Press Release: Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Push Back Against False Claims by the Diocese of Manchester

Thursday, June 4, 2026
The Feast of Corpus Christi
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Brother André Marie, M.I.C.M., Prior (603) 239-6485
[email protected]

With the release of a new report today documenting their relations with Church authorities, the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary are pushing back against a false narrative constructed by these same authorities to discredit their apostolate.

The Slaves, located at Saint Benedict Center in Richmond, New Hampshire, are one of the traditional Catholic religious communities descended from the followers of the late Father Leonard Feeney.

Repeated attempts by the Slaves to receive official recognition from the Church have been rebuffed by the Diocese of Manchester, under the leadership of Bishop Peter Libasci and his Judicial Vicar, Father Georges de Laire.

These longstanding, good-faith efforts at reconciliation have been met with draconian canonical measures, a campaign of vilification in the Catholic and secular media, a plethora of wild and unfounded charges, and the false claim that the Holy See has condemned the doctrinal position of the Slaves on the perennial Catholic teaching of extra ecclesiam nulla salus — outside the Church there is no salvation.

The history of this controversy reveals however, a record of facts which contradicts the false narrative contrived by the leadership of the Manchester Diocese:

• In 1988, during the pontificate of Pope Saint John Paul II, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, then under the leadership of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — the future Pope Benedict XVI — stated that the “strict,” traditional interpretation of extra ecclesiam nulla salus could be held by faithful Catholics.
• That statement has never been revoked, and became the basis for the canonical regularization of two religious communities in the Diocese of Worcester, which remain in good standing today.
• The truth of that statement was recalled and reaffirmed in 2010 by Manchester Bishop John McCormack when he accepted the Profession of Faith made by the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and assigned a diocesan priest to say Mass and hear confessions for them.
• At the time, the Holy See encouraged Manchester to go further, recommending both the erection of Saint Benedict Center’s chapel as a public oratory and recognition the Slaves as a Public Association of the Faithful.

All of this changed roughly two years after the appointment of Bishop Peter Libasci as Ordinary of the Diocese of Manchester in 2011, with his appointment of Father Georges de Laire as Judicial Vicar in 2013.

Years of progress towards canonical approval ground to a halt. In its place, a regime of unrelenting official hostility was imposed.

Appeals to the Holy See under Pope Francis were of no avail. After a Vatican official declared, in 2016, that one observation in a letter from the Slaves was “unacceptable” (a term that is neither a canonical nor a theological censure in the Catholic Church), Father de Laire publicly misrepresented the facts, claiming that the entire doctrinal position of the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary was, based upon this Vatican official’s statement, “incompatible with the official teachings of the Catholic Church.”

This false claim became the pretext for the imposition of the 2019 Precepts of Prohibition by the diocese — harshly oppressive canonical measures clearly intended to isolate and suppress a religious community whose origins can be traced back more than three quarters of a century. The incongruity of this is manifest in the canonical approbation of two communities in the Worcester Diocese who hold to the same doctrinal position.

No tactic to discredit the Slaves is, apparently, beneath Father de Laire, including the vicious calumny he made to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and then leaked to the mainstream media, that a novice in the community was being held against her will.

The story of the relationship between the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the Diocese of Manchester, under its current leadership, is one of good faith met with apparent ill will, of forbearance treated with contempt, and of candor dismissed with misinformation.

Now, the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary wish to make known their story to the Church, to the faithful, and to secular society with the release today of a 4,800-word document entitled “‘Unacceptable’: Did the CDF Censure Saint Benedict Center’s Beliefs in 2016?”

It is a truth worth telling.

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