One controversy may be a misunderstanding. Several unrelated communities protesting different decisions of the same diocesan government are something else. In Ivrea, disputes over the traditional liturgy, parish priests, parish money and the treatment of clergy have accumulated into a larger question: not whether a bishop possesses authority, but what happens when those subject to it cease to believe they are being heard.
One dispute can be dismissed as a misunderstanding. Two can be blamed upon personality. By the time Catholics from several unrelated parishes are signing petitions, marching by torchlight, questioning the handling of parish money, protesting clerical transfers, objecting to restrictions upon the traditional Roman liturgy and publishing letters alleging intolerable treatment within the presbyterate, another question has to be asked: what is happening in the Diocese of Ivrea?
Bishop ✠Daniele Salera has governed Ivrea since February 2025. In little more than nineteen months his episcopate has become the focus of an extraordinary accumulation of disputes: restrictions upon the Traditional Latin Mass at Rivarolo Canavese; the closing of the sanctuary at Cuceglio to an announced SSPX pilgrimage; the bitter aftermath of the case of Fr Mario Viano; a petition carrying 1,078 signatures against the transfer of Fr Alberto Carlevato; unrest following the removal of Fr Ugo Lodi from Montalenghe; controversy concerning approximately €190,000 belonging to that parish; and now the public accusations of the Indian missionary priest Fr David Kamal Chelladurai.¹
These controversies are not identical. Some claims remain disputed. Some decisions plainly fall within the legitimate authority of a diocesan bishop. It would be intellectually dishonest simply to pile every grievance into an indictment and declare the case proved. It would be equally dishonest to pretend that their accumulation tells us nothing.
That is the point which makes Ivrea significant. This is not merely a revolt by traditional Catholics. The people who opposed the transfer of a priest after twenty-five years are not necessarily the people attached to the Traditional Mass. The parishioners concerned about an inheritance are not thereby supporters of the SSPX. Those who walked five kilometres by torchlight for Fr Viano are not interchangeable with those defending Fr Kamal. The common denominator is not ideology. It is diocesan government.
Bishop ✠Salera has, moreover, supplied the vocabulary by which that government may fairly be examined. His first pastoral letter bears the programme Vivere e annunciare la riconciliazione — “Living and Proclaiming Reconciliation”. He proposes transparency, accountability, participation, ecclesial discernment and a synodal renewal of parish life. He deliberately places within that programme Pope Leo XIV’s exhortation that synodality should become a mentality “in the heart, in decision-making processes and in ways of acting”, and later Leo’s insistence that priests and bishops must live as brothers rather than competitors or individualists.² These are not incidental ornaments to the letter. They describe the ecclesial culture Bishop ✠Salera says he wishes Ivrea to embody.
The difficulty is that an increasing number of Catholics in Ivrea appear to be asking where that culture can be recognised in practice.
The first conspicuous rupture concerned the traditional Roman liturgy. In March Bishop ✠Salera restricted the days upon which Fr Raffaele Roffino could celebrate the older Mass at Rivarolo Canavese. Local reporting made an especially important observation: Fr Roffino had distinguished himself precisely through his ability to keep Catholics attached to that liturgy in communion with the diocese.³ That fact should have carried pastoral weight.
Nuntiatoria has repeatedly argued that the post-Traditionis custodes regime does not abolish episcopal judgement. Archbishop ✠Richard Moth has demonstrated another possibility: identify a genuine pastoral need, make the case for it and obtain whatever Roman permission is required. He complied with the restrictive legislation while continuing to advocate for Catholics attached to the inherited Roman Rite. Toronto has more recently illustrated the converse danger: if Catholics are repeatedly told that communion requires remaining within regular diocesan structures while those structures steadily diminish the liturgical life for which they remain, the Church risks manufacturing the centrifugal pressure it claims to deplore.⁴
Ivrea belongs within that same argument. If a priest has succeeded in keeping traditionally minded Catholics attached to the diocese, restricting the provision around which that attachment has been maintained requires more than the observation that a bishop possesses the legal power to do it. The question is not simply may he? It is why should he? Pastoral government begins where bare competence ends.
Then came Cuceglio. On 28 March an announced pilgrimage associated with the Society of Saint Pius X arrived at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Sorrows after a penitential walk. No Mass was proposed. The intention was to conclude the pilgrimage with devotional prayers. The pilgrims found the sanctuary closed, and contemporary reporting attributed the decision not to admit them to the sanctuary rector acting under the direction of Bishop ✠Salera.⁵
Nuntiatoria examined the episode at the time because its symbolism exceeded its administrative details. In a Catholic culture saturated with the language of welcome, accompaniment, encounter and inclusion, an organised group of Catholic pilgrims arrived for prayer and encountered a locked church. Whether one sympathises with the canonical position of the SSPX is not the decisive point. The image was the argument.⁶
That image has since become difficult to forget. The canonical circumstances may vary from case to case, but the pastoral question remains recognisable: why does ecclesiastical language which is expansive towards almost every form of dialogue become markedly juridical when the Catholics asking for accommodation are traditionalists? Communion cannot consist solely in those below proving their willingness to submit. Authority has obligations towards communion too.
The case of Fr Mario Viano requires considerably more caution. Following a police search of his presbytery, Fr Viano became the subject of a civil investigation. The allegations remain matters for the competent civil authorities, and nothing in this editorial presumes his guilt or innocence.
There is also a material conflict in the public record. Contemporary reporting states that Fr Viano tendered his resignation following the search and that Bishop ✠Salera accepted it. AdVaticanum’s subsequent investigation records material supplied to it disputing that version of events. Until documentary evidence resolves the contradiction, the contemporaneously reported resignation and the later challenge to that account must remain clearly distinguished.⁷
What is not disputed is what followed. Around three hundred people walked five kilometres by torchlight in support of Fr Viano. When Fr Carlevato subsequently arrived as the new parish priest, the communities did not reject him. They welcomed him while continuing to protest the way in which they believed diocesan authority had dealt with them.⁸ That distinction matters because it prevents the controversy being reduced to a parish refusing a legitimate successor.
Their subsequent public letter was unusually revealing. They did not deny the existence of episcopal authority; indeed, they promised cooperation with the new priest. What they attacked was method. They said that during the preceding months they had experienced the face of the Church not as a mother but as a stepmother, complained that words such as welcome, inclusion and synodality could become empty when contradicted by conduct, and established the public network Anche noi siamo Chiesa — “We Are Church Too”. Their formula was memorable: “Obedient, yes, but with a straight back.”⁹
That is not the language of people declaring themselves outside the Church. It is the language of Catholics asserting that obedience does not abolish parrhesia — the Christian duty to speak frankly when something appears wrong.
Then there is Fr Alberto Carlevato. After roughly twenty-five years serving Mazzè and Villareggia, 1,078 people signed a petition asking Bishop ✠Salera not to transfer him and sought an opportunity to put their case personally. The transfer nevertheless proceeded.¹⁰
A thousand signatures do not create canonical tenure. Parishioners do not appoint or remove their parish priest, and a bishop cannot govern his diocese by referendum. But that truth does not settle the pastoral question. The Catholic answer to congregationalism is not managerialism. Consultation which can never affect a decision risks becoming no more than the liturgy of administration: everyone is heard, and nothing is heard.
Montalenghe supplied another fracture. Fr Ugo Lodi was removed from responsibility for the parish after three years, prompting resignations from the pastoral council and a petition of approximately 150 signatures seeking his return — a significant number in a village of fewer than one thousand inhabitants. Some parishioners subsequently chose to attend Mass at Vialfrè, where Fr Lodi remained parish priest.¹¹
Then came the money. Montalenghe possesses approximately €190,000 from an inheritance. According to local reporting, the diocese proposed that the funds should be managed centrally, with an annual return of one per cent and assurances that the capital would remain accessible. Parishioners objected that existing investments were producing better returns, questioned the consequences of liquidating them, raised the terms of the benefactor’s bequest and asked how readily the money would remain available for parish expenditure.¹²
There is no evidence in the material examined by Nuntiatoria establishing financial impropriety by the diocese, and it would be irresponsible to insinuate any. But transparency is not an accusation. A parish asking what will happen to €190,000 belonging to it is not rebelling against the Church. Indeed, Bishop ✠Salera’s own pastoral programme specifically commends transparency, accountability and evaluation as elements of the synodal process.² The test of that language is surely not whether transparency is praised in principle, but whether awkward questions are answered when money is actually involved.
The latest rupture concerns Fr David Kamal Chelladurai. In a letter dated 14 September, the Indian missionary priest described what he said had become an intolerable situation in his ministry. He alleged difficulties concerning Mass arrangements and his living conditions, the removal of personal belongings from the presbytery, intrusive behaviour, the use of Piedmontese at meals in circumstances in which he believed he was being deliberately excluded, and schedules which he said sometimes left scarcely enough time to celebrate Mass properly and attend to the faithful. Most strikingly, he wrote that he struggled to live “like a slave”.¹³
His most serious allegation concerns Bishop ✠Salera. Fr Kamal says that after taking his difficulties to the bishop he did not feel heard and was presented with two possible courses: return to India or enter a psychiatric community for treatment. Prima Chivasso independently reported the substance of that allegation.¹³ If accurately described, such an exchange plainly requires explanation.
It is nevertheless an allegation, not a finding. On 19 September the Interparochial Pastoral Council publicly defended Bishop ✠Salera and Fr Davide Smiderle and said that Fr Kamal’s depiction did not correspond with the fraternal atmosphere its members had witnessed.¹⁴ Fairness requires that testimony to stand beside Fr Kamal’s accusations. Nuntiatoria is not conducting a canonical trial by newspaper, and none of us knows everything said in private conversations, presbyteries or the bishop’s office.
But the wider question survives whichever account of this latest controversy eventually proves more accurate. Ivrea now has traditional Catholics protesting liturgical restrictions; one set of parishioners protesting the handling of Fr Viano; another protesting the transfer of Fr Carlevato; another seeking the restoration of Fr Lodi and resisting the proposed handling of parish funds; and a missionary priest publicly alleging grave difficulties in his treatment. When unrelated disputes repeatedly terminate in the same complaint — that people do not believe they have been heard — the culture of government itself becomes a legitimate subject of examination.
That is the thesis which cannot be answered by proving that the bishop possesses canonical authority in each individual case. Of course he does. A bishop may possess the canonical right to transfer a priest while handling the affected community badly. He may have defensible reasons for changing an appointment while explaining those reasons poorly. A financial proposal may be entirely lawful while deserving searching questions. An allegation may be exaggerated while nevertheless revealing a relationship which has catastrophically broken down. Liturgical restrictions may be legally available while remaining pastorally unnecessary.
Authority can therefore survive every individual controversy juridically while losing credibility through their cumulative pastoral effect.
That distinction is profoundly Catholic. A bishop is neither the delegate of parish opinion nor the branch manager of an ecclesiastical bureaucracy. He is the shepherd, father and governor of a particular Church. Precisely because his authority is real, his responsibility for the manner in which it is exercised is real. Earlier generations did not require an elaborate vocabulary for this. They called it good pastoral government.
The contemporary Church calls much of it synodality. Very well. Then synodality should be tested where listening costs something: when 1,078 people ask that their priest remain; when a village questions what will happen to its inheritance; when Catholics attached to the ancient Roman liturgy ask why communion appears to require the progressive restriction of the worship around which their lives have been formed; when three hundred people take to the road by torchlight; and when a foreign missionary priest says publicly that he believes he has been humiliated.
The answer cannot always be yes. Listening is not surrender, and consultation does not abolish episcopal government. But there must be some discernible difference between consultation and the ceremonial announcement of decisions already made. Otherwise “listening” becomes merely another ecclesiastical word whose frequency increases as its content disappears.
There is one final fact which should sober everyone concerned. Bishop ✠Salera himself wrote in his pastoral letter that, “at least for the moment”, the Diocese of Ivrea has no seminarians, although he added that some young men were showing a sincere interest in priesthood and seeking accompaniment.² No reasonable critic can blame a bishop who arrived in 2025 for a vocational collapse inherited over decades. That would be absurd. But a diocese without seminarians is in no position to regard damaged relations between bishop, clergy and faithful as administrative background noise.
Every priest matters in such a diocese. Every living parish matters. Every Catholic family from which a vocation might arise matters. Every young man considering priesthood is not merely listening to a vocations director; he is looking at the presbyterate he may be asked to enter and at the relationship between its priests, its bishop and its people.
A Church without seminarians should therefore be exceptionally reluctant to create the impression that priests are interchangeable personnel, parishes are administrative units and consultation chiefly means explaining decisions after they have been made. Vocations are not produced by publicity campaigns. They emerge where Catholic life appears sufficiently coherent, supernatural and fraternal to be worth surrendering one’s life to.
Bishop ✠Salera chose reconciliation as the programme of his first pastoral year. He chose to place before his diocese Pope Leo XIV’s insistence upon listening, communion, synodal decision-making and genuine fraternity among priests and bishops. Ivrea now presents him with the harder task of showing what those words mean when reconciliation is not theoretical and listening is uncomfortable.
That does not require capitulation to pressure groups or abandonment of episcopal authority. It requires facts to be clarified, allegations to be examined justly, financial questions to be answered transparently, difficult decisions to be explained, priests to be treated fraternally, parishioners to be heard seriously and traditional Catholics to be regarded as souls entrusted to a bishop rather than remnants to be managed.
One grievance proves very little. A succession of grievances arising independently among people who otherwise have remarkably little in common proves at least that confidence has fractured. That is why Ivrea matters beyond Ivrea: it places a fashionable ecclesiastical vocabulary against the ordinary, unglamorous test of government.
The real question is not whether Bishop ✠Salera has the right to govern the Diocese of Ivrea. He plainly does. The question is whether Catholics encountering that government recognise in it the listening, fraternity, transparency, reconciliation and communion which the diocese itself says synodality requires.
For there comes a point at which preaching endlessly about open processes while the people outside repeatedly encounter a closed door ceases to look like an unfortunate contradiction.
It begins to look like the story.
¹ AdVaticanum, “Diocese hit by protests over TLM restrictions, SSPX ban and treatment of priests”, 18 September 2026.
² Diocese of Ivrea, “Lettera pastorale 2025/2026”, 22 August 2025.
³ Giornale La Voce, “‘Tanto tuonò che piovve’. Confino e rieducazione per i fedeli di serie B della Messa antica”, 8 March 2026.
⁴ Nuntiatoria, “Pastoral Need not Extinction: Archbishop Moth and the Choice Traditionis Custodes Still Leaves Bishops”, 11 September 2026; Nuntiatoria, “Toronto: Rome Gave Two Years — Who Ordered the Monthly Restrictions?”, 18 September 2026.
⁵ Giornale La Voce, “Santuario di Cuceglio chiuso ai pellegrini. Vescovo di Ivrea sotto accusa: ‘Aprono a tutti, tranne ai cattolici’”, 29 March 2026; Giornale La Voce, “Il vescovo chiude la porta ai fedeli in processione. Chi sono ‘quelli’ del Priorato San Carlo di Montalenghe”, 1 April 2026.
⁶ Nuntiatoria, “A Door Closed in Lent: The SSPX Pilgrimage and the Crisis of Catholic Inclusion”, 1 April 2026.
⁷ Rai News, “Fiaccolata per don Mario Viano, l’ex parroco di Bosconero, indagato dalla procura di Ivrea”, 13 April 2026; AdVaticanum, “Diocese hit by protests over TLM restrictions, SSPX ban and treatment of priests”, 18 September 2026.
⁸ Rai News, “Fiaccolata per don Mario Viano, l’ex parroco di Bosconero, indagato dalla procura di Ivrea”, 13 April 2026.
⁹ Quotidiano Canavese, “BOSCONERO-SAN BENIGNO CANAVESE — Arriva il nuovo parroco, i fedeli al vescovo: ‘Obbedienti sì, ma con la schiena diritta’”, 4 September 2026.
¹⁰ La Sentinella del Canavese, “Una petizione anche per don Carlevato: Mazzè e Villareggia per il loro parroco”, 7 August 2026.
¹¹ La Sentinella del Canavese, “Montalenghe, raccolta firme per padre Ugo Lodi: il parroco esautorato alla patronale”, 3 July 2026; La Sentinella del Canavese, “Montalenghe, la comunità risponde al vescovo: ‘Chiediamo il ritorno di padre Ugo’”, 6 August 2026.
¹² La Sentinella del Canavese, “La diocesi di Ivrea vuole da Montalenghe il tesoretto del lascito di 190mila euro”, 27 July 2026.
¹³ Prima Chivasso, “Tensione nella Diocesi d’Ivrea, don Kamal in rotta con don Davide”, 17 September 2026; AdVaticanum, “Diocese hit by protests over TLM restrictions, SSPX ban and treatment of priests”, 18 September 2026.
¹⁴ Prima Chivasso, “Don Kamal, il Consiglio Pastorale difende il Vescovo e don Davide”, 19 September 2026.
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