Four priests were ordained as bishops by the Society of Saint Pius X at a ceremony in Écône, Switzerland on Wednesday, in direct defiance of Pope Leo XIV’s personal appeal to halt the proceedings. As BBC News reports, approximately 15,000 people attended the ceremony in a large tent in an Alpine pasture, where the candidates prostrated themselves before the altar and took their vows in Latin. The four new bishops represent Switzerland, the United States, and France. Pope Leo described the ordination as a “schismatic act” that could “tear the seamless garment of Christ.” The SSPX, founded in 1970 by French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, rejects the modernising reforms of the Second Vatican Council and insists on the traditional Latin Mass. The situation closely mirrors the 1988 Lefebvre ordinations, which resulted in immediate excommunication — excommunications that Pope Benedict XVI controversially repealed in 2009.
The received wisdom
The progressive Catholic and ecumenical view of the SSPX is fairly consistent: the Society represents a retrograde force that has substituted nostalgia for authentic faith, that confuses the Church’s external forms with its living substance, and that cannot abide the Holy Spirit’s movement through the Council’s opening to the modern world. On this account, the SSPX’s insistence on Latin-only Mass, priests facing away from congregations, and opposition to interfaith dialogue is a category error — mistaking the accidental for the essential. The pope’s authority, on this view, is not just institutional but theological, and defying it in the matter of episcopal ordinations — the most significant act of ecclesial self-replication — is precisely the kind of schism that fragments the body of Christ. The progressive media framing of Écône as fringe extremism, complete with references to the merchandise and the baseball caps, is designed to render the SSPX ridiculous rather than threatening.
A different read
It is worth, however, engaging seriously with the SSPX’s position before dismissing it — not because their defiance of papal authority is defensible, but because the questions they raise are not trivial.
The Second Vatican Council’s reforms — particularly the introduction of the vernacular Mass, the explicit valorisation of religious freedom, and the opening to interfaith dialogue — were genuinely revolutionary in the context of a church that had defined itself partly through its distinctiveness from the surrounding culture. Archbishop Lefebvre’s original objection was not simply reactionary. He argued, with considerable theological seriousness, that the reforms represented a rupture in doctrinal continuity that the Church’s own teaching on doctrinal development could not easily accommodate. Whether he was right is a matter of ongoing theological dispute; the point is that the dispute is real, and it has never been fully resolved.
The 2009 decision by Benedict XVI to repeal the 1988 excommunications was an attempt at reconciliation that failed. The SSPX declined to be fully regularised, maintaining its canonical independence while no longer being formally schismatic. This ambiguous status — not in full communion but not quite outside the Church — allowed the underlying tension to fester. The appointment of SSPX-sympathetic clergy to positions of influence during Benedict’s pontificate, and the subsequent reversal under Francis of the liberalised access to the traditional Latin Mass, provided the Society with an ongoing narrative of persecution that sustains its internal cohesion.
Pope Leo XIV, who is relatively new to the papal throne, now faces the dilemma that his predecessors failed to resolve: excommunicate and risk deepening a fracture that already encompasses an estimated 600,000 followers worldwide, or absorb the defiance and appear too weak to enforce the basic principle of papal primacy that Catholicism’s entire ecclesiological architecture depends upon. As BBC News documents, the 1988 precedent suggests excommunication is the canonical response; the 2009 precedent suggests the Church will eventually reverse it anyway.
From a conservative perspective outside the Church, the episode illustrates a broader tension that secular institutions share: the difficulty of managing meaningful tradition while maintaining institutional authority. The SSPX’s appeal to continuity resonates with a significant minority because the Catholic Church’s post-conciliar trajectory genuinely has involved discontinuity — in liturgical practice, in pastoral emphasis, and in its engagement with contemporary culture. Acknowledging that discontinuity honestly, rather than pretending that every reform is seamlessly continuous with what preceded it, might have made the SSPX’s grievance less acute. Institutions that insist their revolutions are not revolutions tend to produce factions that insist the opposite more loudly.
The 15,000 at Écône are not simply cranks. They are people who believe they are preserving something real that has been abandoned. Whether they are right is a theological question; whether their presence poses a genuine institutional challenge to Rome is a question with an obvious answer.
What to watch
The key immediate question is whether Pope Leo excommunicates the four new bishops and, if so, whether his pontificate can sustain the legal and political consequences within the Church. Watch whether any SSPX-affiliated clergy currently in good standing — operating canonically legitimate communities worldwide — break with the Society over the ordinations. The US presence is worth particular attention: the SSPX has a substantial American following, and any rupture in a politically engaged conservative Catholic community will have implications beyond the strictly ecclesiastical. Whether other traditionalist groups — the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter, for instance — distance themselves publicly from Écône will indicate whether the Society has overplayed its hand.
— J