(LifeSiteNews) — On this episode of The John Henry Westen Show, filmed at the 2024 Coalition For Canceled Priests Conference, Father Jeff Fasching sat down with me to discuss what led to his removal as pastor of two parishes and explain the teaching “outside the Church, there is no salvation.”
Fr. Fasching had been the pastor of two small rural parishes in the Diocese of Wichita, Kansas, where the parishioners had unfortunately been poorly catechized. This poor catechesis resulted in some of these parishioners getting upset when Fasching preached basic Catholic teaching.
“Long story short, I was simply preaching the Gospel. That’s really all I did, but it rattled some feathers, and it was just a few people,” he said.
Fasching gave examples of how he preached the Church’s teaching on the narrow road to heaven and “extra Ecclesiam nulla salus,” or “outside the Church, there is no salvation.”
“Many people that maybe have relatives that are maybe not Catholic or Protestant, for example, would hear that, ‘So, well, I can’t go to heaven because I’m not Catholic, or Father said, ‘Protestants are going to hell.’ So these are the kinds of things that people, for whatever reasons, just aren’t hearing, and when they hear them, it stirs something up in them,” he said.
Fasching reiterated that all he was trying to do was preach the Gospel. He just wanted his people to know and love the Catholic faith the way he did so that they had the best chance of making it to heaven. He compared his removal to those of Bishop Joseph Strickland and Father James Altman, since he was asked to resign after his bishop received complaints, when all he was doing was preaching the Catholic faith.
“It wasn’t for committing any crime. I did nothing wrong – nothing certainly warranting removal as pastor of my parishes,” he said. “But you hear those same words, ‘Father was divisive.’ I think people forget sometimes – certainly the bishops seemed to have forgotten this – that the Gospel is divisive. Our Lord is divisive. You either hear and accept His truth, or you don’t. And that’s division. It’s very clear in… Scripture [that] Christ actually came to make people choose.”
Later in the episode, Fr. Fasching told me about how he had encouraged his parishioners to meet with him to discuss any complaints they had about him, but only one man ever took him up on his offer. Instead, a few people complained to his bishop, who began a year-long process of asking him to resign and probing him with questions like, “Do you think you’re fit to be a pastor?”
“I firmly believe that if the bishop just would’ve given me a chance that I would’ve converted the parishes,” the priest said. “I mean, I had certain detractors, people that just didn’t like hearing the Gospel, but I wasn’t even given a year. I guarantee you they would’ve come around if I had been there long enough. But, as you know, in our culture and in the Church, the bishops’ solutions now are just to silence or get rid of the pastor because that’s the way they want to handle the complaints.”
For more, watch or listen to my full interview with Father Jeff Fasching on this episode of The John-Henry Westen Show.
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