Two more Italian priests sanctioned for claiming Francis is ‘anti-pope’

ROME – Two clerics in Italy, one a former diocesan priest and the other a member of a religious order, were recently sanctioned for the crime of schism, as both publicly argued that Pope Francis was never validly elected and thus an “anti-communist.” forms. -Pope.”

The Archdiocese of Sassari on the Italian island of Sardinia announced on November 13 that Fernando Maria Cornet, a native Argentine who was ordained as a priest in 1992 and served in Sassari since 2011, had been dismissed from the ecclesiastical state by order of the Pope. Francis.

Meanwhile, reports also suggest that Father Giorgio Maria Faré has been dismissed from the Discalced Carmelites after a deadline imposed by the order’s leadership for renouncing his positions expired, and he too could soon face laicization proceedings.

Both men have prominently advanced the theory of Francis’ illegitimacy. Cornet did that last year in a book entitled Habmus antipapam? Investigations in honor of the truthwhile Faré set out his views in a booklet entitled I will not free the lion and reaffirmed them in a YouTube video.

Essentially, both suggested that due to irregularities in the 2013 announcement of Pope Benedict

“Bergoglio is not and never has been the pope,” Faré said in the video posted in mid-October.

“Moreover, he has fallen into several heresies, something that proves that his election is invalid based on the infallibility of the pope,” Faré said. “The cardinals created before 2013 must intervene to protect the Church and convene a conclave to proclaim a new Pope.”

Cornet made more or less the same argument in his book.

“Just as there cannot be two churches of Christ that are true at the same time, neither can there be two true popes at the same time,” Cornet wrote. “’The Pope is one.’ And the other? He can be nothing but an anti-Pope.”

Remarkably, both Cornet and Faré had fairly distinguished ecclesiastical pedigrees before their fall from favor.

In addition to being a pastor in several parishes in Sardinia, Cornet holds a degree in Theology and Patristics from the prestigious Augustinian Patristic Pontifical Institute in Rome, as well as a degree in Linguistics and Culture from the University of Sassari. He is the author of several books, including a 2011 work tracing his family’s history from its roots in Sassari to its arrival in Argentina, and a 2015 collection of essays on Sts. Cyprian, Ambrose and Augustine.

Faré is also a published author, including a 2019 book on the Mass, for which the foreword was written by Spanish Cardinal Antonio Cañizares Llovera, who served as the Vatican’s top liturgical official under Pope Benedict XVI.

Cornet and Faré now join Alessandro Minutella, another former priest who publicly denied the legitimacy of Francis’ papacy. Minutella was initially suspended and barred from saying mass in public in 2015, excommunicated in 2018, and eventually laicized in 2021.

Today, Minutella has 88,000 followers on Facebook and a YouTube channel with almost 53,000 subscribers. He has founded his own community called ‘Little Nazareth’ just outside the city of Palermo in Sicily, and he continues to brand himself as a priest, traveling around Italy celebrating weddings and baptisms and even claiming to ordain new priests and nuns.

Minutella is also part of a group known as the “Marian Society,” which brings together seven current or former priests, all of whom have rejected Francis’ authority and who believe that Benedict XVI remained the authentic pope until his death in 2022.

The list of Italian ex-priests expelled for rejecting Francis also includes Ramon Guidetti, a former pastor in the northern region of Tuscany, who was returned to the lay state on January 1, 2024, after using his New Year’s Eve Mass on December . 31 to denounce the “false church of M. Bergoglio and his mercenaries,” while also calling the Pope a “usurper” and a “Jesuit mason.”