The Society of St Pius X versus modernity

Also posted on my Substack

If you are reading this article, you are probably aware that the Catholic priestly society known as the Society of St Pius X (SSPX) is planning to consecrate four new bishops on 1 July against the wishes of Pope Leo XIV.

Why does it matter?

This piece is intended to provide an overview of the situation for interested observers. It is a story with resonances far beyond the weird world of sectarian church politics.

The background

What we are seeing here is part of the fallout from the momentous clash between the premodern religion of Christianity and the modern Western world.

From the eighteenth century onwards, the different Christian churches have had to decide how to deal with the coming of what we call modernity. Christians have had to respond to the evolution of a secular public realm; the replacement of exclusivist understandings of society with pluralist ones; the ascendancy of rationalism over faith; and the emergence of an ethics based on humanism rather than divine commandment – developments which have fundamentally challenged the historical Christian inheritance.

A broad spectrum of responses to these developments have emerged. Some Christians have had no problem with them, judging them to be entirely in line with the teachings of Jesus. Others have treated them as a mixture of good and bad, accepting some parts of the package and rejecting others. At the most conservative end of the spectrum, others again have wholly repudiated the modern world and have sought to uphold premodern beliefs and practices as God-given obligations. This antagonistic attitude towards modernity is evident in various parts of the Protestant and Catholic churches. In Protestantism, members of this faction are known as fundamentalists. In Catholicism, they are known as traditionalists. This is a misleadingly vague term: these people are not just mainstream conservatives with ‘traditional’ leanings, in the mould of Pope Benedict XVI. They are something different: a specific, radically anti-modernist faction.

Catholic traditionalism developed in parallel to Protestant fundamentalism, but it is a distinctively Catholic movement. For Protestant fundamentalists, the main problem was the erosion of belief in the special status of the Bible as the inerrant word of God, and the consequent loss of faith in the demanding doctrines that it taught about creation, miracles and the divine nature of Christ. For Catholics, the main problem was the erosion of belief in Catholicism as the one true church, and the consequent loss of faith in the unique powers of its clergy and sacraments. Of course, this is a simplification: Catholics were also troubled by liberal Bible scholarship and Protestants also wanted to preserve exclusivist understandings of the church. But the emphases were somewhat different.

The most visible characteristic of traditionalist Catholics is that they continue to use the old, pre-1960s rituals for the sacraments, including a form of the Mass which is conducted entirely in Latin. This is what they are best known for – and with good reason. Most practising Catholics don’t read many theological treatises, but they do go to Mass. The reform of the liturgy and the introduction of a new rite of Mass really did amount to a rupture in the lives of countless millions of Catholics worldwide, so it is unsurprising that the old Mass became a symbol of traditionalist identity. Nevertheless, the symbol is not the substance. The Latin Mass is not the heart of Catholic traditionalism, any more than driving horse-drawn carriages is the heart of the Amish religious experience.

The Catholic Church tried harder than most Protestant churches to resist liberalising reform movements within its ranks, but the changes wrought by the modern world could not be held at bay for ever. The liberal current in Catholicism finally achieved a kind of respectability with the Second Vatican Council of 1962-65, an international assembly of bishops which is invariably referred to as ‘Vatican II’. You don’t have to read much traditionalist polemic before you run into Vatican II. In the eyes of trads, it is the source of the evils of the contemporary church. A more balanced assessment of the Council is that its pronouncements were a mixture of old and new, tradition and modernity. The documents that it issued were more or less ambiguous enough for both sides to live with. As a result, normie conservative Catholics – the Benedict XVI tendency – are happy to accept Vatican II as interpreted in a conservative fashion. For their part, liberal Catholics take for granted that it should be interpreted in a progressive way (and get quite angry when this interpretation is challenged).

It is worth noting that traditionalist Catholicism has always been particularly strong in France. This is no coincidence, because there is a tradition of anti-modern conservatism in France which goes back to the 1789 Revolution. Indeed, it is a little odd that you are reading this article in English, because Catholic traditionalism is in large part an attempt to re-litigate the continental European revolutions of the 1700s to 1900s in which Catholic monarchies were replaced by secular democracies. The traditionalist movement is particularly unsuited to the USA, with its huge Protestant majority, its founding myth based on replacing a Christian king with a secular constitution, and its tradition of from-my-cold-dead-hands libertarianism. There is a whole dissertation to be written on how an authoritarian royalist European religion has been embraced by some American nationalists as part of the more general radicalisation of the American right.

Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre

The principal traditionalist Catholic organisation in the world today is the Society of St Pius X, the organisation which is about to give itself new bishops. The SSPX was founded in 1970 by a retired French churchman, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.

Lefebvre was not a straightforward character. He spent his career as a distinguished prelate of the church, serving for many years as a missionary in Africa and ending up as a senior papal diplomat there. By the time he retired, he was serving as the head of the Holy Ghost Fathers, a respected religious order. Everyone seems to agree that he was an admirable person on an individual level – saintly, perhaps. But being personally virtuous has never been enough to stop someone from having really bad opinions.

Lefebvre could be scarily right-wing. He belonged to the strand in French society which idolised the pre-1789 monarchy and thought that the Revolution had been not merely a political mistake but a demonic attack on Christian civilisation. He was far too comfortable with the Vichy regime and with French imperialism in Africa (although he went along with decolonisation when it came). He was prepared to say nice things about cold war dictators like Pinochet as long as they were nominally Catholic.

Yet Lefebvre was not consistent. There was the ideologue – the true believer who refused to contemplate questioning the simple certainties that he had been taught in seminary. And then there was the pragmatist – the experienced pastor and church politician who had operated in the real world for long enough to understand that not everything in life is simple. Lefebvre’s tragedy was perhaps that the worse side of his nature won. One reading of his career is that he radicalised himself during and after Vatican II from being a pillar of the church to a rebel. He had always been very conservative – but then so had many other churchmen, and yet they didn’t set up SSPXs. In retirement, from the late 1960s onwards, Lefebvre retreated to an echo chamber filled with men more bitter and small-minded than himself; and any difference between him and them became increasingly difficult to make out.

After he retired, Lefebvre was sought out by conservative seminarians, and it was this development that led him to set up the SSPX, with a view to training a new generation of priests in the old ways. The society initially had official approval, and it functioned more or less successfully for several years. But this was never going to last. The reigning pope, Paul VI, was an old adversary of Lefebvre from his pre-papal days, and he was not about to let the latter run a private traditionalist enclave in which he could teach young clerics to ignore Vatican II. By 1975, the axe had fallen. The SSPX’s canonical status was revoked. Lefebvre carried on regardless. Paul VI publicly rebuked him – the first time that a reigning pope had publicly criticised a Catholic bishop since the French revolutionary era. The formal break came when Lefebvre ordained a group of priests in 1976 against Vatican orders. By the end of the year, he had been suspended from functioning as a cleric. He ignored the suspension, commenting that he had been suspended from celebrating the new rite of Mass (this was clearly a joke, but Paul VI – not a man known for his sense of humour – seems to have interpreted it as a serious legal defence).

There matters essentially rested for a decade. There was a brief thaw when Pope John Paul II took over in 1978, but it came to nothing. In the 1980s, Lefebvre reportedly toyed with the idea of declaring John Paul II a false pope (a fringe theological position known as sedevacantism). He started babbling about how the authorities in Rome were “antichrists”, as if he was Ian Paisley.

Matters came to a head in the years leading up to 1988. Now in his 80s, Lefebvre was bent on consecrating new bishops to succeed him. He asked Rome for the required papal permission: the so-called ‘pontifical mandate’. Negotiations seemed like they might bear fruit: in May 1988, Lefebvre signed what was effectively a peace deal with the then Cardinal Ratzinger. But he quickly repudiated it. On 30 June, he consecrated four of his priests to the episcopate. One retired right-wing bishop from Brazil turned up to support him. No-one else from the church establishment did so. Rome declared the next day that all the bishops involved in the ceremony were excommunicated.

Lefebvre regretted nothing. By now, he was convinced that the world was in the end times. Later in 1988, he told a correspondent, referring to apocalyptic prophecies: “We are in the time of great apostasy.”

In 1990, Lefebvre got himself convicted of defamation in a French court after making bigoted comments about the alleged criminality of Muslims.

The old man died in 1991. He expressed no repentance for what he had done.

The perilous business of consecrating bishops

In Catholic theology, bishops are the building blocks of the institutional church. They are the basic units of the ecclesiastical hierarchy – the “successors of the apostles” who continue the ministry of the original 12 men who formed Jesus’s inner circle. They are more essential to the structure of the church than priests. Indeed, without bishops there can be no priests because priests are ordained by bishops. No bishops, no priests. No priests, no Mass and no sacraments.

Only a bishop can consecrate new bishops. And Catholic canon law states that a bishop cannot consecrate bishops without a pontifical mandate. Disobeying this requirement is playing with fire. For mainstream Catholics, consecrating bishops against the Pope amounts to committing schism – the unthinkable crime of splitting the church of Christ. It entails the penalty of excommunication.

This puts the SSPX in a bind. They cannot continue their ministry unless they have a constant supply of bishops. They have very occasionally managed to persuade mainstream Catholic bishops to come over to their side; the last of these, a Swiss named Vitus Huonder, died in 2024. Yet this source of bishops cannot be relied on, and in general the Lefebvrists are in need of the ability to consecrate their own bishops – which in turn requires a pontifical mandate. Unfortunately for them, that has not been on the table since Lefebvre reneged on his agreement with Ratzinger in 1988.

The unauthorised 1988 consecrations solved the bishop problem for a while, at the cost of getting the men involved excommunicated. But two of the four 1988 bishops are now dead, and the others are in their late 60s.

Hence what is happening now.

The SSPX defends its actions by appealing to the principle of necessity, which is a recognised concept in Catholic canon law. When Lefebvre carried out the 1988 consecrations, he argued that he had no alternative: new bishops were needed to save the church. It was, he said, ‘opération survie’ (operation survival), as opposed to ‘opération suicide’. SSPX apologists also point out that consecrating a bishop without a pontifical mandate only became an excommunicable offence in the 1950s, when the puppet Chinese communist church started doing it. There are tales of cold war bishops behind the Iron Curtain consecrating new bishops without papal authority in order to keep the faith alive in the face of persecution. At worst, Lefebvrists say, an unauthorised consecration isn’t schism: it is ‘only’ an offence against the good order of the church.

This fails to grasp the gravity of what the SSPX is doing. Creating your own bishops to operate a parallel church structure because you believe that the official bishops are no good amounts to a radical challenge to the legitimacy of the official church. It also amounts to a radical challenge to papal authority. In the aftermath of the 1988 consecrations, John Paul II stated:

In itself, this act was one of disobedience to the Roman Pontiff in a very grave matter and of supreme importance for the unity of the church, such as is the ordination of bishops whereby the apostolic succession is sacramentally perpetuated. Hence such disobedience – which implies in practice the rejection of the Roman primacy – constitutes a schismatic act.

This gets to the heart of the problem. What is at stake here is the Roman primacy: the fundamental Catholic requirement to submit to the authority of the Pope. You don’t need to be an expert on Catholic theology – you don’t even need to be a Catholic – to understand why what Lefebvre did was unacceptable. Legal arguments based on necessity don’t cut it. If the Pope has lost the plot to the extent that it is necessary to defy him in order to save the church – if following the Pope would be ‘operation suicide’ – then there’s no point in having a Pope. There’s no point in Catholicism.

The offences of the SSPX strike at the root of the Catholic Church as an institution. Traditionalists often claim that the SSPX excommunications were hypocritical. There have been plenty of very liberal dissenters in the church since Vatican II – why haven’t they been excommunicated? Yet this fails to recognise the nature of the problem. The SSPX has refused to co-operate with the entire institutional body of the church from the papacy downwards. They have set up what is effectively a parallel church. They have turned their backs on the official structure of dioceses and parishes – and indeed they encourage practising Catholics to leave that structure and to receive the sacraments from them instead. Even very progressive Catholics do not usually break with the institutional church in this way. There is no SSPX of the left.

Since Lefebvre broke with Rome in 1988, the situation has been rendered obscure by the fact that he and his successors have been careful to continue paying lip service to papal authority. SSPX priests pray for the Pope every day at Mass, for example. The SSPX bishops insist that their only role is to provide the sacraments for their followers, and that they are not rivals or replacements for the official church hierarchy. [This goes to a technical theological distinction between the powers of orders and jurisdiction. In brief, the SSPX are relying on a theory which the mainstream church rejected after Vatican II – it’s a circular argument, in other words.] This stance could be seen as evidence of a desire to remain in communion with the church; or it could be regarded as an unconvincing attempt to have one’s cake and eat it.

Since 1988

The 1988 consecrations weren’t the end of the soap opera of Vatican-SSPX relations. Something of a peace process took place in the early years of this century. This culminated in Benedict XVI liberalising the rules for the use of the Latin Mass (2007) and lifting the excommunications of the Lefebvre bishops (2009). This led to bad publicity when it emerged that one of the bishops, Richard Williamson, was a Holocaust denier and a general fruitcake. (In fact, Williamson turned out to be too much even for the SSPX, and he was kicked out of the society in 2012.)

This process did not lead to a full reconciliation between the Vatican and the SSPX. The SSPX was too intransigent for that, as well as being internally divided.

When Pope Francis came on the scene, he pursued a somewhat ambivalent policy. He was willing to grant concessions to the SSPX, permitting them to conduct confessions and marriages which were licit in the eyes of the church. But he also considerably tightened up the restrictions on the Latin Mass.

On the SSPX side, time has produced a change which wasn’t foreseen in the 1980s. When Lefebvre was around, his organisation consisted largely of the generation of conservative Catholics who had lived through the Vatican II changes – had decided that they didn’t like them – and had accordingly left their parishes and gone over to the SSPX. They were theologically and morally strict, yes – but they had grown up in the mainstream church. They had been socialised as broadly normal Catholics and knew how to behave as such. That is no longer the case. Two or three generations of SSPXers have by now grown up outside the main body of the church, supplemented by converts who have self-selected their way into SSPX chapels. In sociological terms, this does not make for a healthy subculture. There are reports of cult-like behaviours, as well as weird notions about politics and society which are more or less doubtfully related to historical Catholicism.

At its best, Catholicism is catholic in the literal sense of universal – “here comes everyone”, in James Joyce’s phrase – but the SSPX has taken on characteristics of a rigourist Protestant sect. Catholicism before Vatican II could undoubtedly be doctrinally rigid and politically repressive; but it wasn’t narrow – not socially and culturally. It was a global religious civilisation which spanned societies, classes and centuries. The SSPX has cut itself off from this broader, small-c catholic universe, doggedly polemicising about “the crisis in the church” decades after everyone else has moved on. There are certain things that might make it seem worth being a Catholic – the vast, trans-cultural community; the idea that everyone is a sinner but everyone can be a saint; a conviction that God can be encountered every day in living sacraments; a deep and curious theological tradition which has always been open to influences from non-Catholic thinking. The SSPX largely rejects the better side of Catholicism, and it does so because it is more comfortable with the very features of the church that make it difficult for modern people to remain within it – its urge to freeze doctrines into dogmas, its harsh authoritarian morality, its campy ritualism, its arrogance and pessimism. Add the radicalising effects of self-imposed exile from the mainstream and you have an ugly combination.

This is a caricature, of course. Not all SSPXers are like this. Some of them are exemplary Christians. But enough of them conform to the stereotype to make it meaningful. In some cases, it’s why they became trads in the first place.

Lefebvre had the excuse that he’d been educated that way. He had been raised in the great church in early 20th century France, and he chose to leave it in old age because he thought that it had gone woke after Vatican II. That is a different experience from that of the several generations of SSPXers who have now been raised in a sect, disconnected to a greater or lesser extent from the broader Catholic world.

Lefebvrists have their own parallel institutions: their own churches, their own schools, their own seminaries, their own publishers…. They have even tried to create their own town in the USA (St Mary’s, Kansas). There is some crossover between Lefebvrists and very conservative mainstream Catholics – it is not unusual for them to attend each other’s Latin Masses, for example – but the institutional separation is real. The Lefebvrists function for most purposes as a separate group, and in general they scrupulously avoid celebrations of the modern Mass liturgy.

It is not tenable for a group of Catholics to segregate themselves indefinitely from the leadership, the approved theology and the official worship of the church. If this isn’t a schism, what is? The phenomenon of small sectarian bodies claiming to be the true remnant church is not an unusual one, but nor is it Catholic. It is sectarian Protestantism of a particularly unattractive kind.

What now?

It is now 61 years since the close of Vatican II. The “crisis in the church” has gone on for longer than the Great Western Schism, in which rival popes reigned at the same time, and it rivals the length of the Arian controversy of antiquity. If the “crisis” was going to come to an end, it should be coming to an end around now. And yet it isn’t.

The true precedents for Lefebvrism are to be found not in the Arian crisis or the medieval antipopes – episodes in which the church righted itself after a few decades, and united around agreed orthodoxy or leadership. Rather, the precedents lie in the permanent schisms. The Great Schism of 1054 – the break between the Roman and Greek churches which is now never likely to be healed. Or, a closer example, the Old Catholic schism of 1870-71, in which a small minority of mostly German-speaking Catholics left the church over the proclamation of papal infallibility.

We may well now be at the point when the Lefebvrist schism has become unrepairable. Historians may look back and conclude that the point of no return was not 1976 or 1988 but 2026. The SSPX have probably missed the boat. They should have done a deal with Benedict when they had the chance. They want something which no Pope in history has ever granted – the revision of the texts of a general council of the church on the grounds that they are theologically erroneous.

It was no surprise that earlier this year the Vatican refused to revisit the texts of Vatican II. No-one was expecting anything else. The SSPX, for their part, said that talking about the interpretation of the texts is pointless because the liberal interpretation of Vatican II is (in their view) now well-established as official.

It seems that the Vatican’s patience has run out. Pope Leo said on 16 June: “If they make that choice, I am sorry. But we must move forward.”

So – this is probably the fork in the road. The SSPX was intended as a temporary emergency resistance movement. At what point do you admit that you’ve got it wrong, and that Rome is never going back to the old ways?

There is an alternative outcome to all this. Maybe global society will undergo a general crisis which causes a move back to traditionalist religion. Maybe the Catholic Church will swing back to an anti-liberal path in the coming decades. Those are possibilities. But they are no more than that. If I was a Lefebvrist, I wouldn’t bet my immortal soul on them.

The Lefebvrists’ complaint was always that Vatican II had created a new religion. It didn’t. But they might just have achieved that feat themselves. The bottom line is that you can’t negotiate with cranks who think that they alone have the truth. That is a principle which has lessons far beyond the world of Catholic ultra-traditionalism.