The Catholic Church is in the news again…not over some financial or sexual scandals this time, but over a decree that many would have thought belonged to the medieval age of popes warring with bishops. On Thursday, 2 July, the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a decree declaring the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) to be in schism, and excommunicating its bishops. It happened in 2026, showing that the spiritual hierarchy the Catholic Church built centuries ago still holds its grip.
Who Is the SSPX
Founded in 1970 by the French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the SSPX was born out of opposition to the modernising reforms of the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s. These reforms, among other things, revolutionised the Church’s relations with other Christians and Jews. On the other hand, the Society of Saint Pius X, named after Pope Pius X for his anti-modernist stance, kept old conventions in its rituals.
In 1975, the Vatican suspended the founder, Lefebvre, and suppressed the society. But the deeper rupture came in 1988. By then Lefebvre, at 81, feared that if he died without a successor, the SSPX would be left ordained only by bishops he considered doctrinally unsound. In June 1987 he announced he would consecrate successors with or without Rome’s approval. Canon law is clear that a bishop needs a papal mandate to consecrate another bishop, and an unauthorised consecration carries automatic excommunication. Lefebvre went ahead anyway, consecrating four priests (Bernard Fellay, Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, Alfonso de Galarreta, and Richard Williamson) as bishops. In response, the Vatican excommunicated Lefebvre and the four bishops immediately.
Meanwhile, the SSPX has always argued that it was responding to a genuine moral and theological crisis in the Church; any penalty imposed on it is invalid.
Rome softened its stance over the following decades. First, Pope Benedict XVI lifted the 1988 excommunications in 2009, and Pope Francis went further in 2015, ruling that confessions heard by SSPX priests were valid and giving the society’s clergy permission to witness marriages.
The Reversal
On Thursday, 2 July 2026, the Vatican tore up those concessions. The decree came a day after the SSPX consecrated four new bishops (Pascal Schreiber, Michael Goldade, Michel Poinsinet de Sivry, and Marc Hanappier) at its headquarters in Écône, Switzerland, with Alfonso de Galarreta as principal consecrator and Bernard Fellay as co-consecrator. Both men had already lived through one excommunication in 1988; this made it their second.
The Dicastery declared that the consecrating bishops and the newly consecrated had incurred automatic excommunication, and that the Church now regards the sacraments of confession and marriage administered by SSPX priests as invalid. Clergy and laypeople were warned that formally adhering to the “schism” carries the same penalty.
The SSPX rejected the ruling outright, calling the sanctions “objectively unjust and invalid.” In a letter to Pope Leo XIV, the society’s superior general defended the consecrations as a necessary response to what he called an ongoing doctrinal and moral crisis in the Church.
What the Society Believes
Days before the consecrations, the SSPX published a 154-article “Profession of Catholic Faith of the Society of Saint Pius X to Enlighten Souls in the Face of Modern Errors.” It rejects religious pluralism outright — stating that it does not suffice to say, with Jews and Muslims, that God is one — rejects laïcité as tantamount to declaring “God doesn’t exist,” and calls for religion’s restoration in law, education, culture, and public life. It also rejects modern notions of political and religious liberty, and affirms marriage as the indissoluble union of one man and one woman, in explicit rejection of the LGBT-affirming currents now present in parts of the Church.
These, notably, were the Church’s own default positions before the 1960s council set out to “update” (aggiornamento) them. The SSPX is said to have more than 750 priests and around 600,000 followers across more than 75 countries.
The Bigger Picture
What this saga makes plain is that excommunication is not a thing of the old world. It still functions exactly as it always has. It also shows the fallacies of the catholic church still exist: tying a person’s faith, marriage, and civil standing to the authority of one man. Confession answers to another man’s judgment of who may be absolved and by whom. This is, of course, entirely at odds with Islamic understanding on many counts. In Islam, a human’s relationship with Allah depends on no human authority. Repentance, too, is something the servant earns by turning to Allah in sincerity; no one's faith stands in need of another's mediation. A servant’s bond with his Lord rests on no human authority’s approval.
The dispute between the Vatican and the SSPX is, strictly, an internal Catholic matter, and canon law is theirs to interpret. However, it succinctly depicts how modernism is decisively winning over tradition and the pace at which secular modernity continues to reshape even the most resistant corners of religious life. With more than half a million people now formally cut off from the Church, this is the largest schism to hit Catholicism since 1870, when a much smaller group of German Catholics broke from Rome. Christianity’s oldest lasting schism, by contrast, traces back to fifth-century disputes over Christology. Schisms in history have generally been triggered by philosophy, language, culture, and politics as much as doctrine.
*The views expressed in this content are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of İdrakpost.
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