Do heretics have jurisdiction?
Archbishop Bernard Hebda will stand in the sanctuary of the Basilica of Saint Mary while a rabbi addresses the Catholic congregation and an imam quotes the Quran from the same floor. He will not let one of his own priests remain in public ministry for affiliating with the Society of Saint Pius X.
That is the pattern. The non-Catholic thing is hosted. The Catholic thing, if it is the old Mass and the old objections, is processed.
On the evening of 28 August 2025, the day after the shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church and School, Hebda led an interfaith service at the Basilica. The Basilica’s own page lists the company: Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman of Temple Israel, Imam Matthew Ramadan of Masjid An-Nur, Episcopal Bishop Craig Loya, Metropolitan Nathanael of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Chicago, and, on the Catholic side, Hebda with Bishops Michael Izen and Kevin Kenney. The Catholic Spirit reported the imam greeting the congregation and citing the Quran: “Whoever kills a soul, unless for justice or for corruption in the land, it is as if they had killed all of humanity.” Father Daniel Griffith, the rector, told reporters the doors were open to “people of faith, people of no faith, agnostic.” Two children, Fletcher Merkel and Harper Moyski, had been killed at Mass the morning before. The archdiocese’s answer was a shared service.
The Eponymous Flower wrote it up on 30 August 2025 under the headline “Minnesota McCarrick, Archbishop Hebda Advocating for Gun Control at Interfaith Mess in Fancy Gay Basilica.”
The post quotes the line, attributed there to Christopher Hale, that describes the arrangement exactly: a Jewish rabbi who does not believe in the divinity of Christ, a Protestant minister who doubts it, and a Catholic priest who agrees to forget it for an evening. Hebda’s contribution, as that piece records it, was that prayer “doesn’t absolve us” from steps against gun violence, and that prayer is not “a hall pass for political inaction.” The same post sets the old law next to the new courtesy. Canon 33 of the Council of Laodicea: “No one shall join in prayers with heretics or schismatics.” Apostolic Canon 45: a bishop or priest who merely joins in prayer with heretics is to be suspended, and if he has permitted them to perform any service as clergymen, deposed. The 1917 Code forbade Catholics to take part in non-Catholic worship. None of that was cited from the ambo.
The companion piece, posted 28 August, “Minnesota Archbishop’s Mealymouthed Response to Trannycide,” takes the statement Hebda actually issued. “My heart is broken as I think about students, teachers, clergy and parishioners and the horror they witnessed in a church, a place where we should feel safe.” The blog’s complaint is not that he grieved. It is that grief was asked to do the work of a judgment he would not make, and that the public act which followed was the interfaith service rather than a procession or a day of reparation.
The Basilica evening was not the first counter-example. The Eponymous Flower’s Hebda file records the 2 June 2020 walk. Hebda and other Minnesota clergy, Christian and otherwise, went in silence to the place where George Floyd died and prayed at the memorial. His own summary, quoted there from a tweet: “While many faiths were represented, there was great unity as we prayed for justice and peace.” The same file notes him on a platform with Jewish and Muslim leaders calling for refugee admissions, speaking from Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church. Canon 1210 is quoted against the habit: in a sacred place only what serves worship, piety, and religion is to be permitted.
Set the other column beside it. This week Hebda wrote to the people of Saint Michael and Saint Mary in Stillwater that Father Philip Conklin, ordained for the archdiocese in 2024 and parochial vicar there until March, had affiliated with the Society of Saint Pius X and would not end the affiliation. Hebda has opened a canonical process “to clarify the situation and his status,” and has told Conklin he is not to exercise any public priestly ministry. In July he had already said the Society had rejected Pope Leo XIV’s pleas and gone ahead with episcopal consecrations. The Eponymous Flower noted the canon-law scramble at the time: “Canon 844 & Archbishop Hebda Reaches Out to SSPX Friends.”
So the permission and the prohibition are both public. An imam may quote the Quran in the Basilica, and a rabbi may speak from its sanctuary, and the archbishop will stand with them and call it prayer. A priest of the archdiocese may not remain in public ministry if he goes to the Society that still says the Mass Pius X knew. The non-Catholic thing is allowed. The older Catholic thing is not.
AMDG
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