The SSPX is Not the Problem

Nearly 10 years ago, my spiritual director suggested to me that I should teach a Church history class at my local parish. I asked my pastor, who thought it was a great idea. So I gave a talk once a month on a topic in Church history. Attendance was okay at first, but I noticed over time my audience was changing. A group of people, usually four or more, began coming and sitting together during my talks. One day, a young couple among them introduced themselves to me and told me they enjoyed my talks. 

When I asked what parish they were from, they told me they attended St. Vincent de Paul. As it turns out, there was no parish by that name where I lived at the time; as I later learned, St. Vincent de Paul is the name of the chapel affiliated with the Society of St. Pius X. I have come to count that couple as dear friends of mine. I have also had some occasion since then to interact with other members of St. Vincent’s and a priest of the Society as well. My familiarity with the Society is not the most extensive, but from what I can tell, they are decent people striving to live the Catholic Faith. 

I do not agree with everything their leaders have to say on things like Vatican II or with all the words and actions of Marcel Lefebvre; but on the whole, I have never really had any issue with the Society myself. Of course, I am a layman with no public authority in the Church whatsoever. For the hierarchy, it is very different obviously. 

The Society of St. Pius X made news recently with its announcement that in July of this year they will consecrate bishops without the consent of the Holy Father. I am not a canon lawyer nor a theologian, but I do know enough to say I think these issues are more complicated than many make them out to be. If the Society does go ahead with the consecrations, it will likely deepen the rift between the Society and Rome. This move would be an act of open defiance against Rome’s authority. But I doubt Rome will want to publicly declare the Society in schism if they do.

One reason is the optics. If defying Rome is all you need for schism, then parts of the Church have been in schism for decades. In large, metropolitan cities in the United States, “LGBTQ+” parishes have been openly flouting Church and papal teaching on sexuality for decades—without interference. The German Synodal Way has promoted heresy and radical forms of governance that are closer to schism than anything the SSPX has indulged in—without being disciplined. The Potemkin “Patriotic Church” of the PRC appoints bishops without any regard to Rome whatsoever or public protest from the Vatican. 

Meanwhile, Marko Rupnik, a credibly accused serial rapist, and Gustavo Zanchetta, a convicted felon, remain priests “in good standing” with the Church. More to the point, the late Hans Küng published a book denying papal infallibility but still died in communion with the Church. It is difficult to see how consecrating bishops without the Holy Father’s permission is worse than denying a solemnly defined dogma concerning papal authority. 

Declaring the SSPX schismatics might be too obvious a contradiction, even for Rome. There are Bergoglians in that body who would love to do so, I imagine. It is good to keep in mind that “Rome” and “the Vatican” are not singular stable entities in practice but institutions where rivalries play out among groups who differ on not only theological issues but also tactics. One Vatican observer has already suggested that Rome has been trying to wait out the SSPX over the past 40 years but has run out of time. 

I’m not so sure. Rome likes to ignore problems until they are forced to deal with them, and the SSPX really isn’t in any position to force a clarifying decision from the Vatican. They could just as well go on pretending like nothing has changed, as they have done so often in the past.

As a practical matter, the Society has good reasons to distrust Rome after the last pontificate. As one author has noted, Pope Francis ran roughshod over the Knights of Malta, the Franciscan Friars of the Immaculate, Opus Dei, and several bishops, treating them like employees of Vatican Inc. The Vatican has done nothing as yet about the appalling actions of bishops in Detroit and Charlotte against Latin Mass communities in those dioceses. If the Vatican cannot (or will not?) guarantee that it will respect the institutional autonomy of bodies in communion with her nor protect the faithful from the depredations of bishops, it is not unreasonable for any group to be mistrustful of Rome’s intentions.

But this is not the primary reason why declaring the SSPX beyond the pale would be pointless. That is because ultimately the SSPX is not the real problem. The problem is that the Catholic Church has been attempting to modernize itself over the past six decades plus in order to accommodate itself to modern society; and one result of this has been massive confusion about what constitutes the Church. In practice, the Church has made so many alterations to virtually every aspect of its life that the average person has no idea any more what it means to be in or outside communion with the Church. If the SSPX vanished tomorrow, this problem would still exist; and it would still be just as dire and far from resolution as it is today. The SSPX is a symptom of this problem, not its cause. 

Everyone is aware of this confusion to some degree, and I suspect such awareness conditions people’s reaction to SSPX. You can see this in some of the responses to the announcement about episcopal consecrations. My sense is that many who seem eager for Rome to “bring the hammer down” on the SSPX feel that way because the Society is somehow counterfeiting the Faith, and declaring them to be in schism would clarify who is and is not in communion with the Church. 

For example, one critic has suggested the SSPX are “cosplaying” at Catholicism, promoting a fraud in place of Real Catholicism and therefore leading people astray. Real Catholicism obeys the pope. The SSPX are defying the pope. Therefore, the SSPX are not Real Catholics. QED.

Besides being uncharitable and simplistic, this complaint misses something important about the SSPX. Part of the reason there is so much confusion about the Church’s identity is because the Church has abandoned so many markers that made it recognizable to ordinary people. (The papacy is one of those, obviously, but it is not the only one.) 

Whatever its faults (it had many), the Church prior to Vatican II was easy to recognize. It possessed definite forms in both doctrine and practice that an average person could easily identify. The SSPX keeps growing not because its priests and their lay adherents are horrible monsters lusting to foment schism but because they practice a recognizable form of the Catholic Faith as it has been known historically in the West. 

This is significant because in many places in the contemporary Church there is precious little that marks them out as Catholic in its historic sense. The Church is plagued by what Martin Mosebach called “formlessness” in regard to liturgy, the lack of definite identity brought on by modernization. This same critique easily applies to doctrine, governance, identity, political messaging, etc. This absence of form—of identity—is the result of the Church’s attempt to remake itself for the consumption of the modern world, which redrew the map of Catholicism as it were, leaving its boundaries fluid and its stability questionable. 

The Church wants the faithful to serve her: to donate time and treasure and to sacrifice large portions of their lives to her. But no one is going do this if the faith they want to pass on to their children is going change with every pontificate, or the parish they worked so hard to build is going to be deconstructed by the next bishop for being too “backwardist” or insufficiently loyal to Vatican II.

Many serious Catholics implicitly understand this, which is why so many of them flee the spiritual desert that is most parishes for refuge with religious orders, Newman Centers, the Ordinariate, Eastern Catholic Churches, or the occasional Latin Mass parish, where they have not yet been defenestrated. (Most baptized Catholics find their escape by leaving the Church altogether, of course.) There are a handful of “normal” parishes within the “mainstream” Church that are wonderful, vibrant places, but they are exceptions that prove the rule. 

In the absence of stable forms of worship, teaching, and communal life, chaos and incoherence reign in many areas of the Church. Bureaucratic inertia and reverence for authority are mostly what hold the Church together these days. At the same time, this formlessness has allowed practical and theological differences in different parts of the Church to harden into what are almost different faiths, where sodomy is a “sin that cries out to Heaven” in one diocese and a cause for celebration in another. Declaring the SSPX to be schismatics will not make it go away, and no amount of personal loyalty to the pope or acts of obedience to the Holy See, no matter how obsequious, will do any good without addressing it. 

And I am sad to say it, but I do not think the Church will address it any time soon; certainly, Pope Leo will not. Addressing it would require an unsparing reevaluation of the modernizing project undertaken since the 1960s and a sober, serious willingness to come to grips with its failures (among which, yes, Vatican II plays a major role). This would cause a major upheaval, as those most committed to this project hold power in most of the Church’s institutional structures. It would require an agonizing, prolonged conflict; and virtually no one in a position of authority possesses the fortitude for this. 

But until there is such a reckoning with these failures, I doubt there will be a solution to the problem of the Society of St. Pius X. Even if the Vatican were to declare the Society of St. Pius X to be in schism, a certain number of disillusioned faithful will continue to seek out the SSPX and it will continue to grow, since within it one can still find communities practicing something like the historic Catholic Faith rather than the lifeless gray goo that is force fed to most Catholics. 

No man is beyond the reach of God. If they have misled people like my friends, whom I know to be good and upright, then that is a great sin for which the leaders of the Society will have to answer at the Day of Judgment. But for my part, I believe it is the hierarchy and the leadership of the Church that is ultimately responsible for this impasse. For they have the authority and, thus, the responsibility before God; so the blame for the crisis which birthed the SSPX must fall at their door. It is because so many of them have neglected if not abandoned their flocks—where they have not actively tried to drive them out—that so many have sought pasture outside of their fold.