About 1,200 people turned out for Mass at the St Mary's in Exile community on Sunday despite a worldwide ban impose by Brisbane Archbishop John Bathersby on celebrant Fr Peter Kennedy.
Fr Kennedy, who on Friday was banned from preaching, hearing confessions and officiating at weddings, merely shrugged when asked yesterday about plans for the future, The Courier Mail reports.
"It's business as usual," he said, referring to the 500 strong congregation at the morning Mass at the Trades and Labour Council building in South Brisbane yesterday.
"The fact that hundreds of people are here speaks volumes."
Earlier Fr Kennedy described his ban "as a liberation from a corrupt, ruthless and irrelevant hierarchy."
"But we haven't left the Church, we've been pushed out, excluded by our own archbishop.
"If you set yourself up at some other church you can no longer bring about effective change within the (Catholic) Church.
"I know I'm up against a two thousand year old institution, but the Church is imploding all over the world it seems at the moment.
"It's obvious if in Australia 85 percent of Catholics don't go to Mass.
"We've done nothing to deserve this, we're a prophetic community in the sense that we stand with the poor, the excluded, those who are rendered powerless.
"And for that we are given the chop."
Fr Kennedy said arrangements were almost complete for the establishment of a not for profit company - St Mary's Community Ltd - to underpin the affairs of the alienated congregation.
Fr Kennedy's assistant, Fr Terry Fitzpatrick, who has also been banned from conducting services, although only in the Brisbane archdiocese, said he intended staying with the St Mary's in Exile community.
"I understand there may be pressure for my recall to the Toowoomba diocese," he said.
"But for the time being, I'll stay and perform my pastoral responsibilities to the people with whom I've been for 15 years."
Long time church community leader Marg Ortiz said the decrees issued by Archbishop Bathersby, which penalise Fr Kennedy more harshly than convicted pedophile priest Ron McKeirnan, who has been granted special permission by the Catholic Church leader to conduct masses in private, showed a lack of moral fibre.
"If the Church hierarchy allows priests who are pedophiles to say Mass, but ban Peter from doing so for some intellectual dissent, it just shows they have no moral fibre and not a lot of intelligence, frankly," she said.
Mrs Ortiz, who was the co-convenor of the St Mary's South Brisbane Council before Fr Kennedy was sacked as administrator of the church, said the action taken against the St Mary's priests didn't make a scrap of difference.
"They can't take away from Peter or Terry anything that's important to this faith community," she said.
However, the Church's top legal officer, Chancellor Adrian Farrelly, said the suspension was "a very serious matter".
"Fr Kennedy has consistently ignored a series of formal directives, following years of informal requests from the archbishop to conform with universal Catholic practices," Father Farrelly said.
"The Catholic Church has laws that regulate throughout the world the celebration of sacraments and pastoral care of people which Fr Kennedy has continued to flout.
"These present decrees are about ensuring that Catholics within the archdiocese of Brisbane and beyond can continue to have confidence that the sacraments they are obtaining from all priests are celebrated validly and that pastoral practices and teaching are in harmony with accepted church directives."
SOURCE
Supporters mass for de-frocked St Mary's priest (Courier Mail)
Banned priest continues holding Mass (The Daily)
Catholic Church bans Qld's rebel priest (Brisbane Times)
Banned priests defy Rome (Westender)
Banned St Mary's priest Peter Kennedy to keep praying (Courier Mail)
Rebel Brisbane priest slapped with worldwide ban (Brisbane Times)