ROME — The Vatican on Thursday said it had excommunicated top clerics in an archconservative Catholic sect as well as any parishioners who remain loyal to the group that claims hundreds of thousands of followers largely in the United States and Europe, triggering the most serious schism in decades within the world’s largest Christian faith.
Pope Leo XIV had pleaded directly with the sect, the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), not to consecrate four renegade, traditionalist bishops without the blessing of the Vatican — a move that, under church law, carries the penalty of automatic excommunication.
In an extraordinary act of defiance, the group moved forward Wednesday. By Thursday morning, the Vatican announced the excommunications — signaling the limits of Leo’s willingness to accommodate traditionalists who reject modern church teachings.
The Vatican’s statement, issued by Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, head of the Vatican’s powerful Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith, came with a stern warning to priests and parishioners associated with the society.
“As regards the lay faithful, those who formally join the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X … are to be considered schismatic and excommunicated,” Fernández declared in a letter published Thursday.
In recent years, both conservatives and liberals have tested the Vatican by pushing the boundaries of official doctrine — moves that have threatened to create rifts in the church of 1.4 billion Catholics.
Founded in Switzerland in 1970 by French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who opposed modernizing changes in the church a decade earlier, SSPX claims more than 700 priests and a half million members worldwide. Many will now have to choose between SSPX and the Catholic Church.
On Wednesday, more than 16,000 faithful braved intermittent rain in the mountain town of Écône, Switzerland, where SSPX was founded, to watch the solemn ceremony that anointed four bishops described by the group as “entirely faithful” to “holy tradition.”
“We do not choose what we must believe or cease to believe,” the Rev. Davide Pagliarani, SSPX superior general, said Wednesday. “We cannot modify, reinterpret, or reconsider the faith. We simply have the duty to preserve the faith that the church has always taught. We must love it, we must live by it, and we must hand it on.”
An addendum to the ruling said that lay faithful who “formally adhere” to the society would face excommunication, too.
Marc-André Mabillard, a former spokesman for the group who is a SSPX parishioner in Switzerland, said it had been “unprepared” for the Vatican’s edict to include an explicit warning to SSPX parishioners.
“The decision is very difficult, because … this time they’re speaking of faithful like me,” he said. “We were not prepared for that. Personally, I shall continue to follow the [society] because to me, it’s the only way to receive a good Mass, have priests that can give me good sacraments. I have no other possibilities. I have to remain and will remain. Yes, I am excommunicated.”
The SSPX still adheres to the traditional Latin Mass and rejects many of the teachings of the Vatican II council in the 1960s that modernized the church for an increasingly secular world.
Those changes included the saying of Mass in local languages, turning the priest around to face parishioners and promoting interfaith dialogue, among other adaptations.
Speaking to journalists Wednesday, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s secretary of state, said he was “pained” by what he called a “schismatic act.” But he also left open the door to reconciliation.
“My hope is that despite what happened today, the dialogue can be resumed, and a solution can be found,” Parolin said. “The fundamental point then is that of accepting the Second Vatican Council or not.”
The Vatican excommunicated the two bishops who presided over the ceremony, as well as the four newly minted SSPX bishops.
The same group faced similar penalties in 1988, when Lefebvre defied Pope John Paul II and also consecrated four bishops, including a British cleric known as a Holocaust denier.
In 2009, the traditionalist Pope Benedict XVI reversed the excommunications of those four bishops, and sought reconciliation with the group and its members. Two of those excommunicated in 1988 were among those excommunicated on Wednesday.
“They have a 19th-century soul,” said Andrea Grillo, a Rome-based Catholic theologian. “They are anti-modern communities, against any kind of dialogue with Jews, Buddhists, Hindus. They are hard against non-Catholic Christians — Lutherans and Orthodox. For them, salvation is found only in the Roman Catholic confession, in its 19th-century shape.”
With its previous bishops either dead or aging, the SSPX announced in February that it was planning to repeat the 1988 act on July 1. That decision, the group said in a statement, came after it had made two failed attempts to secure a meeting with Leo.
Some traditionalists questioned Leo, who has made unity and healing division a cornerstone of his papacy, for not speaking out on the issue earlier or meeting with the group to find a compromise.
This situation “is a telltale sign of the Catholic Church’s internal crisis, and there is no doubt that it constitutes a defeat for Leo, as his primary objective … was unity within the church,” said Roberto de Mattei, president of the conservative Catholic Lepanto Foundation. “Today he is facing a significant laceration.”
In moving forward with the consecrations, the group cited the words of Lefebvre: “It is only in the Catholic Church as it has always been, and in her unchanging Tradition, that we have the guarantee of possessing the Truth, of being able to preach it, and of being able to serve her.”
On Tuesday, a day before the consecrations, the Vatican released a papal letter to the SSPX leadership containing a plea from Leo: “Please turn back!”
“With a sorrowful yet hopeful heart, I feel it is my duty, through the authority received from Christ, to ask you to desist from your intended act,” the pope wrote in the letter addressed to Pagliarani, the SSPX superior general.
Excommunication, one of the highest penalties in the Vatican’s spiritual arsenal, is not the same as defrocking — or a loss of clerical title. But it means that the clerics cannot officially accept Catholic sacraments including Communion, ordain priests or officiate Mass, raising the prospect that any services or sacraments they continue to hold will not be Catholic rites.
For SSPX’s global flock — its largest concentrations are in France and the U.S. — theologians say the excommunication effectively presents a choice.
“Technically, the [excommunication] concerns the bishops, but the priests and laity who follow them [can] also enter into a state of excommunication,” Grillo said. “If you have a relationship with a bishop who’s not a bishop, then you too will fall into the dimension of excommunication — in short, you excommunicate yourself.”
SSPX maintains dozens of places of worship in the United States, including The Immaculata in St. Mary’s, Kansas, billed as the society’s largest in the world.
But even some conservative voices in the church expressed alarm at the divisions that SSPX was causing.
“The SSPX’s ordination of four new bishops is a grave act of disobedience that results in automatic excommunication and deepens a dangerous schism within the Church,” said the Rev. Gerald E. Murray, a New York City priest and conservative commentator.
“While claiming to uphold the traditional faith of the Catholic Church, the newly excommunicated bishops boldly cast aside what the Catholic Church has always taught her children, namely that the hierarchical nature of Catholicism includes the dogmatic teaching that the pope is the Supreme Authority to whom all Catholics owe obedience,” Murray continued, adding: “Simply stated, the pope is the successor of Peter, the Vicar of Christ. He governs the Church. Obedience to his decision about who may or may not receive episcopal ordination is necessary if one is to remain a faithful Catholic.”
The break with the SSPX comes as the Vatican is also dealing with a mutiny on the left in Germany, where liberal Catholics have been warned by the Holy See against allowing female deacons and also against codifying religious ceremonies for same-sex couples.
Michelle Boorstein in Washington D.C. contributed to this report.
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