An Italian priest has been excommunicated after he said publicly that he believed Pope Francis is an “antipope”.
Fr Natale Santonocito, 61, parish priest of San Cesarea Church, south east of Rome, was investigated after posting several online videos in which he says that Francis has never been Pope.
“The Pope is not the Pope,” he says in one of them. “He never was.”
The priest, who was ordained in 2023, has been removed from active ministry in the Diocese of Tivoli and Palestrina and automatically excommunicated.
He took to YouTube on Wednesday to issue a valedictory statement.
“I have to shout out this truth that many may find shocking,” he said, wearing white priestly vestments.
“For 11 years we have had an antipope,” he added.
In earlier posts he had said: “The so-called Francis is not the Pope, he never was because Benedict XVI, on February 11, 2013, never renounced the papacy.”
He said Benedict “did not abdicate by renouncing the munus petrino, ie, the investiture as pope that derives directly from God, as is expressly required by canon 332.2.
“Rather, Pope Benedict made a declaration in which he renounced the ministerium, the practical exercise of power, and not the papacy.”
Bishop Mauro Parmeggiani of Tivoli and Palestrina launched an urgent investigation of Fr Santonocito’s statements following the first of his posts in early December.
A statement from the diocese said: “Having ascertained the culpability of the offender and finding the dissemination of such statements incompatible with the exercise of sacred ministry, in the name of the Catholic Church, the bishop has declared his excommunication.”
He said that in accordance with canons 751 and 1364 §1 of the Code of Canon Law the priest has “incurred ipso facto in excommunication latae sententiae, with the effects and consequences set forth in Can. 1331 of the Code of Canon Law”.
The diocese warned the faithful any “adherence to his heretical –schismatic teachings”.
Fr Santonocito is the second Italian priest to be excommunicated in just a year for expressing “heretical” beliefs about Francis papacy.
Speaking on the first anniversary of the death of Pope Benedict, Fr Roman Guidetti told the faithful at his parish in Livorno that Francis “is not the Pope … he’s a usurper”.
Local Bishop Simone Giusti ruled his homily to be a “publicly schismatic act” which incurred automatic excommunication from the moment it was delivered.
In November, Fernando Maria Cornet, an Argentinian priest serving in Sassari, Sardinia, was excommunicated for his book Habemus antipapam? which again questioned the validity of the Francis papacy.
“Just as there cannot be two Churches of Christ which are simultaneously true, there are also cannot simultaneously be two true popes,” Cornet said in the book. “The Pope is one. And the other? He cannot be anything other than an antipope.”
Fr. Giorgio Maria Faré, a Carmelite, was in the same month dismissed from the order after he made a video arguing the same points.
He said that Pope Francis has fallen into “various heresies, something which proves his election is invalid on the basis of the infallibility of the pope”.
He continued: “The cardinals created prior to 2013 must intervene for safeguarding the Church and convoke a conclave for proclaiming a new pope.”
@The Catholic Herald
