(CNN) – A Catholic priest has gone to court, saying the partial government shutdown is preventing him from providing religious services– even voluntarily– on a U.S. military base.
Father Ray Leonard filed a lawsuit Monday in federal district court in Washington, saying he “wishes to continue practicing his faith and ministering to his faith community free of charge… but has been told that he is subject to arrest if he does so.”
Leonard is a newly hired civilian employee, scheduled to start work October 1 to provide Catholic religious services at the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in Georgia.
The priest was one of thousands of civilian military employees and contractors furloughed because of the failure of Congress to reach a deal on funding the federal government. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has since recalled some Defense Department workers, but civilian military chaplains were excluded.
Leonard and co-plaintiff Fred Naylor, a veteran who attends Catholic services, said their First Amendment right of religious expression and outreach was being violated. (source)
The weekend before last I was experiencing car problems and thought about just walking to the chapel on base for Mass. Good thing I checked their Facebook first since it turned out Mass was canceled and continues to be.
I do wonder if any of these military bases affected had arranged for transportation of service members to a nearby parish? Especially for those Catholics living in barracks without cars. Of those in this situation I wonder how many are aware how serious the obligation is to attend Mass?
Not being a Canon lawyer and having not even played one on television I still wonder about the canonical questions regarding this obligation (Canon 1247, 1248). I would think just because the closest convenient parish was closed would not be a sufficient grave cause when other parishes are available in the area. I faced this question myself realizing that just because our car wasn’t working didn’t mean we couldn’t call a taxi. Thankfully we did end up getting a ride to Mass that day.
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The priest at our local Air Force base (at which I happen to work) found an ingenious solution to the problem: he simply traded places with the priest from a small town near the base, with the town pastor coming on to the base for Sunday Mass and the chaplain taking his masses at the local parish. There is, after all, no law against a non-employee priest saying Mass on the base.
Deacon…thank you for a non paranoid moment in this while many in the Catholic blogs are going koo koo in the conspiratorial direction which completely lets the tea party off the hook for the shut down in general.
Nobody should be let off the hook for this.
The fact that this happened at all is sad enough.
Jeff: in answer to your question, the problem wasn’t just that the base parish was closed — many military people have very tight schedules and a very small window of time available for Mass. So even if Mass was available nearby and the military folks had transportation to it (they don’t all have cars), it might have been at a time when they were required to be doing something else. That was part of the problem.