Freethinking Rebel Priest Pat Remembered

Prayers and thoughts are being shared for Pat Buckley, a gay, married and rebel Catholic priest who has passed on to the realm of our LGBTQIA+ ancestors at the age of seventy two.  Pat officiated at the marriages of divorcees who wished to remarry but were prevented from doing so under Catholic canon law. In 2013, he received a suspended sentence under Northern Irish law for officiating at sham marriages being used to circumvent immigration policies.  The judge noted that Buckley had "had a genuine affinity with these illegal immigrants".  Buckley  began to organise bi-weekly Masses, and he officiated at the marriages of divorcees who wished to remarry, as well as baptising babies from inter-faith marriages and blessing same-sex couples.  His father was a trade union official who later became a barrister and his socialist views influenced his son.  As a Catholic priest, he ministered to Provisional Irish Republican Army prisoners during the 1981 Irish hunger strike, including their leader, Bobby Sands.  He predicted, quite correctly, that Sands would die for his beliefs.  The BBC News Channel reports that Since 1986, Bishop Buckley, who was based in Larne, County Antrim, acted as an independent cleric outside mainstream Catholicism.   His official status within the Catholic Church was that of a suspended priest.   The church said he had excommunicated himself after he was consecrated as a bishop in 1998 by Dr Michael Cox, a similarly controversial figure who famously ordained the singer Sinead O'Connor into the priesthood.   He described himself as the "unofficial chaplain" to disaffected and alienated Catholics and Christians, and others, from across Ireland and further afield.  According to the Oratory Society that helped found,  Bishop Buckley "has had a decades long ministry to the LGBT+ community and made his sexual orientation public in 1999".