Michael Cox (bishop)

Michael Patrick O'Connor Cox (born c. 1945) is an Irish independent bishop. He is the best known member of the Traditionalist Catholic "Tridentine" movement in Ireland and is also known for ordaining the singer Sinéad O'Connor. He is the founder and bishop superior of the Irish Orthodox Catholic and Apostolic Church, which is "his own religious order".

Cox was an Irish soldier and a Dún Laoghaire harbour policeman.

Cox was consecrated as a bishop in 1978 by Ciarán Broadbery,who in turn was consecrated in 1977 by Clemente Domínguez y Gómez of the independent Palmarian Catholic Church. Domínguez was consecrated in January 1976 by Archbishop Ngô Đình Thục of the Roman Catholic Church. In September 1976, Thục, and those he had ordained, were excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church.

Cox offered Tridentine Masses at Monkstown, County Dublin, in the mid-1980s.

Cox's church is St Coleman's, in the townland of Cree near Birr, County Offaly.

In May 1998, Cox consecrated a Roman Catholic priest, Patrick Buckley, as a bishop. According to a British journal, The Tablet,, it was said at the time that Buckley's consecration was "valid but illicit" but that the Catholic Media Office of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales "has now said that it doubts that the bishop's episcopal consecration is valid". Irish issues within the Roman Catholic Church, however, fall under the jurisdiction of the Irish Catholic Bishops' Conference; in June 1998, Jim Cantwell, director of the Irish Catholic Press and Information Office, said that Cox's consecration of Buckley was valid but illicit.

In April 1999, Cox ordained female rock singer Sinéad O'Connor as a priest. Her ordination ceremony, after six weeks of theological study, was held in a Lourdes hotel bedroom. O'Connor then assumed the religious name of "Mother Bernadette Mary".

In 2001, Cox planned to convert his 75-foot (23 m) commercial fishing trawler, called The Little Bishop, into "a mobile floating church, offering on-board marriages and baptisms to people around the British Isles." Cox planned to protest against the ship being sailed into Ireland by the pro-choice feminist group Women on Waves. In 2004, Cox's 84-foot (26 m) trawler, called The Patriarch, caught fire while underway and sank. Cox also planned to use The Patriarch as a church.

In 2011, Cox was a candidate in the general election for the Laois–Offaly constituency, coming last with 60 votes.

In 2013, a District Court judge requested that the Garda Síochána investigate a marriage conducted by Cox for a 17-year-old Traveller youth and his partner. Civil marriages in Ireland require that the participants are over 18, or have a Court Exemption Order if this is not the case. Cox states that such weddings conducted by him are religious, not civil, and that there is no religious reason why somebody 16 years old should not get married.

I recognise their [Traveller] customs and appreciate them. Anyone who asks why I do what I do- I tell them that I make it clear the wedding ceremony is purely religious. I do not register marriage with the state.

— Michael Cox,

Cox insists on parental consent and parents being present at the ceremony.