Belfast, Northern Ireland, Oct 25, 2019 / 05:05 pm (CNA).- A priest in Northern Ireland has exhorted pro-choice politicians not to receive Holy Communion, and Catholic voters not to vote for pro-choice candidates or parties, after legislation expanding abortion access in the region took effect this week.
“To be publicly pro choice-abortion is irreconcilable with being a faithful Catholic. Therefore, such persons should not approach the Holy Eucharist. If they do so, they are committing the mortal sin of sacrilege,” Fr. Patrick McCafferty, parish priest at Corpus Christi in Belfast, said in an Oct. 21 Facebook post.
“The Word of God calls everyone to be in the state of grace when they approach the Lord’s Table,” added the priest of the Diocese of Down and Connor.
Northern Ireland’s devolved legislature failed Monday to block a change to the region’s law imposed by the British parliament, which expands access to abortion. Previously, abortion was legally permitted in Northern Ireland only if the mother’s life was at risk or if there was risk of permanent, serious damage to her mental or physical health.
The British parliament passed the Northern Ireland (Executive Formation etc) Act 2019 in July. The act took effect Oct. 22 because the Northern Ireland Assembly, which has been suspended the past two years due to a dispute between the two major governing parties, was not able to do business by Oct. 21.
Pro-life members of the Northern Ireland Assembly, largely comprised of members of the Democratic Unionist Party recalled the assembly Monday for the first time since January 2017 in order to block the relaxed abortion restrictions.
However, in order for the assembly to make any binding changes, the election of a speaker of the assembly with cross-party support was required. This proved impossible when the Social Democratic Labour Party walked out of the Oct. 21 meeting.
Members of the assembly from Sinn Fein, the Green Party, and People Before Profit did not participate in the Oct. 21 session.
“We were betrayed today at Stormont,” Fr. McCafferty wrote in another Facebook post, on Oct. 21. “I implore all faithful Catholics, faithful Christians and all good people who value human life and true (not fake) human rights, to withdraw all support from pro abortion-choice politicians and political parties.”
“For Catholics and nationalists/republicans, in particular, Sinn Fein and the SDLP have betrayed us in a most hideous fashion,” he said.
Sinn Fein supports abortion rights, while the SDLP allows their Members of the Legislative Assembly a conscience vote on the topic. Fr. McCafferty noted that “Sinn Fein is avowedly pro abortion,” and charged that “The SDLP is infected with influential pro abortionists.”
And Fr. McCafferty wrote Oct. 22 on Facebook that “We have been failed miserably by politicians – all of them.”
He noted that the Northern Ireland Assembly collapsed because of the Renewable Heat Incentive scandal, saying some of the politicians and officials of the DUP “are at the heart of this scandal.”
“The collapse of the Northern Ireland Assembly, due to the RHI Scandal, has left the door wide open for a phalanx of determined and fanatical pro abortion MPs in Westminster, led by Stella Creasy – unelected by the people of Northern Ireland – but aided and abetted by pro abortion-choice politicians in Sinn Fein, the SDLP, Alliance, PBP and the Green Party – to railroad through, at Midnight last night, one of the most extreme abortion regimes in the world,” the priest lamented.
Fr. McCafferty wrote that “The SDLP, once a party that Catholics could trust and vote for with confidence, is no longer such a party. There are now a significant and influential number of SDLP MLAs and councillors, who are pro abortion-choice. Catholics voting in the future, for SDLP candidates, need to carefully determine their stance on abortion before giving that candidate their vote.”
Dolores Kelly, an MLA from the SDLP who told the Belfast Telegraph she is “a pro-life politician”, said that “many people who are pro-life and practising Catholics will also be very alarmed and angry about Fr McCafferty’s comments” regarding not approaching Holy Communion.
“I don’t know much about canon law, but I know that such a decision would have to come from Rome,” Kelly stated.
Canon 916 of the Code of Canon Law states that “anyone who is conscious of grave sin may not celebrate Mass or receive the Body of the Lord without previously having been to sacramental confession”; and the previous canon notes that those “who obstinately persist in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to Holy Communion.”
Fr. McCafferty noted, “I have the utmost regard and respect for those persons who, knowing they are living in an irregular situation, present themselves at Mass, during Holy Communion, for a blessing,” saying that “such persons are real men and women of Faith.”
He reiterated that pro-choise politicians “should not receive Holy Communion … until they sincerely repent, seek reconciliation with the Lord and renounce their pro abortion-choice positions.”
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The extent of corruption in the Church is physically nauseating at this stage. Is this predatory monster going to be defrocked of his cardinalatial scarlet and laicized like McCarrick? Is he going to be prosecuted by French authorities under French criminal law for his rape of this 14-year-old girl? Is His Eminence Jean-Pierre Ricard going to be publicly deputed by the appropriate Vatican authorities and the French bishops’ conference to a life of prayer and penance in a strict monastery for his “reprehensible” crimes? Since he is a Bergoglio protege, we can guess what the answers are. And how many more predatory monsters are there among the “princes of the Church”?
I pray for this priest of God and the young woman he abused when she was 14. Sin is real; repentance and remorse are possible; forgiveness and reconciliation are made possible by Christ’s sacrifice on our behalf. We don’t hold people in their sin who have asked forgiveness.
That is the catechism and the most constructive ethos from an anthropological perspective. And we have the directive from Christ, himself. But I do note that Jesus forgive nearly every type of sin while personally present on earth (of course with the injunction to go and sin no more), EXCEPT the sin of corrupting a child.
I hope that you’re not suggesting that this prelate’s sin is unforgivable.
It is if he doesn’t truly repent which, given his age, is reasonably questionable. To suddenly repent decades later? Sorry, but I don’t buy it. If he’s not genuinely repentant he’s goin to Hell.
Is he “repentant” because he got caught. If there is one victim, there’s likely more.
Our Blessed Lord Himself made it clear that it was indeed unforgivable, and that when the corrupter of children was flung into the depths of the sea with a millstone round his neck, into the depths of the sea was precisely where he would stay.
Sir, perhaps more biblical study, and less flaunting to total strangers of your purported diaconate, would be to your spiritual advantage.
I have no authority of absolution. I do wonder what Christ holds in these cases since the clue he left us in the case of leading children astray is ominous.
35 years later at age 78 after a life spent in the highest reaches of the hierarchy? I think it would be irrational to accept simpliciter his “asking forgiveness” now.
While it may seem this HIGH RANKING CHURCHMAN should be commended for coming clean, it is beyond reprehensible that he waited until he had lived out his life in a position of power and ease. He’s 78. He won’t be spending much time in prison for CHILD RAPE. He’ll be dead soon. His victim’s soul was murdered decades ago. May God have mercy on his soul.
11 Bishops in France so far including one cardinal, are being investigated for committing or hiding abuse. What does this say about character and leadership for a people who are defined by the extent to which they follow the character and the ways of doing life as Jesus demonstrated in a clear and decisive manner in how he lived and taught his disciples! I will ask this question. Most people in the modern ‘christian’ west have no idea who Jesus was and is, his character attributes etc etc and who would be the cause of this ignorance? Jesus is a threat to the Catholic Church as it has become, and a threat to the economic paradigm of modern western culture! Just as he was a threat to the power base of the Pharisees and King Herod and that is why he was set up with the Romans to be crucified! Mankind has ‘defined’ god in his own image!
This Cardinal needs to be laicized. Prison is simply not sufficient punishment.
A very different attitude to Cardinal Jean-Pierre Richard is evident in most responses here to the attitude of responses to Cardinal Pell’s series of trials and the ultimate overturning of his conviction. A different response was also evident in Cardinal Pell’s relationship with Ballarat priest serial child abuser Father Ridsdale whom Cardinal Pell lived with and later supported in a court appearance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ridsdale#:~:text=Ridsdale%20was%20born%20at%20St,where%20he%20was%20a%20chaplain.