The leader of the Catholic Church in San Antonio has issued a rare decree urging church members not to participate in activities at a privately owned Hill Country retreat center known as Sanctus Ranch.
Sanctus is Latin for holy, but the retreat center does not have the archbishop’s blessing. The owners of Sanctus Ranch in the Bandera County community of Pipe Creek are misrepresenting the activities there as Catholic, said Archbishop Gustavo GarcÃa-Siller in late January.
Among his concerns are the presence of two priests who are not in good standing and a chapel that lacks canonical status — a term that means it is not officially recognized by the church.
“Currently, the chapel is being operated as a pseudo parish, with a regular Saturday evening Vigil Mass and Sunday Mass, including a weekly collection,” GarcÃa-Siller said in a statement to clergy, Catholic school principals and other Catholic groups dated Jan. 30.
The archbishop said he has sent a letter outlining his concerns to Dan Sevigny of Sanctus Ranch “after several months of unsuccessful attempts to dialogue.”
“I cannot and will not be silent and witness the people of God being misled by those who are acting independently of the Catholic Church in the Archdiocese of San Antonio,” GarcÃa-Siller said.
GarcÃa-Siller also stated that Catholic-affiliated groups and parishes are prohibited from contracting with or utilizing Sanctus Ranch for retreats, meetings or other events.
A spokesman for the archdiocese said he could not comment further on the issue.
Reached by email last week, Sevigny asked for written questions and stated, “I am preparing a response with my attorney presently.”
He did not respond to questions from the San Antonio Report.
On Friday, Sevigny responded to the archbishop’s letter by posting a statement to the Santus Ranch website: “Sanctus Ranch is a private retreat center in the state of Texas and has never claimed to represent the Catholic Church, act on its behalf, or operate as a part of the ecclesiastical structure of the Catholic Church, contrary to what is insinuated by the Archbishop’s statement.”
Sevigny said he is within his rights to operate the private retreat center and cites canon law in his defense of the priests’ activity at the center. He said GarcÃa-Siller should “retract his false allegations.” He states: “Lawyers are being consulted to determine the next appropriate steps.”
Father Roger Keeler, assistant professor of canon law at San Antonio’s Oblate School of Theology, said the archbishop is within his rights to issue the decree. In the Catholic Church, the bishop of a diocese has authority and responsibility for everything that goes on within a diocese, he said. “Nothing can happen within the diocese unless the bishop is in some way engaged or involved. In this case, we don’t have it.”
The Archdiocese of San Antonio covers a 19-county region that spans from Gonzales County in the east to Val Verde County in the west, and north from Gillespie County to McMullen County in the south, with 170 parishes and hundreds of social welfare, health care and educational institutions.
The ranch
County records show the Sanctus Ranch property, which spans 36 acres in the River Bluff Ranch development, was bought in 2016 by a partnership known as Sanctus Ranch LLC with Sevigny as the agent.
Sevigny founded a retreat program in southern New Hampshire, according to the Sanctus Ranch website, and served on the board of a Massachusetts retreat center, Vita Nova Inc.
A 2018 church bulletin listed Sevigny as director of youth ministry at St. Stanislaus Catholic Church in Bandera; church staff confirmed he no longer works there.
The Sanctus Ranch website states that Sevigny is the founder and CEO of Igniter Strategies, and he and his wife, Jennifer, opened the retreat center as part of a long-held calling to serve.
Along with meeting space, the retreat center offers overnight accommodations in the Vesters and Corpus lodges, a site for the ritual meditation Stations of the Cross and recreation areas.
The center has hosted Catholic lay retreats organized by San Antonio parishes such as St. Luke’s and St. Mark the Evangelist Catholic churches under the ACTS Mission program. Both teens and adults attend the retreats. (ACTS stands for Adoration, Community, Theology and Service, and the retreat program that began in San Antonio is now worldwide.)
The center also runs programs of its own, including retreats for married couples, for women and mothers, and a retreat for men known as “Whiskey, Cigars & Jesus.”
“The multi-use nature of Sanctus Ranch, for both religious and corporate retreats and events, is at the heart of what makes it so special,” its website states. “It is the sincere goal and vision of Sanctus Ranch to create an environment where corporate training events fill its facilities each week to learn, excel and prosper professionally, and religious groups each weekend to learn, pray and prosper spiritually.”
Disciplined priests
The retreat center is a program of a nonprofit known as Spiritual Retreat Foundation, which accepts online donations and hosted a fundraising dinner in early January.
The nonprofit accountability site Charity Navigator shows the foundation reported $600,000 in revenue in 2022 and paid Sevigny and his wife as board officers a combined $88,389.
One of the archbishop’s concerns about the retreat center is that the altar in the retreat center’s Divine Mercy Chapel “has not been dedicated for the Sacred Liturgy,” or public worship.
“An altar in a Roman Catholic Church is not just a thing. It’s not just a dining room table. It’s a sacred place,” Keeler said. “This is operating as a church. Anything that operates or functions as a church is to be blessed, and it’s always with the permission of the bishop.”
At the chapel, two priests are celebrating the sacrament of reconciliation, or confession “without the necessary canonical faculties,” he said.
Both the Rev. Donald Kloster of the Diocese of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the Rev. Jeffery Fasching of the Diocese of Wichita, Kansas, have been disciplined by the diocesan bishops in those cities, according to the archbishop’s decree.
In addition, the Sevignys are operating a school, Lumen Christi Academy, they represent as Catholic although it has not been approved as such by the archdiocese. The school’s website describes it as “whole person classical education that is unapologetically Catholic.”
Kloster and another Catholic priest, listed as faculty, also taught at The Atonement Catholic Academy in far Northwest San Antonio, according to the website. In 2017, GarcÃa-Siller removed the priest in that church over concerns about its Anglican practices.
The priests who teach at the Lumen Christi Academy, a school for grades 6-12, and other individuals are not certified as safe through the archdiocese’s required program that addresses sexual harassment and protecting children and vulnerable adults.
This is the first such prohibition by the archbishop of an entity like Sanctus Ranch that the spokesman for the archdiocese could recall.