As we begin a new, unfortunate chapter in the relations between the Catholic Church and the Society of St. Pius X, it is striking to see the casual indifference most SSPX adherents display toward the grave penalties imposed on them by the Vatican. Indeed, more than casual indifference, one senses an untroubled air of confidence from these schismatic clerics and their committed laity. Listening to SSPX sermons from this past weekend, reading the superior general’s letter to Pope Leo, or conversing with SSPX parishioners offers ample proof of their defiant mindset. They believe that the Holy Father’s excommunications are null and void, that their confessions are still valid, their sacraments licit, and that — one day — a future pope will “correct” the mistakes of Leo XIV. Perhaps there is no better embodiment of their worldview than the words of the newly consecrated (and immediately excommunicated) Bishop Goldade:
“The modernist church is a desert. It kills everything that it touches, it kills the supernatural life, it kills the sources of grace. It dries up everything. Because it has placed man in the place of God.”
Yes, according to Bishop Goldade — who has chosen his own interpretation of theology over that of the pope and the Church’s magisterium — it is the Catholic Church who puts man in the place of God! Of course, theological opinions on this matter already abound online. I’d rather add my voice to a question that’s discussed far less but matters just as much: how can the Society of St. Pius X’s members seem so unbothered and self-sure in the face of almost overwhelming evidence of their own schism? I’d point to three things: isolation from outside institutions, a relentless focus on the Church’s supposed deficiencies, and a cultivated fear of damnation for leaving. Together, these keep members committed to the Society’s doctrinal teachings and reliant on their priests for spiritual aid — even as the Church excommunicates their clergy and renders their sacraments illicit.
Having been born into an SSPX family, attended their parishes, and gone to one of their boarding schools for years, I know full well the lengths to which they go and the tactics that they employ to make sure parishioners stay “in the fold.” Contact with outside ideas and institutions is widely frowned upon, and priests often discourage traditional college routes for fear that graduates will “lose their souls.” One priest at school even told us that the school itself was the “real world,” since that’s where the true faith was kept — the outside world, he said, was the fake one. Consequently, most students at Society schools end up on one of a few narrow paths. The seminary is often presented as the default option: I remember priests telling us students that if we didn’t feel strongly about anything else, we had an obligation to at least “try out” the seminary. Those who don’t enter the seminary (or who quickly drop out, realizing they don’t have a vocation) often settle into a kind of minimum-contact existence. They work just enough to pay the bills, never fully engaging with a world they’ve spent their whole lives being warned against. Many eventually settle in towns with a heavy SSPX presence, like St. Marys, Kansas, or Post Falls, Idaho, to remain among their own. When I told my school’s headmaster that I planned on attending a “Novus Ordo” university, he responded with a lengthy explanation of the spiritual dangers to which I was exposing myself and, of course, recommended attendance at St. Mary’s College instead.
Bishop Goldade can be seen as an embodiment of this insular “pipeline,” whereby children are sent to SSPX schools K-12, then enter the seminary, and become priests with little to no real-world experience. Goldade was raised in St. Marys, entered the seminary at age 18, and was ordained a priest seven years later. He is now 45 and has never known life outside the SSPX.
From a young age, I thought of traditional and non-traditional Catholics in terms of “us vs. them” — a divide reinforced at school by priests who explained that you couldn’t be “true friends” with someone who disagreed with the SSPX on Vatican II or the Traditional Latin Mass. There is a dangerous superiority complex that accompanies this kind of thinking: to be an SSPX Traditional Catholic means to be among the fraction of the population who has the truth. We alone were pleasing to God, as we alone clung fast to the “true” teachings of “tradition.” I think most Society members — whether they recognize it or not, and myself included at one point — look down on people outside the Society. Non-Catholics are bad enough, but “Novus Ordo” Catholics are worse: traitors within the Church itself, selling out tradition for heresy and modernism.
Isolation alone doesn’t explain their confidence. Just as important is an almost obsessive focus on the failures of the post-Vatican II Church — what Society members simply call the “Novus Ordo,” using the name of the new Mass as shorthand for the whole institution. Anyone who has attended an SSPX sermon can attest to this. Instead of telling their parishioners and students how to live a virtuous Catholic life, Society priests tend to focus their attention on the evils of the “Novus Ordo” Church. Even sermons on Church history and saints are usually given in the wider context of making a point about “modernism” or “tradition.” That’s not to say that SSPX priests don’t care about living a virtuous Catholic life — but their focus on the errors of the “modernist Church” is ubiquitous. Ask a Society priest, and they will be the first to say that one of their biggest disagreements with other Vatican-approved TLMs is the inability of those priests to badmouth the Catholic Church in public!
I recall my junior and senior years of high school; the religion classes were focused almost exclusively on SSPX apologetics — running through the “errors” of the Second Vatican Council and explaining the “superiority” of the TLM over the Reformed Liturgy. I recall talking to a priest who told me that for his high school religion class, he would play videos of the supposed worst liturgical abuses in the Reformed Liturgy to get the point across. Anti-Novus Ordo sentiment was unavoidable and frankly reached a point of indoctrination — as if it were the only thing the priests cared for us to take away. This was reinforced by countless stories of people — even alumni of the Society’s own schools, people who had “sat in our very seats” — who had gone to the Novus Ordo and “lost their faith.” We were constantly reminded: it could happen to us too. Before I graduated, one of the priests spoke to my class and said that, knowing what we had been taught about the Novus Ordo, it would be a mortal sin to attend one. Even the Society’s own examination-of-conscience guide has, under the third commandment, listed:
“Have you attended and actively participated in the ‘New Mass’? Have you received communion in the hand?”[1]
Excerpt from Retreat Manual and Family Prayer Book (Angelus Press, 1995), p. 27. Screenshot via Internet Archive.
This is why it can be so difficult to reason with Society members regarding the recent consecrations and excommunications. Many of them have been taught little but contempt for the post-Vatican II Church. You may be trying to tease out the specifics on the consecrations and excommunications, but they simply cannot stay on the subject. You will hear about a liberal prelate, so-called “Pride Masses,” the Pachamama, blessings for homosexual couples, an unconfirmed Marian apparition, religious liberty, the German bishops, ecumenism, and a million other unrelated matters before you get a straight answer on the consecrations and subsequent excommunications. Don’t believe me? Try it. They cannot talk directly about the excommunications because, on the merits, the canonical case is simply not one they can win. Instead, they are conditioned to retreat to a hundred other unrelated issues, where they feel they are on firmer ground.
The final piece is fear — a carefully cultivated belief that the Society alone is a refuge for your soul, and that beyond its walls salvation is no longer guaranteed. Why risk your salvation somewhere uncertain, the logic goes, when you already have it secured right here? Leave the Society, and you’ve turned your back on the truth. The devil sets to work right away, and outside the safe confines of the SSPX, you won’t stand a chance. Before long, you will lose your faith, and that means damnation.
They make hell feel real. In a recent article, a woman wrote about attending an SSPX retreat where at meals they would play narrations of the bombing of Dresden during World War II — describing the terrible heat and burns — all to help describe how terrible a thing hell is. I can remember on a retreat of my own, the priest looking at my fellow retreatants and me, maybe 20 of us or so, and telling us not all of us would make it to heaven. He said it was simply a matter of math. Percentages and statistics. Almost as if you were in a competition with the people next to you to get a spot in heaven before someone else took it. On the same retreat, they had us listen to audio of real-life exorcisms over meals, to give us a taste of what the devil was like.
I recall, as a young child at summer camp, hearing a story told by the priests about a man who had lost his faith and owned a pet monkey. Little did this man know that his pet monkey was in fact a demon from hell, waiting for permission from God to drag him down to hell. However, this man had promised his mother that he would say three Hail Marys every night before bed — and so God would not let the demon drag him to hell. But one night, tired and in a hurry, the man forgot his Hail Marys! And lo and behold, the demon-monkey dragged him out of bed — and down to hell. From the perspective of a 10- or 11-year-old child, this was absolutely terrifying. It made me want to cling even more to the SSPX, since they alone were endowed with the full truth of tradition and could protect me from evils like the demon-monkey. This fear pervades everything, making sure SSPX adherents don’t even think about jumping ship for the “watered-down” Novus Ordo.
This crippling fear of leaving, together with passionate hatred for the Novus Ordo and the insular nature of the SSPX ecosystem, makes adherents not only difficult to win over, but totally confident in the judgments of the clerics who run the organization. Frankly, they are more confident in the assertions of their superior general or of their bishops and priests than of ecumenical councils, popes, and cardinals.
Of course, the demon-monkey story was never about the monkey. It was about teaching an impressionable child that salvation could hinge on a single missed prayer, that eternal hellfire could be merited over the minutest details, and that the world outside the Society was waiting, patiently, to take you there. Bishop Goldade did not invent this fear. He was raised inside it, the same as I was. The desert he warns against is not the Church he loathes — it is the one he was never allowed to leave in the first place!
Note
[1] Editor’s note: This wording appears in multiple prayer books published by the SSPX’s Angelus Press. See Retreat Manual and Family Prayer Book (1995), p. 27, and Christian Warfare (2009 ed.), p. 289. Both ask: “Have you attended and actively participated in the ‘New Mass’? Have you received Holy Communion in the hand?”
Image: The exommunicated SSPX Bishop Michael Goldade, YouTube screenshot.
Gabriel Hart was born into a family of the Society of St. Pius X and educated in its schools before leaving the SSPX as an adult. He writes under a pseudonym to protect the privacy of family members who remain in the Society.
Popular Posts