Retired Kazakh ‘Abp.’ Lenga Censured after Rejecting Francis as “Heretic” and “Antichrist”

Now it’s getting interesting…

Retired Kazakh ‘Abp.’ Lenga Censured after Rejecting Francis as “Heretic” and “Antichrist”

Mr. Jan Paweł Lenga is the former Novus Ordo bishop of the diocese of Karaganda, Kazakhstan. In the past he made headlines by authoring an open letter on the crisis in the church (2015) and by co-signing the Profession of the Immutable Truths about Sacramental Marriage (2018) as well as the Declaration of the Truths relating to some of the most common Errors in the Life of the Church of our Time (2019).

Lenga retired from Karaganda in 2011 and moved to Poland, where he still resides today, in the diocese of Włocławek. Now the local ordinary there, “Bp.” Wiesław Mering, has forbidden him from publicly offering the Novus Ordo worship service, from preaching, and from contacting the media, according to a report of the Polish Novus Ordo news site eKAI, published on Feb. 20.

The reason: Lenga no longer acknowledges Francis to be the Pope of the Catholic Church, opting instead for the other Modernist-in-white in the Vatican, “Pope Emeritus” Benedict XVI, whose resignation he believes to have been invalid. (This is a phenomenon we have nicknamed “Resignationism”.) In his open letter of 2015, Lenga had already hinted at this stance, saying: “It is difficult to believe that Pope Benedict XVI freely renounced his ministry as successor of Peter.”

On Feb. 24, the British Tablet released a report on this, which can be found in full here but from which we can only quote some excerpts for copyright reasons:

The former Archbishop of Karaganda in Kazakhstan, Jan Lenga, has been banned from preaching and celebrating Mass by the Polish Church for describing Pope Francis as the antichrist and refusing to include him in prayers.

…

The KAI agency said Lenga had “issued controversial claims undermining the authority of the reigning Pope Francis, and refusing to name him during Masses”. It added that the ban on public appearances had been imposed by Bishop Wieslaw Mering of Wloclawek and would remain in place until further restrictions were announced by the Vatican.

…

In a book-length interview, still circulating in Polish on YouTube, [Lenga] said he still recognised Benedict XVI as Pope and had dropped the name of the “usurper and heretic” Francis from his Mass prayer intentions.

“Bergoglio has not confirmed himself in the faith and is not passing that faith to others, he is leading the world astray,” said the archbishop, who trained secretly in Soviet-ruled Latvia and Lithuania and was appointed Kazakhstan’s first bishop in 1991 and Archbishop of Karaganda in 1999. “He proclaims untruths and sins, not the tradition which has endured for 2000 years… He proclaims the truth of this world, which is precisely the truth [of] the devil”.

(Jonathan Luxmoore, “Polish church silences Kazakhstan bishop”, The Tablet, Feb. 24, 2020)

As is clear from this report, there may still be further sanctions to come from the Vatican, although the Bergoglians there may not have an interest in this getting any more publicity.

For the benefit of our readers who understand Polish, we are embedding a video of Lenga being interviewed recently on the Polish television program Warto Rozmawiać:

In rejecting Francis, Lenga is at odds with his compatriot Athanasius Schneider, who believes that a Pope’s Magisterium can contain all kinds of heresies and errors, and when this is so, the faithful must figure that out and refuse the Roman Pontiff their submission, lest they be tainted with what he teaches. (This Schneider prefers to the idea that maybe Jorge Bergoglio just isn’t the Pope.) Nothing says “keeping the gates of hell from prevailing” quite like that.

After Henry René Gracida of Corpus Christi, Texas, Lenga is now the second Novus Ordo bishop to state publicly that he does not acknowledge Francis as the Pope of the Catholic Church and instead believes Benedict XVI is the lawful Roman Pontiff.

We would encourage both Lenga and Gracida to familiarize themselves with the facts about Benedict XVI so they can reject him too for being as fake of a pope as his inglorious successor, albeit with more style.

Image source: own composite with elements from shutterstock.com and Wikimedia Commons (Kamczadałka)
License: paid and CC BY-SA 3.0