Another Squabble On The Catholic Far Right; Vaughn Treco Resurfaces Yet Again

Just days after the Church Militant board was forced to demand Michael Voris's resignation, the news broke that another organizationon on the Catholic fringe had fired its founder:

All, it with a heavy heart that I share this press release. Thank you, for my brother priests for their support. For now, please discontinue your support of the Coalition until the current board resigns. This is a Hostile take over by the board for their own secular purposes. pic.twitter.com/fLEoIVHhqp

— Fr. John Lovell (@Fr_Lovell) December 2, 2023

According to this post from 2022,

Fr. John Lovell is known as a “Canceled Priest.” Sadly, he is not alone. Fr. Lovell, who co-founded the Coalition for Canceled Priests in 2021, first ran into problems with his own bishop, the late Thomas Doran, in 2009 after reporting allegations of sexual misconduct by a teacher in the diocese. Fr. Lovell was immediately reassigned from his parish and sent for a psychological evaluation. Later, he was told to enroll at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. And in 2012, he was removed/canceled by the new bishop of Rockford, David J. Malloy. Ever since, Fr. Lovell has fought for his good name and helps other priests in the same or similar situations.

I simply can't comment on the circumstances of Lovell's removal, except to note that in 2009, only two years after his ordination in 2007, he'd gotten crosswise with one bishop, and by 2012, following apparent attempts to get him back with the program, he was "removed/canceled" by another. Whether this was a legitimate case of Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders, we'll likely never know, except that now, Lovell has been removed/canceled by the board of the organization he founded. All we know is that the board is saying nothing, and this isn't unusual in many cases of termination, as organizations want to avoid being sued for defamation, while the legal issue is often that employees can be fired for any reason anyhow.

Four "canceled priests" have signed the appeal on Lovell's behalf. They all style themselves "Fr", although I don't know how many have been laicized -- I do know that one of the signatories, Vaughn Treco, was undergoing laicization when I covered his situation here in 2019-20, so if this has been concluded, he isn't entitled to call himself "Fr". I'll get to Treco in more detail farther down, but let's look briefly at the other three signatories.

• Henry Clay Hunt III was removed from his parish, St. Joseph in Del Rio, TX, by Abp Gustavo Garcia-Siller of San Antonio in 2018 and made the chaplain for the criminal justice ministry. This followed a meeting at the Del Rio city hall in which Hunt objected to the election of the openly gay mayor, Bruno "Ralphy" Lozano, from which Lozano had Hunt forcibly ejected. Two years later, in 2020, the archbishop removed Hunt's faculties to celebrate mass in public and began the process of laicization. As is normal in such cases, the archdiocese did not provide other details.
• Joseph Nicolisi had his ministry restricted by the Diocese of Rockford, IL, in 2011 for the delict of living in concubinage with an adult woman. He appealed the penalty to the Roman rota, where it was upheld. According to the link, Fr Nicolisi continues to be forbidden from exercising the power of orders except for celebrating mass without anyone else present.
• Michael Suhy was removed from his parish in Plymouth, MI by Archbishop of Detroit Allen Vigneron following multiple meetings "in the hopes of assisting him to become better equipped to handle such a large parish with a school". He was removed, according to the archdiocese, because "Ultimately and unfortunately, his intransigence triggered a canonical process for his removal." Suhy claims that instead, the reason for his removal was his repeated attempts to report an archdiocesan employee for sexually harassing a man. Although Suhy was removed as pastor, his clerical functions were not restricted.

These are three widely diverse cases, and in at least one of them, there was a clear violation of canon law leading to the priest's restriction. The cases are so diverse that it's misleading to characterize them under an umbrella of "removed/canceled". In the case of Suhy, I think it's reasonable to trust the judgment of the archdiocese that the man was overwhelmed by the job of running a large parish. This can happen. I suspect as well that if that large parish had been up to date with the Bishop's Appeal, the pastor would have had wider latitude over any private cantankerousness about gays.

But this brings us to the case of Vaughn Treco, with which I'm much more familiar, since I covered it here. Vaughn Treco was removed as administrator of a tiny ordinariate group in Minnesota in late January 2019 due to the contents of a sermon he delivered the prior November, which in the view of Bp Steven Lopes of the North American ordinariate were heretical. Treco was offered the opportunity to recant his position and submit to further education, but he refused.

This had nothing to do, at least directly, with any views Treco might have held on same-sex attraction, but it was due to Treco's expressed view that Vatican II was illegitimate. We may argue about this in general terms, but to a Catholic priest, Vatican II is authoritative, and if a priest says it isn't, the bishop is fully within his rights to remove him. Case closed.

Treco was ordained a priest in the ordinariate in 2014, and I was expressing full-fledged reservations about him here as early as August 2015. He had been angling for ordination as a Roman Catholic priest for over a decade before that, despite the fact that he was married. On the establishment of the US ordinariate in 2012, which provided for the ordination of married former Anglican priests, this was a new potential route for him, but another difficulty was that he was a citizen of the Bahamas, and he'd been ordained there in a fringe Anglican denomination, when the ordinariate was intended for former US and Canadian Anglicans.

The best I could conclude as of the 2015 post, based on input from knowledgeable parties, was that there was some back-channel deal between the Archdiocese of Nassau in the Bahamas and the Archdiocese of St Paul-Minneapolis to ordain Treco via the ordinariate, when every indication was that Treco was never a serious candidate for the Roman Catholic priesthood, in particular because he was married. However this was arranged, it wasn't a problem for the Archdiocese of St Paul-Minneapolis, because Treco would be under the ordinariate.

In addition to his minimal duties with the tiny Minnesota ordinariate group, he was also a hospital chaplain in the archdiocese there, which is where his problems began -- apparently his preference for celebrating daily mass at the chapel ad orientem rubbed the hospital sisters the wrong way, and for all I know, he might have been preaching heresies in his homilies there as well. Eventually pressure appears to have built from the archdiocese -- which had facilitated Treco's ordination in the first place -- for Bp Lopes to remove him. I never thought Treco was ever anything but an utter misfit who never should remotely have been considered for the priesthood, and his career was brief as a result. As far as I'm aware, he was undergoing laicization as of the time of his removal.

That Treco should be a signatory in this latest fringe squabble and feel entitled to style himself "Fr" says a great deal about the Priests for the Coalition. These little tempests in teapots also say way too much about the current Catholic fringe.