Bishop Hugh Gilbert of Aberdeen has opened the door a little wider for the Traditional Latin Mass, allowing two Transalpine Redemptorist priests to celebrate it every Sunday at the Church of Our Lady of the Garioch and St. John the Evangelist in Fetternear. The move follows an earlier arrangement that only permitted the older liturgy once a month, and it lands in the middle of a tense moment for the small religious community tied to Papa Stronsay.
The priests involved, Father Yousef Marie and Father Peter Mary, had already stepped away from the leadership of the Transalpine Redemptorists before this new permission was granted. Their break came after the order released a sharp declaration in May that described recent popes as “papal pretenders” and blasted the reforms of the Second Vatican Council as a rupture with the Church’s life and teaching.
That background matters because the Mass schedule is not happening in a vacuum. It is unfolding just days before Father Michael Mary Sim, the founder and superior general of the order, is expected to be consecrated a bishop on July 25. Gilbert has already made it clear that he sees that planned consecration as a serious act of defiance and has urged the faithful not to show up.
“Since this consecration is due to take place within the geographical boundaries of the Diocese of Aberdeen, I am obliged to make clear to the faithful of the Diocese that any such episcopal ordination would be unlawful and a grave act of disobedience, separating those taking part from communion with the Catholic Church,” the bishop of Aberdeen said in a diocesan announcement.
“No member of the faithful should attend. This action is not ‘for the good of the Catholic Church’ as is falsely claimed,” the bishop added. “This development is greatly to be regretted and we can only pray that those concerned have a change of heart.” The language is unusually direct, and it shows just how far apart the two sides have drifted.
The Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer, better known as the Transalpine Redemptorists, are a tiny community with roots on the remote island of Papa Stronsay. Founded in 1987 under the influence of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and the Society of St. Pius X, the group later reconciled with Rome in 2012 and expanded its work beyond Scotland, including in the United States and New Zealand.
Even with that reconciliation on the record, the order has taken a much harder line in recent years. It issued an open letter arguing that “the hierarchy has broken with the chain of command, which renders it human, and spiritually null,” then pushed further in May by rejecting Popes Paul VI through Leo XIV and calling the Second Vatican Council part of a deeper crisis in the Church.
That controversy has fed a broader struggle over who gets to speak for the group and what its future looks like. The bishop had previously shifted responsibility for the monthly Latin Mass at Fetternear away from Transalpine clergy and placed it with Father Bruno Murphy, a diocesan priest, after the order began turning up the volume on its criticisms of Rome.
Now the parish has become a kind of pressure point, where tradition, authority, and obedience are all colliding at once. For Catholics attached to the old rite, the expanded Sunday Mass schedule is a welcome gain, but for Church leaders the issue is tangled up with discipline, public dissent, and the risk of normalizing outright rebellion.
The situation is made even more complicated by the personal instability around the community. In recent months, several monks and priests have left the island abruptly, and on April 11, a 24-year-old monk known as Brother Ignatius Maria disappeared during the night before his body was later found in the water off Stronsay on May 6.
Scottish police have not treated that death as suspicious, but it has added a grim shadow over an already unsettled story. Former members have also accused the Redemptorists of psychological manipulation, while others say the superiors were strict but believed they were pushing brothers toward discipline, fidelity, and spiritual growth.
That mix of devotion, conflict, and fracture is exactly why the new Mass permission is drawing attention well beyond one parish in northeast Scotland. The Latin Mass itself remains a source of deep loyalty for many Catholics, and in Aberdeen it is now being carried forward by priests whose relationship with their own order is as broken as their relationship with the larger Church hierarchy.
