While speaking with reporters on the evening of Tuesday, June 16, outside Castel Gandolfo, Pope Leo XIV was asked about the decision of the leadership of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) to consecrate four new bishops without papal approval on July 1 in Écône, Switzerland. The pope replied:

“We are still considering making another appeal, to say ‘do not do this, let us try to live in communion in the Church.’ But it is their choice. We must realize what it means for them and for the Church. Certainly, division among Christians is always a painful point, but they refuse to accept certain fundamental elements of the Church, starting with various points of the Second Vatican Council. If they make that choice, I am sorry, but we must move forward.”

Background

The SSPX has been in a “canonically irregular” situation with the Catholic Church since 1975, when the Society was officially suppressed by the bishop of Fribourg, ending five years of provisional, ad experimentum approval as a pious union of clerics in the diocese.

From that point forward, the SSPX continued to exist without the recognition of the Catholic Church. The SSPX’s founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, was suspended a divinis by Pope St. Paul VI in 1976 after ordaining priests without permission from Church authority, and in 1988 Lefebvre and five other bishops were declared excommunicated for participating in the “schismatic act” of consecrating bishops without a pontifical mandate, against the will of Pope St. John Paul II.

Formal attempts to reconcile the Society with the Church in 1988 and 2012 ultimately failed. Acceptance of the doctrine taught in number 25 of the Second Vatican Council’s dogmatic constitution Lumen Gentium (LG 25) — the paragraph on the religious assent owed to the Church’s authentic teaching — played a key role in both. It formed the second article of the May 1988 Protocol that Archbishop Lefebvre signed and then repudiated a day later, and the same requirement of assent to the Council’s teaching remained central to the failed 2012 negotiations.

Recent popes have made conciliatory gestures towards the SSPX with the expressed wish that these would help facilitate the Society’s return to full communion with the Church. For example, in 2009 Pope Benedict XVI lifted the formal excommunications of the four surviving bishops as a gesture of good will but making clear that “until the doctrinal questions are clarified, the Society has no canonical status in the Church, and its ministers — even though they have been freed of the ecclesiastical penalty — do not legitimately exercise any ministry in the Church.” During his papacy, Pope Francis granted faculties to SSPX priests to validly absolve the sins of “those faithful who, for various reasons, attend churches officiated by the priests of” the Society.

Then, in February of this year, the relationship between the Society and the Church was shaken by SSPX Superior General Davide Pagliarani’s announcement of a plan to once again consecrate new bishops without the required papal mandate. Canon 1387 in the Code of Canon Law says that this act incurs an automatic excommunication that can only be lifted by the Apostolic See.

Following the SSPX announcement, Cardinal Víctor Fernández, the prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), met with Pagliarani on February 12, and following the meeting issued a statement describing the Vatican’s offer to begin a dialogue with the SSPX “to highlight, in the topics under discussion, the minimum requirements for full communion with the Catholic Church, and consequently to outline a canonical statute for the Fraternity.” The one condition was that the SSPX must call off the July consecrations.

A week later, Pagliarani responded, declining the offer.

Then in May, Cardinal Fernández issued another statement reiterating what he wrote in February — that if the SSPX went through with the consecrations, they would be committing “a schismatic act.” He reminded them that “formal adherence to the schism constitutes a grave offence against God and entails the excommunication established under Church law.” Nevertheless, the SSPX has continued to move forward with the planned consecrations.

The weight of the Church’s non-infallible teachings

Ever since Vatican II (1962–1965), traditionalist critics of the Council have attempted to make the case that its teachings are not binding on the faithful. Oft-repeated talking points — such as “it was a pastoral council,” “it did not teach infallibly,” and “it did not issue any anathemas” — have been used to argue that acceptance of the Second Vatican Council is optional for Catholics. Many go much further, insisting that the Council taught many false doctrines and that the faithful are obligated to reject these alleged errors.

From a Catholic perspective, this position is incorrect, and the Church has repeatedly taught very clearly on this point. Earlier this week, we published Pope St. Paul VI’s general audience address of January 12, 1966, because it clearly anticipates (and soundly rejects) the traditionalist claim that the faithful are not bound to assent to the teachings of Vatican II, despite its lack of anathemas and definitive declarations. He stated:

“In view of the pastoral nature of the Council, it avoided any extraordinary statement of dogmas that would be endowed with the note of infallibility, but it still provided its teaching with the authority of the supreme ordinary magisterium. This ordinary magisterium, which is so obviously official, has to be accepted with docility and sincerity by all the faithful.”

Effectively, Paul VI invoked the principle taught in LG 25, that religious submission of intellect and will is owed to teachings of the authentic Magisterium on faith and morals, even if they are not taught infallibly — the same teaching at the center of the failed attempts to reconcile the SSPX. Also drawing from LG 25, he preempted attempts to interpret the documents creatively by adding that the teachings should be read “in accordance with the mind of the Council on the nature and aims of the individual documents.”

Although Lumen Gentium formally clarified the different types of magisterial teaching and the level of assent owed to each, the Church taught long before the Second Vatican Council that the faithful are obligated to accept even teachings not proposed by solemn dogmatic definition. In the Syllabus of Errors, Pope Pius IX explicitly condemned the view that Catholics are required to give assent only to infallibly defined dogmas. The condemned proposition, listed as error number 22, stated: “The obligation by which Catholic teachers and authors are strictly bound is confined to those things only which are proposed to universal belief as dogmas of faith by the infallible judgment of the Church.” Pius IX drew this rejected proposition from his own 1863 letter Tuas Libenter, in which he rejected the notion that Catholics “are absolutely bound, only to those decrees which are set forth by the infallible judgment of the Church as dogmas of faith to be believed by all,” insisting that the obligation extends also to what is “handed down as divinely revealed by the ordinary teaching power of the whole Church spread throughout the world.”

A sympathetic voice from Kazakhstan

Following Pope Leo’s June 16 comments — and with the planned consecrations fast approaching — several sympathetic traditionalist voices from outside the SSPX expressed support for the Society’s doctrinal positions and criticized the pope’s statement that “various points of the Second Vatican Council” are among the “fundamental elements of the Church.”

Among those making this argument was Athanasius Schneider, an auxiliary bishop from Kazakhstan who has built a media presence and a large following among traditionalists in the United States and Europe. In a “Declaration” in support of the SSPX consecrations, posted on the SSPX website, Schneider quoted from the same January 12, 1966 address discussed above, but did so selectively.

This is the quotation that appears in Schneider’s declaration:

“There are those who ask what authority, what theological qualification the Council intended to give to its teachings, knowing that it avoided issuing solemn dogmatic definitions engaging the infallibility of the ecclesiastical Magisterium. The answer is known by whoever remembers the conciliar declaration of March 6, 1964, repeated on November 16, 1964: given the Council’s pastoral character, it avoided pronouncing, in an extraordinary manner, dogmas endowed with the note of infallibility.”

Schneider ends the quotation there. But in the original Italian text, Paul VI has not finished the sentence. After saying that Vatican II avoided extraordinary dogmatic definitions endowed with the note of infallibility, Paul VI continued:

“… but it still provided its teaching with the authority of the supreme ordinary magisterium. This ordinary magisterium, which is so obviously official, has to be accepted with docility and sincerity by all the faithful, in accordance with the mind of the Council on the nature and aims of the individual documents.” [1]

Schneider relies on the truncated quote as the basis for his core argument: because Vatican II issued no extraordinary dogmatic definitions, its disputed teachings cannot be treated as doctrinally definitive or made an unconditional test of communion with the Church.

Schneider presents those who disagree with this premise not simply as Catholics who accept Vatican II according to the mind of the Church, but as people captive to “preconceived judgments,” “legalism,” and an “excessive papal-centrism” that he says approaches a “quasi-divinization” of both the papal office and the person of the pope.

Schneider’s broader argument is that Vatican II was a pastoral council whose non-definitive teachings should not be treated as conditions for full communion, especially where he believes they are ambiguous or difficult to reconcile with prior doctrine. He identifies religious liberty, ecumenism, interreligious dialogue, collegiality, and the postconciliar liturgical reform as areas requiring clarification or correction. He also argues that the SSPX is not rejecting Catholic dogma or papal primacy, but resisting what it sees as doctrinal and liturgical ambiguity in a time of ecclesial crisis. For that reason, he urges Pope Leo not to impose penalties, but to permit the consecrations as an exceptional pastoral gesture.

A suspended priest’s support

Another example came from Alcuin Reid, a liturgical scholar and prior of the Monastère Saint-Benoît in Brignoles, France. Reid’s background suggests he is not a neutral observer in this controversy. In 2022, after years of being refused priestly ordination, he was ordained without the permission of his bishop by an unnamed prelate and suspended from priestly ministry. His monastery’s public association of the faithful was suppressed. Reid does not deny the irregularity; in a Rorate Caeli interview, he defended the ordination as an act of conscience, placing his community’s situation alongside that of the SSPX.

In a June 18 article for The Catholic Herald, Reid urged Pope Leo to make room for the Society’s position. Reid asks what it means to “accept Vatican II,” and then reduces acceptance to acknowledging that the Council occurred, was validly convoked, and defined no new dogmas. He never suggests that the faithful are required to “accept” anything the Council actually taught on matters of faith and morals. For Reid, acceptance apparently means little more than admitting that the meeting took place.

His argument echoes the fundamental error found in Schneider’s declaration, and he effectively divides the whole of the Church’s Magisterium into two piles: divinely revealed dogma (which all Catholics are required to believe) and “pastoral policies and orientations” (mere prudential judgements that “one may freely question”). For Reid, the entire Second Vatican Council is up for debate, since he — like Bishop Schneider — is keen to remind us that “Vatican II made no dogmatic definitions — that is to say, it neither taught nor proclaimed anything at all new as revealed by God to be held by all Catholics.”

Reid’s false binary does not reflect Catholic doctrine or ecclesiology. It is also fundamentally misleading. He is quick to remind us, “The policies of Vatican II and their frequently mutant implementations do not form a ‘super dogma’ to which one must subscribe in order to be a Catholic.” But no one has suggested that the teachings of Vatican II are “super dogma.” What faithful Catholics are suggesting — and what Reid is ignoring — is the Catholic Church’s position on the authority of the Council’s teachings on faith and morals. Pope St. Paul VI gave the Church’s position in that January 1966 address, stating, “The Council is a great act of the magisterium of the Church, and anyone who adheres to the Council is, by that very fact, recognizing and honoring the magisterium of the Church.”

Reid writes that the “fundamental elements of the Church” are found in Scripture, the Creeds, dogmatic definitions, and infallible papal teaching. These, he says, are what a convert professes in saying, “I believe and profess all that the holy Catholic Church believes, teaches and proclaims to be revealed by God” — “nothing more, nothing less. No one has a right to demand more. No one can permit less.”

That sounds precise, but it is false. This framing leaves out the category at issue: the authentic ordinary Magisterium. No serious Catholic claims that every pastoral judgment, disciplinary decision, or postconciliar implementation of Vatican II is irreformable. But the doctrinal teachings of an ecumenical council, proposed by the bishops in union with the pope as part of the Church’s authentic Magisterium, cannot simply be treated as optional because they are not solemnly defined as dogma.

Reid’s distinction — that Catholics are bound only to what is divinely revealed and can discard the rest — is not the recovery of authentic tradition. It is a subversive attempt to undermine Church authority and doctrine.

Paul VI did not invent a new postconciliar standard. Pius XII had already rejected the idea that official papal teaching leaves disputed questions untouched simply because it is not proposed by an extraordinary definition. In Humani Generis, he wrote that when the popes “in their official documents purposely pass judgment on a matter up to that time under dispute,” that matter “cannot be any longer considered a question open to discussion among theologians” (HG 20). If that is true of official papal documents, it can hardly be less true of the doctrinal teaching of an ecumenical council promulgated by the pope.

In his essay, Reid’s goal is not a modest clarification of levels of authority. The subtext is that he wants to dissolve the obligation to accept the Council at all. This is the radical traditionalist’s fantasy: to reopen, re-litigate, and reject Vatican II. It is also the great hope of the SSPX. Sixty years later, some Catholics have not given up this dream, and many likely never will. Perhaps it is time, as Pope Leo suggests, to “move forward.”

Bux the Benevacantist

A third appeal came from Msgr. Nicola Bux, a priest of the Diocese of Bari and a former consulter to the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints. In an open letter published by Edward Pentin, Bux urged Pope Leo to do everything possible to bridge the differences with the SSPX before the Society proceeds with illicit episcopal consecrations. He called on the pope to revisit Summorum Pontificum, to restrain the German Synodal Path, and to answer unresolved dubia from the Francis pontificate. Above all, he appealed to Leo to “state clearly what is truth and what is error” and warned, “Let us not allow the underlying schism to become irreparable.”

On one level, the appeal sounds pious and reasonable. No Catholic should desire a hardened schism. No one should be indifferent to division in the Body of Christ. But coming from Bux, the appeal to clarity is difficult to take seriously. During the Francis pontificate, Bux made a name for himself as one of the more extreme critics of the pope, repeatedly lending credibility to the claim that Benedict XVI’s resignation may not have been complete or valid. In 2018, he publicly suggested that one possible way to address the crisis of the Francis pontificate would be to examine whether Benedict’s resignation had been “full or partial.” In 2020, he contradicted one of Benedict’s own arguments for the validity of the resignation, telling LifeSiteNews that comparing the papal office with the episcopal office on resignation was “not correct.”

Then, as I reported last year, it emerged after Francis’s death that in 2014 Bux received a personal letter from Benedict himself forcefully and unequivocally rejecting the Benevacantist thesis. In other words, Bux spent years helping to keep alive a theory that Benedict had personally rejected to him in writing, and he kept the letter secret until after both Benedict and Francis had died. He knew Benedict’s answer but withheld it and chose to continue feeding the conspiracy theory.

Today Bux presents himself as a servant of ecclesial unity, pleading with Pope Leo to accommodate the SSPX before the schism becomes final. But when he had the ability to extinguish one of the most destructive anti-Francis conspiracy theories in the Church, he did not do so. He let the confusion fester. Then, when the letter finally became useful, it appeared as an appendix to his own book. That does not make him a credible witness for clarity.

Bux’s appeal is, admittedly, different in kind from those of Schneider and Reid. He does not argue that the Council’s teachings are non-binding; his demand is rather that the pope first resolve every disputed question — liturgical, doctrinal, and pastoral — before the Society can be expected to accept the Council. Yet in the end his letter belongs alongside theirs. Each presents itself as a plea for peace, unity, and truth. And in each case the practical effect is the same: the burden of reconciliation is shifted entirely onto the pope, and full communion is treated as something the Holy See must earn from those who have separated themselves from it, rather than something the faithful owe to the Church.

Conclusion

None of this is rooted in the Catholic tradition. It is refuted by the Church’s tradition — by Pius IX, who condemned the minimalism; by Pius XII, who taught that the pope has the authority to settle a theological debate; by Paul VI, who taught that the Council binds; and by the constant doctrine that the faithful owe the Magisterium more than assent to defined dogma. When Pope Leo says that “we must move forward,” he is not being cold or dismissive. He is being faithful — and realistic. The door to communion remains open, and it has been for fifty years. The window of opportunity for reconciliation with the SSPX as a whole is likely closed, meaning that individual members and supporters of the Society may have to face obstacles alone in their journeys back to full communion with the Church that Christ founded. But the journey is worthwhile because the destination is unity with the Body of Christ.

Note

[1] Schneider is not the first traditionalist writer to quote Paul VI’s January 12, 1966 general audience in this way. The same passage, usually ending before Paul VI’s statement that Vatican II taught with “the authority of the supreme ordinary magisterium,” has appeared for years in traditionalist discussions of Vatican II’s authority. See, for example, Atila Sinke Guimarães, “What Went Wrong with Vatican II?”; Tradicat, “Magisterium and Levels of Assent”; Pertinacious Papist, “What to make of Vatican II?”; and OnePeterFive, “Vatican II Cannot Be Separated from Its ‘Spirit’”.

These examples do not all use exactly the same English translation, but they quote the same section for the same purpose and omit the same decisive continuation. In the examples cited here, none supplies Paul VI’s next words, which state that the Council nevertheless taught with “the authority of the supreme ordinary magisterium,” nor do they direct the reader to the full Vatican text. The full Italian text is available on the Vatican website: Paul VI, General Audience, January 12, 1966. The English translation quoted here is from The Pope Speaks, as reproduced in full on Where Peter Is earlier this week.

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Image: Council bishops on Saint Peter’s Square (1962, Italy). By Peter Geymayer – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4090784