An Open Letter—and an Urgent Plea—to an SSPX Priest

I recently opened a piece of mail and unfolded a masterpiece of calligraphy: a letter written on a single sheet of soft beige Southworth 25% cotton stationery. A priest of the Society of St. Pius X wrote it, just days before the Society’s July 1 episcopal consecrations.

His words read like something pulled from a time capsule—sublime words drawn seemingly from the inmost cords of his heart. I read the letter three times in succession, where later I placed it in a frame, something I had never done before. 

I will give it to my eldest daughter, Gabrielle, in the hope that it will become an heirloom for her and her newly betrothed husband.

The priest’s intent was to express his sympathy over a recent family tragedy, but more importantly, I believe from that pit of sorrow, he wanted to grow a future Catholic priest. A few weeks earlier, he had read my Crisis article about my daughter’s wedding, where days before, her fiance unexpectedly lost his father—his closest friend—to a sudden heart attack.

An excerpt from his letter:

“I can not help but wonder, and hope, that Our Blessed Lord is attentively forging your daughter’s heart into that of a mother of a priest. Such hearts are rare pearls of great price, for they never withhold their Fiat even as the swords of sorrow run them through, and thus they continue the song of the Mother of all priests.”

As this good priest wrote with sincerity to me, I write to him:

Dear Father,

Because I’ve never met you, I asked about you. I was told by a friend who attends a local Society of St. Pius X chapel that you were a priest “who cares only for souls.” Really, what more do I need to know? What else matters? Still, I hope to meet you someday, to thank you for your priesthood and for reminding me (and my daughter) how the mysterious providence of God is able to create a priest out of death. 

I was told that you have already helped form a few hundred seminarians. “He cares only for souls,” my friend said of you. As I imagine you recall, Saint Pope Gregory the Great reminded his bishops and priests in his Pastoral Role: “The art of arts is the government of souls.” 

Thank you, Father, for putting the care of souls above all else. I know you already see that cura animarum—the care of souls—seems to have been mostly forsaken on the Novus Ordo side of the Roman Catholic Church. 

The widespread diminishment of cura animarum is, of course, just another reason why the Society wrote to Pope Leo XIV regarding the “state of necessity” in the Church and Bishops Alfonso de Galarreta and Bernard Fellay to proceed with the episcopal consecrations, despite having been warned not to do so.

My gut admires what they have done. The Body of Christ is sick, and the SSPX bishops— and you and I—know that the remedy lies in the Church’s pure medicine, handed down over two millennia. I don’t know you, but I can guess that you, like me, regard the Synod on Synodality and Fiducia Supplicans as modern Church initiatives that spew vomit onto Christ’s Face and injects Luciferian light into His already long-ailing Bride. 

Even still, I have to imagine that you are feeling the weight of the excommunication that awaits should you grant your imprimatur of the bishops’ decision to proceed with the consecrations. Although I am heartened by SSPX bishops fighting to bring the Church back to its traditions, supernatural identity, and time-tested sacred remedies, reason prevails; their decision to disregard Peter’s authority and defiantly press on with the ordinations was an act deserving of excommunication. If my hunch is correct, I imagine that part of you, too, wonders whether the decision will prove fatal—setting the Society on a course toward gradual splintering, disintegration, and disappearance, like a scarecrow left to the elements in a winter-forgotten field.

But Father, the Catholic Church on this N.O. side, as many traditionalists are fond of reminding me, is also vanishing. Faithful and hard-working N.O. priests, ones just like you—whose priesthoods are defined by cura animarum—see the horror of their priestly brethrens’ identity becoming slowly deformed by a Church that now appeases the world rather than confronting it. 

The past few weeks, I have been thinking a lot about you at this bleak Catholic crossroad, where Extraordinary and Ordinary form Mass attendees suffer in different ways. As an SSPX priest, you bear the weight of forming seminarians beneath the long shadow of bishops who have been excommunicated. Novus Ordo Mass attendees must scratch out spiritual nourishment in a Church led by modernist bishops who seem intent to peel away its supernatural character—precisely in the fashion of Thomas Jefferson cutting the miracles of Christ from the pages of his ridiculous Bible.

Ours is a sad confluence of disparate dilemmas. They seem, temporarily anyway, irreparable. But really, aren’t these problems just a few more landmines in the long timeline of sins and omissions eternally-baked into the mortal side of the Church—that, in time, God sorts out? 

Through the words of your letter, I know that you are a shepherd of souls and a builder of priests. My Irish imagination wonders, however, whether, behind some hidden door in your conscience, you see there lies a temptation within the SSPX—what I might call a “Pilate out-clause”—whereby the priests of your Society have found a way to wash their hands of the world’s moral pus and retreat into their palace of comfort—while Christ is left to die and the souls He came to save live a world covered over by unseen, flapping black wings.

Father, I want to come to the reason for my letter, one that I pray will inspire you to consider authentic priestly heroism. I have a thought—one that I believe offers a way forward for both you and me. My idea requires a conversation with you. I would much rather share it over pints of good beer in a bar, but until you and I can find the time to make it happen, I want to lay it out, or at least its framework.

First, though, I need to ask a hard question. If you answer too quickly, and in the negative, before dialogue has even started—well, we both know how these evenings end. The beer tastes like battery acid, and we part ways never seeing each other again.

Father, will you leave the SSPX? 

Do not dismiss me, Father. Due to our fallen will and dyed-in-the-wood tendency to scorn or reject instinctively that which we find ludicrous, I ask you to examine what I propose with ruthlessness. 

Father—and any other SSPX priest who has made it to this point—rather than mocking me for what I propose, would you at least consider looking into the ringed eyes of millions of spiritually-starved postconciliar Mass-goers? Would you dare cross the Rubicon and face West —versus populum—to look more deeply into the harrowed faces of faithful parents and grandparents who realize they are losing the souls of their children and grandchildren to the world? 

Will you agree to at least take my idea and present yourself before the monstrance and ask this one question to the Starved Man on the Cross: Lord, where is the true fight to save future damned souls? Father, your answer is none of my business, but maybe later on from our barstools, as we get to know one another, you might even share with me what Jesus shared with you—whether the greater need was in the SSPX, or within that Church—that infiltrated, modernist Novus Ordo? 

Wherever Christ brought you, I do hope in some way that you were led to your patron, St. Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney. Because you are a seminary formator, I imagine you know that Vianney failed out of seminary three times, and that he is one of the Church’s only “home-school” seminarians. Praise God for his heroically-patient formator Fr. Charles Balley, who tirelessly worked to shepherd the poorly-educated farmboy to the finish line.   

Because his bishop knew Vianney was his diocese’s Forest Gump, he assigned the young priest to his runt-of-the-litter parish, St. Sixtus, in spiritually-dead Ars. He knew Vianney lacked all theological opulence and was utterly ungifted in homiletics and the social graces. But Fr. Balley told His Excellency that the odd young priest had a sincere priestly heart, and that he had given his priesthood to Our Lady in order that she might show him how to become a proper priest.

Father, as you recall, Ars after the Reign of Terror was a riotous farming village filled with lustful, drunken, and gossipy fallen-away Catholics. Farmers in Ars’ potato fields heard the toll of the Angelus bells, but they didn’t care. Few of Fr. Vianney’s 260 residents had been attending Mass on the February day in 1818 that he became village curé.

I can well imagine that SSPX chapels and seminaries are filled with statues of the Curé of Ars. Father, as one whom I’ve been told genuinely cares for souls, you surely understand that, at a deeper level, Vianney’s priesthood could not be reduced to just “care of souls.” Vianney knew he was ministering to a guillotine-haunted, spiritually-gutted nation. He had to become their victim.

Interestingly—as I’m certain you are aware—Vianney did not take to Latin. He spent his entire life carrying his linguistic hardship. He had come to abhor the ancient language because he knew mastering it took away from his ministering to lost souls. All Vianney wanted to do for Mary was to go about the work of nailing his priesthood to the Cross. 

So, he took his Latin limp into his work and spent the remainder of his life working twenty or so hours a day to save Ars, and in time, all of Catholic France. Hundreds of “juror priests”—French clergy who signed oaths to Robespierre to keep their heads—had corrupted the millions of the French faithful. Vianney had seen the effects of turncoat priests; his own pastor in his home parish of Dardilly turned rotten. 

So Mary pointed Forest Gump to her Son on the Crucifix and said: Jean-Marie, you must die like this to save; this is the only way. 

In time, Ars—one-by-one—returned to the sacraments. Later, in the city of Lyon, a new train line was built to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of French men and women who began walking pilgrimages to Ars to see the man they were told could read souls in his confessional, where he absolved sin for as many as twelve hours each day. No priest in world history has absolved more sin than John Vianney. 

Father, Catholic-dead France didn’t need a Latinist or headman, and neither does Catholic-dying America. The lambs of the crumbling West need Victims. Head knowledge is incomplete and impotent and means nothing to God when hundreds of millions of His children are trapped in a long moral winter. 

Father, far be it from me to presume to tell you who you are. But since I have, hopefully, brought you this far, permit me to say this at this dark hour: As a priest, you are a man called to be consumed in sacrifice for lost souls. Your name is “sacrifice.”

Father, where is the sacrifice in shepherding to heaven the soul of a woman who wears a chapel veil and prays the Rosary every day? Where is the immolation and hard work in leading to Heaven a serious-minded man who delights in discussing Thomistic philosophy with you? Does the well-ordered, homeschooled child require your pastoral care as much as the blank-faced, porn-addicted teenager shuttled between divorced parents?

Lace and maniples and incense and calligraphy—so beautiful and moving to my mortal soul—mean little to God when His Son enacted the Great Commission for you and I to help save a broken world.

What good are statues of martyrs and portraits of Our Lady—or for that matter,  Latin-chanted prayers to St. Michael the Archangel—if your share of the trench warfare is avoided? To put a finer point on it: What good is a Vianney statue in an SSPX seminary when the memory of what he did—and of why he is your model—is forsaken? 

The image of a claustrophobic confessional-wearied Vianney fleeing Ars on three occasions for life in a Cistercian monastery might be good for a SSPX priest to take to prayer. Vianney returned within hours on each occasion, after his conscience pointed to the thousands of souls in Ars seeking his absolution, who could have been damned if he had attained refuge in a monk-like setting.

I will return to my invitation. Given the difficult position in which you find yourself, will you help faithful and serious-minded N.O. laity—and even those lovers of the Synod on Synodality? As you contend with your gag reflex, recall the aforementioned Fr. Balley, and of his exasperating daily attempts to teach and form Vianney. How will Novus Ordo Catholics effectively proclaim Christ and perennial Faith to their families and world if they are left to to draw from horrid CCD programs, uninspired Masses, watered-down preaching, and are forced to take their marching orders from defective synodal blueprints?

We are not counting on you to save us, civilization, or the Catholic Church; but we are counting on you to see where the true work for souls lay, and to embrace the burden of your identity; Victimhood. If you show us the priestly work of the Victim, we will figure out the ways to lead souls to God and to grace.

Because the natural reaction to what we perceive as revolting is to recoil and withdraw, I understand why the thought of presiding over the Sacrifice of the Mass versus populum might disturb you. But I don’t care about your feelings. On behalf of strong Catholic priests, I will tell you that there remains many liturgically reverent Masses on this side of the Church—celebrated ad orientem, with polyphony, Latin Mass parts, altar rails, incense, and priests who speak with prophetic clarity. 

Father, these good priests need you. They, too, are nauseated by the synodal direction of the Church. They see how this turn to the world has thinned their flock and expedited the biblical-like exodus of youth in their parishes. 

I’ll conclude by mentioning a priest I have been told you have come to love; Venerable Aloysius Schwartz. A few weeks ago, I was invited to Champion, Wisconsin, the site of America’s lone approved Marian apparition, where I joined with seventy-some other guilds asked to speak about America’s Catholic heroes. 

I told the crowd that Schwartz, a Washington, D.C., native, recognized in postwar Korea the same depravity, corruption, and sin that have become woven into the fabric of today’s American society. Thankfully, though, while attending seminary in Louvain in the 1950s, he made a promise to Our Lady at her apparition site in Banneux: he would be her slave.

Fifteen years after arriving as a fresh-faced priest in Korea’s southern peninsula, he had saved tens of thousands of bodies and souls, pulling worms from wounds in the morning, rebuking his sinful Korean bishop in the afternoon, and catechizing the religious order of Sisters of Mary he founded at night.

Fr. Al disliked the new Mass; he had a sincere love for the old form. Because he prayed at least three hours each day, mortified his body with severe penances, lived in a shack, and worked Vianney-like hours each day, he was able to help raise South Korea from the dead, then did the same in parts of the Philippines and Mexico before he died of ALS in 1992.

Like you, he knew the old Mass was superior. But Fr. Al was too busy to complain about the calamitous stripping away of beauty from the old form. Not to beat a point into the ground, but Fr. Al knew Korea’s lepers, orphans, and abandoned needed a victim—not a Latinist. 

These years later, his victimhood has allowed more than 175,000 poor children—the trafficked, sexually abused, orphaned, and homeless—to be catechized, educated and mothered back to life by the Sisters of Mary in sixteen Boystown and Girlstown communities throughout the world. On this night, in six different countries, 21,000 children will kneel on the floor to pray the Rosary together. 

Father, alas, we are here at the end. Be patient with me and permit me one final point: In the dystopian novel of war-torn Korea, Fr. Al told his order of sisters that their work necessitated they do revolting things each day, corporal acts of love no one else would take on. He told the sisters that the souls of Korea necessitated they wear “a constant crown of thorns” wrapped around their habit.

Father, will you fight in this dimension? Are you able to humble yourself and cross the Rubicon? Will you at least pray on whether you might begin to clean the spat-upon face of the Bride? 

And Father, how can you help the Church when you are outside of it?

Imagine, just for this moment, how your priesthood would change if you took the leap. Despite the ridicule from your brethren that would surely follow, imagine waking before dawn each day knowing souls needed you, in the same way Fr. Al saw orphans scattered on streets like leftover war shrapnel. Imagine how your soul would stir—in a brand new way—if you united with hard-working and holy priests to fight to save God’s collapsing modernist Novus Ordo parishes.

I believe the gamble is one in which God could fashion you into a canonized saint—or, at the very least, a white-crowned martyr. Do you believe that?

I do, Father. Because like you, I know what Christ said about men like John the Baptist, who chose the wilderness, deprivation, and loneliness for his home, where it became a winepress that crushed him into a libation of prophecy and power—a lone voice in the desert who cared so completely for souls that he was decapitated. 

Over one-third of Americans believe the world is ending. Father, if the hour is indeed approaching, would you not rather go down swinging, smelling of blood than of incense—would you not rather die on the streets a martyr than of routine and old age?