to the men captured with him, served as an example of selflessness and religious piety. Lafleur, according to testimonies by other prisoners, converted many to Catholicism.
Since his death Lafleur has been awarded two Distinguished Cross medals by the U.S. military for heroism at Clark Field and his attempts at saving men who were trying to escape the sinking Japanese prison ship.
