Last Wednesday, I published a backgrounder on the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), in which I attempted to lay out why the SSPX’s planned consecration of new bishops this July is effectively a schism in all but name. Within 24 hours, events moved quickly. Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández met with SSPX Superior General Fr. Davide Pagliarani at the offices of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith on February 12, with Pope Leo XIV’s approval. The Vatican offered an olive branch — an offer to enter into serious dialogue with SSPX leadership on unresolved doctrinal differences.

The Vatican has stipulated one condition before dialogue can begin: the episcopal consecrations that Pagliarani announced will occur on July 1 must be suspended. The SSPX has not yet made their reply, but based on the reactions and commentary, it appears likely that the SSPX will decline the offer and move ahead with their plan to ordain new bishops this summer.

As I read and listened to the commentary on the situation, I found myself stuck somewhere between “Could this have turned out any other way?” and “I don’t see how this could have turned out any other way.”

What the Vatican Is Proposing

Fernández proposed a structured theological dialogue — with “a very precise methodology” — to work through questions the Vatican acknowledged had “not yet received sufficient clarification.” These included the distinction between an act of faith and obsequium religiosum, the different levels of adherence required by Vatican II texts, and topics from SSPX correspondence dating back to 2019. Fernández noted that they also discussed the question of divine will regarding the plurality of religions — a reference to the Abu Dhabi document that the SSPX has long cited as evidence of heresy.

Again, the dialogue is contingent on the SSPX suspending its announced plan to consecrate new bishops. As the DDF put it, proceeding with illicit consecrations “would imply a decisive rupture of ecclesial communion (schism) with grave consequences for the Fraternity as a whole.” (Incidentally, a contact in Rome saw Fr. Pagliarani leaving the Vatican Thursday morning after his meeting with Fernández. My friend commented that Pagliarani crossed the street “with a look of apparent frustration on his face. He seemed to be in a hurry, and I wondered if he was trying to get away from the Vatican as quickly as possible,” adding that in his haste, Pagliarani “sort of stumbled over a pothole full of rain.”)

Many Vatican journalists gave thorough news reports following the meeting: Elise Ann Allen at Crux, Justin McLellan at NCR, and Gerard O’Connell at America gave good overviews of the situation. On the Inside the Vatican podcast with Colleen Dulle and O’Connell, their guest, veteran Vatican journalist John Thavis, raised a question that cut to the heart of the matter: “How much does this matter to the global Church and how much energy and resources should [Pope Leo] devote to this question?”

Thavis noted that the cardinals at Leo’s recent consistory actually declined to take up the Tridentine Mass question as a topic for discussion because it simply wasn’t a priority for most of them. Thavis also noted (as I did in my article) that the SSPX still has two bishops under 70 — and argued that this isn’t the existential crisis Lefebvre faced in 1988 at age 82 with one bishop. The July 1 date is a deliberate provocation — it is the anniversary of the excommunication decree that Cardinal Gantin signed against Lefebvre and the newly consecrated bishops the day after the 1988 consecrations. In Thavis’s reading, the ordination threat is leverage for canonical status, not a real emergency. And O’Connell delivered the bluntest assessment: “To have unity, you also need the other partner to be willing to move. And we have not seen, in 55 years, a move.”

O’Connell is right. Over more than fifty years, SSPX leadership has rarely expressed regret for anything they have done. The most notable exception was in early 2009 during the explosion of international outrage sparked by Pope Benedict lifting the excommunication of the four SSPX bishops ordained in 1988. One of the bishops, Englishman Richard Williamson, was revealed to be a notorious antisemite and Holocaust denier. The then–Superior General, Bishop Bernard Fellay, apologized to Pope Benedict XVI (who had been unaware of Williamson’s history and described the revelation of Williamson’s views to be an “unforeseen mishap”) for the damage caused by the scandal.

But when it comes to the Society’s defining posture toward Rome — its rejection of key teachings of the Second Vatican Council and its decision to proceed with episcopal consecrations against explicit papal warnings — the public record reflects defense rather than contrition. Pope St. John Paul II judged the 1988 consecrations to be a grave act of disobedience that “constitutes a schismatic act” in his motu proprio Ecclesia Dei. The Society, for its part, has consistently framed those consecrations as necessary and justified, and its official communications continue to defend their rationale rather than acknowledge wrongdoing.

Fifty Years of No

The SSPX has been given the opportunity to return to communion before — under John Paul II, under Benedict XVI, and under Francis. Every time, they have found the terms unacceptable. What’s different this time is that the SSPX is led by Fr. Pagliarani — a priest who, as I noted in my earlier article, has never served as a priest in full communion with the Catholic Church. Pagliarani was elected superior in 2018 by the “hardliner” faction of the SSPX, unseating the “moderate” Bishop Fellay after two 12-year terms. Unlike Fellay’s faction (which had sought reconciliation with Rome with the canonical status of a personal prelature — albeit on their terms), Pagliarani is seen as representing priests of the SSPX who are less favorable to the idea of reconciliation with the Apostolic See.

Unlike Bishop Fellay, who suggested that the Second Vatican Council could be read “in a manner coherent with the truths previously taught by the Magisterium of the Church,” the hardline faction explicitly rejects much of the Council. In a 2018 interview, Pagliarani said flatly that “the Pope should declare the decree on religious liberty erroneous and correct it accordingly,” insisting the Church must “return to the pure doctrine” that preceded Vatican II. In public statements, the SSPX has asked Catholics to pray that “Catholic Tradition regain all its rights in the Church,” while an SSPX district publication urged prayer “for the conversion of Rome and especially for the Pope — language that makes clear what they believe must change before any lasting settlement is possible.

In a Facebook post that is well worth reading, Thaddeus Noel G. Laput captured the ecclesiological absurdity of the SSPX’s position. The SSPX, he argued, has “functionally adopted the Protestant principle of private judgment while claiming Catholic fidelity.” He points out the contradiction that the SSPX insists upon extra ecclesiam nulla salus (no salvation outside the Church) while treating the looming threat of excommunication as a technicality. Laput drew a parallel with the Old Catholic schism after Vatican I: a group that initially insisted it was the true defender of tradition eventually fragmented and drifted into theological incoherence. “Separated from Rome,” he wrote, “claims to preserve tradition become self-referential and ultimately collapse.” The SSPX already follows this script — their own logic has spawned sedevacantist splinter groups who simply take SSPX premises to their natural conclusion.

Even if the SSPX surprises everyone and agrees to suspend the consecrations — what then? The proposed dialogue would address the interpretation of Vatican II — but the SSPX doesn’t merely have “questions” about the Council. They reject the teachings of Vatican II, including Nostra Aetate and Dignitatis Humanae. They reject the reformed liturgy and consider it harmful to souls. In practice, they reject the binding authority of every pope since Paul VI on the matters touching the Council. Having spent eight years defending and debating these principles with Catholics in good standing, it is very hard to imagine that discussions with the SSPX over different degrees of magisterial authority will compel them to submit to the pope.

Beyond the Theology

But as important as the SSPX’s doctrinal errors are, their problems go far beyond liturgical disagreements or theological quibbles about the Council.

First, there is the antisemitism. In a comprehensive essay published the same day as the Fernández-Pagliarani meeting, Msgr. Arthur Holquin, retired rector of Mission Basilica San Juan Capistrano, zeroed in on what he called the question “too rarely posed with the seriousness it demands”: whether the Church truly wants to reconcile with a movement that has never repudiated its deep-rooted hostility toward the Jewish people. The SSPX’s rejection of Nostra Aetate is not, Holquin argues, an incidental theological quibble — it reopens the wound the Council Fathers labored to close, the centuries-long persecution of the Jewish people rooted in a belief in collective Jewish guilt for the death of Christ.

The liturgical dimension is particularly telling. While the SSPX officially claims to follow the 1962 Missal — from which John XXIII had already removed the word perfidis (“faithless,” “perfidious”) in 1959 — Holquin documents that the Society’s own official liturgical directives for Good Friday explicitly retain the older, pre-1959 text: Oremus et pro perfidis Judaeis. Their stated reason is that John XXIII’s removal was made “for dubious reasons which could question certain aspects of the Faith.” In other words, even the modest reform of a sainted Pope who worked to save thousands of Jewish lives during the Holocaust is too much for the SSPX to accept. As Holquin writes: “A movement that rejects Nostra Aetate does not merely have a liturgical preference or a canonical irregularity. It carries forward a theology that made Christian Europe complicit in Jewish suffering for a millennium.”

It is not just a problem with isolated individuals. The ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center have documented extensive antisemitic content in SSPX publications and sermons. Bishop Williamson denied the Holocaust on camera. Former Superior General Fellay called Jews “enemies of the Church.” The SSPX in France long maintained ties with Civitas, a far-right group dissolved by the French government in 2023 for antisemitism. Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, in his authorized biography of SSPX founder Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, records that Lefebvre eulogized Marshal Pétain at his tomb in 1987, declaring: “You saved France twice, and you not only saved it but you rebuilt it spiritually and morally by making it rediscover its deepest traditions of faith, work, and love of family…. In this you showed so much exceptional heroism and virtue that you should have been given the title of Father of the Country.” When the Williamson scandal broke in early 2009, the SSPX quietly scrubbed its US and Canadian websites of several articles articulating positions about Jews — most notably a 1997 piece from The Angelus called “The Mystery of the Jewish People in History,” which Holquin cites and the ADL described as promoting medieval antisemitic tropes including deicide theology, conspiracy theories about Jewish financial domination, and a defense of Jewish ghettos. The SSPX never repudiated the content or explained the removal. They simply made it harder to find.

The ADL, which had archived the material before it disappeared, quoted it at length in a 2009 report — and concluded that the purge appeared to be a cosmetic response to outside pressure, not a sign of any genuine theological reckoning. The removal was reported by Fr. James Martin, S.J. at America Magazine on February 5, 2009. Rabbi Eric Greenberg of the ADL has since stated that any rehabilitation of the SSPX should require the Society to “publicly reject their decades of hatred” and, as an expression of their affirmation of Nostra Aetate, “remove all anti-Semitic rhetoric from both their online and their print publications.” As Holquin concludes, Williamson’s Holocaust denial “was not an aberration. It was the metastasis of a disease present in the Society’s theological DNA.”

The Abuse

There is the abuse. In 2024, Fr. Arnaud Rostand, the SSPX’s former US District Superior, was sentenced to 12 months in a French prison after admitting to molesting seven boys across France, Spain, and Switzerland over a 15-year period. In court, Rostand testified that he had informed his SSPX superiors about his attraction to children by letter in 1998 — and again in 2000, 2006, and 2013. Despite those disclosures, he was placed in charge of a school in Paris, then promoted to lead the Canadian and US districts. The SSPX claimed his superiors never covered anything up. A 2017 Swedish investigation documented additional cases of SSPX clerics molesting at least a dozen young people across several countries, with evidence kept secret and priests left in ministry. In Kansas, a four-year Kansas Bureau of Investigation inquiry into abuse across the state’s Catholic dioceses and the SSPX resulted in 30 cases referred to county prosecutors. Also, as we have noted at WPI, the SSPX has been known to assign priests who have left or been removed from active ministry in the institutional Church to serve in their chapels. For example, three out-of-active-ministry priests who were incardinated in the Diocese of Scranton (one of whom was credibly accused of sexual abuse) were discovered to be ministering illicitly to the breakaway Carmelite nuns in Arlington, Texas, in 2024. Such priests, referred to as “friends of the SSPX” do not formally belong to the society, but serve SSPX congregations. Often, these priests operate in secret, keeping their names and whereabouts off the internet and away from the public record. It was only due to the media attention given to the Arlington Carmelites that the three Scranton priests were exposed. And they may still be operating illicitly as priests today. The SSPX is not exactly transparent about such things.

If the leaders of the Catholic Church care about safeguarding, they need to weigh the risks of integrating a group that does not properly vet priests and does not seem to take child protection all that seriously.

And then there is the stunning fact that the SSPX has never admitted wrongdoing — not for their disobedience to the pope, not for the antisemitism, not for the abuse, not even for sheltering Paul Touvier — a French Nazi-collaborating war criminal convicted of crimes against humanity — who was found hiding in an SSPX priory in Nice in 1989. Every scandal is met with deflection or the claim that the real problem lies with the Church itself. When Williamson’s Holocaust denial became international news, the SSPX blamed “progressivists and the media.” When abuse allegations surfaced, silence. This is not the behavior of an organization genuinely seeking communion with the Catholic Church.

If you want to understand the SSPX, don’t be taken in by the aesthetics — the chapel veils, the big families, the fiddleback chasubles, or the Latin and incense. Some conservative Catholics treat traditionalism like Amish tourism — a picturesque and quaint group to be admired from the outside for their devotion and piety. Listen to the survivors instead. Talk to people who have left the group and describe a reality far darker than that surface suggests. When we consider the cultishness, the abuse cover-ups, and the antisemitism, what does this group have that is worth preserving?

What Leo Might Do

Some commentators have suggested that Pope Leo XIV is more open to dialogue than his predecessor and believe he might have a better chance of reconciling with the SSPX. Perhaps. But it should be noted that unlike Pope Francis, Leo has not agreed to meet with SSPX leaders. Still, he approved the Fernández/Pagliarani meeting, and his willingness to facilitate engagement is worth noting. But Thavis raised another possibility on the podcast that I find compelling: what if Leo simply chooses not to play this out in public the way John Paul II did, with warnings and counter-warnings that build the sense of crisis?

Leo could simply let the SSPX know the consequences and move on. The problem has never been a lack of Vatican outreach. The problem is that the SSPX has built its entire identity on the rejection of Church authority. The irony is that they like the idea of an authoritarian pope — the society is named after St. Pius X, remember. They just want such a pope to lay down the law and teach the things they want him to teach. It is a fantasy.

So could this have turned out any other way? Maybe, decades ago, before Lefebvre consecrated those bishops. Maybe before an entire generation grew up knowing nothing other than separation from Rome. But today? I don’t see how. And frankly, the SSPX has so much corruption and baggage that many changes will be necessary before they can be grafted onto the wider Church.

A Different Kind of Outreach

None of this means that individual Catholics in SSPX pews are beyond reach. Laura Vander Vos, who co-founded the Trad Recovery apostolate in 2023, had already been doing the groundwork for years through her MrsHappyCatholic YouTube channel — interviewing former SSPX members and other ex-traditionalists about their experiences and their journeys back into full communion with the Church. Her inspiration came partly from watching her own brother-in-law’s journey out of the SSPX: the contrast between his growing peace and joy and the bitterness she saw hardening in others still immersed in that world became a catalyst for her work. Trad Recovery now provides support, community, and resources for former traditionalists navigating religious trauma and the often-disorienting experience of re-entering ordinary Catholic parish life.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Laura about her work about two years ago, and what struck me most was her genuine warmth and her deep care for the people she serves — many of whom have lost their entire community by walking away. That kind of human kindness, extended one person at a time, may ultimately do more to reach people trapped in the SSPX world than any amount of canonical negotiation ever could.

The ball is in the SSPX’s court. Pagliarani will take Fernández’s proposal back to his council. I hope I’m wrong about what happens next. But this organization has spent more than half a century telling the Catholic Church that it knows better than the pope. I don’t think one meeting — however cordial and sincere — changes that.