By Patrick B. Craine
NASHVILLE, Tennessee, August 5, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A priest of the Nashville diocese may be facing canonical discipline after putting out a video on the front of his parish website this week denouncing the Pope and various Church teachings such as those against divorce, contraception, women's ordination, and the married priesthood.
The video, titled 'The State of our Church', is staged as an interview of the priest, Fr. Joseph Patrick Breen, by one of his parishioners at St. Edward's Catholic Church. It appears to be an attempt at reaching out to fallen-away Catholics. The video was picked up Thursday by the blog Creative Minority Report.
“That's the way we are, and that's where the people are,” Fr. Breen explained when asked by LifeSiteNews why he released the video. “You gotta get the bishops to, the Pope to listen to the people – the voice, you might say, of the Spirit – and you see so many people, I do, that quit going to church because there's no response to the necessary changes that should be made.”
Rick Musacchio, director of communications for the Diocese of Nashville told LSN Thursday that Bishop David Choby became aware of the video on Tuesday and “considers it a very serious matter.” “He's in the process of developing a response in light of the canonical disciplines of the Church, and is in the process of arranging a meeting with Fr. Breen to address the matter,” Musacchio explained.
Fr. Breen, however, said he is not afraid of facing discipline. “I'm just telling them what the people think. That's all I'm doing,” he said. “What the people believe, that's what I'm saying.”
In the video, Fr. Breen claims the Church is facing “difficult times” because it has “little or no leadership” with “all the authority” being in Rome. “We respect the Pope, but we owe no obedience as adults except to our conscience, to what we feel is the spirit of God,” he says.
The Church right now is “under the domination of one person in Rome, surrounded by a group of maybe a dozen Cardinals who are not relevant to the needs of the Church at all,” he adds.
Asked by the interviewer how active lay Catholics can help bring back those who have fallen away, Fr. Breen complained that there is “no opportunity in the Catholic Church to have laity and really priests involved in the decision making.”
The priest calls for a petition drive to demand for the ordination of married men, and he urges laity to call the bishop and write letters. “Be very committed to it,” he says. “Demand a change.”
When asked about his dream for the Church in the next five years, he says he hopes the Pope will come out with an apology for the Church's stance on contraception and other issues. Referencing Pope John Paul II's apology for the Galileo affair, he said, “we're not able to wait for this Pope or the next Pope to wait another hundred years to say 'we made a mistake on birth control' or the fact that we do allow women to be at least deacons in the Church” or married men to be priests.
He also expressed concern about the growing number of foreign priests, and cited “authorities in the seminary” to claim that that many of the men entering seminary today are “intellectually inferior to what the standards were in the past.”
Creative Minority Report (CMR) reports that Fr. Breen had been silenced in 1993 by then-Bishop of Nashville Edward Kmiec for the same views. In fact, the priest at one time sent a petition signed by 1,100 lay Catholics to Rome demanding an end to clerical celibacy. In 2006, he presented his various demands in a letter to Cardinal William Levada (“Cardinal Bill”), prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
CMR has called for the priest to be removed from his parish, where he has served for the last 26 years.
Deal Hudson, director of Inside Catholic, says that before being removed the priest should be given the opportunity to retract those remarks that specifically violate Magisterial teaching. “If he refuses to make such a statement, he should be removed from his present position and given time to reflect,” Hudson told LifeSiteNews.
Hudson noted that while Fr. Breen is “speaking his mind without any fear of consequences,” the priest “is only saying in front of a camera what many clergy say privately.”
“The faithful should not be discouraged that clergy say such things from to time, but they should be concerned if such opinions are widely held,” he said. “No doubt a significant minority of clergy think along similar lines, but it is the obligation of both the laity and the bishops to correct with charity such convictions when they are uttered.”
Contact Information:
The Most Reverend David R. Choby
Bishop of Nashville
The Catholic Center
2400 Twenty-first Avenue South
Nashville, TN. 37212
[email protected]