MY RECENT COURT APPEARANCES

MY RECENT COURT APPEARANCES

Those of you who watch the news will know that I have recently been making my way through the Belfast Crown Court system.

I have wanted to blog about this matter for a long time but as the whole thing was sub judice I was not able to. But I would not shy away from it just because I was in trouble. I am what I am - but I am not a coward!

This matter has been hanging over me for 4 years. It started with me being invited by the police to assist them with their enquiries. As the matter dragged on the police formed the view that I had assisted those who had organised 14 sham marriages.

Since I was ordained I have celebrated some 2,500 marriages. Therefore the 14 marriages before the court represent less than 0.05 % of all my marriages.

As was said in court by the judge and lawyers I did not organise or profit from those marriages or the people involved.    

My compassion - and maybe my naivete - was abused by others who made vast sums on money.

But of course it does leave me with a criminal conviction.

Below is the statement I read to the gathered media outside the court:

STATEMENT OF BISHOP PAT BUCKLEY

Today in Belfast Crown Court Mr Justice Mark Horner has imposed a suspended sentence on me. I am 61 years old and this is the very first time in my life that I have found myself on the wrong side of the law.

These proceedings began by me wholeheartedly assisting the police in 2010. I have never been arrested. I have never been the subject of a personal or home search. I have never been detained.

I have never sought to profit from the miserable circumstances in which the non EU participants have found themselves.

I had a genuine affinity with the poor. I do feel a strong sense of compassion for those who must live outside the EU in profound poverty and in appalling circumstances.

I am glad that the judge and the prosecution accept that I have provided solace to the outcast and that my door is always open to the downtrodden.

I am sorry for allowing my compassion to bring me to the point of breaking the laws that our whole society agree upon.

I did not intend to offend my fellow citizens but accept that I have and again for that I am sorry.

At this time of the year let us remember that Jesus, Mary and Joseph were emigrants into Egypt and the Wise Men of the time came from the East.

We are all descendants of immigrants..

Finally to those who want to rush to judge me can I address the words of the most famous man ever convicted or put on trial: “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”

+ Pat Buckley

19^th December 2013.

PROTESTUS INTERRUPTUS AND TEA-OLOGY

PROTEST-US INTERRUPTUS AND TEA-OLOGY

Do you ever wonder - as I do - why most so called liberal priests only protest so far and then crawl back into the safety and comfort of their monastery or diocese, toe the line, and accept all the privileges of being regarded as being "IN GOOD STANDING".

 They then seem to "glory" in being called "silenced" and parade around like modern day martyrs.

The so called ASSOCIATION OF CATHOLIC PRIESTS OF IRELAND is full of these types who engage in what I call PROTEST-US INTERRUPTUS. They take their protests only so far - usually to the bounds of making noises - but they are not willing to go the whole hog - put their words into action - and suffer being suspended, excommunicated and expelled from their comfortable monasteries and presbyteries.

They are VERBAL LIBERALS only and do not put their money where their mouth is.

Jesus said that His disciples would be known by their ACTIONS - not by their words.

He also said:

"Would that you were cold or hot. But you are only lukewarm. I will spit you from my mouth"

I remember one time being at a meeting with a real liberal and challenging priest - Father Des Wilson from Belfast. Some ladies were telling us that they been to see Cardinal O'Fiaich about change in the church. Father Des asked the ladies if the cardinal gave them anything. One said the cardinal gave them tea. Father Des said: "It is by their deeds that ye shall know them - not by their tea".

FR DES WILSON - REAL RADICAL

We have a lot of tea-ologians in our Catholic Church in Ireland today. The very worst of them in that slimy Brian Darcy. But there are others who are more intelligent and therefore should know better. Father Brendan Hoban is a verbal tea-ologian. Father Tony Flannery is a tea-ologian. The Association of Catholic Priests of Ireland is full of tea-ologians. 

These people are not harmless. They are dangerous. They give the corrupt Catholic institution a bit of good PR. They lend some respectability to something that is vile. 

We need people like Hans Kung who has gone all the way and had his licence to teach theology removed by The Roman Empire MK 11.

FR HANS KUNG - REAL RADICAL

We need people like Father Des Wilson who was pursued and tortured by Bishop William Philbin of Down & Connor.

We need priests like Father Michael Keane (RIP) who was suspended and evicted from his home by Archbishop Dermot Ryan - of unhappy memory.

FR MICHAEL KEANE - REAL RADICAL

We need theologians like Matthew Fox, Ernesto Cardenal, Charles Curran & Co who were tortured by the modern day Inquisition.

ERNESTO CARDENAL - REAL RADICAL

We do not need the Darcys, the Hobans and the Flannerys who are "sixpence each way" men whose graves will produce weeds and not roses.

FLANNERY - TEA-OLOGY?

We do not need "coitus interrutpus" priests and tea-ologians who do not have the balls to create the new baby of a renewed church.

HOBAN - TEA-OLOGY?

Of these people who are theological and pastoral seed wasters we need to say with Jesus: LET THE DEAD BURY THE DEAD"

Bishop Pat Buckley

4.12.2013

ARE THE SSPX NEO NAZIS?

ARE THE SSPX NEO NAZIS?

The Society that was founded by Archbishop Marcel Lebfevere in rejection of the changes of Vatican 11 and the introduction of the Vernacular Mass (as opposed to the Latin Mass) are back in the headlines again for all the wrong reasons.

Archbishop Lefebvre with the 4 bishops he consecrated.

The most infamous of the SSPX bishops and priests in Bishop Williamson who is a holocaust denier

Bishop Williamson

The traditionalist Society of St. Pius X offered to celebrate a funeral for convicted war criminal Erich Priebke after the Diocese of Rome said the service would be allowed only in a private home.

Erich Priebke

However violent protests outside the chapel forced the cancellation of the Mass, with some 500 protesters gathering on Tuesday outside the SSPX district headquarters in Albano, south of Rome, when a hearse carrying Priebke’s body arrived. People shouted “murderer” and beat the hearse.

Violence broke out after the arrival of a small group of people described by witnesses as neo-Nazis. Riot police intervened and two people were taken into custody, but the protesters remained and, according to Priebke’s lawyer, made it impossible for friends and relatives of the former Nazi SS officer to get to the chapel.

The lawyer, Paolo Giachini, told reporters outside the SSPX headquarters that the funeral Mass had not taken place, but that he had fulfilled his obligation to arrange a funeral. “Now it’s up to the authorities to decide what to do with the body,” since he was unable to find a city where Priebke could be buried.

Priebke died recently at the age of 100. "Only the good die young"? A former captain in the SS, he was convicted of carrying out a 1944 massacre of 335 Italian civilians in the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome. At the time of his death, he was serving his sentence under house arrest.

Priebke continued to claim he was only following orders when he took part in the Ardeatine Caves’ massacre and, shortly before he died, he affirmed his belief that the Holocaust was an invention.

The Diocese of Rome had refused Giachini’s request to allow a funeral to take place in a church or chapel.

In a statement issued on Monday, the diocese said, “Considering all the circumstances of the case, the ecclesial authorities believed that prayer for the deceased and entrusting him to the mercy of God — the aims of a religious funeral — should take place in the strictest privacy.”

“Prayers for the dead were never denied,” the diocese said, but the church had a right to insist the rites be “reserved and discreet.”

Bishop Marcello Semeraro of Albano, secretary of Pope Francis’ Council of Cardinals, told Rome’s Corriere della Sera newspaper Oct. 16 that the church would never prohibit prayers for someone, but canon law does allow a bishop to deny a public funeral to a “manifest sinner” when it would scandalize the faithful.

In Priebke’s case, he said, “the crime was public and notorious, the lack of conversion was public and notorious, and the scandal it would have raised in the Christian community was public and notorious.”

After agreeing to host the funeral, the Italian district of the Society of St. Pius X issued a statement on its website saying, “A Christian who was baptized and received the sacraments of confession and the Eucharist, no matter what his faults and sins were, to the extent that he dies reconciled with God and the church, has a right to the celebration of the holy Mass and a funeral.”

SSPX PRIEST ATTEMPTING PUBLIC FUNERAL

The statement said the SSPX condemns “every form of anti-Semitism and racial hatred, but also hatred under all its forms. The Catholic religion is one of mercy and forgiveness.”

The SSPX has a history of comments by its leaders expressing suspicion or hostility toward Jews. In 2009, after now-retired Pope Benedict XVI lifted the excommunications of the society’s bishops, there was widespread outrage at revelations that one of the four, Bishop Richard Williamson, had denied the gassing of Jews in Nazi concentration camps. The SSPX later ousted Bishop Williamson.

The New York-based Anti-Defamation League, which combats anti-Semitism, issued a statement on Monday saying it was “shocked” that a “fringe Catholic sect” would agree to host the funeral of a “notorious Nazi war criminal.”

Its not very often I agree with a Vatican decision but I think that this funeral decision was a good one. 

In Catholic theology we believe that we are all sinners and the prayers after death and the funeral Mass are prayers to ask God to forgive our sins.

In that respect Pribeke, as someone responsible for the murder of over 300 innocent people was certainly a sinner and certainly needed prayers.

However I think that the Diocese of Rome was right to deprive him of a large, celebratory public funeral which Neo-Nazis would have attended to celebrate the life and actions of one of their own.

I think that an SSPX priest was prepared to conduct such a public celebratory funeral of a retired Nazi says all we need to know about the SSPX.

Bishop Pat Buckley
3.12.2013