Posted on 11/19/2020 6:20:37 PM PST by marshmallow
COVID-19 rules in Ireland prohibit gatherings for ‘religious or other reasons.’
CAVAN, Ireland, November 19, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — Irish police are threatening a Catholic priest with prosecution because of his refusal to turn people away when they arrived for Mass.
Under the current law, the Irish government is expressly forbidding gatherings for “religious or other reasons” and threatening priests with a fine of €2,500 and/or six months imprisonment should they attempt to offer public Mass. The law has come about as part of the Level 5 lockdown currently enforced across the country.
Speaking to the AngloCelt, which reported on the story, Fr. P.J. Hughes mentioned that “somebody reported me,” which led to his Masses becoming known to the local bishop and the civil authorities.
Fr. Hughes’ superior, Bishop Francis Duffy, had contacted the priest last week after receiving a complaint from a parishioner that he was saying Mass with people present. Duffy reportedly told Fr. Hughes that he was in “dangerous territory.”
Fr. Hughes told the AngloCelt, “I have continued to say Mass because I feel it is our Constitutional right to practise our religion,” and also mentioned that when members of his congregation would arrive at church, he “did not chase them away.”
He noted that the church had taken all the measures required by the government in the face of COVID-19 and that people in the church are “just there to pray and go home.”
Based in Mullahoran, Cavan, in the Diocese of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise, Fr. Hughes was approached by two police officers before offering Mass this past Sunday, who informed him he was breaking the law.
Shortly after Mass ended, four officers appeared, stating that “a file would be prepared for the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), meaning that he may be prosecuted for.......
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God canceled ... due to Covid-19
The Irish have lost their spine since giving in to the Brits.
A regular Nazi pastime.
The ones with balls came to America.
Something that hasn't happened since the Elizabethan Age, when Catholic families had to hide Priests from the Protestant officials.
Free Staters...
What a sad decline for what was once “the land of saints and scholars”
Now it is a mini-England with only better accents, well on the road to being just as secular
The faithful will have to go back to the hedge schools and the Mass rocks in the wilderness.
And dust off the priest holes in the old houses.
Covid Cromwellians aka Pandemic Puritans
The good Irish emigrated to the USA over a hundred years ago and left the dregs behind. My kin were amoung those who arrived in the US during the 1800’s worked off their indebtedness and went to work building a great nation, and populating it with their feisty kids.
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