Titusville-based anti-abortion priest defiant amid reports of being defrocked

A Titusville-based Roman Catholic priest who has campaigned against abortion said he will continue to support the pro-life movement despite reports that he is being removed from the priesthood by the Vatican.

“We will not slow down,” the Rev. Frank Pavone, 63, tweeted defiantly early Monday after news of his pending removal surfaced over the weekend.

“My vocation is to be a priest and a prolife leader and I will not walk away from either one of those,” tweeted Pavone, who had been a priest for more than three decades.

The Titusville priest, who says he has an 'irrevocable calling' to protect the unborn, is the national director of Priests for Life, a pro-life organization with a national following that has been engaged in an ongoing battle against abortion and pro-choice advocates. He is also known for his firebrand rhetoric aimed at those supporting or providing abortion services.

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The Priests for Life’s office moved from New York to Titusville nearly five years ago. Pavone, who answers to the Catholic Diocese of Amarillo in Texas, uses the Space Coast office as a base to travel the nation for pro-life marches - including in Melbourne - and speaking engagements.

Over the weekend, the Catholic News Agency reported that the Vatican had reached the decision Nov. 9 to defrock the priest. The decision, issued in a letter to U.S. bishops, said that Pavone had carried out ‘blasphemous communications on social media,’ and was persistently disobedient to his own diocesan bishop, the news service reported. No official notice, however, has been made public.

Pavone's social media page does include language and rhetoric aimed at political figures like President Joe Biden and former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. "The religious language that fake Catholic Biden and Pelosi use to justify abortion is blasphemous," Pavone, an avid supporter of former President Donald Trump, tweeted Saturday. "We don't have to wait for bishops or the pope to address this. We all need to do so."

Pavone — who calls efforts to revoke his priesthood as an effort to 'cancel' his ongoing work with the pro-life movement — said he had not yet received the official notification from the Vatican about his removal as a priest. "I have not heard anything. But it's not surprising. (The opposition) has done a lot of things like this. There has been a pattern of them telling me one thing and a week later shifting it 180 degrees. It's been a long, bizarre road," Pavone told FLORIDA TODAY.

"Right now nothing surprises me. But only certain bishops have been opposed to our work for the unborn. Obviously, there are some in Rome who are opposed to us. But we also have support in Rome," he added, speaking of the church headquarters at the Vatican.

Pavone said that the anti-abortion movement continues its battle, after seeing a major victory this year with the U.S. Supreme Court's overthrow of Roe vs. Wade, the landmark 1973 case that recognized a woman's right to have the freedom to choose.

"This has been a banner year and we've had a tremendous victory. But the court did not protect the unborn but rather said that we the people can protect the unborn. So there is work to continue," Pavone said.

J.D. Gallop is a Criminal Justice/Breaking News Reporter at FLORIDA TODAY. Contact Gallop at 321-917-4641 or jgallop@floridatoday.com. Twitter: @JDGallop.

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This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Catholic priest from Florida defiant after reports of being defrocked