Note: This article was originally published June 27, 2026 in Spanish by the Spanish digital media outlet EL ESPAÑOL as “León XIV, ante el cisma de los ‘tradicionalistas’ de la Sociedad de San Pío X: dan misa en latín y quieren sus propios obispos.” Translated into English and published on Where Peter Is with permission of the journalist and EL ESPAÑOL.

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In Écône, a small Swiss village ringed by mountains, the ceremony looked like just another solemn Mass. There were vestments, Latin, silence, ancient gestures, hands laid on bowed heads. Four priests were about to become bishops.

But that morning in 1988 was no ordinary ceremony. Marcel Lefebvre, founder of the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X, was doing exactly what Rome had forbidden him to do: consecrating bishops without a pontifical mandate. For his followers, it was an act of survival. For the Catholic Church, it was outright disobedience to the Pope.

Thirty-eight years later, every indication is that the scene may repeat itself. The Society plans new episcopal consecrations this coming July 1, and Rome has already warned that such a gesture would constitute a “schismatic act.”

The challenge comes in the first months of the pontificate of Leo XIV, who inherits one of the most delicate matters Rome has carried for decades: its relationship with the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X.

This is not merely a dispute over cassocks, veils, or the Latin Mass. Nor is it an aesthetic quarrel between an old liturgy and a modern one.

Behind it lies a far deeper dispute: who has the authority to interpret Tradition, what place the Second Vatican Council occupies, and how far a community can go that claims to obey Rome while acting outside of Rome.

The question hanging over the case is simple and stark: can a community claim to remain within the Church while consecrating its own bishops against the will of the Pope?

Canon-law sources consulted by EL ESPAÑOL explain that an episcopal consecration without a pontifical mandate can be valid from a sacramental standpoint but illicit from a legal one. That is: it can genuinely produce a bishop, but through an act gravely prohibited by the Church.

A source who teaches Canon Law in Rome sums it up plainly: if a bishop consecrates without the Pope’s permission, “he has indeed made him a bishop.” It is not null. But he has committed “a disobedience of the first order.”

That disobedience, the same sources explain, carries automatic excommunication for the one who consecrates and for the one consecrated. No trial need come first. The penalty is incurred by the very fact of the act.

The matter does not affect only the bishops. The same sources specify that the faithful, too, could incur schism if they consciously and formally adhere, in faith and in worship, to a schismatic authority. This does not mean, they qualify, merely attending an occasional celebration, but rather a stable adherence to a rupture with the communion of the Church.

Teodoro Bahillo Ruiz, a professor of Canon Law and Theology at the Pontifical University of Comillas, specifies that the situation of the Society of Saint Pius X before July 1 was already irregular, though not formally schismatic.

“It was no longer schismatic as it once was, but neither was it regular,” he explains.

For years, Rome attempted a path of rapprochement. Benedict XVI lifted the excommunications of the bishops consecrated in 1988. Francis took a line more pastoral than legal and made allowances for certain sacraments to be celebrated by the Society’s priests.

Juan Luis Lorda — a priest, doctor of theology, and professor emeritus at the University of Navarra — notes that this difficulty in reaching a stable agreement has been a constant: the Society has agreed to sit down and negotiate with the Holy See, but its hardest-line factions have ended up frustrating any rapprochement whenever the discussion reached the core of the problem: acceptance of the Second Vatican Council and of the authority of the popes who came after it.

For Bahillo, July 1 would amount to “a great step backward” from that attempt at reconciliation — a way of deepening a fracture that never fully closed.

It Was Never Just the Mass

Lorda maintains that Lefebvre became a figure of traditionalism precisely because of that 1988 gesture.

“He made an especially drastic gesture by ordaining bishops without the permission of the Holy See,” he explains. “With that, he turned himself into a far more defiant figure than many others.”

For Lorda, the problem did not begin with the Latin Mass, even though the Mass has ended up becoming its most visible banner. The origin, he argues, lies in the Second Vatican Council and, specifically, in the acceptance of religious liberty.

“The original problem is a difficulty with one point of the Second Vatican Council, which is specifically religious liberty,” he explains. That is: the acceptance that people have a right to their religious freedom and that this right must be respected by states as well.

In the past, Lorda recalls, confessional states operated by a different logic. In a Catholic country, the presence of Protestants was tolerated, but not necessarily their having the same public rights to spread their worship.

The Second Vatican Council changed the approach with the declaration Dignitatis Humanae.

“To us it seems obvious, because it is what has been established,” Lorda says. “But it was not what was said before.”

That point, he adds, is hard to explain today. And so, according to the theologian, the Society shifted the focus toward something more visible and emotional: the Mass.

“The original problem was not the Mass. And it still is not the Mass,” he insists. “When they speak with the Holy See, the question is whether or not they accept the Council. But when they speak with ordinary people, what they say is that the problem lies with the Mass. That is false.”

The old Mass, then, functions as an emblem. But the real dispute is something else: who interprets Tradition, who decides what binds Catholics, and what authority Rome retains over a community that claims to obey the Pope while preparing to act against his command.

“The Church has a unity, and part of the unity of the Church is precisely that,” Lorda explains. “Bishops have to be in communion with the Holy See.”

For the Society, by contrast, bishops are a matter of survival. Without bishops it cannot ordain priests. Without priests it cannot sustain its Masses, its sacraments, or its communities.

Life on the Inside

Andrew Mioni explains it from the inside. He is 29, lives in New York, and spent years in the Society’s orbit. Both his paternal and maternal grandparents joined the Society in the eighties.

His parents grew up in those communities. He arrived at St. Mary’s Academy, in Kansas, when he was 15.

He remembers old, peeling walls and stone blackened by time. Radiators caked with paint, dark-green chalkboards, and books that looked as though they had sat there for decades.

“It was as if a Catholic school from the 1950s had been transplanted into the present,” he says.

The boys wore navy-blue trousers, white shirts, and ties. The girls wore long plaid dresses, or vests and long skirts. Boys and girls were not allowed to fraternize with one another. The priests were everywhere: they taught classes, ran activities, exercised authority.

The chapel was on campus.

That world, say those who knew it from within, cannot be reduced to a Mass. It is a complete culture: a way of dressing, of educating, of praying, of relating to Rome, and of and of how it views the rest of the Catholic world.

Louis Massett, now 53, also grew up in that environment and has just reconstructed the experience in the book Traddyland: The Memoir of a Radical Traditional Catholic.

His family began attending the Society of Saint Pius X in 1982, when he was nine.

His father, Tom Massett, was central to bringing the Society to central New York: in 1985 he invited Bishop Richard Williamson to celebrate Mass once a month at a union hall in Syracuse. From those Masses the Society’s local chapel would later be born.

For Massett, entering the Society was a “culture shock.”

Women were required to wear dresses and cover their heads in church. Television was seen with suspicion. Rock music was discouraged. On Sundays, one went to the Latin Mass. At night, the rosary was prayed before a candle. The catechism, he recalls, was studied “as if it were the only thing worth studying.”

But the most revealing part of his account is something else: the Society was not just a Mass. It was an entire life.

“The Latin Mass was the gravitational center, but everything else was organized around it: friendships, marriages, homeschooling, summer camps,” Massett says.

Leaving, he says, did not simply mean switching parishes. It meant breaking with a world: the friends, the routines, the room where a sister’s wedding was held, the priest who heard one’s first confession.

“It wasn’t just a Mass. It was a whole life,” he sums up.

The Fear of Leaving

Spanish priestly sources consulted by this newspaper describe it the same way: priests who spent years in traditionalist communities tied to the old Mass and who are now navigating, cautiously, their incorporation into diocesan structures.

They ask not to be identified. They want no names, no details that might place them. They speak in the plural, as part of a broader phenomenon: that of people who entered traditionalist settings seeking beauty, discipline, silence, and clarity, and who ended up discovering as well a machinery of belonging that is hard to leave.

One of them sums it up with a dry phrase: “These groups are very easy to enter, but very hard to leave.”

The difficulty is not only spiritual. It is also material. Some have spent years in those settings and, upon leaving, discover that their studies are not recognized, that they have no record of social-security contributions, that they do not know where to reintegrate, or that they fear they will not be accepted by the diocesan Church.

“Many are afraid that the official Church will not accept them, or want them — that one will always carry the stigma of having belonged to these extremist groups,” one of those Spanish priestly sources explains.

The fear of leaving mixes with something more intimate: the shame of admitting one was wrong.

“There is the pride of thinking: if I go back to the world, it’s like admitting that I was wrong,” he adds.

The word “world” is no accident. Inside these settings, what lies outside is not perceived simply as different. It is often perceived as dangerous, contaminated, spiritually suspect.

Mioni remembers it this way: the Society saw itself as “the best.” Its schools, its communities, and its teachings were presented as uncontaminated, set against the rest of the Church, which was regarded as riddled with errors or even heresies.

“An undeniable superiority complex permeates their world,” he says.

In a religion class, Mioni heard a remark he still keeps in his memory. A priest was talking about the diocesan Catholic church nearby. He said: “Those people across the street? They aren’t Catholic.”

It was not an isolated anecdote. According to his account, entire portions of the school curriculum were devoted to explaining the “crisis of the Church,” the life of Lefebvre, the Second Vatican Council, and the history of the Society.

Rome appeared under names heavy with suspicion: “modernist Rome,” “the conciliar Church,” “the Church of Vatican II.”

For them, Mioni says, “it was a fact that the hierarchy was corrupt and that the Vatican was compromised.”

From the inside, the Society insists that it is part of the Catholic Church. Any suggestion that it stands outside the Church provokes indignation. Yet, at the same time, it constantly criticizes Rome, the hierarchy, and the post-conciliar Church.

Mioni puts it this way: they have divided the Church into two distinct entities, “Eternal Rome” and “Conciliar Rome,” and they hold that they remain faithful to the former.

Their sermons, he recalls, often did not center on the day’s readings or on a Christian virtue, but on defending their position and explaining Rome’s supposed errors.

Gary Campbell, a former priest of the SSPX, describes an atmosphere of rigid, tightly controlled thinking. There was, he says, a constant expectation to believe the same things and to act in a particular way.

“Thinking for yourself was seen as something dangerous,” he maintains.

According to Campbell, Rome was viewed ambivalently: as legitimate authority and, at the same time, as a threat. The Pope and the bishops were considered to have been appointed by Jesus Christ, yet, at the same time, supposedly contaminated by the errors of Vatican II.

For him, the Society does not see itself as just one more part of the Catholic world. “They believe that they are the Catholic world, and that the institutional Church follows a different religion.”

Campbell goes further. He claims that, in the environment he knew, extreme ideas circulated: antisemitism, theories about a Masonic conspiracy “led by the Jews,” and sympathies for authoritarian far-right politics. In one of the houses where he worked, he says, he even found Nazi marching songs among the CD collection.

He does not present this as an isolated anecdote, but as part of a closed intellectual atmosphere in which the laity were often viewed as ignorant, unreliable, and in need of clerical guidance.

Here lies one of the keys to the conflict. From the inside, the Society is not experienced as a split. It is experienced as resistance. Not as a break with the Church, but as fidelity to what they consider the true Church.

That is why, when Rome warns of a possible excommunication, many do not receive it as an alarm. They receive it as a confirmation.

Mioni believes Rome’s warnings will be dismissed, and even ridiculed, in the Society’s circles. “They regard these judgments as invalid and as lacking any legal force,” he says.

By his account, the mood surrounding the consecrations is not somber. It is almost festive: “Ready to be excommunicated? See you in Écône!”

Campbell distills it into a single phrase: “From the inside, schism never looks like schism. It looks like loyalty to the real Church.”

Life inside the Society, according to the accounts gathered, also had a component of social pressure. Mioni speaks of very high social demands. Anyone who did not conform was marked out.

“If you didn’t meet their standards, you were singled out, pushed aside,” he says.

The dress code for women was especially strict. Women would correct and report each other when they thought the code was being broken. “There were no such modesty rules for men,” he notes.

There was also a strong distrust of doubt. According to Mioni, the Society discouraged any questioning or disagreement. Doubts were presented as temptations. Those who questioned the community or its leaders were branded “rebels.”

“They end up socially marginalized,” he maintains.

He recalls the case of a teacher who began to have doubts, distributed material critical of the Society’s position, and ended up losing his job.

Campbell uses a harsher word: he speaks of a “sectarian” atmosphere. According to him, within the Society’s circles there was the idea that Lefebvre had been a saint and a prophet sent by God, and that anyone who contradicted him must be deceived or spiritually weak.

The leadership, he maintains, took on “an aura of infallibility.” Dissent, he says, “was not even considered possible.”

When he decided to leave, Campbell did not go out the front door. “I put my things in a bag and climbed out a window in the middle of the night,” he recalls. He says the environment was so toxic that he did not feel he could leave freely in broad daylight.

In his account, Campbell further claims to have learned of at least three occasions on which the seal of confession was allegedly violated in order to contain internal problems. It is a grave accusation, one he places within a culture of closing ranks against dissent.

Massett carries another extreme memory from within his own family. He recounts that in 1985, when he was 12, his sister Lisa went to Bishop Williamson because her husband had begun to beat her. According to Massett, she had been raised to trust Williamson absolutely.

The reply he attributes to the bishop was: “What are a few blows, when the salvation of your husband and your son is at stake?” Lisa stayed, Massett says, and the abuse continued intermittently for years.

“That is what social pressure inside the SSPX looked like at its harshest, in my family,” he maintains.

For the priests, that structure had a cost as well. Campbell recalls an expectation of constant activity, long journeys to bring the sacraments to the faithful, and a physical and mental fatigue that could end in burnout.

“If you couldn’t keep up the pace, it was your own fault,” he says.

But none of the sources denies that there was beauty. Mioni remembers those Masses from childhood as ceremonies of wonder and solemnity, especially for the music and the ritual rigor.

“The feast days seemed very beautiful to me,” he says.

Massett, too, speaks of an intense sense of belonging. To be a child inside that world, he says, was to feel “deeply loved and deeply besieged.” Beauty and siege at the same time.

That nuance matters. The Society does not attract only through rejection. It also attracts people with what it offers: silence, ritual, community, clear doctrine, close-knit families, and a kind of order within a Church that many find confusing.

Mioni does not disdain that desire. “The longing for reverence, tradition, and orthodoxy is undoubtedly admirable,” he says. “I don’t blame anyone for thinking they might find these things in the Society.”

But he draws a line: “Legitimate desires can never be justified through disobedience and separation.”

For many, leaving is not just walking out of a chapel. Mioni believes the main lock is a spiritual one: “The main reason people hesitate to leave is that they have been told their whole lives that they would gamble their souls if they ever left.”

Even those who have already accepted that the Society is wrong, he says, are afraid to set foot in a diocesan church.

“They are too afraid to set foot in a diocesan church because they have been told that all kinds of sacrileges happen there,” he explains.

Almost all of them, he adds, repeat the same phrase when they begin to talk with others who have left: “I thought I was the only one.”

Then come anxiety, scrupulosity, guilt, fear. The suspicion of having given in to a temptation. The difficulty of learning to trust again a Church they spent years hearing was corrupt.

Massett places July 1 within that same logic. For him, the new bishops are neither isolated figures nor exceptions within the system. They are “the system’s most faithful sons.”

In his judgment, the deeper meaning of the consecrations is that an entire ecclesial world, built over decades outside Rome’s authority, is seeking to perpetuate itself.

The need for bishops, he insists, is not symbolic. “Without bishops, the Society cannot ordain priests. Without priests, its Masses, sacraments, and parishes go dark.”

With bishops of its own, by contrast, the Society can carry on. It can ordain new priests. It can keep schools, seminaries, chapels, families, communities. It can survive another forty years.

Lorda puts it differently. If there is one strong point in the Church’s tradition, he maintains, it is unity with the Pope.

For the theologian, the paradox lies in invoking fidelity to Rome while acting against an express order from Rome: “I want to be faithful, and to be faithful, I do whatever I please.”

On July 1, if the consecrations go ahead, the Society of Saint Pius X will once again cross a line that Rome has already marked. For its faithful, it may be an act of fidelity. For the Church, a schismatic act.

Between the two views, the rift opens.

And within that rift, for nearly four decades now, lives a community that claims to obey Rome — except when Rome says no.

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Featured image: The four candidates with the SSPX’s two bishops and superior. Pictured (L–R): Frs. Michel Poinsinet de Sivry (France) and Pascal Schreiber (Switzerland), Bishop Alfonso de Galarreta, Fr. Davide Pagliarani, Bishop Bernard Fellay, and Frs. Michael Goldade (US) and Marc Hanappier (France). (SSPX photo)