ROME – Two clerics in Italy, one formerly a diocesan priest and the other a member of a religious order, have been sanctioned recently for the crime of schism, as both have publicly argued that Pope Francis was never validly elected and thus constitutes an “anti-pope.”
The Archdiocese of Sassari on the Italian island of Sardinia announced on Nov. 13 that Fernando Maria Cornet, a native Argentinian who was ordained to the priesthood in 1992 and who served in Sassari since 2011, has been dismissed from the clerical state by order of 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 passed, and he too may soon be facing a laicization procedure.
Both men have prominently propounded the theory of Francis’s illegitimacy. Cornet did so last year in a book titled Habmus antipapam? Investigations in honor of the truth, while Faré laid out his views in a booklet titled I Won’t Deliver the Lion and reaffirmed them in a YouTube video.
In essence, both suggested that due to irregularities in the 2013 resignation announcement of Pope Benedict XVI, Francis was never validly elected pope, and that various doctrinal errors and deviations during his papacy have confirmed the point.
“Bergoglio is not the pope and never has been,” Faré said in the video posted in mid-October.
“Moreover, he’s fallen into various heresies, something which proves his election is invalid on the basis of the infallibility of the pope,” Faré said. “The cardinals created prior to 2013 must intervene for safeguarding the church and convoke a conclave for proclaiming a new pope.”
Cornet made more or less the same argument in his book.
“Just as there cannot be two Churches of Christ which are simultaneously true, there are also cannot simultaneously be two true popes,” Cornet wrote. “‘The pope is one.’ And the other? He cannot be anything other than an anti-pope.”
Strikingly, both Cornet and Faré had fairly distinguished ecclesiastical pedigrees before their fall from grace.
Cornet, in addition to serving as a pastor at several parishes in Sardinia, has degrees 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’s 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 penned 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’s 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’s founded his own community, called “Little Nazareth,” just outside the city of Palermo in Sicily, and he continues to hold himself out as priest, moving around Italy celebrating weddings and baptisms and even purporting to ordain new priests and consecrate nuns.
Minutella is also part of a group known as the “Marian Priestly Sodality” which brings together seven current or former priests, all of whom have rejected Francis’s 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, formerly a pastor in the northern region of Tuscany, who was returned to the lay state on Jan. 1, 2024, after using his New Year’s Eve Mass on Dec. 31 to excoriate the “false church of Mr. Bergoglio and his mercenaries,” while also calling the pope a “usurper” and a “Jesuit Mason.”
