The EWTN News portal reports on September 6, 2026, that the Irish musical trio known as “The Priests” — Messrs. Eugene O’Hagan, Martin O’Hagan, and David Delargy — continue their international concert career nearly two decades after a Sony talent scout discovered them singing at the Pontifical Irish College in Rome. The three conciliar “presbyters,” ordained in the invalid post-1968 rite for the diocese of Down and Connor, have released four albums under a major secular label, beginning with a contract signed on the steps of Westminster Cathedral. Mr. Delargy claims their performances constitute a priestly ministry where “sacred music in its essence is prayer” and serves as a “gateway to Catholicism” for concert audiences. This spectacle of conciliar clerics reduced to recording artists for a multinational corporation, hailed by the neo-church’s premier media outlet as evangelization, exposes the utter substitution of the sacerdotium for show business.
The Counterfeit Priesthood on the World Stage
The article presents as a matter of course that these three men are “priests” exercising a legitimate ministry through commercial music production. From the perspective of integral Catholic faith, this premise is radically false. The conciliar “ordination” rite promulgated by “Paul VI” in 1968 excised the essential form specifying the power to offer the Unbloody Sacrifice of Calvary and to forgive sins, substituting a vague “presbyteral ministry” oriented toward “service” and “community.” As Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre — himself compromised by his recognition of the usurpers — admitted, the new rite “does not make priests in the Catholic sense.” These men, ordained in the 1970s or later within the paramasonic structure occupying the Vatican, possess no sacramental character, no power to confect the Eucharist, no jurisdiction to absolve. They are laymen in clerical costume, functioning as religious entertainers for a sect that has abandoned the sacerdotium for the theatrum mundi.
The article notes they signed their Sony contract “on the steps of Westminster Cathedral” — the very seat of the “cardinal” Vincent Nichols, a manifest modernist who promotes homosexuality and intercommunion with heretics. This detail is not incidental; it is a sacrilegious theater symbolizing the conciliar sect’s capitulation to the world. Lex orandi, lex credendi (the law of prayer is the law of belief): the “liturgy” of the new rite, the “music” of the concert hall, the “contract” of the marketplace — all proclaim the same creed: homo factus est deus (man has become god).
Linguistic Engineering: The Priesthood as Performance Art
The rhetoric deployed by Mr. Delargy and the EWTN reporter reveals the naturalistic anthropocentrism of the conciliar religion. “I don’t leave my priesthood behind me… when I’m performing or singing on the stage. My priesthood is there, and I am ministering through the means of sacred music for those who, if you like, are the congregation rather than the audience.” Observe the careful equivocation: “performing” vs. “ministering,” “stage” vs. “congregation,” “audience” vs. “faithful.” This is the language of Modernist immanence, condemned by St. Pius X in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907): the reduction of the supernatural to the psychological, the sacred to the aesthetic, the missio to the spectaculum.
The phrase “gateway to Catholicism” is particularly insidious. It implies that the vera religio is accessible through aesthetic experience, bypassing the necessitas medii (necessity of the means) — the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, the sacraments, the extra ecclesiam nulla salus (outside the Church there is no salvation). As Pius XI teaches in Quas Primas: “There is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). The “Lord” of Mr. Delargy’s discourse is not the Christ the King who “reigns from sea to sea” and before whom “every knee shall bow,” but a vague divine force that “uses… our poor little voices and instruments to his own kind purposes and ends.” This is practical Pelagianism: salvation by human effort and emotional resonance.
Theological Bankruptcy: Sacred Music Divorced from the Sacrifice
The article invokes St. Augustine: “when you sing, you pray twice.” This half-truth is weaponized to justify concertizing as liturgy. But St. Augustine speaks of the cantus ecclesiasticus — the chant of the Church in liturgia, united to the Sacrificium laudis (Heb 13:15) which is the Holy Mass. The Council of Trent anathematizes those who say “the ceremonies, vestments, and outward signs… are incentives to impiety rather than offices of piety” (Sess. XXII, can. 7). The “sacred music” of “The Priests” is detached from the altar, severed from the Actio Christi, and offered not Deo Patri but to a paying public. It is cantus profanus masquerading as cantus sacer.
Pius X’s Tra le sollecitudini (1903) defines sacred music as that which “being created for the celebration of divine worship, is endowed with a certain holy sincerity of form.” It must “exclude all profanity not only in itself but in the manner in which it is presented.” A concert in a secular venue, under a Sony contract, for “stages around the world,” is profanity by definition. The “evangelization” claimed is the heresy of religious sentimentalism, condemned in the Syllabus of Errors (Pius IX, 1864): “The faith of Christ is in opposition to human reason and divine revelation not only is not useful, but is even hurtful to the perfection of man” (Error 6). Here, faith is reduced to a feeling evoked by melody.
Symptomatic of the Conciliar Apostasy
This phenomenon is not an aberration but the logical fruit of the conciliar revolution. The Second Vatican Council’s Sacrosanctum Concilium opened the floodgates by declaring that “the Church approves of all forms of true art… for divine worship” (para. 112), ignoring the Thomistic principle that ars est recta ratio factibilium (art is right reason about things to be made) — and that liturgical art is subservient to the Sacrifice. The “Pontifical Irish College” centenary celebrated here is a monument to the formation of the new clergy in the spirit of Gaudium et Spes: accommodation to the world, dialogue with modernity, the “cult of man” denounced by Paul VI himself at the Council’s close (but practiced by him throughout).
The commercial success — “nearly two million copies worldwide” — is presented as validation. In the economy of the neo-church, numbers replace sanctity, record sales replace souls, Sony replaces the Societas Iesu of old. The “musical pilgrimage to Rome” to historic churches is a liturgical tourism, a parody of the stationes of the Roman liturgy, where the faithful once gathered sub auspiciis of the Pope to offer the Sacrificium for the conversion of the world. Now, “priests” and “faithful” gather to hear concerts.
The Silence That Condemns
What the article omits is more damning than what it says. Not a word of sin, redemption, the Cross, Purgatory, Hell, the Last Judgment. Not a word of the Social Kingship of Christ over nations, which Pius XI instituted the Feast of Christ the King to proclaim: “When God and Jesus Christ… were removed from laws and states… the foundations of that authority were destroyed” (Quas Primas). Not a word of the Catholic priesthood as alter Christus, victima et sacerdos, offering the Hostia immaculata for the living and the dead. The “priesthood” of Mr. Delargy is a functional role, a “ministry” of emotional management. This is the abomination of desolation (Matt 24:15) standing in the holy place: the sacerdotium emptied of its ontological reality, filled with the noise of the world.
The true Church, perennis et immutabilis, endures in the catacombs of the faithful who keep the Traditio intact — the Mass of all ages, the unchanging doctrine, the regnum Christi over all creation. “The Priests” and their promoters at EWTN are minstrels in the court of the Antichrist, singing a lullaby to a dying world while the vera Missa is suppressed, the vera fides betrayed, the verus Pontifex awaited. Veni, Domine Jesu! (Rev 22:20).
Source:
The Priests: The Irish trio bringing sacred music to the world (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 06.09.2026