Excommunicate the Trad, Bless the DJ

Leo’s synodal Church finds its courage for traditional bishops, not abusers, kidnappers, or heretics

A Bishop in the Shadows, a Hammer from Tucho

In March 2024, the retired Archbishop Telesphore Mpundu of Lusaka quietly consecrated Fr Anthony Ward as a bishop in the traditional Roman rite. Mpundu is a lifetime Novus Ordo prelate, ordained priest in 1972 and bishop in 1987, who led the Zambian bishops and then slipped into early retirement at seventy without explanation.

Ward, formerly of the SSPX and ordained by Lefebvre, founded the Servants of the Holy Family in Colorado in 1977. The Diocese of Colorado Springs long ago declared his group “not in good standing,” but he has spent decades doing the obvious “crime”: forming priests in the old rite and ignoring the postconciliar circus.

On November 16, 2025, Ward told his faithful that he and Mpundu had received letters from Víctor Manuel “Tucho” Fernández, head of the doctrinal dicastery, declaring that both had incurred latae sententiae excommunication for episcopal consecration without papal mandate. The same Rome that cannot bring itself to discipline German bishops proposing same-sex blessings and women priests can move very fast when a traditional bishop quietly appears on the map.

Deny the moral law and you get a listening session. Consecrate a bishop in the old rite and you get the firing squad. The message is unmistakable: there may be endless doctrinal experimentation, but there may not be a parallel traditional hierarchy that could outlast the experiment.

Bass Drops at the Cathedral

While Ward’s chapel in Colorado receives Rome’s wrath, the Establishment’s preferred “new evangelization” looks very different.

In Košice, Slovakia, the Church celebrated Archbishop Bernard Bober’s seventy-fifth birthday by turning St Elisabeth’s Cathedral into a nightclub backdrop. Portuguese priest-DJ Padre Guilherme set up outside the Gothic façade with club lights, lasers, and an electronic set, while a giant video of Leo XIV blessing the crowd was projected onto the cathedral walls.

This is held up as creative mission. The image of the Vicar of Christ becomes part of the visual effects package for a dance track. No one in Rome is drafting decrees about “scandal” there.

The contrast is brutal. A hidden episcopal consecration in the traditional rite is treated as a threat to unity; a rave against a cathedral front, complete with papal projection, is treated as a model of outreach.

Women at the Altar, Protestants as Role Models

Leo has now appointed Yohanes Hans Monteiro, a liturgy doctorate from the University of Vienna, as bishop of Larantuka in Indonesia. The Vatican biography is safely anodyne. It omits that in 2024 he co-authored a paper arguing that the Church could, and likely will, change its teaching to ordain women.

Monteiro openly complains that the Church is “far behind” other Christian communities and asks whether their worship is any less accepted by Christ because they ordain women. He insists no one is harmed if women are ordained, calls Ordinatio sacerdotalis a regression, and predicts that tradition “will change” sooner or later.

In other words, a man who publicly undermines what John Paul II taught as definitive doctrine now receives the fullness of the priesthood from Leo’s hands. The old rule survives: if you attack tradition, you advance. If you defend it with a bishop’s mitre, you are cast out.

Mother Earth at the Offertory

The new metropolitan of Edmonton, Archbishop Stephen Hero, comes with a similar pattern. In May 2025, the Saskatchewan bishops, including Hero, issued a directive on “Liturgy and Inculturation for Indigenous and Métis Celebrations.” On paper, it talks about healing, listening, and excellent liturgy. In practice, it sanctions drums at Mass as symbols of “Mother Earth’s heartbeat,” sweetgrass or sage as “hair of Mother Earth” in place of incense, smudging before the Eucharist to connect with ancestors and the land, and prayers to the four directions in a Christian sanctuary.

This invites Catholics to experience the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass inside an earth-spirituality framework, with a baptized language of “Mother Earth” layered on top. The same establishment that recoils in horror from a maniple and a Roman chasuble at the old Mass nods calmly at rituals whose theology comes straight from pagan cosmology.

Synodality Without a Spine

Sr Nathalie Becquart, Leo’s favorite evangelist of synodality, recently assured a German outlet that resistance to the synodal process comes from fear and ignorance; once people “experience” it, they convert. She stressed that Leo wants no “uniform model,” that local realities must be respected, that some regions will move faster than others, and that we should expect even greater diversity of ministries in future.

Translated, this means Germany and Belgium can sprint ahead with women’s ministries, LGBT blessings, and lay governance while Africa and Asia are instructed to be patient and eventually acclimate. There is no uniform model when it comes to doctrinal experimentation. But when a bishop dares to ordain in the traditional rite, suddenly Rome discovers ultramontanism and uniformity again.

When Chastity Becomes a Hate Crime

The Spanish state is playing the same game from the other side. Prosecutors in Madrid have opened a preliminary investigation into Bishop José Ignacio Munilla for “hate offenses” after he criticized Spain’s ban on so-called conversion therapies and defended the right of Catholics with same-sex attraction to receive help in living chastely.

Munilla did not call for coercion. He simply stated that psychologists and pastors who support chastity are threatened by law and that such bans violate freedom of religion and conscience. For this, an activist group dragged him into the hate-crimes framework.

So a bishop who repeats the Catechism finds himself treated as a potential felon, while bishops who campaign against that same Catechism sit on synodal committees and draft pastoral guidelines.

Children in Chains, Rome in Denial

While the Western church plays with LEDs and listening sessions, real persecution is grinding on elsewhere.

In Nigeria’s Niger State, armed men stormed St Mary’s Catholic Primary and Secondary Schools in Papiri in the early hours of November 21, abducting an estimated 315 students and staff from a school run by the Sisters of Our Lady of Apostles. The sisters have begged the global Church for prayer. Parents are left wandering empty dormitories and classrooms, staring at the beds where their children slept the night before.

And this is not an isolated atrocity. Nigeria has endured wave after wave of religiously targeted violence in recent years: coordinated assaults on churches and villages, priests kidnapped or murdered, whole communities driven from their land by jihadist militias and radicalized Fulani herders. Local bishops describe a deliberate campaign to expel Christian populations from entire regions.

Yet when the topic reaches Rome, the language suddenly becomes very careful. While the Vatican choreographs its ecological pageants and synodal press conferences, the Secretary of State assures the world that the slaughter of Christians “is not a religious conflict.” Cardinal Parolin, ever the diplomat, explains that the bloodshed is really “a social” problem, a set of unfortunate “disputes between herders and farmers.” The same Vatican that can issue solemn warnings about “microaggressions” against the environment somehow cannot bring itself to say plainly that Christians are being hunted and killed because they are Christians.

So a Catholic school is emptied by armed men; thousands of believers have been displaced, maimed, or buried in mass graves; clergy have been shot, burned, or taken for ransom. The blood of martyrs cries out from Nigerian soil, and Rome hears only the “cry of the earth.”

Abuse Victims Versus the Papal Machine

In Peru, abuse survivors from Chiclayo have issued a devastating public statement. As children, they say, they were abused by Fr Eleuterio Vásquez González. They report that, after years of negligence, Leo has now granted him a dispensation from the clerical state without any serious canonical investigation or trial.

The victims say the preliminary inquiry was a “joke,” that they were manipulated into seeing the dispensation as a victory, and that in reality it shuts down their case forever. Without a canonical judgment, they remain publicly vulnerable to those who call them liars, while the priest is quietly removed from the clerical roll and spared any formal condemnation.

This touches Leo’s own record in Chiclayo, where his handling of abuse allegations has already raised severe questions. The rhetoric of zero tolerance dissolves into a paper maneuver that removes a problem priest while leaving the victims without justice.

One Church, Two Religions

Put the week together and the pattern is painfully clear.

A traditional bishop is excommunicated. A priest-DJ is celebrated for turning a cathedral into a dance venue. A man who advocates women’s ordination is made a bishop. A bishop who defends chastity is treated as a hate criminal. Indigenous earth rituals are folded into the liturgy, while the old Mass is treated as a contagion. Hundreds of Catholic children are kidnapped and the Church can do little but plead for prayer. Abuse survivors fight the papal bureaucracy simply to have their suffering investigated.

There is one “Church” that dances under blue lights, burns sweetgrass to honor Mother Earth, praises Protestants for their women priests, and treats doctrine as a mood board to be rearranged by synodal consultants.

And there is another Catholicism that still believes the Faith must be handed on, intact, by real bishops, real priests, and real martyrs, even if Rome throws its penalties at the wrong people and saves its tenderness for the wrong causes.

Only one of those can be the religion of the apostles. The other is just using the buildings.

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