Day: Jun 19, 2019

ABUSIVE AND CLERICAL COMMENT MAKERS MAKE REFERENCE ON A DAILY BASIS TO THE COURT CASE I WAS INVOLVED IN 6 YEARS AGO IN 2013.

Yesterday people like MMM referred to an article in a recent edition of The Irish News – a biased RC newspaper that was set up by the Irish Catholic Bishops in the late 18th century to oppose and bring down Charles Stewart Parnell a Church of Ireland MP who was marrying a divorcee.

THE 2013 COURT CASE

Over the past 33 years couples seeking marriage have been referred to me by a variety of people – family, friends, solicitors, doctors, wedding co-ordinators, hotel managers etc etc.

Between 2007 and 2009 a Belfast solicitor named Ho Ling Mo reffered 15 couples to me in that 3 year period.

Up until 2007, priests like me were responsible for the marriage preliminaries – interviewing the couples, checking their documents and issuing the marriage licence.

That changed in 2007 in the Republic – when new legislation was introduced taking away all preliminaries from the clergyman and reserving them absolutely to the state registrars. From that at point onwards ALL couples had to be immediately referred to the civil registry office – who then became absolutely responsible for interviewing the couples, checking their documentation and issuing the marriage licence. A priest had no power or permission to marry any couple until the state registrar gave the green light by issuing the MRF Marriage Registration Form in the South and the MS – Marriage Schedule in the North. In fact the North was much later in changing their procedures.

So, the 14 couples I married were all referred to the civil registry office at Dundalk. They were interviewed by the civil registrar, all their documents were checked and a MRF issued.

At that stage, and at that stage only, could I as a priest marry that couple – and I celebrated all 14 marriages with the direct permission of the Irish State.

I got my normal fee of £300 and my travelling expenses to Dundalk and other parts of the South were covered by the couple.

What I did not know at the time was that the solicitor, Ho Ling Mo was charging each couple up to £18,000 for arranging their marriage and handling their visa applications.

When I discovered that I challenged Mo and refused to take any more referrals from her.

Eventually the police became interested in Mo’s activities. They asked me to go and meet them in Belfast and I did and told them all I knew.

Later, at my invitation, they came to home and spent all an afternoon studying my registers and all my extensive paperwork.

The asked if I would be willing to be a witness for the prosecution, and I agreed.

Later they said they wanted to interview me under caution and on 3 occasions I went to talk to them for many hours and never even brought a solicitor with me.

Later again they told me they were going to charge me with “assisting illegal immigration”. At that stage I brought a solicitor to my 4th interview.

After this again they told me that they could not charge me with assisting illegal immigration and changed the charge to “conspiracy to defraud the British Home Secretary!

The crime of “conspiracy” is a very controversial crime because it requires an inferior level of proof and a longer sentence.

An American judge has called the crime of conspiracy the preferred charge of lazy policemen and prosecutors”.

So I was charged and put on trial in Belfast Crown Court. The trial ran for 3 weeks before a jury and ended up with the jury not being able to come to a verdict.

Later the prosecutors decided to have a second trial.

I am a mentally very strong man. And when a strong man is under extreme stress the stress goes for the body. In 1987 I was diagnosed with the inflamatory bowel illness called Crohns Disease – an illness which ban be fatal.

During the stress of 3 week trial, my Crohns flared up very seriously and I was in very bad pain, was bleeding and having “accidents” on the way to and from court.

The prospects of another 3 weeks or longer would leave me open to becoming seriously ill. On my lawyer’s advice I decided to take a deal from the prosecution and plead guilty. For me it was better to live with a criminal record or die without one.

The judge, Mr Mark Horner, who was hearing his first criminal case in court decided to give me a suspended sentence but also decided to punish me further by telling the gathered press that I was HIV+.

What he did was against the European Human Rights Convention. When I discovered this I spoke to the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission but unfortunately the 3 months I had to complain had run out. But the human rights people had correspondence with the Lord Chief Justice and judges have been informed that they cannot breach human rights in their judgements.

ANOTHER ASPECT

Since the case I have learned from a very reliable source that a very senior RC cleric met a very senior policeman in a Belfast Indian restaurant quite a while before any proceedings. I have also learned that there was communications between the church and other senior members of the legal profession.

PASSPORTS

After my court case the police and home office awarded two of the grooms wth British passports for being prepared to give evidence against me.

Why did they reward two men they were accusing of sham marriages with passports?

Finally, why would a man who had never broken the law in 61 years decide to break it at 61. And the same man has not broken the law in the 6 years since 2013.

I continue to be a wedding celebrant in both jurisdictions.

At the time the government, the police and the border force were under big pressure to address sham marriages. It suited them very much and got them more publicity if they could attach someone with a public profile to the case.

To my knowledge the 14 marriages I celebrated have never been declared null and void.

Miss Mo got a short sentence and is now living on her £5,000,000 back in Hong Kong.

My enemies will say I did it for money. I did not need those 4 weddings a year. At the time I had so many weddings I was outsourcing some weddings to others. The judge also made me pay £6,000 to the state which I did.

I will not be addressing this topic again on the blog but will place this statement on my personal website http://www.bishoppatbuckley.org

Archbishop Vigano

Barbie Latza Nadeau Correspondent-At-Large The Daily Beast.

ROME—There are few scandals in the sordid history of the American Catholic church more painful than the saga of former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, a high-ranking prince of the church who fell from grace amid a slew of lies and cover-ups.

McCarrick was forced to resign and later defrocked after credible allegations that he sexually abused a boy from the age of 11 until the young man was 29, starting long before the Boston Spotlight probe and Pennsylvania Grand Jury report came to define priests behaving badly.

It was well known in certain Catholic circles that the cardinal liked to entertain six or more seminarians in his five-bedroom New Jersey beach house with the assumption that the odd man out would share his bed.

“Francis is a big problem for the church and his liberals will ultimately destroy it.”

Unlike in Boston and Pennsylvania, where the local dioceses were easy to blame for bad management, McCarrick was a man of the popes, which makes him an easy target for those who oppose the direction of the church. Both John Paul II and Francis relied on him as a chief fundraiser and were, it seems, willing to look beyond the rumors. McCarrick’s fall from grace shook the very foundations of the Roman Curia.

While McCarrick’s sins and crimes are by now established, there is still mystery surrounding what his bosses—both Pope John Paul II and Pope Francis– knew and, perhaps more importantly, when they knew it. But there is even more mystery why those who are so ardently against Francis see him as their poster priest of bad behavior.

Enter Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, a traditional conservative Italian cleric supported by American Cardinal Raymond Burke and Francis-foe Steve Bannon—both of whom have been vocal critics of Francis’ policies on everything from immigration to gay Catholics and who have embraced the McCarrick fiasco as a way to pin all the church’s problems on this pope.

Bannon, whose own dreams to open an alt-right Catholic institution run by the Burke-sponsored Dignitatis Humanae Institute in Italy recently were thwarted, told The Daily Beast that Viganò was heroic and that Francis was the enemy.
“Francis is a big problem for the church and his liberals will ultimately destroy it,” Bannon said. “His open border policy on immigration won’t help, either.”

It is little wonder that Matteo Salvini, the hard-line far-right Bannon protégé is also a Pope Francis hater, even bragging last week that he has never asked for an audience with the pontiff.

Viganò was the apostolic nuncio, or ambassador, to the United States from 2011 to 2016. He was a harsh foe of Francis long before he was elected as pope in 2013 and one of the first to speak out when he was coronated. He was the one who set up the ill-conceived handshake with same-sex marriage opponent Kim Davis on Francis’s first visit to America. He was also the one who penned a lengthy testimonial last July in which he claimed that Francis knew all about McCarrick’s illegal behavior but covered it up. And for that, suggested Viganò, the pope ought to do the church a favor and resign. A month later, Viganò had gone into self-imposed exile.

This week, he surfaced again, this time on the pages of The Washington Post whose reporters interviewed him from his still-undisclosed location through a series of emails. The fruit of that labor is an 8,000-word tome that doubles down on the allegations against the leader of the Roman Catholic Church.

“The signs I see are truly ominous,” Viganò wrote. “Not only is Pope Francis doing close to nothing to punish those who have committed abuse, he is doing absolutely nothing to expose and bring to justice those who have, for decades, facilitated and covered up the abusers.”

Viganò calls the pope’s February summit on abuse a farce, blaming the Vatican’s gay mafia for the real crimes of clerical sex abuse. “An especially serious problem is that the summit focused exclusively on the abuse of minors,” he wrote, acknowledging that yes, those crimes are truly horrific. “Indeed, if the problem of homosexuality in the priesthood were honestly acknowledged and properly addressed, the problem of sexual abuse would be far less severe.”

McCarrick, he has long asserted, should have been made an example of years ago as an abuser who indiscriminately abused both young boys and adults. Viganò believes that Francis knew that and chose to elevate the American cardinal, who was a skilled diplomat who helped him broker a deal with China over its underground church. “McCarrick’s degradation from office was, as far as it goes, a just punishment, but there is no legitimate reason why it was not exacted more than five years earlier, and after a proper trial with a judicial procedure,” Viganò wrote in the Post. “Those with authority to act [i.e. Pope Francis] knew everything they needed to know by June of 2013.”

Viganò’s return comes at a time when battle lines have never been so clear between the more liberal faction of the church that supports Francis and the traditional conservatives who support the likes of Burke and Viganò.
Even the timing of the release of a harsh Vatican document against what it calls gender theory—“nothing more than a confused concept of freedom in the realm of feelings and wants”—is curious. A Vatican insider confided to The Daily Beast that the timing, during the height of Pride month, was meant to push the pope into a corner, either in defending the document or defending transgender people. In the end, he did neither.

That Viganò finally gave permission to The Washington Post to publish its scoop after weeks of negotiations (Vigano’s letters are dated May 2), is another example of the systematic criticism meant to embarrass the pontiff. “We are in a truly dark moment for the universal Church: The Supreme Pontiff is now blatantly lying to the whole world to cover up his wicked deeds!” Viganò claims. “But the truth will eventually come out, about McCarrick and all the other coverups, as it already has in the case of Cardinal [Donald] Wuerl, who also “knew nothing” and had “a lapse of memory.”
Wuerl, another American cardinal from Francis’ inner circle who like McCarrick, brought millions in donations from wealthy American Catholics to Rome, is the disgraced head of the powerful Washington, D.C., diocese. Francis was forced under pressure to accept his resignation last October after Viganò claimed he knew and covered up for McCarrick with the help of both Francis and John Paul II of McCarrick’s crimes proved too credible to ignore.

To those against the pope, Wuerl and McCarrick are emblematic in what is fast becoming a troubling legacy for the popular pope many thought could do no wrong after he was elected. For those who support this pope, they are just ammunition used against the most liberal pope in modern history. Either Vigano is the pawn or the errant clerics are in what is fast becoming a schism that may soon be hard to close.

“Pope Francis needs to reconcile himself with God, and the entire Church, since he covered up for McCarrick, refuses to admit it, and is now covering up for several other people,” charges Viganò. “I pray for his conversion every day. Nothing would make me happier than for Pope Francis to acknowledge and end the cover-ups, and to confirm his brothers in the faith.”

PAT SAYS

I like Vigano because he is a whistle blower.

Im not sure his motives are 100% pure as he is right wing and anti liberal.

But he has served at the top in Vatican affairs and he knows the dirt on the big boys and knows where many of skeletons are buried.

He knows what even a number of popes have done and not done.

The Vatican and the RC church thrive on secrecy and keeping their massive corruptions under wrap.

As more whistle blowers emerge and the international media bloodhounds follow leads more and more chunks fall off the ugly edifice.

The Chinese curse says “May he live in interesting times”.

I started off my life as a thoroughly brainwashed RC.

How glad I am to have lived in ways that opened my eyes.

I am living in interesting times.