This letter was written in 1975 by the faithful priest, Father Denis O’Brien Buckley to his bishop, expressing his concerns over the new Mass and other reforms of the post-conciliar period.
It is prefaced by an introduction from Silvester Donald McLean, who was founder and editor of the traditionalist newspaper, “Catholic”, which ran from 1982 to 2000.
People who have remained faithful to the Mass of all Times from the ’70s onwards in Australia will remember the name of Father Denis O’Brien Buckley. Those who knew him will know of the difficulties he
suffered. Some of those difficulties are detailed in the letter reproduced here.
Not long after he wrote this letter to his Bishop, he was told that he was no longer wanted in the Diocese of Townsville. He set up a chapel in his parents home soon after his father died in 1976. From there he became known throughout the country as one of the few priests who were actively defending the Old Mass.
Most countries had just a few priests who remained faithful to their ordination oath: we might indeed call them hero-priests, and this is a fitting description of Fr Buckley.
For a time Fr Buckley operated The Catholic Research Centre which inserted paid advertisements in the Brisbane daily The Courier-Mail, until forces conspired to prevent them appearing. He also printed many
pamphlets as funds permitted. But it also has to be said that he was not very successful, no more than the many other priests who tried to fulfil their priestly vocation by staying faithful to the Old Mass.
Fr Buckley contracted a particularly painful cancer, a trial which he accepted with resignation. His illness caused him to lose more than half his body weight, from around 150 pounds (70kg) to less than 70 pounds (32kg). Our Lord took this priest of God to his eternal reward six years ago, on June 10 1988, the Feast of the Sacred Heart.
Please pray for the soul of Fr Buckley, for God knows all the prayers that will be offered for every soul at the time of judgement.
And his Bishop? Fr Buckley’s letter had little effect on him. He went on to become Archbishop of Adelaide, and was Australia’s leading proponent of ‘inclusive language ‘ in the liturgy.
1st March 1975
Most Rev. L A Faulkner, D.D.
Bishop of Townsville
My Lord Bishop,
I have just arrived home (yesterday) from overseas, and I will be in the Diocese of Townsville as soon as I can manage it, as there are some matters I must attend first.
As you know, I followed your advice and went to the St John of God Brothers Hospital (in Sydney) in May last year for mental examination. Their doctor did not admit me as a patient, and after treating me as an out-patient, finally said that as far as he could discover, there was nothing wrong with my mental processes, and that he would issue a certificate to that effect to anyone who required it. He was going to
advise you accordingly.
So I was cleared, but the problem is still there. You remember I told you three years ago that I didn’t know what was going on —- I wasn’t leaving the Church as far as I know, but the Church was certainly leaving me. I didn’t know how else to put it. I had been ordained into a Church that believed and taught certain very definite things, and acted in a certain very common sense and satisfying way— and here it was believing and teaching and acting differently, and in a most unsatisfying and distressing way.
I told you there were times when I felt ashamed to be a priest — and I never thought I’d ever feel that way. The Church was actually questioning and contradicting its own previous teachings, and permitting and promoting things that had been explicitly forbidden and anathematized in the past.
You remember I said to you in April 1977 that if before our ordination we had said we could refer to bread and wine on the altar after the Consecration in the Mass, we would never have been ordained — and yet that is what is done now. This can’t be the Catholic Mass — even the Protestants see that because they use the English Eucharistic Prayers as their service.
I asked you why we say “your people and your ministers” and not “your people and your Priests”, because I was ordained a Priest, not a minister. Were we not supposed to regard ourselves as Priests now?
How could we now, with the blessing of the Church, involve ourselves in communicatio in sacris1 which the Church has always taught was illicit, being formal co-operation in an evil act, and forbidden by the natural law? Was the Church wrong about this in the past?
It was an insult to our intelligence to make out, as has been made out, that nothing has really changed. Of course it was changed and most dishonestly; but because of our promise of obedience we were prepared to believe that we must accept anything we were told by authority in the Church. We should all be very angry that our obedience has been abused by making us agree to heresy.
The thing that shocked me most when I realised it was the Mass had been so tampered with. Every time the Priest says the words of Consecration over the wine in English (and who now uses anything else?) he tells a lie.
He says that Our Lord’s words were “. . . It will be shed for you and for all men.” The Gospels say Our Lord said “shed for many”. The Catechism of the Council of Trent says:
“With reason were the words ‘for all’ not used, as in this place the fruits of the Passion are alone spoken of, and to the elect only did His Passion bring the fruit of salvation.”
And this is the purport of the Apostle when he says: “Christ was offered once to exhaust the sins of many” and also the words of Our Lord in John: “I pray for them: I pray for the world, but for them whom thou hast given Me, because they are Thine.”
Not only is it a lie to say that Our Lord said “for all men”, but if the Priest uses these words he attacks the Mystical Body. The Mass is not for all men, but only for the members of the Mystical Body. This is simple Catholic doctrine. So if this form of worship is being offered for all men, it cannot be the Mass.
(See footnote)
What more sacrilegious way to make the Mass invalid than to put a lie in the words of Consecration?
Would Our Lord be involved in condoning a lie? How could the Real Presence be there?
Even if this made it only doubtfully invalid, a Priest is seriously forbidden to confect a doubtful Sacrament — again Catholic doctrine.
The day I found that out, eight months ago, was the last day I had anything to do with the Novus Ordo. I went back to the Mass I was certain of.
When the psychiatrist, Dr Pasfield, was able to assure me that I was thinking perfectly straight, then it was one of two things: either the Catholic Church had gone mad, and therefore Our Lord had abandoned it, which would rule that out, or this was not really the Catholic Church speaking at all, but heretics had somehow got inside the Church and were speaking in its name.
This also seemed crazy, but at the time I’d forgotten, if I ever knew, that in 1910 Pope Saint Pius X had warned the Bishops that this very thing was facing them: “ . . . internal enemies who in alliance with the chief enemies of the Church are aiming at the ruin of the Faith.” Pope Pius IX and Pope Leo XIII had warned of the same thing.
That’s why I went overseas, My Lord, to Rome, Switzerland, France, the U.K. and the U.S.A., to check on this unbelievable situation. And everywhere I went the Catholics I met said the same thing: “Unbelievable.” They found it just incredible that the Catholic Church was getting to be just another Protestant sect; even more incredible that the Bishops were doing nothing to prevent it — were even doing the very things that would bring it about.
The Catholics angriest about all this were the converts. They knew at first hand what Protestantism was and had left it precisely to become Catholic; and now they were expected; commanded, to become and
think like Protestants again. They were now directed to accept, in the Novus Ordo Missae what they clearly recognised as their former Protestant communion service. Of course they have have refused their
substitute for the Mass — when they can’t attend a Catholic Mass they certainly don’t go to the Novus Ordo.
Everywhere people complained at all the things that were being allowed to humiliate the Church and take away its image. They blame the Bishops and Priests for it. We have never in our lifetime been regarded with such contempt as now. One leading Catholic in San Francisco told me: “Anyone who trusts a priest today is a nut,” and he has reason to be was very savage when he said it. Truly, every priest has to be angry at what has happened to us.
Sadly enough, I heard of no Bishop, Priest or lay person who had enough concern about what was happening to the Church to go and find out. No wonder everyone is ignorant, and doing nothing about it –but this is absolutely no doubt the Church is meant to be destroyed and its enemies are working hard at it.
In the five months I was away I gathered an immense amount of documented facts which show to anyone who is honest that the Church has been “got at”, very cleverly. The Mass has been mutilated so that many of the clergy overseas no longer believe in the Real Presence.
Changes have been made in the matter and form of the Sacraments which bring into doubt the validity of at least some of them. Heresies
which have been condemned by name by the Church in the past are now presented as Catholic truth or at least “acceptable to Catholic thinking.”
The Catholic Church is no longer thought of as the repository of all religious truth, but we have something to learn from the heretics and pagans. And so on and on. And in the USA in the last five years the Church has lost 3000 Priests, and in the last ten years 40,000 nuns and 533 Catholic High Schools. Surely there’s a connection.
Anyway my Lord, I don’t intend to have anything more to do with the new religion, no matter who commands or authorises it; and that is in accord with the oath we all took at our ordination.
As you know, I have been a Priest of the Diocese of Townsville for twenty-six years. You asked me when we met at the Seminary (Banyo) in September if I was still saying my Office. I have never deliberately missed an hour of the Office since my sub-diaconate; nor have I ever missed attending a single Mass if I could be there, as I think you know.
My one aim in life has been to look after my own soul and any others I could; and in this crisis in the Church, knowing what I do know, I am more determined than ever that I won’t be cheated out of Heaven anyway.
So if I am to continue to serve in the Diocese it can only be on the conditions the Diocese agreed to ordain me in 1948 — to offer the Mass in the rite to which I swore an oath to be faithful; to administer the Sacraments in the Catholic way which was the only way before they were mutilated by licence of the Second Vatican Council; to teach and preach orthodox Catholic truth and devotions and to have nothing to do with Modernism of any kind.
If My Lord, you feel bound by some agreement with the Australian National College of Bishops not to allow me to work in the Diocese in that way, then that is your decision. I shall carry on my priestly work for my own parents to whom I owe so much for my Priesthood, and for the many other people I know who value their Faith.
I would hope that what I have written My Lord, will make you determined to look into what is going on in the Church as I have done. In a matter as serious as this, surely you owe it toyourself and the Priests and Religious and people of the Diocese. I assure you that you will find things very wrong.
People overseas asked me: “Is there an honest Bishop in your country who will come over here to see what is happening and do some about it?” They have no hope of their own Bishops saving the Church.
The one thing that should strike everyone as significant is the hatred shown for the true Mass. It is literally true that any kind of sentimental, unlawful, blasphemous performance of the Novus Ordo can take place anywhere, with communion handed around in baskets by nuns to children who are told to help themselves — any disrespect, irreverence or sacrilege is allowed without restriction; apparently no one cares.
But let a Priest try to offer the Sacrifice of the Mass in the presence of a few devout Catholics, the Mass for which the English Martyrs died, and he is persecuted as though he were a traitor to the Church. It is the same hatred of the Mass as at the Reformation, but now in the name of the Church! How could Our Lord’s Church treat His Sacrifice like that?
The Mass is the clue to what is happening in the Church today. My Lord. They tried to destroy the Mass at the Reformation by outlawing it, but after the Reformation it was still there, to come down to us. This time they have slyly changed it into a non-Mass, while having everyone think nothing has been changed.
So the grace of the Mass has gone for most clergy and people throughout the English-speaking world at least. No wonder there is serious trouble in the Church and the world.
My Lord, those Catholics who know all this are very angry that they have been robbed. When all Catholics know it, as they are going to, their anger will make things very hard for those in authority who should have stopped this disaster. Even in your own interest and that of the Episcopacy generally, My Lord, please do something about it before it’s too late. You surely must realise what a dangerous situation this is.
I couldn’t avoid writing at this length My Lord, and this is only a fraction of what could be said. I hope to be in the Diocese about March 12, and meanwhile ask your blessing.
I am, My Lord, Your obedient servant.
Father Denis O’Brien Buckley.
- The participation of Catholics in the worship, sacraments, or liturgical celebrations of non-Catholic Christians ↩︎
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