Schism in San Antonio: a priest laicized and excommunicated

A former priest of the Archdiocese of San Antonio, in Texas, has been found guilty of schism, dismissed from the clerical state and struck with excommunication. He stands charged with having refused submission to the Roman Pontiff and with having publicly branded Popes Francis and Leo XIV « usurpers ».

A tribunal of three judges — priests holding doctorates in canon law, none of them belonging to this archdiocese — handed down the sentence on 20 April 2026, at the close of a trial opened on 10 April 2025 in which the accused was granted a promoter of justice and an advocate for his defence. The tribunal had been authorised by the Roman dicastery for the doctrine of the faith. The archbishop made the decision public on 14 August. The excommunication, he specifies, is « latae sententiae »: incurred of itself by the man's own schismatic acts, and he has renounced any appeal.

The judgment of tradition falls not upon persons but upon acts. Schism, Saint Thomas teaches, is the sin of the man who cuts himself off from the unity of the Church by refusing submission to the Roman Pontiff, the visible head that Christ gave to His Body. Boniface VIII defined it in express terms: it is of necessity for salvation to be subject to the Roman Pontiff. The very Canon of the Roman Mass binds the priest to this communion, for it makes him pray « una cum famulo tuo Papa nostro », in union with our Pope; to strike that name out is to manifest publicly one's separation from the See of Peter.

As for the prophetic « messages » the group invokes, the perennial rule is constant: every private revelation remains subject to the judgment of the Church and can never arm anyone against his lawful pastors. To publish them against the bishop's express prohibition, and then to go on celebrating Mass despite the interdict received, is not to obey God: it is the disobedience that the Faith condemns.

The archbishop has accordingly forbidden any Catholic to attend any Mass, ceremony or gathering held by the man or by the suppressed apostolate, holding such participation to be « a formal act of disobedience », and he has urged the faithful to cease supporting him financially. The dispute went back to « messages » attributed since 2016 to a member of the community, which the group had begun to circulate in early 2024 without approval; the bishop had then withdrawn the priest's faculties and suppressed the work by a letter of March 2024.

Sources. Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, IIa-IIae, q. 39, on the sin of schism; Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566), on the unity of the Church under one head; the bull Unam Sanctam of Boniface VIII (1302); the Roman Canon of the Mass, the prayer Te igitur (« una cum famulo tuo Papa nostro »).