SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — A suspended Catholic priest on a tiny Caribbean island is embracing calypso to make his voice heard on topics including Gaza and sexual abuse within the church.
Father Gerard Paul, who hails from Grenada, can no longer officiate masses, funerals, weddings or baptisms after repeatedly criticizing the church and clergy. But that hasn’t stopped him from preaching via the lilting rhythms of calypso, an Afro-Caribbean music genre known for its witty lyrics and satirical social commentary.
“It’s a kind of pulpit for me,” Paul told The Associated Press in a phone interview this week.
The 64-year-old priest made his debut this year at Spicemas, Grenada’s biggest soca and calypso carnival. Like many annual carnivals across the Caribbean, it celebrates rebellion against enslavement. Paul sang his way into the finals and is scheduled to compete as “Father Paul” against 10 other singers this weekend, including “Killa B” and “Sour Serpent.”
Paul joined the seminary 40 years ago and has been a priest for 32 years: “I was always concerned about the plight of the masses, so I saw the church as a vehicle for societal change.”
His first taste of calypso came in 1988, while he was still in the seminary in Trinidad and Tobago. The seminary held a calypso competition where Paul made his debut and placed second.
His priestly duties then dominated his life, but after he was suspended two years ago following a sermon criticizing Israel's actions in Gaza, Paul embraced calypso again. He has recorded two songs so far — “Oh Gaza” and “Ah Want Ah Radar.”
“I can’t quite say I miss the ritual,” he said, referring to being a priest. “Although I loved the ritual ... there is a lot of limitation to it as well.”
He said that while he loved interacting with his congregation, being a calypso singer allows him to reach a wider audience.
“When you’re in a small world, you feel that’s the whole world,” Paul said. “As a much bigger world opens to you, you can’t go back.”
Paul is known for his song “Ah Want Ah Radar,” a riff on the U.S. government’s real-life request to install a radar at Grenada’s international airport last year as the U.S. military struck suspected drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean.
Paul sings about Grenada’s government dragging its feet on a decision, with the U.S. later installing a radar in neighboring Tobago.
In the song, Paul asks U.S. President Donald Trump for a radar of his own, which he said he would use to expose sexual abuse within the church.
“I’m begging the U.S., please,” Paul sings.
“We all know the Catholic faith say that priests must be celibate, but they love what they say they hate. And it’s just a cover-up from the level of the top,” he sings as part of explicit lyrics that reference clergy having sex with boys.
Paul, who angered the church in recent years, was hit with an indefinite suspension in April 2024.
In footage shot and later deleted by Good News Catholic Communications, an arm of the Catholic Diocese of St. George’s in Grenada, Paul criticized Israel and accused it of committing genocide in Gaza — which Israel vehemently denies — during a March 2024 sermon in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in St. George's.
Paul called on the pope, bishops and priests to speak up during his sermon, which was published on social media by The Bubb Report, a local weekly investigative journalism program.
“We cannot rightly ever preach the gospel if we do not stand for justice,” he said as some in the congregation applauded. He added: “When you stand in silence, when you sit in silence, you are part of the injustice.”
Then-Bishop Clyde Harvey criticized Paul's sermon, calling it a “diatribe” and said he did not give the priest permission to say what he did.
“We can be proud to belong to a church which fails sometimes, but … is always standing up wherever it can for justice,” Harvey said.
On April 4, 2024, Paul was suspended indefinitely. In a statement, Harvey accused Paul of “persistent” attacks on the church and its leadership, saying his statements “have confused, harmed and scandalized many faith-filled persons. They have brought his fellow clergy into disrepute.”
Harvey wrote: “When Fr Paul said, ‘I have no regrets and I will do it again,’ he put himself beyond review and fraternal correction. No institution can survive when such attitudes and actions are adopted.”
On April 8, 2024, Harvey said in a video posted on social media that Paul was not suspended for his comments on Gaza, noting that such sentiments have echoed within and outside the Catholic Church. Rather, he was suspended for “his continuing lack of respect for the church of which he is a priest” and failure to “correct his errors,” Harvey said.
He added: “Father Paul has expressed his views in ways that seem to mock authority.”
Harvey stressed that the suspension is not a dismissal from priesthood.
Yet Paul remains suspended two years later.
The priest reached the upcoming finals by singing songs including, “Oh Gaza,” a biting commentary about the Israeli military offensive in Gaza that has killed more than 73,000 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, with Paul describing deaths “while Zion drums beat and missiles pound.”
“This is a time to make a voice for them,” he sings. “Cannot just pretend everything is fine, Gaza on me mind … When the Church would not take a stance, I go preach, I go preach.”
Gibbs reported from Port-of-Spain, Trinidad.
Father Gerard Paul, who can no longer officiate masses, funerals, weddings or baptisms after repeatedly criticizing the church and clergy, rehearses with Royal Grenada Police Force Band in St. George, Grenada, Thursday, Aug. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Floyd Robinson)
Father Gerard Paul, back center, who can no longer officiate masses, funerals, weddings or baptisms after repeatedly criticizing the church and clergy, rehearses with Royal Grenada Police Force Band in St. George, Grenada, Thursday, Aug. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Floyd Robinson)
Father Gerard Paul, who can no longer officiate masses, funerals, weddings or baptisms after repeatedly criticizing the church and clergy, rehearses with the Royal Grenada Police Force Band in St. George, Grenada, Thursday, Aug. 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Floyd Robinson)
JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Scott Colom is a gregarious prosecutor who grew up in Mississippi with a Republican father who campaigned for Ronald Reagan and counted political titan Thad Cochran as a friend.
That background sounds ideal for a U.S. Senate hopeful in a Deep South state run for generations by white conservatives.
Except Colom is a Democrat. And a Black man.
So, he's an underdog in his bid to unseat Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, a white Donald Trump acolyte seeking her second full term. Yet several variables — Colom’s biography, Mississippi’s demographics, lingering inflation and Hyde-Smith's understated profile — make for a wildcard matchup as Republicans defend their 53-47 Senate majority at the midpoint of Trump's second presidency.
“Mississippi matters,” Colom insisted throughout a recent day of campaigning.
He told The Associated Press he has a rare opportunity to flip the state's usual script by casting Hyde-Smith as a rubber stamp while deflecting broadsides that he's a liberal misfit.
“I’m going to fight the corruption that we’re seeing in D.C. that’s making everything less affordable,” he said, zeroing in on Trump’s tariffs, the Iran war and the Republican-controlled Congress’ capitulation on both. “Our junior senator has totally given away our voice. She’s not worried about us at all.”
Through aides, Hyde-Smith declined an interview. But her campaign manager projected confidence.
“No one believes in Scott Colom except for Scott Colom,” said Jake Monssen, tagging the challenger as a stooge of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and billionaire donor George Soros, whose family backed Colom's district attorney races.
Schumer recently held a fundraiser for Colom, and Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, Maryland's first Black senator, traveled to Mississippi to support him as Democrats look for every path to Senate control. She predicted more senators will follow.
“I can guarantee you one thing,” Alsobrooks said, "I’m not the last.”
As they campaigned together, Colom cited a famous biblical long shot while alluding to his state's history at the vanguard of the Civil Rights Movement.
“We know a little something about David and Goliath in Mississippi," he said.
Mississippi’s fraught history with racism is never far below the surface.
Colom’s weekend featured a voting rights discussion at Jackson’s Farish Street Baptist Church, where Medgar Evers, the NAACP leader killed by white supremacists in 1963, held organizing meetings. One of Evers’ successors embraced Colom's candidacy as the next step in a long struggle.
“Mississippi is not just a moral argument,” said state NAACP Executive Director Charles Taylor. “It is simple math.”
Black voters make up a larger share of Mississippi's 2.95 million residents (about 37%) and typical November electorate (about a third) than in any other state. More than 9 out of 10 of them typically vote Democratic but turn out at a lower rate than white voters, especially young generations, according to strategists in both major political parties. White voters opt by a 4-1 ratio or more for Republicans. Younger white voters trend slightly less Republican, but they're also less likely to vote.
That makes most Mississippi elections closer than in neighboring Alabama and Louisiana. In 2018, Hyde-Smith won a special election runoff over Mike Espy, Mississippi's first Black congressman since Reconstruction and a former U.S. agriculture secretary, by 7 percentage points. She notched a 10-percentage-point rematch win in 2020 but trailed Trump’s 16-percentage-point margin over Democrat Joe Biden.
Three years later, Republican Gov. Tate Reeves managed just a 3-percentage-point reelection margin and finished less than 1 percentage point over the majority threshold that Mississippi law requires to avoid a runoff in statewide general elections.
Taylor said registration and turnout efforts by the NACCP and other groups could draw 75,000 more Black voters, enough to close recent gaps.
Wilbur Colom, who once lost a state treasurer’s race as a Republican, enjoys gaming out turnout scenarios for his son.
Scott Colom can hit a winning sweet spot, his father said, by increasing Black share of the electorate to 35% and get closer to one out of four white votes rather than the typical 20% or less.
“That’s hard,” Wilbur Colom said. “But demographics are our friend here.”
Colom mostly sidesteps Mississippi history or electoral math unless asked.
“We’ve made a lot more progress than we get credit for,” he said.
“A lot of Mississippians,” he added, “want somebody that’s going to look out for them,” regardless of race.
On Republican gerrymandering after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted a last key Voting Rights Act provision protecting minority voting strength, Colom steers the conversation to economics. Republicans, Colom said, “don't want to be held accountable” for how things are going.
Asked about Biden tapping him for a federal judgeship only for Hyde-Smith to block the nomination, Colom says the campaign isn't about that. He avoids personal shots at Trump, instead emphasizing Mississippi farmers harmed by the Republican president’s tariffs and “400,000 Mississippians that don’t have health insurance” because the state hasn’t expanded Medicaid and Republicans, Hyde-Smith included, let expanded insurance premium subsidies expire.
Colom mentions crime victims and their families in his jurisdiction, promising voters will see them vouch for him. And he criticizes Hyde-Smith for using campaign funds at Las Vegas hotels.
“Voters in Mississippi were promised America first. They were promised lower grocery prices, no more endless wars, concepts of a healthcare plan,” he said. “We’ve been betrayed on all three fronts, and Cindy Hyde-Smith won’t even do a town hall to justify any of it.”
The senator's aides note that she travels regularly to community events around Mississippi — and only annually to Las Vegas for a national campaign fundraiser the onetime state agriculture commissioner plans around a professional rodeo event.
Hyde-Smith, in turn, frames Colom as beholden to extremes beyond Mississippi. Monssen said voters will see a challenger trying “to transition kids’ genders,” raise taxes and give “healthcare to illegal immigrants” to please his “socialist supporters” from the coasts.
It’s a play-it-safe strategy that presumes Republicans like Steve Rogers, a 73-year-old from Brandon, still make up Mississippi's majority.
“I like how she votes, and I think any Democrat’s wasting their time,” Rogers said. He still gives Trump high marks and hasn't even heard of Colom. Trump’s slide “may give her some trouble,” he allows, “but I think she coasts.”
Colom acknowledged financial support from the Soros family but said no candidate controls outside political action committees. He pointed to his prosecution of a Democratic sheriff for sexual abuse of a prisoner as proof that partisanship doesn’t guide him. Voters, including many who've backed Trump and Hyde-Smith, “are smart enough,” he said, to “see through the lies.”
Democrat Judy Weiner, a 72-year-old poll worker in Hinds County, added that Hyde-Smith distinguishes herself only by her fealty to Trump, while not establishing a reputation for securing appropriations and helping rank-and-file Mississippians, as did her predecessor Cochran.
“He made his decisions based on what was good for all the people in Mississippi, not because the president whispered in his ear,” she said, noting Cochran attracted votes from Black and white Democrats.
The candidates' campaign accounts and Mississippi's inexpensive media markets intensify the unknowns.
Through June, Hyde-Smith had raised $3.8 million this cycle, with $2.5 million left. Colom pulled in $2.8 million and had $850,000 remaining. But Colom outpaced Hyde-Smith among individual contributors, $1.9 million to $1.8 million, from the start of 2025. More of his money ($536,000) came from Mississippi than any other state, despite Monssen's broadsides.
There is no statewide TV advertising yet, but Senate Majority PAC spokeswoman Lauren French said the group is “watching closely.” And it doesn't take seven figures per ad buy to penetrate the electorate, unlike in more populous states like Texas, Georgia and North Carolina. That means that either national party or super PACs could make late investments that matter.
“We need to be working for every single seat,” said Alsobrooks, the Maryland visitor, “and you know what, it always seems impossible until it’s done.”
Mississippi Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Scott Colom, center, speaks with an attendee of a voting rights town hall at the historic Farish Street Baptist Church in Jackson, Miss., Saturday, Aug. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Sarah Warnock)
From left, Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md., Mississippi Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Scott Colom, Mississippi NAACP State Conference Executive Director Charles Taylor and Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., conduct a voting rights town hall at the historic Farish Street Baptist Church in Jackson, Miss., Saturday, Aug. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Sarah Warnock)
FILE - Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-Miss., speaks during a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, on May 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
Mississippi Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Scott Colom speaks with attendees at an event held at the Two Mississippi Museums in Jackson, Miss., Saturday, Aug. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Sarah Warnock)
Mississippi Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Scott Colom speaks with Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md., before a campaign event at the Capital Club in Jackson, Miss., Saturday, Aug. 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Sarah Warnock)
