ALBANY — Bishop Mark O’Connell, the leader of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany, has warned local followers of the ultraconservative Catholic group whose leaders were excommunicated last week by Pope Leo XIV that they are committing “a grave offense against God” and that they, too, could face excommunication.
O’Connell made the announcement in a July 7 letter in which he formally conveyed the news that the Holy See and the Society of St. Pius X were in a state of schism resulting from the group’s decision to consecrate four bishops at a ceremony in Switzerland earlier this month in direct defiance of the pope.
“Such disobedience and disregard for the primacy of the Bishop of Rome as the Successor of St. Peter, the first pope to whom Christ entrusted his Church, is considered a schismatic act and gravely harms the unity of the Church for which Christ so fervently prayed,” the bishop wrote in his letter, which was addressed to the region’s “diocesan family.”…