ABOUT 1200 St Mary's-in-Exile community members turned out for services at the weekend to upport rebel Catholic priest Peter Kennedy.Fr Kennedy, who on Friday was stripped of his holy orders and banned from preaching, hearing confessions and officiating at weddings, merely shrugged when asked yesterday about plans for the future.
"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."
The latest actions against Fr Kennedy by Catholic Archbishop John Bathersby followed Fr Kennedy's sacking in February and the 1000-plus St Mary's South Brisbane congregation setting up a breakaway group.
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."
Longtime 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.
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