Pope Leo draws a hard line against apostate traditionalists, but it may be spreading

For years, the ultra-traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X, or SSPX, existed in a kind of Catholic limbo.

Officially you were outside the Roman Catholic Church, yet you tolerated it. Its priests heard confessions, its communities grew and its bishops took courage.

On Thursday, Rome expelled them from that place.

The Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the body that oversees matters of Catholic doctrine and discipline, issued a declaration that the SSPX is in formal schism – a break from papal authority and communion with the wider Catholic Church – after it consecrated four new bishops without Pope Leo XIV’s approval.

Vatican observers say the most important part of the decree was not just the excommunication of the bishops involved. It was a notice that SSPX priests and lay Catholics who adhere legally to the community were also considered excommunicated – a move that raised spiritual stakes for thousands of followers around the world.

The Vatican’s action came after Wednesday’s consecration ceremony in Écône, Switzerland.

On the green side of the mountain, SSPX bishops laid hands on four priests under a white tent, before rows of priests and thousands of supporters gathered in the mountain valley with bells ringing.

The community says that 15,500 people attended the event. It also claims approximately 800 communities in 77 countries and more than 700 priests.

Six decades have passed since the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which opened up new relations with Jews and other Christian denominations and allowed pluralism in local languages ​​instead of just Latin. The SSPX completely rejected those changes.

According to Elise Ann Allen, a Vatican expert for the online Catholic magazine Crux, the church’s efforts to bring them back have been unsuccessful.

‘Down with individual bishops’

What Thursday’s law means in practice, he says, is another matter.

“Law enforcement will suffer,” he said.

“It goes to certain bishops in their areas, if they know people who go to the SSPX church but come to their parishes looking for the sacraments.

Hours after excommunicating SSPX priests and clerics on Thursday, the Vatican offered an olive branch to moderates in the mix.

It posted a statement on the website of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith inviting priests and followers caught up in the schism to return to full communion with the church – citing a 1996 note from the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts that says, for ordinary Catholics, legal adherence to schism depends on “the intention of the individual.”

John Lydon, an Augustinian priest who grew up in Toronto and now heads the Mother Cabrini Institute on Immigration at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, worked with the current Pope when he was Father Robert Prevost for ten years in Peru.

‘Church principles’

“I don’t think the Pope is doing anything to them, it’s the norms of the church and it’s been a norm for a long time, he was trained in canon law, so he’s just using the rules of the church,” said Lydon.

“He is a compassionate person, he wrote to them and tried everything he could to avoid the consequences, now he says, ‘You can come back, you are always welcome,’ because few people are guilty.”

This is why the Vatican’s use of the word “separation” is important. Lydon says the goal is not to deepen the divide, but to clarify where Rome believes the line lies.

The word carries centuries of weight. Major schisms in Christianity include the schism between Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy in 1054, and the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, which forever changed Christianity in Europe.

The breakup of the SSPX, with a small foreign group, is nowhere near as consequential, observers say. But the language chosen by the Vatican makes it clear that it no longer sees the dispute as only about liturgies, nostalgia or a lot of Latin. It is an official break for the meal.

The community was founded in 1970 by the French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. In 1988, Lefebvre consecrated four bishops without the permission of Rome, which resulted in automatic excommunication.

Decades of peaceful coexistence followed, with Pope Benedict XVI proposing the excommunication of four surviving bishops in 2009 in an attempt to restore the group.

Pope Francis later allowed SSPX priests to hear confessions and officiate marriages in the Holy Year of 2025, but he saw giving mass in Latin as divisive and required bishops to ask for permission to do so.

Longtime Vatican observer Francis X. Rocca says that when Leo was elected, some traditionalists hoped that he might do more than his predecessors, perhaps formally returning the SSPX to the institutional church.

Instead, Leo went ahead of Francis.

“Catholics who adhere to the traditional religion and remain in the church ask why Leo did not meet with the SSPX when he met with those who do not agree with the church’s gender behavior or with the archbishop of Canterbury, who is a woman,” said Rocca.

“He is now firmly in the grip of apostate traditionalists, although he may be soft on the traditionalists who remain in the church.”