Vatican excommunicates SSPX after unauthorised bishop consecrations

Rome,UPDATED: Jul 4, 2026 00:24 IST

The Vatican's split with the Society of St Pius X deepened after the traditionalist Catholic group defended its decision to consecrate four bishops without papal consent, saying it was acting to save souls and had been unfairly punished by the Holy See.

A day after the Vatican excommunicated the group's bishops and priests and warned that followers too could face excommunication for taking part in the schism, the head of the SSPX wrote to Pope Leo XIV defending the group and rejecting the sanctions.

The Society of St Pius X, or SSPX, celebrates the traditional Latin Mass and opposes the modernising reforms of the Catholic Church. On Wednesday, it consecrated four new bishops during a large ceremony at its seminary in Econe, Switzerland, without papal approval, an act regarded as one of the gravest offences under church law.

Pope Leo had urged the SSPX not to go ahead with the ceremony, but the group did so. Within 24 hours, the Vatican announced what was seen as an unusually severe punishment, surprising even some of the SSPX's strongest critics.

In his letter to Leo, the SSPX superior, the Rev Davide Pagliarani, presented the group as a defender of church tradition and a victim of Rome's action. "What the Society of Saint Pius X has done, and will continue to do, is nothing other than an extraordinary initiative for the salvation of souls, amidst the doctrinal and moral confusion into which the church is plunged," he wrote.

Pagliarani said that despite what he called the "unjust and invalid" sanctions, the SSPX would love the church even more and "offers up the suffering caused by these new sanctions for the good of the universal church and of Your Holiness".

French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre founded the SSPX in 1970 in opposition to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which changed the church's relations with other Christians, Jews and people of other faiths, and allowed Mass to be celebrated in local languages instead of Latin.

Though now a fringe movement on the Catholic right, the SSPX has troubled the Vatican for five decades because it claims to be more faithful to Catholic tradition than the Holy See itself. The Vatican's strong response suggested that, after trying to negotiate with the SSPX through three pontificates, Pope Leo XIV's Vatican had reached its limit.

The Rev Robert Gahl, an ethics expert at The Catholic University of America, said the speed and clarity of the Vatican's response mattered because it clearly told the SSPX faithful that they were taking part in a schism. He said it also exposed how the SSPX falsely claims to be "more Catholic than the pope".

Gahl said the SSPX had argued that it had to go ahead with the consecrations "because of the need of the faithful to receive their sacramental care, while claiming that their sacramental care is somehow better than what the rest of the church offers". He said the Vatican's response "calls them out and says, 'If you want the salvation that the church offers, you have to belong to the church, and you stepped out of full communion by disobeying the pope's explicit command'".

The clash has left the SSPX and the Vatican further apart, with the group defending the consecrations as necessary and the Holy See treating them as a formal break in church unity.

With PTI Inputs

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