Pope Fest 2010: The Birmingham Three Are Vanished
POPE Fest 2010 News: The Birmingham Three – what news of the exiled priests, banished in readiness for the Pope’s visit? The three have been despatched “to spend time in prayer for an indefinite period”.
Will the period end when the papal visit is over? Is concealment and secrecy part of the allure of the Catholic faith? Why have then been vanished?
Jack Valero is the spokesman for the Birmingham Oratory. He tells the BBC’s Sunday Sequence that the “Birmingham Three” are embroiled in a tale of “pride, anger, disobedience, disunity, nastiness, dissension, the breakdown of charity.”
He adds:
“Very serious things were going on inside that house.”
He goes on:
“When the [Apostolic] Visitation started in April 2009 … the [Apostolic] vistor, Fr Felix Selden, found the community in Birmingham disintegrating. Its very existence was actually threatened. This man is not an autocrat, as he has been portrayed in the papers or on the blogs. This is a man who went in there and spent a year, from April 2009 to April 2010, trying to help them to sort themselves out privately because these were private discentions [sic] within the community, and when this wasn’t working, he said, ‘Well, I need to do something . . . this community is in danger.’ So he thought, well, the answer is for some to absent from this community for a while. But this ‘Free the Birmingham Three’ campaign — what is the meaning of this? These three men are not prisoners. They can come and go as they please, they can do pastoral work, they are priests in good standing, they can study, they can publish articles, they can visit friends, their movements are not restrained — what does it mean?”
What does it mean? Father Dermot Fenlon, Father Philip Cleevely and Brother Lewis Berry, tell us.
Spotter: Yampster.
Posted: 1st, September 2010 | In: Reviews Comment (1) | TrackBack | Permalink
