The foremost and largest traditionalist society of Catholic traditionalists was excommunicated by Pope Leo XIV on 2 July, after four bishops were consecrated at a public Mass in Écône, Switzerland, without the permission and in rebellion against the expressed wishes of the Holy See.
The Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) is known for its rigorous doctrinal, social, and liturgical conservatism. Presenting itself as a bastion of old Catholicism in an institution in which morality and doctrine are not supposed to be able to change, it counts 733 priests, 264 seminarians, and some 600,000 faithful attending its Masses across 77 countries. Founded in 1970 by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in reaction to the liberal and modernising reforms of the Second Vatican Council, it has operated an extensive network of schools, seminaries, and chapels on five continents, exercising an influence over the Catholic landscape wholly disproportionate to its formal membership. The SSPX has furthermore played a pivotal role in keeping the old Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) alive—a form which is linguistically, audibly, theologically and orientationally more solemn than modern forms, with emphasis on silence, reverence, seriousness, ancient chant, purification and contrition for sins—during the decades when official Church policy was largely hostile to it.
The ceremony itself carried an atmospheric quality noted keenly by observers and in reports. As the four men—Pascal Schreiber (of Switzerland), Michael Goldade (from the United States), and the Frenchmen Michel Poinsinet de Sivry and Marc Hanappier—received the laying on of hands before some 16,600 faithful, clouds gathered over the Swiss Alps, and a torrential downpour fell on the crowd, with thunder and lightning breaking over the hillside. By the close of the Mass, the sun had returned. The newly consecrated bishops processed uphill to the seminary courtyard to applause from the society’s priests. Critics speculated that the sombre atmosphere of defiant chant amidst streaming rainfall in the Swiss Valley may be a sign of divine disapproval—a suggestion dismissed by supporters.
The two presiding bishops were Alfonso de Galarreta and Bernard Fellay—the surviving members of the four consecrated by Lefebvre in 1988, whose own excommunications were lifted by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009. At the point in the liturgy where the papal mandate would normally have been read aloud, an assisting priest instead proclaimed a justification: “From the Second Vatican Council to the present day, the authorities of the Church have been animated by a spirit that is contrary to that of the faith.” Its superior general, Father Davide Pagliarani, in his homily, dismissed Leo’s plea as presenting “a false dilemma between the society’s vision of the faith and its adherence to the Church” and called for the canonisation of Lefebvre—himself a signal of the gulf between the society and any near-term reconciliation.
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