What happened
An anti-modernist Catholic breakaway group Wednesday consecrated four new bishops without the consent of Pope Leo XIV, a violation of canon law that incurs automatic excommunication for the new prelates and the two bishops who ordained them.
Thursday morning, the Vatican “went above and beyond the minimal sanctions” and also declared all 733 priests of the Society of St. Pius X “to be schismatic, and therefore excommunicated,” The Associated Press said. And it said the lay followers “who adhere formally” to the society are schismatic and excommunicated as well.
Wednesday’s five-hour ceremony at the SSPX seminary in Econe, Switzerland, was a blow to Leo’s “efforts to bridge divisions within the church,” The New York Times said. The pope on Monday had pleaded with the group to call off what he called a “sin of extreme gravity.”
Who said what
SSPX, formed by the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, uses an old version of the Latin Mass and rejects the modernizing reforms of Vatican II. The group claims 600,000 members worldwide and maintains that “only it is upholding the true faith of Christ,” the AP said. But even many “conservative and traditional” Catholics “opposed the consecrations as an act of severe disobedience.”
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What next?
The Vatican’s response, especially “targeting the priests, the faithful and the sacraments they can receive,” was “particularly harsh, and reversed concessions the Vatican had granted the SSPX in recent years,” the AP said. In 2009, Pope Benedict XIV reversed the excommunications Pope John Paul II had declared against Lefebvre and the four bishops he consecrated in 1988, but Wednesday’s sanctions suggest that “after nearly five decades of trying to negotiate with the society, the Holy See has had enough.”
