Vatican excommunicates followers of global Catholic sect

Baz Ratner/AP

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Baz Ratner/AP

ÉCÔNE, Switzerland (RNS) — A group of traditionalists directly defied Pope Leo XIV by ordaining four new bishops without his consent, calling it their "sacred duty" during a ritual-laden ceremony at the society's seminary in the Swiss village of Écône.

The Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) had received repeated warnings from the Vatican that the ordinations would constitute a schismatic act and trigger the automatic excommunication of all bishops involved. On Thursday, the Vatican went further than expected, declaring that the four new bishops, the two bishops who consecrated them, all priests of the SSPX and all lay Catholics who "adhere formally" to the group were now in schism and excommunicated.

Excommunications are extremely rare, and generally mean the excommunicated person is no longer considered a member of the church and cannot receive the sacraments. Under the church's legal system, Catholics can be excommunicated for schism, defined as the refusal to submit to the Pope "or of communion with the members of the Church subject to him."

In its excommunication announcement, the Vatican offered the possibility of welcoming the former members back into the church.

Even before the consecrations, Pope Leo had published a letter dated June 29 addressed to the superior general of the society, the Rev. Davide Pagliarani. "I implore you and ask you with all my heart: Turn back!" the pontiff wrote, saying the consecrations would be a "sin of extreme gravity" for threatening the unity of the church.

Yet in a meadow filled with more than 1,000 clergy and another 15,000 faithful wearing free "Écône 2026" hats — which rendered the crowd as white-capped as the Alps around them — the SSPX proceeded as planned, with a statement read at the start of the ceremony declaring that "every punishment or sanction" brought against them "will have no validity."

Since his inaugural Mass, Pope Leo has championed a message of unity for the Roman Catholic Church. Now he faces the largest internal crisis of his young papacy.

"We are accused of not loving the pope," Pagliarani said in French during a sermon at the ceremony. "It's precisely because we love the pope as the vicar of Christ that we do not want to see the pope humiliated anymore, next to false priests representing false religions."

What is the Society of St. Pius X?

The Society of St. Pius X, a priestly fraternity, was founded in 1970 by French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in opposition to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council from 1962 through 1965, which promoted the role of laypeople, ecumenicism and interreligious dialogue and enabled Mass to be celebrated in vernacular languages instead of Latin. In 1988, Lefebvre consecrated four bishops in Écône without approval from Pope John Paul II.

Wednesday's ceremony came 38 years to the day after Lefebvre was excommunicated alongside those four bishops — including Bishop Alfonso de Galarreta, who led Wednesday's consecrations and was again excommunicated Thursday. In 2009, after years of strained relations between SSPX and the Holy See, Pope Benedict XVI remitted the 1988 excommunications as a step toward healing the rift. But doctrinal differences remained unresolved, with the SSPX still in a "canonically irregular" status within the church, according to the Vatican.

Pope Francis continued conciliatory efforts with the SSPX, allowing the society's priests to hear valid confessions in 2015 and, with the authorization of the local bishop, to officiate marriages formally recognized by the church in 2017. But Francis also announced restrictions on the Latin Mass in 2021, angering many traditionalists.

The latest consecrations could prompt Pope Leo to end the Vatican's decades of dialogue with the breakaway society. The Vatican's July 2 decree of excommunication states that