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Illicit Bishop’s Consecration of Traditional Priest – Tucho Excommunicated Both

In March 2024, the retired Archbishop Telesphore Mpundu, 78, of Lusaka, Zambia, ordained the US priest Anthony Ward in the Roman rite as a bishop.

Archbishop Mpundu was ordained a priest in 1972 and a bishop in 1987, both in the Novus Ordo. He served multiple terms as president of the Zambia Bishops' Conference. In 2018, he requested early retirement at the age of only 70. No reason was given.

Ward was ordained a priest by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre for the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X, but left soon afterwards. In 1977. He founded an independent group in Colorado called the Servants of the Holy Family.

In 2013, the Diocese of Colorado Springs declared the group “not in good standing with the diocesan or universal Catholic Church”.

On 16 November 2025, Ward announced after Mass that he and Archbishop Mpundu had both been notified by Tucho Fernández - author of soft pornography and Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - of an excommunication latae sententiae.

Archbishop Mpundu has issued no public statement regarding the consecration or the penalty.

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Sandy Barrett shares this

Bishop Anthony Ward has revealed that he was secretly consecrated in a Traditional Rite ceremony in 2024 – which while valid was illicit – by Archbishop Telesphore George Mpundu, the retired Archbishop of Lusaka

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Father Karl A Claver

Because they believe the true faith and are not heretics, I believe the excommunication is INVALID.

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la verdad prevalece

Ah, so a heretic has the power to excommunicate! Then why hasn't he excommunicated the homosexual pedophile Zanchetta?

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Denis Efimov

Good news! At least two people are now officially separated from the conciliar church.
Monsignor Lefebvre: "I should be very happy to be excommunicated from this Conciliar Church" (July 29, 1976); "A strict duty for every priest wanting to remain Catholic is to separate himself from this Conciliar Church" (Spiritual Journey, 1991).
SSPX: “We have never wished to belong to this system that calls itself the Conciliar Church. To be excommunicated by a decree of your eminence…would be the irrefutable proof that we do not. We ask for nothing better than to be declared ex communione…excluded from impious communion with infidels”; "To be publicly associated with the sanction would be a mark of honour and a sign of orthodoxy before the faithful, who have a strict right to know that the priests they approach are not in communion with a counterfeit Church” (July 6, 1988).

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Anthony November

Tucho is a disease.

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foward

Was Archbishop Mpundu conditionally ordained as a bishop in the old rite?

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Denis Efimov

An important question.

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