The Watchman’s Lamp: November 13, 2026
DABBLING WITH DEMONS
What happened at Our Lady’s altar
At the Basilica of Our Lady of Caacupe in Paraguay, an indigenous religious leader and several others performed an ancestral rite over the Catholic altar and the image of the Blessed Virgin. Bishop Pierre Laurent Jubinville presided at the Mass that followed. Think about that for a moment. The altar at which the Holy Sacrifice was about to be offered was itself made the object of a separate rite of blessing. And the people who came to honor Our Lady saw that rite in the very place where they had come to profess their Catholic faith.
That should grieve us. That altar belongs to Christ. The image is there because the woman it represents is the Mother of God. These are precious things. At Caacupe they were put at the disposal of a religious ceremony that had no rightful place at a Catholic altar. As a bishop, I have a duty to say that the rite described in that report should have been stopped at the altar. The faithful were owed that much.
“You cannot drink the chalice of the Lord, and the chalice of devils: you cannot be partakers of the table of the Lord, and of the table of devils.”
Those are the words of St. Paul. He was writing to Christians who had to decide, in the ordinary course of their lives, how far they could go in taking part in the practices of the people around them. He gives a straightforward example. They could buy what was sold in the market without asking where it had come from. To sit down at a sacrificial meal, however, was to take part in a religious act. The difference lay in what a man was doing and what he was joining himself to by doing it.
Paul says something more disturbing than we sometimes allow ourselves to hear. When he speaks of the sacrifices offered to idols, he speaks of demons. He calls the Corinthians to flee idolatry because it endangers their allegiance to Christ. Paul knew the power of Christ to deliver people from bondage. He had no intention of leading them back to the things they had renounced in order to become Christians.
That is the reason for the title of this episode. We are dealing with spiritual things. Worship concerns who has a claim on our souls. A pastor who permits a religious rite to take place at a Catholic altar has a duty to know what that rite means, whom it invokes, and what his people are being asked to witness. His first concern must be the honor of God. If he is embarrassed to say that, what will he teach the people who look to him to tell them why their faith matters?
Why Caacupe matters
On November 7, Pope Leo XIV appointed Bishop Pierre Laurent Jubinville to the Diocese of San Lorenzo. Two days later, Chris Jackson drew attention to Bishop Jubinville’s record in “Hiraeth in Exile.” The episode at Caacupe took place on December 4, 2022. “ABC Color,” a Paraguayan newspaper reporting on the Mass that day, describes four indigenous participants, with flute and drums and led by an indigenous religious leader, carrying out ancestral rites before Mass. It says they blessed the altar and the image of Our Lady. Bishop Jubinville presided at the Mass. The paper also describes indigenous Catholics singing and taking part in the readings.
The decisive detail is where the ancestral rite was directed. The altar was one of the things blessed. So was the image of Our Lady. The rite was carried out over the very things that tell a Catholic he is in a house dedicated to the worship of God. A Catholic in the pew could reasonably understand what he saw as an act the Church was willing to receive at her own altar. That is the scandal in the public act. It gives people reason to think that the Church can lend the things of God to another form of religious worship.
The newspaper gives no text of the rite. That limits what I can say about whom the participants invoked or what any individual intended. It does nothing to relieve a bishop of the responsibility to guard the altar. A pastor should have known the meaning of the rite before it reached the sanctuary. The fact that it preceded Mass leaves its public meaning intact. The people were already there, the altar was before them, and they had every reason to look to the Church for an explanation.
Perhaps the clearest way to see the harm is to think of what Catholics have been taught to do at that altar. The priest approaches it to offer the Holy Sacrifice. He kisses it. The faithful kneel before the Lord. At the Mass, the sacrifice that Christ offered once on Calvary is made present sacramentally, and the faithful receive the same Lord who offered Himself for them. Generations of Catholics have learned to approach this mystery with reverence because their priests and their parents taught them, by word and example, what takes place there.
The Church has received something she must protect. The people who come to her sanctuary have come for the worship of the true God. They are entitled to find it offered with reverence and to see that the things set apart for it are treated accordingly. If I were responsible for that celebration, I would have kept the ancestral blessing away from the altar. I would have made sure that those organizing the Mass understood why. And if the rite had already taken place, I would have explained the matter publicly, because the confusion was public. The people who witnessed it should hear from the shepherd who is responsible for teaching them.
Our Lady deserves particular mention. Catholics honor her because of her Son. A pilgrim kneeling before her image at Caacupe may be bringing a sorrow he has scarcely been able to put into words. He has come to ask the Mother of God to intercede for him. The image is precious to him for that reason. When we give that same image a place in an ancestral religious rite, we risk obscuring the very thing that drew him there. Surely a bishop can see why that would wound a Catholic who loves Our Lady and has entrusted his family to her prayers.
I can also see why people who have endured the loss of their land would come to the Church hoping their priest would hear them. The homily at Caacupe addressed that suffering. A priest can preach about injustice, visit families, and stand with people whose rights have been ignored. He can invite them to bring their grief before Christ at Mass. The people who come to him deserve both his help and the fullness of the Catholic faith. Every one of them has a right to worship at an altar kept for Christ.
Jackson also pointed to the 2023 regional synodal meeting in Brasilia. The Latin American bishops’ council records that Bishop Jubinville preached at the closing Mass. A figure pictured at a Eucharistic celebration during the gathering was identified in some reporting as Pachamama. Its identification and use are less clearly established than the account of what took place at Caacupe. For that reason I put the emphasis on the blessing at the Marian shrine, where the local report tells us what was done and where it was done.
Zeal for the house of God
In St. John’s Gospel, Our Lord enters the Temple and finds the money changers and those selling animals. He drives them out and overturns the tables. To the people selling doves He says, “Take these things hence, and make not the house of my Father a house of traffic.” His disciples remember the words of the Psalm about zeal for God’s house. They had seen in Jesus what that zeal looks like. He acted when He saw His Father’s house being misused.
I want us to take that scene seriously. There are times when a shepherd has to say, in front of people, that something must stop. The priest at the altar has a responsibility to all the souls who have come to worship. He may have to disappoint the organizers of a celebration. He may have to interrupt a carefully planned occasion. He may have to bear the accusation that he has caused offense. There are worse things for a bishop than being thought difficult. One of them is allowing the people who trust him to walk away with a false idea of what the Church believes about the worship of God.
The Church’s law speaks with admirable simplicity about the altar. It reserves the altar for divine worship alone. Think of what that means when a bishop dedicates an altar. The Church takes something fashioned by human hands and sets it apart for the worship of God. That act binds those who will serve there after him. The altar will stand long after the bishop who dedicated it has died. There will be Masses there when the church is full and Masses when only a few people are there. There will be a first Communion and a funeral, perhaps in the same week. Through all of it the altar has the same sacred purpose.
The Catechism also speaks plainly about scandal. An act gives scandal when it leads another toward evil, and the responsibility is especially serious for those in authority. That is why a bishop has to ask what his people learned from a public ceremony. A Catholic who sees a separate rite of blessing conducted over the altar may come away thinking that the Church accepts that rite alongside her own. The concern is for his faith, for the faith of his children, and for the person who came to Mass that day looking for the strength to leave a former religious practice behind.
And if a bishop has allowed something gravely contrary to the holiness of a church, he has work to do after the event. The Church’s law provides for a penitential rite when the local ordinary judges that a sacred place has been gravely violated. That judgment belongs to the bishop responsible for the place and requires that he know the facts. Whatever judgment he reaches, he can still call his people to prayer, reaffirm what is sacred, and see that the offense is addressed openly. A shepherd can begin repairing a public wound by having the courage to acknowledge it.
A consecration and a funeral rite
The same Vatican bulletin transferred Bishop Victor Luis Quematcha from Bafata to Bissau, in Guinea-Bissau. Reporting on his episcopal consecration in June 2025, “Jornal Tribuna de Macau” said that before the apostolic nuncio laid hands on him, members of the bishop’s Balanta family performed a traditional dance known as a toca-choro. The paper describes it as an evocation of spirits. It also reports that the family understood the ceremony as discharging an ancestral obligation during the bishop’s lifetime. According to the account, it was his relatives who performed the rite.
Here the concern is different from Caacupe, and the report is more specific about the religious meaning. We are talking about an act described as an evocation of spirits taking place just before the Church confers the fullness of Holy Orders. At an episcopal consecration, a man is set apart to preach Christ, to ordain priests, and to guard the sacraments. The people see the bishops lay hands on him and hear the Church call upon the Holy Ghost. To let a rite associated with calling up spirits stand beside that sacramental act is to leave the people with two incompatible accounts of where spiritual help comes from. The Church should have made that distinction plain to everyone present.
The reason a family might wish to perform such a rite deserves attention. People can carry a deep fear about what will happen if they fail to fulfill what they have been taught they owe the dead. The Church has something better to give them than a public accommodation to that fear. She can teach them to pray for their dead, to offer Mass for them, and to commend them to the mercy of the Lord. She can teach them the difference between asking a saint in heaven to pray for us and trying to summon a spirit or to obtain an assurance through an ancestral rite. Catholics are bound to reject the conjuring of the dead and to put their trust in God. A family that comes to the Church deserves to hear that as a promise of freedom as well as a command.
I would want the bishop preparing for a consecration to speak personally to that family. They should hear what the sacrament means and how the Church can honor their dead. They should know that their bishop can pray for them and with them, and that his whole ministry will be given to bringing people to Christ. Such a conversation might be difficult. That is precisely the work of a shepherd. It is worth doing before the faithful are left to puzzle over what took place at the consecration.
The Church’s judgment on Freemasonry
In Cuba, Pope Leo transferred Bishop Juan Gabriel Diaz Ruiz from Matanzas to Santiago de Cuba as metropolitan archbishop. Jackson points to the historical chronicle of the Diocese of Ciego de Avila, which records that representatives of Masonic lodges were among those who attended his 2017 episcopal ceremony. The fact reported here is the attendance of lodge representatives. Any claim about the archbishop’s own affiliations would require evidence of its own.
The presence of those representatives is an occasion to say plainly what the Church teaches. In 1983, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith reaffirmed that Masonic principles are irreconcilable with Catholic doctrine, that membership remains forbidden, and that Catholics who enroll in Masonic associations are in a state of grave sin and may not receive Holy Communion. The congregation’s subsequent explanation recalls Pope Leo XIII’s concern about a view of life in which human reason and moral effort are treated as sufficient. The Catholic faith starts with what God has revealed and the grace Christ won for us. We are creatures who need a Redeemer. That conviction runs through everything the Church teaches about sin, salvation, and the sacraments.
A priest may be asked about this by a man whose friend or relative has invited him to join a lodge. He deserves a definite answer before he makes that commitment. Courtesy toward guests at a church event is entirely possible alongside fidelity to the Church’s teaching. I would expect a bishop to make that teaching clear whenever a public occasion creates uncertainty about it. His silence can leave his priests to deal with the confusion one family at a time.
What a bishop owes his people
These appointments matter because bishops teach by the things they permit as well as by the things they say. And an episcopal appointment is a public act of trust. When Rome gives a bishop a new diocese, it is reasonable for Catholics to ask whether serious questions about the public worship associated with his ministry have been examined and answered. The November 7 bulletin records the appointments. The faithful still deserve to hear what their shepherds understood those earlier rites to mean and what they would do if the same thing were proposed again.
If a bishop discovers that a rite at a Mass he celebrated had obscured what Catholics believe about worship, he owes his people an explanation. He should find out what prayers were spoken, who authorized the ceremony, and how it came to be held there. If he finds out that it should never have taken place, he should say so in public. If he had a part in permitting it, he should acknowledge that and ask God’s forgiveness. And he should see to it that his priests know what to do the next time they are asked to make a similar accommodation.
Why say it publicly? Because a public act can teach a whole congregation something false in a matter of minutes. Think of the father who has told his children that their family belongs to Christ and that there are spiritual practices they must give up. If those children then see a rite of that kind given a place at the church altar, what is he supposed to tell them on the way home? He is entitled to an answer from his pastor. The bishops who have asked him to hand on the faith in his own house owe him the same fidelity in the house of God.
We also owe something to the Catholics who were hurt by these accounts. Some of them remember how carefully a priest once taught them to reverence the altar. Some have made sacrifices to teach their children the faith. They look at a report like Caacupe and see something they love being handled carelessly by the very men charged with its protection. That sorrow ought to be heard. It asks us bishops to look at the event as they saw it and to give a direct answer about what was wrong and what should have happened.
We can defend the altar and welcome people to it with the same conviction. A people can bring its language, its music, and its history to the worship of Christ. Its children can sing in the choir, proclaim the readings in their own language, and offer flowers to Our Lady. These are ways in which a people makes the Catholic faith its own. A priest who welcomes those gifts should also have the courage to say that invoking spirits, offering worship to another power, or bringing a separate religious blessing to a Catholic altar is outside what he can receive. Both parts of his answer come from love for the people who have come to him.
Whom we serve
St. Paul tells the Ephesians that the struggle of a Christian reaches beyond flesh and blood. He gives us something to do about it. Put on the armor of God. Take up faith, the word of God, and prayer. A Catholic who has sought help from a medium or tried to contact the dead can bring that to confession. A family afraid of what might happen to their departed can ask for Mass to be offered. A person who fears that some spiritual power still has a claim on him can go to his priest and ask for help. Our Lord has already won the victory on which that priest’s whole ministry depends.
At Baptism we renounce Satan and profess faith in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. That profession is the beginning of a life under the protection of Christ. We should remember it when we are tempted to seek reassurance from some other spiritual power. A bishop should remember it before he allows a rite to take place at an altar, and before he asks the people to trust his judgment about what they have seen there.
I began with St. Paul’s warning about two chalices. Listen to what he says about the one that belongs to Christ.
“The chalice of benediction, which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ?”
The next time you kneel at Mass, remember what has been entrusted to the Church at that altar. The Son of God who gave Himself on Calvary gives Himself to you. This is what our fathers and mothers in the faith handed down to us. It is what our children should find when they come to Mass. And it is what every bishop, including the one speaking to you now, must be willing to defend.
May God bless you.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Bishop Joseph E. Strickland
Bishop Emeritus
