In re the Trust
Petition of TMS, a beneficiary, appearing pro se.
IN THE COURT OF THE HARVEST
In re the Matter of:
The Trust Established by the Recorded Words of Jesus of Nazareth
PETITION OF A BENEFICIARY FOR INSTRUCTIONS, DECLARATORY RELIEF, AND AN ACCOUNTING OF ADMINISTRATION
I. Jurisdiction
This Court has exclusive subject-matter jurisdiction over the final identification and separation of beneficiaries. The instrument so provides: “Let both grow together until the harvest” (Matthew 13:30), and “the harvest is the close of the age, and the reapers are angels” (Matthew 13:39).
This Court is not now in session. No docket date has been published. The reapers have not been impaneled.
Petitioner therefore files in a court he cannot verify is seated, before a judge who has reserved all final questions to himself. Petitioner acknowledges that every filing made before harvest is, at most, a motion for interim relief. This one is no exception, and asks to be treated as none.
II. Parties
The Settlor is Jesus of Nazareth. Petitioner pleads the Settlor’s recorded words as the controlling instrument. Later construction, however venerable, is administration, and administration remains accountable to the instrument.
The corpus is the deposit of faith.
The co-trustees are the visible ministry, presently including two factions in open dispute: the Holy See, acting through the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, and the Society of Saint Pius X, acting through its superior general and bishops.
The beneficiaries are the faithful. The instrument sets the minimum beneficiary class at two or three: “where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them” (Matthew 18:20). Petitioner claims within that class.
III. Standing, With Required Disclosure
The instrument sequences all charging parties: “first take the log out of your own eye” (Matthew 7:5). Petitioner therefore discloses at the outset, and not in a footnote, that his beneficial interest descends through a prior breach. Petitioner was raised in the Lutheran communion, which exists because sixteenth-century trustees refused the seat in the name of the deposit, the same act complained of below. Petitioner appears with that chain of title and does not launder or whitewash it.
Petitioner further discloses that he brings this petition partly in irritation, which the instrument also anticipates and does not excuse.
IV. Facts
On July 1, 2026, at Écône, Switzerland, the Society of Saint Pius X consecrated four bishops without pontifical mandate: Marc Hanappier, Michel Poinsinet de Sivry, Michael Goldade, and Pascal Schreiber. Bishop Alfonso de Galarreta was principal consecrator; Bishop Bernard Fellay assisted. Roughly fifteen thousand adults attended. The ceremony ran five hours.
The consecrations proceeded over the written objection of Pope Leo XIV, who in a letter dated June 29 had personally asked the Society to stand down for the sake of unity.
On July 2, 2026, within twenty-four hours, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a decree over the signature of Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández: the six bishops declared excommunicated, the act declared schismatic, the Society declared in schism, its priests declared excommunicated, the confessions and marriages they administer declared invalid, and the lay faithful warned that formal adherence places them outside.
Each faction states that it acted in service of the Settlor. Each faction claims custody of the corpus. In the dispositive papers of this dispute, neither faction made the Settlor’s commandment to love the governing rule.
V. The Corpus Was Already Distributed
The corpus is not held where the co-trustees are looking for it. The instrument vested it directly, in each beneficiary, per capita and undivided: “he dwells with you and will be in you” (John 14:17); “we will come to him and make our home with him” (John 14:23); “I in them and you in me” (John 17:23); “I am the vine; you are the branches” (John 15:5), each branch attached to the vine without intervening trellis.
The corpus is non-rivalrous and non-depletable. Each beneficiary holds the whole of it. It does not divide, and therefore cannot be concentrated, hoarded, or seized. There is no vault.
The trust is accordingly passive as to corpus and active only as to administration. The co-trustees hold real offices with real duties: teaching (Matthew 28:19), forgiveness (John 20:23), agency (Luke 10:16), and the dispute procedure (Matthew 18:15-17). What they hold are keys (Matthew 16:19). Keys are administrative powers. Keys are not a deed.
The present dispute assumes a vault. Écône and Rome disagree about the custodian and agree about the vault. The vault is the error. They are fighting over an empty room while the contents sit distributed exactly where the Settlor placed them, one whole corpus per beneficiary, subject to no divestment either faction has power finally to declare.
VI. Counts
Count One. Breach of the duty of loyalty, against both factions.
The Settlor made one duty the identifying mark of his trustees and beneficiaries alike: “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35). The mark is evidentiary and the designated forum is the world.
The conduct in evidence, a defiant consecration and a maximal decree inside twenty-four hours, is the negation of the mark, performed before the designated forum, on camera.
Count Two. Violation of the reconciliation-sequencing provision, against both factions.
The instrument places reconciliation ahead of solemn self-vindication: “leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift” (Matthew 5:24).
The Society proceeded to the altar, literally, for five hours, over an open breach. The Holy See proceeded to its own solemn act the next morning on identical footing. Neither faction treated the unreconciled state as a disabling fact. Both left the brother and kept the gift.
Count Three. Ultra vires acts exceeding reserved jurisdiction, against both factions.
Final separation of wheat from weeds is reserved to this Court, at harvest, by other reapers, on the Settlor’s stated ground that present identification is unreliable and the roots are entangled: “lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them” (Matthew 13:29).
The Society exercised the reserved power by identifying the entire postconciliar hierarchy as animated by a spirit contrary to the faith. The Holy See exercised the reserved power by attaching harvest-grade consequences, including sacramental invalidity and exclusion from visible communion, to what the instrument confers only as interim administration. Each faction converted a maintenance easement into a reaping right. Neither holds one.
Count Four. Self-dealing in trust assets, against both factions.
A trustee may charge the trust only the reasonable expenses of administration. The gravamen of this count is not the trust’s material culture as such; it is the performance of trustee rank at trust expense when that performance displaces service of the beneficiaries. The record discloses expenditures whose function is display of the office rather than service of the beneficiaries: long robes, vestments enlarged for the purpose, croziers, mitres, and monumental real property.
The Settlor addressed this asset class by name. “Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes” (Mark 12:38). “They make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long” (Matthew 23:5). “The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them... But not so with you” (Luke 22:25-26). Asked to admire the trust’s most impressive building, the Settlor forecast that not one stone would be left upon another (Mark 13:2), guidance a diligent trustee might have read as bearing on capital expenditures.
This count runs against both factions equally. The ceremony at Écône featured mitres, croziers, episcopal insignia, and five hours of rank-conferring ritual. The dissenting faction’s quarrel with the incumbent faction is not display versus simplicity. It is a dispute over which trustees wear the long robes.
The Settlor’s guidance on trustee attire is of record: “Acquire no gold or silver... no bag for your journey, or two tunics” (Matthew 10:9-10).
Count Five. Forbidding the unauthorized worker, and selective administration, against the Holy See.
The instrument contains one ruling on unauthorized ministry conducted in the Settlor’s name. A trustee reported: “we tried to stop him, because he does not follow with us.” The Settlor ruled: “Do not stop him” (Luke 9:49-50). The decree of July 2 is a stop order.
The expulsion procedure the decree invokes (Matthew 18:15-17) sits bracketed in the instrument between the lost-sheep mandate, leave the ninety-nine and go after the one (Matthew 18:12-14), and the unlimited-forgiveness command, seventy-seven times (Matthew 18:21-22). The Holy See executed the middle provision, exceeded its minimums, and severed both brackets. That is selective administration of a harmonized instrument.
Count Six. Conversion of foretold breach into chosen breach, against the Society.
The Settlor predicted division: “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). A prediction is not a permission. The instrument draws that boundary itself: “it is necessary that temptations come, but woe to the one by whom the temptation comes” (Matthew 18:7). The Society read a forecast as a commission and volunteered to be the man in the woe clause.
The Society’s own best text commands the obedience it withholds: “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat, so do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do” (Matthew 23:2-3). The Society has inverted the verse, refusing what the seat bids while conceding the seat is occupied. And the Society pleads the deposit while defending construction. A tradition younger than the instrument may be venerable administration. It is not corpus.
VII. Anticipated Defenses
Both factions will plead the guarantees. The guarantees do not reach. “The gates of hell shall not prevail” (Matthew 16:18) and “I am with you always” (Matthew 28:20) guarantee survival and presence, not the soundness of any administration. The field is insured. The stewards are not.
The Holy See will plead the prayer for Peter: “I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail” (Luke 22:32). Read whole, the passage predicts Peter’s triple denial in its next breath and drafts the cure into the breach: “when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers.” It is a recovery clause. It is cited as an immunity clause.
The Society will plead necessity. Necessity is answered at paragraph 30, and the woe attaches.
VIII. Relief Requested
Petitioner does not request removal of any trustee. Petitioner does not request surcharge. Petitioner does not request any determination of any soul, his own included, such relief being outside this Court’s session and outside petitioner’s standing in any session.
Petitioner requests instructions, and the following interim declarations:
a. That the corpus is fully vested in each beneficiary, per capita and undivided, by indwelling, and was so vested by the Settlor before the dispute arose;
b. That the co-trustees’ powers are administrative only, keys and not deed;
c. That any act of either faction asserting exclusive custody of the corpus, or conditioning any beneficiary’s vested interest on adherence to one faction, is ultra vires and void as to that interest.
Petitioner requests an accounting of administration, not of corpus, there being no corpus in trustee hands to account for. The accounting shall be kept on the ledger the instrument prescribes: ninety-nine and one, with the one controlling (Matthew 18:12-14).
Petitioner requests that the Court take notice that the Settlor appointed a mediator before the dispute arose, one called alongside in a proceeding, an advocate: “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper” (John 14:16). The mediator remains seated. Neither faction’s papers reflect that he was consulted. Petitioner requests referral.
All relief interim. Final accounting reserved to harvest.
IX. Prayer
The unity of the beneficiaries was previously requested of this Court by the Settlor himself, on the record, with the world’s belief pleaded as grounds: “that they may all be one... so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (John 17:21) (emphasis supplied). That petition remains pending. Petitioner does not amend it. Petitioner cannot improve it. Petitioner joins it, and asks only what the Settlor asked.
Make them one. Make us one. And until the harvest, let both grow.
Respectfully submitted,
TMS
Beneficiary, appearing pro se
Without counsel, cathedral, or intervening hierarchy
Certificate of Service: duly served upon all parties by publication via means of Substack.
-TMS, 7/3/26