ROME (AP) — The Vatican on Wednesday issued a final warning to a breakaway group of traditionalist Catholics that their planned consecrations of bishops without papal consent constitutes a schismatic act that incurs automatic excommunication.
Pope Leo XIV is praying for enlightenment so that the leaders of the Society of St. Pius X “may reconsider the extremely grave decision they have made,” said a statement from the Vatican’s doctrine czar, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández.
The statement appeared to be a last-ditch effort to head off the group’s planned July 1 consecrations of four new bishops. If they go ahead, they will amount to the gravest challenge to Leo’s authority to date, as he seeks to heal divisions with traditionalist Catholics that worsened during the Pope Francis pontificate.
The SSPX, as the group is known, was founded in Écône, Switzerland in 1970 in opposition to the modernizing reforms of the 1960s Second Vatican Council, which among other things allowed Mass to be celebrated in the vernacular rather than Latin.
The group, which celebrates the pre-Vatican II Latin Mass, first broke with Rome in 1988, after its founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, consecrated four bishops without papal consent. The Vatican promptly excommunicated Lefebvre and the four other bishops, and the group today still has no legal status in the Catholic Church.
Yet the group has continued to grow in the decades since that original schismatic act, with schools, seminaries and parishes around the world and branches of priests, nuns and lay Catholics who are attached to the traditional Latin Mass.
The growth poses a real threat to Rome since it amounts to a parallel Catholic church. Today it counts two bishops, 733 priests, 264 seminarians, 145 religious brothers, 88 oblates and 250 religious sisters representing 50 nationalities, according to SSPX statistics.
The current SSPX superior, Rev. Davide Pagliarani, announced earlier this year that new bishops would be consecrated July 1 to tend to the faithful, arguing that the SSPX’s two remaining aging bishops can no longer minister to such a global reality.
The Vatican invited Pagliarini for talks, but the same theological and practical problems that have prevented rapprochement for 50 years seemingly left the two sides at an impasse.
In recent comments on the SSPX website, Pagliarani reiterated the need for the new bishops. He expressed satisfaction that his announcement had triggered debate about what the SSPX considers to be a crisis afflicting the church, including religious pluralism and confusion about the faith.
“Now, what is at stake today is not an opinion, nor a sensibility, nor a preferential option, nor a particular nuance in the interpretation of a text, but the faith and morals that a Catholic must know, profess, and practise in order to save his soul and reach paradise,” he said.
The looming consecrations, which would incur automatic excommunications, have created the first tangible crisis for Leo, who has sought to pacify relations with Catholic traditionalists that worsened under Pope Francis after the Argentine pope cracked down on the spread of the old Latin Mass.
While the SSPX is out of communion with the Holy See, plenty of Catholic traditionalists who are loyal to Rome but attached to the old Mass are sympathetic to the SSPX plight and are watching how Leo handles the challenge.
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