The SSPX’s Foundational Error

Four Society of St. Pius X priests were consecrated as bishops without papal mandate yesterday, and this morning it was announced that they (along with the two SSPX bishops who consecrated them) are excommunicated. Further, all priests of the Society were declared “schismatic,” and the lay faithful who “formally adhere to the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X are to be considered schismatics and excommunicated.”

No Catholic, no matter where he stands on this controversy, should be gladdened by this mess. But let’s also be clear about what’s happened, for it touches the core of what it means to be Catholic.

While the Society disobeyed a direct command of the Supreme Pontiff of the Catholic Church, it justifies the consecrations on the grounds that the Church is currently in a “state of necessity;” i.e., a crisis so significant that such acts are not actually canonically illicit (see Canon 1323 §4) and do not carry the punishment of excommunication.

It should come as no surprise to my readers that, overall, I’m sympathetic to the Society and its analysis of the state of today’s Church. As the Editor-in-Chief of Crisis Magazine, I obviously believe that our age sees the Church afflicted with a grave crisis. While, in one sense, the Church has always been in a state of crisis—she is always composed of fallen, sinful men—today’s crisis is particularly acute, historically speaking. And as a regular attendee of the traditional Latin Mass, I cannot deny that I have the founder of the Society, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, to thank for almost single-handedly preserving the old rites when almost everyone was against his effort. Moreover, while I have a few minor quibbles with it, the Society’s Declaration of Catholic Faith is refreshingly clear and orthodox, a sharp contrast with the confusing and sometimes conflicting statements Vatican officials and many bishops issue today.

Speaking of the Vatican, let’s be blunt: they’ve bungled the whole relationship with the Society over the years. Regardless of whether a person thinks the SSPX is a beacon of light for the Church or a schismatic group acting contrary to the Faith, the disparity between how the Vatican has dealt with the Society and how it deals with everyone else must strike any objective observer as terribly inconsistent. We’ve been told for 13 years that our watchwords must be “mercy” and “dialogue” and “accompaniment,” yet when it comes to the Society, the Vatican watchwords seem to be “intolerance” and “judgement” and “condemnation.” 

Popes meet with every heretical Christian leader on the planet, with promoters of immorality, and with degenerate Hollywood celebrities, but not with the head of a thriving, growing community within its ranks. All because the community supposedly doesn’t “accept Vatican II” (a sin the Vatican will not actually define). If only the Vatican had been so bold over the years in disciplining Catholics who rejected Vatican II’s condemnation of birth control (Gaudium et Spes 51) or the Council’s defense of the necessity of the Church for salvation (Lumen Gentium 14).

In a nutshell, in an era of rampant heresy, irreverent liturgies, and immorality in the Church, as well as lackadaisical enforcement of Catholic teaching by the hierarchy, I agree with the sentiments of Darrick Taylor, who wrote for Crisis that “The SSPX is Not the Problem,” and I think the pope should have approved the episcopal consecrations in an act of mercy and reconciliation.

But that doesn’t mean the Society is beyond criticism, nor that its every decision is prudent or even faithfully Catholic. Nor does it mean the excommunications are invalid or even unjustified.

The SSPX has always presented the dispute between it and the Vatican as one of doctrine, and it is right to do so. Anyone who thinks it’s about the aesthetics of the TLM does not understand what drove Archbishop Lefebvre, nor what drives Society leadership today. The Society believes that Church leaders have failed to transmit the Catholic Faith as it has been handed down to us by past generations of Catholics. And it’s hard to argue with that point. Just attend a local parish’s Mass.

However, the Society is ignoring the doctrinal elephant in the room, which is communion with the Pope of Rome. Being in communion with the person of the pope—not just an ethereal “eternal Rome” as defined by the Society—has always been identified as an essential part of what it means to be Catholic; it is, in fact, a key point of Catholic doctrine, for it’s foundational to the visible unity of the Church.

In the early 20th century Fr. Adrian Fortescue defended the need for communion with the pope against Anglican arguments to the contrary. It’s striking in its application to today’s SSPX:

To be a member of the Catholic Church, a man must be in communion with the Pope…The visible unity of the Church of Christ is the root of all our belief, after the existence of God, the claim of Christ as our teacher, and the fact that Christ did found a Church…All idea of divinely given authority, divinely guided teaching, depends on the first concept of all, namely, one united Church in communion with herself throughout the world. Unhappily, here the extreme High Anglican is as remote from us as any Protestant. That is why his whole position is wrong and impossible. He copies our rites; he adopts most points of our faith; he uses our language. But he does not have the foundation on which all these things rest. He is no nearer to us really, not one whit more Catholic, than the Evangelical or the frank Protestant. We can leave all the rest as of secondary importance till we have convinced him of the one vital issue: the visible unity of the Church. (Early Papacy to the Synod of Chalcedon in 451, p. 80)

And for those who might think this is just the writing of another early-20th century ultramontanist, note that Fr. Fortescue (privately) called the papacy of his time “disastrous” and the pope “deplorable.” Yet he recognized that communion with the pope, no matter his opinion of him, was still vital.

Now, to be clear, I’m not saying there’s an exact parallel between High Anglicans and the SSPX; yet the underlying issue is the same: by acting in direct contradiction to the explicit command of the pope, the SSPX breaks from the visible unity of the Church, which is the foundation for all Catholic teaching. 

And communion with the pope is not some later teaching, concocted to resist the antipapal Protestant Revolution in the 16th century. Since the beginning, Christians understood that communion with the pope is an essential element of that visible unity. 

As just one example, St. Jerome wrote to Pope Damasus:

I speak with the successor of the fisherman and the disciple of the cross. I, who follow none but Christ as first, am joined in communion with Your Holiness, that is with the See of Peter. On this rock I know that the Church was built. Whoever eats the lamb outside his house is profane. Whoever is not in the ark of Noah will perish when the deluge comes…Whoever does not gather with you scatters; for whoever does not belong to Christ is of Antichrist. (Ep. XV, ad Damasum, 2)

I could add many similar statements about the importance of communion with the pope from other Church Fathers. In a number of cases, the Church Father in question himself disputed with the pope on various issues of discipline or doctrine. Yet none disputed the vital necessity of maintaining communion with him.

While the SSPX has many legitimate complaints about what Church leaders have promoted as Catholic teaching over the past 60 years, the Society itself adds to the crisis by breaking communion with the pope by these consecrations.

Now many Society defenders say that any excommunications are invalid and that they are still in communion with Pope Leo, with arguments from canon law about a state of necessity. But this flies in the face of the obvious evidence:

• The pope declares them excommunicated.
• They say they are not excommunicated.
• The pope, however, has universal jurisdiction over the discipline of the Church, including the power of excommunication.
• Therefore, they are legitimately excommunicated.

At the risk of a primitive analogy, the Society’s defense is like a boyfriend saying he’s not broken up with his girlfriend, but his girlfriend saying that in fact, they are broken up. The girlfriend has absolute authority to make that decision, no matter what ingenious arguments the boyfriend might contrive. 

One denies the universal jurisdiction and authority of the pope if when the pope says, “you’re excommunicated,” he denies that he is, in fact, excommunicated.

In this debate about “communion with the pope,” we should also remember (or learn) what exactly this communion means, particularly when the pope is one we consider flawed, even deeply flawed. I wrote an article explaining this during the Francis pontificate, and I’d encourage people to review it. My essential argument is this: being “in communion with” is not the same as being “in agreement with;” that’s a Protestant model of communion (and it’s why there are tens of thousands of Protestant denominations). Communion represents a visible acknowledgment of the visible Church. We are members of a visible and universal Church, which includes not only all Catholics today, but all Catholics throughout history and in the future—the saints and the sinners. When we break communion with the center of unity in that visible and universal Church—the pope—we fall, perhaps, into the Protestant error of an “invisible” Church united by shared agreement rather than by mystical union with Christ by means of his visible Church on earth.

None of this is to say that most, if not all, of the Society’s complaints about the postconciliar Church aren’t legitimate and in need of a serious response. I lament the Vatican’s refusal to seriously engage with those complaints. But those complaints are less likely to be taken seriously from a group that itself violates a foundational principle of Catholic doctrine. 

We must all work for reform in the Church…from within the Church, not outside her visible unity. Only then will she be able to overcome the crisis that plagues her.

Photo Credit: Michael Haynes.