ONWARD CHRISTIAN SOLDIER! - Fr. Paul Wickens

Rev. Father Paul WickensTraditional Catholic Priest
St. Anthony of Padua ParishWest Orange, New Jersey

REV. FATHER PAUL WICKENS -- Solemn Pontifical Requiem Funeral Mass will be Offered TODAY

A good and holy priest has been elevated to glory! Stricken shortly before last Lent, he patiently suffered next to the chapel of his (our) Patron Saint* and finally died from esophageal cancer last Thursday afternoon at Overlook Hospital in Summit, NJ.

In your mercy and love, please pray for the repose of the soul of REV. FR. PAUL WICKENS an embattled Traditional Roman Catholic priest -- constantly embroiled with defending The Church while building Her up -- who reposed on July 8, 2004 at age 74.

[* I recommend to you, for his posthumous application, the Chaplet of St. Anthony (BELOW this obit) which was one of Father's daily pious devotions.]

This morning at 10 AM, three priests from the Society of Saint Pius X will offer his Solemn Pontifical Requiem High Mass (Traditional Latin Funeral Mass) at the ST. ANTHONY OF PADUA CHAPEL in West Orange. NJ. He will be buried this rainy morning next to this same Traditional Roman Catholic Latin Mass Chapel which he built and served as founding pastor.

I had the honor of knowing and admiring Father Paul ever since my youth when he was then assigned to St. Venantius RC Parish in Orange, N.J. -- where I was born and raised. There he ministered to many of my immediate family. Although he tried to sway me away from the ultrajectine tradition, he remained a booster of mine when I entered the ORC seminary in New Jersey in 1976. And years later when I served as Chancellor of my ORC Diocese of NJ, he publicly supported my Tridentine Rite posture in our local daily press.

Ordained on June 4, 1955 in the Basilica Cathedral of the Sacred Heart for the Archdiocese of Newark, NJ, Father Paul was almost immediately labeled a "rebel priest" because he dissented against the modernist changes slowly evolving in the RC Church. The renowned Latin Mass advocate became even more vocal with his alarms after Vatican Council II. After the proclamation of the Novus Ordo Missae in 1969 he clamored against the vernacular liturgy for which he blamed the decline in the Roman Catholic Church. Later he would be branded a "maverick priest" when he voiced his discontent and stood up almost alone against the unholy forces which entered The Church Catholic. He wore those diatribes nobly as badges of honor.

Relations between Fr. Paul Wickens and the RCC hierarchy, already fragile, reached a breaking point in 1983. That February, Fr. Wickens held a press conference in Newark, denouncing another novelty resulting from Vatican II -- the introduction of coed sex education into Catholic schools. He contended that it is never permissible to discuss the delicate subject of marital intimacy in classroom settings and that the material was without moral guidance and inappropriate for some age groups. He also loudly protested they were stealing innocence from children and violating the absolute ban on all such classroom instruction that had been imposed by Pope Pius XI in Divini Illius Magistri in 1929. **

[** Little did he realize how much truth he was actually exhorting against these theological dangers of "naturalism" and "sensuality"... and I never had the heart to divulge this to him: Across town at my Our Lady Help of Christians parochial school in East Orange, a young, personable and ruggedly handsome curate priest in my OLHC parish, Fr. David Ernst, was still exploiting and abusing his role as male sex ed instructor to rape scores of my fellow male class mates. The first thing Fr. did was gleefully pull down all our classroom window shades and pass out his pack of smokes. These "classes" also included group show & tell in the little boys room. This popular Boys Glee Club director fancied and styled himself as another Bing Crosby singing "Going My Way". There were very few of Father Dave's troubled boys who did NOT know of Fr. Dave's oral talents. Some of his altar boys were "rewarded" during school time -- usually around 2:30 PM -- with private rides with Father in his small Cessna airplane ejaculated from a local airfield where it was then flown on automatic pilot... (Afterwards I scolded them in disbelief over these scandals, etc. they whispered about to me & the other boys.) I'd estimate his post-ordination crime spree of about 10+ years duration. Several parents reported him to the Chancery Office and the Supt of schools, Msgr Tuith, etc. So eventually the late Archbishop Thomas A. Boland quietly reassigned him to a string of rural parishes within our Essex County. Yet he still maintained his local "boys club/bachelor's pad" in a apt. on South Munn Avenue within our home town. Young male house guests were shuttled to and fro in his jeep. My own accounts over the decades were scoffed, ridiculed and ignored. Utterly disgusted with him, his enablers, his blasé superiors and their novel myriads of liturgical abuses, etc. --- I finally left that Novus Ordo communion in 1975. I was 22 years old when I "transferred rites" to the Old Roman Catholic Ultrajectine Tradition. Here I finally answered my priestly vocation and began my ministry to other "walking wounded." It took a span of three decades before we were ever believed. I often wondered if any of that dead priest's victims ever disclosed their traumas and sought healing. He had free reign for more than a decade as he openly "befriended" hundreds of young boys from any of the nine grades within our OLHC parochial school that he could chose from. Time and distance have kept me in constant prayer for them.]

That's when his liberal Ordinary retaliated. The following month, then-Archbishop Peter L. Gerety of Newark ordered Rev. Wickens reassigned from St. Venantius to a distant outpost in a vain attempt to silence him. When Father Paul refused the unjust demand to leave his rectory -- until a civil court order forced him out -- the Archbishop suspended him.

(Conservatives soon forced the Archbishop's early retirement just three years later in 1986. In reprisal and much belated response, RC Church authorities stipulated to Father Wickens - only two years ago - that the price of his "regularization" by the Archdiocese of Newark would entail his apology to Emeritus-Archbishop Gerity for having resisted him in the matter of sex-instruction.)

....So instead he initially redirected his energies to a newsletter he published wherein he denounced the drastic changes and abuses wrought by Vatican II. He continued the publication in subsequent years using even more pointed language. Over the years he became a prolific author and wrote many books, tracts, and pamphlets devoted to parenting, the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony and the Holy Mass of Time Immemorial, etc.

Father Wickens was one of the first to loudly and widely rail against female altar servers, Holy Communion in the hands of laity or under both species, non-clerics giving the homily, non-scripture readings at Mass, leaving the sanctuary to give the sign of peace, improper purification of sacred vessels, Eucharistic ministers used in non-extraordinary circumstances, elimination of patens, adding prayers to the Mass, etc.

His constant admonitions also entreated "flagrant acts of disobedience" such as "heresy taught in pulpits, Modernist catechism in parochial schools, erotic sex ed in classrooms, unCatholic RENEW and R.C.I.A. programs, subjectivism in morality so common in confessionals, the proliferation of General Absolution in parishes, at weddings, in funeral homes; hospital chaplains who give Communion to anybody regardless of creed, etc."

In 1994, Father Paul Wickens began construction on the Saint Anthony of Padua Chapel in West Orange located at 1360 Pleasant Valley Way in West Orange, NJ, 07052-1313. The church was completed two years later. The Traditional Catholic parish has 900 members, and its three Sunday Masses typically draws 500 worshippers on any given Sunday or Holy Day of Obligation. It is one of the most spacious and most beautiful Traditional Catholic chapels in the country!

The local church hierarchy was very resentful of the large crowds which flocked to his Latin Masses from around the tri-states area -- and even more so that he led the national Tridentine Rite Conference. In a 1997 interview, a spokesman for then-Newark Archbishop Theodore McCarrick (now Cardinal in Washington, D.C.) said Rev. Wickens' chapel was not a legitimate Roman Catholic entity. "He had no authorization to build it, to say Mass, to hear confessions or to preach. Those faculties were suspended in 1983 and have never been reinstated," said the spokesman, Michael Hurley.

Like my seminary sponsor, the late ORCC Msgr. Charles G. Scalzitti used to say, "Every knock is a boost." Not that Fr. Paul needed such free publicity. He most certainly never deserved it. But he patiently endured it despite the vicious onslaughts. Well done, Father! You were always an upright example of spiritual courage to me and the epitome of a manly Catholic priest.

Rev. Wickens is survived by four devoted brothers in NJ, Albert of Madison, Joseph of Roselle Park, John of Roseland and James of Westfield, and three loving sisters in NJ, Mary Meade of Ocean Grove, Barbara Wickens of Cranford and Jean Sexton of Westfield.

"Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine. Ex lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace. Anima ejus, et animae omnium fidelium defunctorum per misericordiam Dei requiescant in pace. Amen." -- (Sequence: "Dies irae")

Incline Thine ear, O Lord, unto our prayers, wherein we humbly implore Thy mercy upon the soul of Thy servant, whom Thou hast commanded to pass out of this world, that Thou mayest place him in the region of peace and light, in fellowship with Thy saints. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Mary, Mother of God and Mother of mercy, pray for us and for all who have died in God’s embrace.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him. May he rest in peace. Amen.

And may the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace, Amen.

THE CHAPLET OF SAINT ANTHONY OF PADUA
(After each of the 13 petitions, recite one Our Father, one Hail Mary, and one Glory Be.)

1. St. Anthony, who raiseth the dead, pray for those Christians now in their agony, and for our dear departed.

2. St. Anthony, zealous preacher of the Gospel, fortify us against the errors of the enemies of God, and pray for the Pope and the Church.

3. St. Anthony, powerful with the Heart of Jesus, preserve us from the calamities which threaten us on account of our sins.

4. St. Anthony, who drivest away devils, make us triumph over their snares.

5. St. Anthony, lily of heavenly purity, purify us from the stains of the soul and preserve our bodies from all dangers.

6. St. Anthony, healer of the sick, cure our diseases and preserve us in health.

7. St. Anthony, guide of travelers, bring to safe harbor those who are in danger of perishing, and calm the troubled waves of passion which agitate our souls.

8. St. Anthony, liberator of captives, deliver us from the captivity of evil.

9. St. Anthony, who restorest to young and old the use of their limbs, obtain for us the perfect use of the senses of our body and the faculties of our soul.

10. St. Anthony, finder of lost things, help us to find all that we lost in the spiritual and temporal order.

11. St. Anthony, protected by Mary, avert the dangers which threaten our body and our soul.

12. St. Anthony, helper of the poor, help us in our needs and give bread and work to those who ask.

13. St. Anthony, we thankfully proclaim thy miraculous power, and we beseech thee to protect us all the days of our life.