Pope Leo appoints archbishop who said ‘Church is called to disappear’

VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — Pope Leo XIV has appointed a new bishop known for his promotion of religious indifferentism and the LGBT agenda to a Moroccan diocese.

On September 12, Pope Leo XIV appointed Father Mario León Dorado, OMI, as coadjutor archbishop of the Archdiocese of Rabat, Morocco. During his years as a missionary, Dorado became known for promoting some of Pope Francis’ most contentious agendas, including the religious indifferentism embodied in the Abu Dhabi Declaration regarding Islam, and the “blessing” of “irregular” couples, as authorized under Fiducia Supplicans. Dorado served as apostolic prefect of Western Sahara since 2013 and as apostolic administrator of the Archdiocese of Rabat since 2026.

“There is the ecclesiological challenge: the Church as a sacrament at the service of the Kingdom of God. The Church is called to disappear so that the Kingdom may grow, in analogy with the experience of John the Baptist…. The experience of John the Baptist is the experience of the Church,” Dorado stated.

Writing in the September 2022 issue of Migraciones, the magazine of the Spanish Bishops’ Conference’s Migration Department, Dorado lamented what he saw as resistance to Pope Francis’ vision of universal fraternity in both Muslim North Africa and the West’s “old Christian societies.”

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“I am struck by the strong resistance to the universal fraternity proposed by Pope Francis in the name of the Gospel,” he wrote. “Why is there so much resistance to universal fraternity?” Reflecting on his experience as a missionary among a very small Catholic community, Dorado said love is the acceptance of another person without a “need to change” him.

In Dorado’s view, the extinction of the Catholic Church is therefore the inevitable outcome required to implement Francis’ conception of fraternity. However, this concept departs from Catholic doctrine. The Catholic Church teaches that it is indefectible by its divinely instituted nature and is therefore eternal. The Church is the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ. Its visible dimension on earth, known as the Church Militant, together with the Church Suffering (those in Purgatory), finds its fulfillment in the Church Triumphant, composed of the blessed and the angels in Heaven. As such, the Church cannot disappear in favor of the Kingdom of God, because the Church is the Kingdom of God.

Dorado also referred to Muslims who were killed by Islamist terrorists in Algeria as martyrs. In 2018, he described 114 Algerian imams who had been murdered after refusing to support Islamist violence as “authentic Muslim martyrs.” He placed them alongside Catholic martyrs as witnesses to “coexistence, peace and encounter,” adding: “Perhaps all of them may help us with their example and intercession” (page. 8).

Dorado has also been involved in the implementation of Pope Francis’ controversial 2021 declaration Fiducia supplicans, which permitted non-liturgical “blessings” of people in “irregular situations.” As apostolic prefect of Western Sahara, he participated in a January 2024 North African assembly that approved the application of Fiducia supplicans in the region and authorized “blessings” for homosexual “couples” who presented themselves together.

Cardinal Cristóbal López Romero, former archbishop of Rabat, on behalf of bishops in the countries of Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Western Sahara, stated that “everyone deserves unconditional respect under the Gospel… This document is an invitation to read again and evaluate our ecclesial practice of discernment, to deepen the concrete paths of a pastoral ministry of reconciliation and communion.… Faced with the risk of clear-cut positions and exploitation likely to endanger the unity of the Church, it seems to us that the subject deserves to be re-examined in a peaceful manner within the framework of the synodal dynamic underway in the Church universal.”

Dorado also expressed support for interreligious initiatives associated with the 2019 “Document on Human Fraternity” signed in Abu Dhabi by Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar. Following Francis’ visit to Morocco in 2019, Dorado wrote that the Abu Dhabi document and the papal visit revealed “an entire agenda and overarching vision: making interreligious dialogue a central priority, alongside ecological conversion (Laudato Si’) as also concern for the poor and marginalized (embodied in our case by the figure of the sub-Saharan migrant).”

In 2020, Dorado also signed a joint declaration in response to Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis’ encyclical on human fraternity. The North African bishops emphasized: “This is the first time for a magisterial text to make such extensive reference to the role of a Muslim in the Pope’s reflection.” They added that, “in a certain sense, [Fratelli Tutti] gives the world as the Church’s boundary, or rather its horizon.”

The bishops further stressed that, particularly in the Maghreb, though not exclusively there, the Church “cannot conceive of itself apart from a bond of fraternity and mission with the non-Christian.”

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Presenting Father Charles de Foucauld as a model of this missionary approach promoted by Pope Francis and the North African bishops, Dorado highlighted how Foucauld, “attentive to respect for the other,” desired that his entire life “cry out” his love for Jesus Christ, even when his lips “did not pronounce His name.”

Yet, Dorado and other bishops added, Foucauld also “opened the way for others who, by seeking to become ‘universal brothers’ after him, would work toward a genuine fraternity among peoples and human beings beyond their differences.”

The statement concluded: “We wish to renew our commitment to building universal fraternity through communion among ourselves, through ecumenical efforts with other Christian communities, through Christian-Muslim encounter, and with all people of good will, particularly in the service of peace and the protection of our ‘common home.’”