A former Catholic priest has slammed Shane MacGowan’s funeral as a “3-hour concert and circus”.
‘Independent’ bishop Pat Buckley, who was ex-communicated from the Catholic Church in 1998 after being ordained a bishop “without a pontifical mandate”, wrote a lengthy blog post following the former Pogues frontman’s requiem mass at St Mary's of the Rosary Church in Nenagh, Co Tipperary last Friday.
The star-studded service saw the likes of Johnny Depp, Nick Cave, Gerry Adams, and Michael D. Higgins line out to pay their respects to the musician.
His career was also celebrated throughout the mass, with loved ones hopping over pews to dance in the church aisles during Glen Hansard and Lisa O’Neill’s rendition of Fairytale of New York.
Writing about the spectacle on his blog, which aims to expose the “corruption, abuse and criminality in the Roman Catholic Church”, Buckley noted that MacGowan's funeral was unlike the average requiem mass.
“Shane MacGowan’s funeral highlighted one fact, and that fact is that within the Roman Catholic Church, there is one rule for the rich and famous and another rule for the ordinary man and woman,” he wrote.
“Every day, at funerals the length and breadth of Ireland, bossy priests dictate to bereaved families about what music they are allowed, what readings they can have, what items can be in the Offertory Procession and the time and content of a eulogy.
“But in Nenagh on Friday all rules were flung to the wind and quite literally the MacGowans and their friends could have done what they liked, and the priests would have hollered and clapped.
“That has left a lot of people very angry.”
Buckley, who is based in Larne, shared a message from a Waterford priest who had written to him in anger, venting that MacGowan’s vibrant funeral service was “not great” as the Eucharist remained in the tabernacle throughout the mass.
It highlighted how “anything goes” for celebrities participating in Catholic sacraments.
“It gives out a very clear message to ‘ordinary folk’ that if you are rich and famous, anything goes at a requiem mass.
“I pity people tomorrow who will bury a loved one and can’t have ONE song that the family have requested.
“The Bishops on this island need to speak up and out NOW.”
Buckley agreed, adding: “The MacGowan Funeral Mass was turned into a 3-hour concert and circus.”
It comes as West Belfast parish priest Fr Paddy McCafferty described MacGowan’s funeral as a ‘scandal’.
“It was an abuse of what mass is and what the Catholic funeral liturgy is all about,” the Corpus Christi clergyman told Belfast Live.
“The introduction of all these elements into that funeral mass frankly was a scandal and it shouldn’t have happened.
“If they wanted to have that sort of event they could have hired a hall somewhere and did all that.
“He was a good man in his own way and he was entitled to a funeral mass as every baptised Catholic is, but all of that stuff should have been kept out of the mass, there is no place for that in the mass at all.
“It was an abuse of the liturgy and it showed a completely askew understanding of what we actually are doing when we celebrate a funeral mass.”
Fr McCafferty added that he was particularly unimpressed with the Fairytale of New York performance after communion, describing it as “totally out of place”.
“The words that are used in that song and in the church showed no understanding of the sacredness of what the place is and the holiness of the mass.
“It was completely inappropriate to say the least, to the point of scandal and something needs to be done about these so-called celebrity funerals in a Catholic church. If people don’t want that then go somewhere else.
“I watched maybe a couple of minutes and thought, ‘my goodness, I couldn’t watch any more of that’.
“We’re not there to entertain, we’re there to celebrate the worship of God and lead people in the worship of God. I wouldn’t allow that in my church.”