{"id":695,"date":"2026-07-13T19:07:24","date_gmt":"2026-07-13T19:07:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=695"},"modified":"2026-07-13T19:07:24","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T19:07:24","slug":"a-reminder-that-the-pope-can-and-will-excommunicate-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americanlivingreport.com\/?p=695","title":{"rendered":"A reminder that the pope can and will excommunicate you"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Pope Leo XIV is dealing with his first schism.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A small, conservative sect of Catholics were excommunicated from the church earlier this month after it ordained a group of bishops without the pope\u2019s approval. The drastic move from the first American Pope is the latest way he\u2019s cementing his tenure at the helm of the church, just months after his call to \u201cdisarm AI.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more The one thing MAGA nativists get right<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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But David Gibson thinks the Pope\u2019s strategy of dealing with this radical group of followers tells us something bigger about how we deal with our stateside politics. Gibson is the director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Today, Explained<\/em> co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Gibson about the Catholic drama, what this schism represents, and why it might be a losing battle to go up against the pope.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There\u2019s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Pope Leo XIV did something dramatic. Tell us what happened. <\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Well, basically the pope excommunicated a bunch of traditionalist, super right-wing, Latin mass, types. Actually he would say they excommunicated themselves. It\u2019s this group called The Society of Saint Pius the X (SSPX). They ordained four bishops.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Catholic church is an apostolic church. It\u2019s all about chain of custody. You can\u2019t break the chain. You need bishops to ordain priests. You need to keep bishops going. The pope is the one who ordains bishops. He says you can ordain a bishop. You can\u2019t go ordain a bishop on your own. That\u2019s like starting your own church. That\u2019s a total red line.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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They said, \u201cNo, we need this,\u201d July 1st in \u00c9c\u00f4ne, Switzerland. They gathered SSPX and they ordained these four bishops. That was a schism.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s really a tiny, tiny group. They\u2019re located in the West. It\u2019s all about restoring christendom, restoring the glories of old European, white Catholicism. Basically, this group wants a special carve out, a special bubble where the Pope says, \u201cIt\u2019s okay and I\u2019ll give you your own bishops.\u201d The Pope is saying, \u201cNo, you can\u2019t do that. You can\u2019t go off and have your own special little church.\u201d So essentially they\u2019re saying, \u201cOkay, we are more Catholic than the pope.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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You mentioned that this group, the Society of St. Peter the X that has now at least partly been excommunicated by Pope Leo wanted to keep the church to some degree European. This is in the wake of what people thought could have been the first Asian Pope, the first African Pope. Is this group a little kind of white racist?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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They\u2019re certainly culturally chauvinistic to put it mildly. I\u2019ve traveled around the world with popes. I\u2019ve seen popes celebrate mass in a dusty refugee camp in Africa. I\u2019ve seen mass celebrated in St. Peter\u2019s Basilica with the incense and the whole deal. It\u2019s beautiful. It\u2019s the mass wherever you are. It\u2019s diversity. These folks don\u2019t like that.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s very much this kind of cultural, ethnic, and some would say racial chauvinism that our culture, our people, is the same dynamic in the church. It makes no sense from a Catholic perspective. You\u2019re baptized Catholic, you\u2019re raised Catholic, you are Catholic. Anybody is Catholic, whether you\u2019re in Indonesia or Indiana. But these folks don\u2019t see it that way. That\u2019s what they\u2019re about.<\/p>\n

Read more This US state has become an unexpected epicenter of the global extinction crisis<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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They have influence and they have money. So that\u2019s really why it\u2019s a big story. They also have an amen corner.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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An amen corner?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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So to speak. The Vatican for decades has bent over backwards to try to accommodate these folks. Because it\u2019s kind of a \u201cno enemies to the right\u201d dynamic within the Catholic Church. Here are these folks who\u2019ve been given everything and they still went and split. They would never have given to people on the left wing, on the progressive wing, but they\u2019re giving them to people on the right wing, on the far right wing and that they still thumb their nose at the Pope is what makes this so important.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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So this small but powerful sect of the Catholic church thumbs its nose at Pope Leo. Why pick a fight with the pope?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Well, there are two reasons. One is to go down the liturgical rabbit hole of all this arcana about the mass and the Latin mass and can you change it and can you not?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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They want to revisit the Vatican II council where the Church modernized like 60 years ago?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Yes, exactly. In the 1960s, they did things like lifting the anathemas of Protestantism, engaging in endorsing religious freedom, accepting a division between church and state, and lifting the teachings of contempt against Jews.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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It also gets to what is really going on. It\u2019s not about the Latin mass. They love to argue about that stuff. The bigger dynamics that I wanted to get to in a New York Times op-ed I wrote about this are that these really channel the same dynamics we\u2019re seeing in the secular world, where it\u2019s this sort of civilizational fight to retain the privilege and position mainly of white European folks who see America, \u201cthe glories of empire,\u201d of the past, being \u201ctaken away what is rightfully ours.\u201d That kind of resentment is what they are using as a wedge issue. That\u2019s really their platform of grievance against what they perceive as a loss of status.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Is it a losing battle?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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If you\u2019re looking at the global church, these folks are already outliers. They\u2019ve already lost. When Pope Leo was elected, they lost in a global sense. In the smaller kind of Western sense, the jury is still out because they are much larger. This kind of conservative oppositional mentality is much wider in the United States. And will that triumph? Will they try to make peace with Leo, the first American pope? Will they recognize that he could be around for 20 years and we better take a step back? Or will they just persist here in the United States as kind of right-wing Catholicism?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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JD Vance, who wouldn\u2019t know a Latin mass from anything, he\u2019s the guy who tells the pope to stay in his lane on theology. It\u2019s that kind of mentality that we\u2019re really talking about, which is why the stakes really are high. The issue is whether this conservative Catholicism remains ascendant and essentially isolates the American church even further in the global church. That would be a tragedy.<\/p>\n

Read more Lindsey Graham sacrificed his reputation to Donald Trump. He got plenty in return.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

See More:<\/span><\/p>\n
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  • Life<\/li>\n
  • Podcasts<\/li>\n
  • Religion<\/li>\n
  • Today, Explained podcast<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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