Pope Leo has made a last-ditch attempt to persuade a rebel group of ultra-conservative Catholics to abandon plans to ordain its own bishops without Vatican approval, calling the “schismatic act” a “sin of extreme gravity”.
The Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), founded in the Swiss village of Ecône in 1970 to oppose liberalising reforms in the Catholic church, plans to ordain four new bishops at its seminary there on Wednesday.
The order, which has gained a significant following in the US, where it has a large operations base in Kansas, as well as in France, Argentina and other countries, has nearly 1,500 priests, seminarians and other vocational members.
The ceremony on 1 July risks further straining the church’s fraught relationship with rightwing and traditionalist Catholics and could be the first significant crisis for the pontiff, who since his election in May last year has prioritised unity within the Catholic church.
The society rejects key reforms that emerged from the Second Vatican Council – a landmark Vatican gathering of cardinals, patriarchs, bishops, theological experts and others between 1962 and 1965 – including allowing mass to be celebrated in local languages. Until then it had been said only in Latin.
The SSPX has accused the modern church of being rife with heresies and errors, saying that the ordinations originate from practical necessity and “do not proceed from any desire to claim a power of jurisdiction or to establish a parallel authority within the church”.
However, church law stipulates that such ordinations constitute an act that could provoke a schism – an intentional rupture of the church’s unity – and could lead to the automatic excommunication of the newly ordained bishops and the bishop who carries out the consecrations.
“I plead with you and ask you with all my heart: please turn back!,” Leo wrote in a letter addressed to Rev Davide Pagliarani, the superior general of the SSPX.
“I urge you to consider carefully the spiritual good of the faithful, because the schismatic act you are about to undertake would deprive them of the licit and, in some cases, even valid reception of the sacraments, which they love and seek for their sanctification.”
Leo added: “I pray for you, because to tear the seamless garment of Christ is a sin of extreme gravity.”
In response, Marc-André Mabillard, media manager for the society, told AP that SSPX was changing “absolutely nothing” in its plans, expressing “great sadness to not be understood by our leader”.
Mabillard added: “We don’t fear it. It pains us immensely, but we believe that the good we seek is greater than the pain that will be inflicted upon us.”
Leo had previously appealed to SSPX not to go ahead with the ordinations, and last week told journalists that if the society made the “choice” to continue on the trajectory of schism, then “I’m sorry, but we must move forward”.
Christopher White, author of Pope Leo XIV: Inside the Conclave and the Dawn of a New Papacy, and a senior fellow at Georgetown University in Washington DC, said: “The fact that he’s made it clear that there will be consequences, namely excommunication, attests to the gravity of the situation – and that he’s not willing to turn a blind eye to rogue, schismatic behaviour simply for the sake of preserving a false unity.”
In 1988, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the late founder of SSPX, and four bishops he had ordained without permission from then-Pope John Paul II, were excommunicated, including a British bishop, Richard Williamson. In 2009, the conservative Pope Benedict lifted the excommunications. Shortly before, Williamson caused uproar by denying the Holocaust.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
