My Dear Brother Priest and Dom Alcuin,
I was both impressed and humbled by your swift and stirring reply to my original communication. That first communication was composed by a valued colleague of mine who has a very different calling to ours.
This second letter comes from what we Irish call “beal an capaill” ‘ the horse’s mouth” 😀.
Your courteous and sometimes challenging reply suggests to me that indeed you are striving, like myself, to be a Christian and a gentleman.
While you and your ordaining prelate have the right to keep his identity confidential my source for this information is confident of his information having, he says, talked personally to the other priest who was ordained that day alongside you. But I have no pressing need to pursue this matter at all and leave it at your feet.
Indeed I am keenly aware of the canonical realities surrounding your ordination and my consecration. In your case “they” say you are suspended. In my case “they” say I am “excommunicated.
I will be celebrating the Silver Jubilee of my consecration on the Feast of St Joseph in eight months time. I must say that in that quarter of a century I have never experienced any symptoms of that canonical Covid. Perhaps both you and I had been graced by being vaccinated by the Holy Spirit – whose vaccinations have never been known to fail.
On the grave were my mortal remains will eventually be interred there is an inscription from Saint Cardinal John Henry Newman: “Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ”.
I think that might leave us both standing not only solid but even Holy ground?
I totally agree with you about Grace requiring some, at times, to act outside the ( hierarchical, clerical) box.
I will indeed pray for your bishop and hereby encourage my readers to do so.
Of course Bishop Rey, like all of can make mistakes. Bishops don’t claim infallibility.
As as someone who has been treated dispicably by Rome and their representatives in Ireland for 40 years, my heart goes out to Bishop Rey.
In 2019 I was apprehended. detained and interrogated for three hours in the Vatican for the “crime” of entering St Peter’s to pray. Before permitting me to leave they insisted I place my clerical collar, episcopal ring and pectoral cross in my pocket.
But if the Lord Jesus was humiliated by the Romans of His time, was it not fitting that I, as His sinful disciple should humiliated by the Romans of my time?
I sympathise with you over your defamation on the internet. All my secrets and past sins can be found on Google. But that’s allows me the perfect protection from my enemies. Of course, on Judgement Day the Communion of Saints will be told about all our sins. But on that occasion our refuge will be Infinite Mercy and not the armaments of our human enemies and detractors.
If there is anything untrue on any of my blogs concerning you I am prepared to immediately and voluntarily remove them freely and joyfully.
I am most grateful for your kind and truthful words about Dom Benedict’s absolutely unjust and uncharitable predicament. He is being punished by enemies not unlike your own for speaking the Truth.
At this time of writing I am not aware of how our Catholic beliefs might differ? There are people out there who have and regularly misrepresent me.
I want to immediately and gratefully accept your generous invitation to visit, have dialogue and pray with you and your community. And that would include attending Holy Mass celebrated by you if allowed.
I hope to do this in the near and not the distant future. Of course, I will pay all my own expenses etc and not cost you a single euro. Which is your nearest airport.
Dear Dom Alcuin don’t allow yourself to imagine that any great vastness separates you and I. For instance, I have no per se objection or distaste for the Traditional Latin Mass. I only worry when people with an ignoble agenda weapomise the TLM. I am not an extreme Novus Ordo man 😀
By the same token, you and your colleagues have an unending welcome here. I’d like to think that my hospitality is as Benedictine as your own.
If a TLM group here with no hidden agenda asked to use my humble Oratory here I would agree with a heart and a half.
Incidentally, my tabernacle was recently rescued from a French parish church which was descreated.
You and I are baptised brothers, validly ordained brother priests, lovers of the Church of Jesus Christ and heirs to the Kingdom.
And I can absolutely no reason why we cannot be friends and begetters of a mutually felt sense of wishing each other every grace and wellness.
And if I had “friends” who objected to me being your friend they would have by their objection become friends emeritus.
My episcopal motto is: TOLERANCE – LOVE – DIVERSITY.
I quite deliberately placed LOVE between TOLERANCE and DIVERSITY 😀
With warmest thoughts,
+ Pat
BISHOP PAT BUCKLEY 