Vatican declares – The Vatican declared the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) in schism after the group consecrated four new bishops at its Econe, Switzerland seminary without papal consent, excommunicating the bishops and also sanctioning its priests and faithful. The decree warned
Econ e, Switzerland was filled long before the ritual ended.
On Wednesday, the Society of St. Pius X held a five-hour Mass attended by some 15,500 people and their children. In a tent set up outside the SSPX seminary. four men were consecrated as bishops in direct defiance of Pope Leo XIV. who had urged the SSPX to hold off for the sake of church unity. The names of the newly consecrated bishops were Pascal Schreiber, Michael Goldade, Michel Poinsinet de Sivry, and Marc Hanappier.
Thursday brought the Vatican’s response—fast, firm, and unusually broad.
Through its doctrine office, the Vatican declared the SSPX in schism. In a decree, it excommunicated the four new bishops and the two bishops who participated in the consecration ceremony. The consecrations were called a “schismatic act. ” and the Vatican said the society itself had created a schism—an intentional rupture with the Catholic Church. The sanctions did not stop at the altar: the Vatican warned that those who formally adhere to the SSPX are considered themselves schismatic and excommunicated.
The decree also targeted SSPX priests and the sacraments they administer. It declared SSPX priests to be schismatic and therefore excommunicated, and it invalidated the sacraments of confession and marriage that they administer.
The Vatican’s doctrine office went beyond the minimum sanctions foreseen by canon law to respond to the Econe consecrations. The harshness carried extra weight because the penalties—especially those aimed at priests. the faithful. and the sacraments they can receive—reversed concessions the Vatican had granted the SSPX in recent years as part of an outreach effort to bring the group back under Rome’s wing.
For the Vatican, the timing mattered. The consecrations had posed a crisis for Pope Leo XIV, whose American papacy stresses the need for church unity. He has reached out especially to the conservative and traditionalist wing of the church that. during the Pope Francis pontificate. had become alienated in many ways.
The sequence of steps left little room for compromise: papal urging to pause, consecrations carried out anyway in Econe, and then a decree that not only excommunicated the consecrators but extended penalties to the priests and sacraments that sustain daily life for the society’s members.
The SSPX’s origins go back to a different era of church politics. French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre founded the SSPX in 1970 in opposition to the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Among other things. the 1960s meetings known as Vatican II reshaped the church’s relations with other Christians. Jews and people of other faiths. and allowed Mass to be celebrated in the vernacular rather than Latin.
Lefebvre consecrated four bishops without papal consent in 1988. The Vatican responded by excommunicating Lefebvre and the four bishops and declaring those consecrations a “schismatic act.” Pope Benedict XVI lifted the excommunications in 2009 as part of his yearslong outreach to the group.
Today, the SSPX has no legal standing in the church, and Thursday’s decree declares it to be in schism.
The Vatican’s explanation for the broad response also pointed to what the SSPX represents: a parallel. ultra-Catholic. pre-Vatican II church that has grown in the decades since its original break from Rome. Even so. the society—while still representing a fringe of the Catholic right—has expanded into a significant community within Catholic traditionalism. SSPX statistics cited in the report put the group at six bishops. 751 priests. 264 seminarians training in five seminaries. 145 religious brothers. 88 oblates and 250 religious sisters representing 50 nationalities.
Not everyone who favors the Latin Mass agreed with Thursday’s sanctions.
In an explanatory note accompanying the decree. the Vatican said it was willing—“like a caring mother”—to welcome any SSPX faithful back into the fold. But the note did not create a specific Vatican entity to receive them. It instead decreed that Vatican ambassadors around the world would establish procedures for local bishops to follow.
Traditionalists who remain in communion with the Holy See were watching the response closely. They had been surprised by the harshness of the sanctions.
Luigi Casalini. of the blog Messa in Latino. said the excommunication of the bishops was correct because canon law provides for it. But he called the extension of excommunications to SSPX priests and faithful “an act of unusual severity. ” and he said the invalidation of SSPX sacraments was problematic. “Above all. we find it hard to believe that. to date. no Vatican body has been established to manage potential defectors. ” Casalini told The Associated Press. He referenced procedures after the 1988 excommunications.
The SSPX, for its part, says the Church is “rife with errors,” including modernism and liberalism, and it argues that only it upholds the true faith of Christ. It justified the consecrations by citing a “state of necessity” to minister to its faithful.
Rev. Davide Pagliarani. the SSPX superior. had insisted during his homily during the Wednesday consecrations that the ceremony served Pope Leo and the church. “We are accused of not respecting the pope,” Pagliarani said. “But it is precisely because we love the pope as the vicar of Christ. as the head of the church. that we don’t want to see the pope humiliated anymore. on the side of false shepherds representing false religions.”.
Only two of the original four bishops consecrated in 1988 are alive, and the SSPX said they are simply too old to minister to all of the SSPX faithful.
On Wednesday night. with bishops praying in miters and holding pastoral staffs under the tent outside the Econe seminary. the society framed its act as fidelity. not rupture. On Thursday. the Vatican answered with a word that leaves no middle ground: schism—and with sanctions that reach beyond leadership to the priests and sacraments through which believers are meant to be cared for.
Vatican SSPX Society of St. Pius X schism excommunication Pope Leo XIV Econe Switzerland traditionalist Catholicism Latin Mass canon law confession invalidated marriage invalidated