The ceremony took place at the Seminary of Saint Pius X in Écône, Switzerland, where 38 years earlier the group’s founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, similarly consecrated four bishops for the SSPX without papal approval. As in this case, Lefebvre and the other bishops involved in the proceedings incurred automatic excommunication by their actions, which Pope John Paul II described as constituting “a schismatic act”.

Archbishop Lefebvre died in 1991, but the excommunications of the four bishops who had been consecrated by him were lifted by Pope Benedict XVI – at their request – in 2009. However, the society’s status was not regularized as a result.

Regardless, despite the mirror-imaging of the events, the Vatican’s response in 2026 went further than previously.

The Vatican Drops the Hammer

In the 2 July decree published by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, all six SSPX bishops, both the consecrating bishops and those consecrated, were declared to have been automatically (“latae sententiae”) excommunicated.

The consecrators, Bishops Alfonso de Galarreta and Bernard Fellay – themselves unlawfully installed by Archbishop Lefebvre in 1988 – were additionally said to have “committed an act of a schismatic nature” and “publicly adhered to the schismatic act” respectively by going ahead with the event without a pontifical mandate.

What set apart this latest response, though, was the warning to clerics and lay faithful contained at the end of the decree, which advised “not to adhere to the schism of the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X, because they would ipso facto incur the penalty of latae sententiae excommunication”.

It is unprecedented territory for the priestly fraternity which has since its inception in 1970 had a contentious relationship with the Vatican. It was not territory entered without warning, however.

“I plead with you and ask you with all my heart: please turn back! I urge you to consider carefully the spiritual good of the faithful, because the schismatic act you are about to undertake would deprive them of the licit and, in some cases, even valid reception of the Sacraments, which they love and seek for their sanctification”, wrote Pope Leo XIV to the SSPX Superior General Fr. Davide Pagliarani two days before the group defied his will.

“The Church is open to a path of dialogue and understanding that the Holy Spirit can make possible and fruitful”, Leo wrote, adding that he was praying for those concerned “because to tear the seamless garment of Christ is a sin of extreme gravity”. 

“May the Lord enlighten your consciences and awaken your hearts,” he wrote.

The warning fell on deaf ears, as evidenced by the ceremony itself, but also by the statement released afterwards by the SSPX, which persisted in its belief that it had secured the “means necessary for the preservation of the sacred heritage of Tradition”.

“The gift of these four new bishops constitutes truly a very great grace for the Society itself and for the whole Church”, it said, having expressed its regret that the consecrations “had to be” conferred against the will of the pope.

Despite ongoing dialogue between the Society and the Vatican over the decades, enduring periods of greater and lesser frigidity, the fundamental divide has never been resolved, and was alive and present in the week’s rupture. That divide was best expressed by Lefebvre in his 1974 “Declaration”, which more clearly than anything else summed up the fraternity’s essence:

“We hold fast, with all our heart and with all our soul, to Catholic Rome, Guardian of the Catholic Faith and of the traditions necessary to preserve this faith, to Eternal Rome, Mistress of wisdom and truth.”

“We refuse, on the other hand, and have always refused to follow the Rome of neo-Modernist and neo-Protestant tendencies which were clearly evident in the Second Vatican Council and, after the Council, in all the reforms which derived from it.”

On the one hand, a pledge of allegiance to the Church. On the other, an interpretation of the Church post-1965 (when the Second Vatican Council ended) that makes allegiance to the Church impossible.

A Perverse Return to Tradition

That spirit of division animated the speech of one of the recently-consecrated SSPX bishops, Michael Goldade, who said during the week that “if the Catholic Church in her Tradition brings forth life, the modernist church is a desert that kills. That kills everything that it touches”.

https://twitter.com/MLJHaynes/status/2072355890359837022

The week’s proceedings made unavoidable for some the conclusion that on its current course, the SSPX has potentially, unwittingly, lined itself up for a collision with that ancient heresy, Donatism, addressed so powerfully by one of the Church’s greatest Fathers, Saint Augustine.

Augustine wrote in the fifth century that “the righteous are not defiled by the sins of other men when they participate with them in the sacraments”.

“And thus you have no excuse by which you can wash away the guilt of the schism whereby you have gone forth from the unity of the Church”, the Bishop of Hippo ominously wrote. From Rome’s perspective, it is a warning better heeded late than never. The Vatican has outlined the conditions required for SSPX clergy and committed laity to reconcile with the Church, and senior officials have suggested that dialogue is still possible in the future but that time would be required.

The great tragedy of the SSPX is that it accurately diagnoses a great many of the ills afflicting the Church at present, but has allowed itself to be radicalized by those rather than by love and service of Christ in the Church he established. 

A subtle, but very real, distinction. What is required next is, contrary to the SSPX’s understanding, a return to the bedrock of tradition. Repentance and conversion.