History is repeating itself. On July 1, 2026, the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) intends to consecrate new bishops in Écône, Switzerland, in defiance of Pope Leo XIV. This is the same place where SSPX founder Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre consecrated four bishops on June 30, 1988, in defiance of Pope St. John Paul II’s explicit admonitions. The Code of Canon Law could not be plainer about what such an act is. Canon 1013 reads: “No Bishop is permitted to consecrate anyone as Bishop, unless it is first established that a pontifical mandate has been issued.” Canon 1387 attaches the penalty: “Both the Bishop who, without a pontifical mandate, consecrates a person a Bishop, and the one who receives the consecration from him, incur a latae sententiae excommunication reserved to the Apostolic See.” The penalty is automatic.

In his apostolic letter responding to the 1988 consecrations, Ecclesia Dei, John Paul II described Lefebvre’s illicit consecrations as an act “of disobedience to the Roman Pontiff in a very grave matter and of supreme importance for the unity of the church” (emphasis in original). He stated that it was a “schismatic act” and that it incurred automatic excommunication for Lefebvre, as well as the four priests he consecrated — Bernard Fellay, Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, Richard Williamson, and Alfonso de Galarreta. The official decree of excommunication (issued on July 1 of that year) declared that Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer, the bishop emeritus of Campos, Brazil, was also excommunicated for participating as co-consecrator.

Following a February 12 meeting with current SSPX Superior General Davide Pagliarani, Cardinal Victor Fernandez — the Vatican’s Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) — proposed a dialogue between the DDF and SSPX, in order to clarify “the minimum requirements for full communion with the Catholic Church, and consequently to outline a canonical statute for the Fraternity, along with other aspects requiring further study.” The cardinal added, “In the event of a positive response, the steps, stages, and procedures to be followed will be established by mutual agreement.”

In his letter, Fernandez set one condition before the dialogue could take place: “that the Fraternity suspend the announced episcopal ordinations.” He also spelled out the consequence of proceeding with the consecrations: “the ordination of bishops without the mandate of the Supreme Pontiff, who possesses ordinary, supreme, universal, immediate, and direct power (cf. CIC, can. 331; Dogmatic Constitution Pastor aeternus, chs. I and III), would constitute a decisive rupture of ecclesial communion (schism), with serious consequences for the Fraternity as a whole.”

Father Pagliarani, in a February 19 response to Fernandez cosigned by the two living SSPX bishops and two priests with leadership roles in the group — Franz Schmidberger and Christian Bouchacourt — announced his decision to reject the offer of dialogue and to proceed with the consecrations, writing, “I cannot accept the perspective and objectives in the name of which the Dicastery offers to resume dialogue in the present situation, nor indeed the postponement of the date of 1 July.”

Pagliarani’s letter, rich with effusive language, is filled with pious-seeming statements about how the SSPX desires “only to be allowed to continue to do this same good for the souls to whom it administers the holy Sacraments.” He claimed that the Society asks to ordain new bishops only on behalf of “these souls, for whom, as already promised to the Holy Father, it has no other intention than to make true children of the Roman Church.” In line with SSPX custom, the letter attempts to leverage prior acts of papal generosity towards them as evidence that their behavior is justified, saying, “over the years, the Sovereign Pontiffs have taken note of this existence and, through concrete and significant acts, have recognized the value of the good it can accomplish, despite its canonical situation.”

Such conciliatory flourishes and performative humility are a familiar part of the SSPX’s communications strategy, but they make up only a small part of a much more confrontational and hostile posture toward the institutional Church and other outsiders. Pagliarani’s rhetorical style follows a long precedent of ecclesiastical doublespeak that has marked the SSPX since its beginning. In one message, the group’s leaders will appeal to a shared love of the Catholic faith and a mutual devotion to the Church. In the next, they will launch harsh and unfiltered attacks against the pope, the bishops, and the Catholic faithful that would make the most ardent anti-Catholic Protestant blush.

The precedent for the SSPX’s two-headed approach goes all the way back to its founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. Lefebvre was known for his fiery invective against Church leadership and the Second Vatican Council. In his 1974 declaration, he rejected what he called “the Rome of neo-Modernist and neo-Protestant tendencies” and claimed that the postconciliar reforms were “contributing to the destruction of the Church, to the ruin of the priesthood, to the abolition of the Sacrifice of the Mass and of the sacraments, to the disappearance of religious life.” He described those reforms as “poisoned through and through,” saying that they “derive from heresy and end in heresy.” Over a decade later, in his 1985 Open Letter to Confused Catholics, Lefebvre’s views had grown even more extreme. In it, he wrote that Paul VI had “done more harm to the Church than the French Revolution,” that the Novus Ordo Missae had been “drawn up on Protestant lines,” and that “the rite of the new mass is a bastard rite, the sacraments are bastard sacraments.” Nor did he stop there. He called postconciliar priests “bastard priests,” warned that “the devil’s greatest victory is to have undertaken the destruction of the Church without making any martyrs,” and declared that “to dialogue with error is to put God and the devil on the same footing.”

He also used this “bastard” language in a 1976 sermon. On this occasion, he even called into doubt the validity of the post-Vatican II sacraments, saying, “the sacraments are bastard sacraments—we no longer know if they are sacraments which give grace or which do not give grace. We no longer know if this Mass gives the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ or if it does not give them.”

Lefebvre would go on to make grave accusations against the pope and the Church itself. In his response to his 1976 suspension a divinis, he accused the institutional Church of schism, saying, “This conciliar Church is a schismatic Church because it breaks with the Catholic Church of all time.”[1] In a 1976 interview he gave the French newspaper Le Figaro (which was reproduced in 1996 by the SSPX-aligned journal Le Sel de la Terre), he toyed with sedevacantism, casting doubt on the legitimacy of Paul VI’s papacy, saying, “If it appears certain to us that the faith taught by the Church for twenty centuries cannot contain error, we have much less absolute certitude that the pope is truly pope.” In a 1987 letter “to future bishops,” Lefebvre went even further, condemning “The See of Peter and the posts of authority in Rome being occupied by anti-Christs.”

And we certainly should not ignore what Lefebvre wrote about three popes in his final book, Spiritual Journey, published in 1990 — by which point his rhetoric had taken on an increasingly paranoid and conspiratorial cast: “We must not be afraid to affirm that the current Roman authorities, since John XXIII and Paul VI, have made themselves active collaborators of international Jewish Freemasonry and of world socialism. John Paul II is above all a communist-loving politician at the service of a world communism retaining a hint of religion.”

And yet, when Lefebvre stood before Pope Paul VI at Castel Gandolfo on September 11, 1976, the bomb-thrower suddenly became a delicate flower. According to the transcript of their meeting (published in La Stampa in 2018), Paul VI clearly saw through Lefebvre’s rhetorical games. He told him, “Unfortunately, the position you have taken is that of an antipope.” Lefebvre protested, “Perhaps there was something inappropriate in my words, in my writings; but I never wished to strike at your person — I never had any such intention.” Paul VI did not accept the dodge. “That is not true,” he replied. “You have been told and written to many times that you were in error, and why you were in error. You never wished to listen.” The pope then laid it out plainly: “You said it and you wrote it. That I am a modernist Pope. That, by applying an Ecumenical Council, I have betrayed the Church. You do understand that, if this is so, I would have to resign — and invite you to take my place leading the Church.”

Lefebvre invoked the SSPX’s favorite talking point: “There is a crisis in the Church.” Paul VI acknowledged a crisis, but pointed out Lefebvre’s responsibility for making it worse: “You have helped to deepen it, with your solemn disobedience, with your open defiance of the Pope.” When Lefebvre protested that he was not being judged as he should be, Paul VI answered, “Canon Law judges you.” He asked Lefebvre, “Have you become aware of the scandal and of the harm you have done to the Church?”

Later in the meeting, Lefebvre insisted, “I would like to collaborate in the building up of the Church.” The pope, pointing out a contradiction that is just as relevant today, shot back: “It is certainly not in this way that you contribute to the building up of the Church. Are you aware of what you are doing? Are you aware that you are going directly against the Church, the Pope, the Ecumenical Council? How can you arrogate to yourself the right to judge a Council?”

Pope Paul VI exposed Lefebvre’s game. Yet the SSPX continues to play it. In most settings — at Mass, in seminary, in private conversations, in writing, in the media — SSPX leaders won’t hesitate to make outrageously offensive and vitriolic accusations against the pope, Vatican II, the Church, and the faithful. Whenever they try to plead the righteousness of their cause to outsiders, including Church officials, however, they retreat into patronizing piety, false humility, and effusive platitudes. They will appeal to things like a shared desire “to collaborate in the building up of the Church.” Of course, for the SSPX, “building up the Church” means “turning the entire Church into the SSPX.” They have been doing this for five decades, so apparently they think this approach will help them make a good impression. No one with any common sense is buying it.

Lefebvre’s letters to popes over the years are a clinic in this saccharine duplicity. For example, he opens a May 1975 letter (while waiting for a decision on the canonical status of the SSPX) to Paul VI with the words, “Prostrate at the feet of Your Holiness, I assure you of my entire and filial submission.”

In September 1976 — following his meeting with Paul VI, Lefebvre wrote, “How I long to collaborate in that salutary work with Your Holiness and under your authority, so that the Church may recover her true countenance.” In his response, the pope noted Lefebvre’s conciliatory language and contrasted it with the archbishop’s rhetoric in other settings. He wrote to Lefebvre, “How must these few words to which your response is limited—and which in themselves are positive—be interpreted? You speak as if you have forgotten your scandalous words and gestures against ecclesial communion—words and gestures that you have never retracted! You do not manifest repentance, even for the cause of your suspension a divinis.”

In December of 1976, Lefebvre wrote back, saying that the pope’s letter was “like a sword going through me.” He insisted, “I am so desirous of being in full accord with and full submission to the Vicar of Christ and the Successor of Peter, as I think I have been, the whole of my life.”

Lefebvre’s tone towards the pope did not change following the death of Paul VI. In December 1978, he waxed poetically about the SSPX’s mission to Pope John Paul II (while simultaneously defending his illicit ordinations of priests): “It is plain to any impartial observer that our Work is a nursery of priests of the sort the Church has always desired and the true faithful want.” A year later, he made an overt attempt to butter up the pope, writing, “Through your discourses you have made evident your attachment to Our Lord Jesus Christ Who is the only solution to all problems, your fidelity to Catholic morality, and your wish to restore the priestly and religious life.”

In the final decades of his life, Lefebvre continued in this split-personality approach — claiming to defend the Church while going directly against the Church. He spoke in defense of papal authority while acting like a rival pope. That same contradiction is still the heart of the SSPX’s position today.

Although he employs less bombast than his predecessor, Davide Pagliarani embraces Lefebvre’s two-headed approach. When writing for Vatican officials, he appeals to values held by the institutional Catholic Church: tradition, the priesthood, the Mass, the crisis in the Church, and the salvation of souls. Unlike in the case of Lefebvre’s meeting with Paul VI, we don’t have a transcript of Pagliarani’s audience with Pope Francis. Even still, the summary in the SSPX press release about the meeting contains echoes of Lefebvre: “This meeting made it possible to show that the SSPX has no other goal than to serve the Church in the midst of the current crisis. Fr. Pagliarani had the opportunity to make it clear to the Pope that everything the Society does has only this service in mind.”

When he is not meeting with the pope, Pagliarani barely conceals his true intentions — to undercut Church authority and ultimately to impose the SSPX’s distorted understanding of “tradition” on the universal Church.

One of Pagliarani’s more egregious claims is that ordinary Catholic parishes cannot save souls. On February 5 of this year, he stated in an interview, “It is sad to acknowledge, but it is a fact that, in an ordinary parish, the faithful no longer find the means necessary to ensure their eternal salvation. This deprivation is what constitutes the state of necessity.” Two days later, addressing several hundred young Catholics at the Society’s Winter University outside Châteauroux, he said it again in nearly identical words. It clearly wasn’t a slip of the tongue — in January, prior to the announcement of the consecrations, Zenit reported that he also made this claim in Friedrichshafen, Germany, on December 17, 2025. Apparently, this is what Davide Pagliarani believes. According to his framing, if you are a Catholic in full communion with Pope Leo, your soul is in peril.

Additionally, there is no question that Pagliarani holds Archbishop Lefebvre in the highest regard. In a 2018 interview, he spoke extensively about what he called “the providential character of the Society.” In the interview, he canonized Lefebvre, explaining that the SSPX “is the result of the result of choices and decisions of a saint, guided only by a supernatural and ‘prophetic’ prudence, whose wisdom we appreciate even more as the years go by and as the crisis in the Church gets worse.”

It’s not just Pagliarani. Many SSPX leaders openly express contempt for the institutional Church. In the weeks since the announcement of the July 1 event, the Society’s senior leaders have openly and repeatedly made public statements arguing effectively that the consecrations are necessary because the mainstream Catholic Church does not truly hold the Catholic faith. Pagliarani’s predecessor, Bishop Bernard Fellay, has made this claim. So have Father Bernard de Lacoste — the rector of the Écône seminary — and numerous other SSPX clergy.

Bishop Fellay preached against the “postconciliar Church” in a sermon on April 19, arguing that the SSPX gives graces that the mainstream Church cannot give. Comparing the “new” Mass to the “old,” he told the congregation, “It’s really two tubes. One is full of holes. At the end of it, you get one, two drops. The other one you [get] a whole flow of graces.” Later in the sermon, he added, “They may still say the creed at Mass. That’s the outside. The inside is dead.”

Father Bernard de Lacoste, the rector of the Society’s seminary at Écône, preached at the seminary the same week. “For sixty years now,” he said, “those very men who have received from Christ the mission of confirming priests and the faithful in the faith have been using their authority to attack the faith and morals.” In the same sermon, Lacoste read out eleven current Catholic teachings (or his interpretation of them, anyway) that, in his account, must be refused “in order to remain Catholic.” Later in the sermon, Lacoste dramatically proclaimed: “We would rather die than be schismatics. We would rather die than live outside the Roman Church. We would rather die than become modernists. We would rather die than renounce the integral Catholic faith. We would rather die than replace the Mass of Saint Pius V with the Mass of Paul VI.”

The Society’s official podcast picks up on similar themes. On April 10, 2026, Father David Sherry told viewers that “the pope is teaching error and there’s no doubt anymore,” that “Peter is not doing his job,” and that “tragically, the pope and the bishops are actually not doing their job to save my soul and are positively trying to stop me.” Three weeks later, Father Daniel Loop compared Pope Leo XIV to a father who has “lost use of his supernatural reason as the head of the Church.” Loop pressed the analogy: a household with two parents, both drunk, the father grown violent, the older children obliged to defend the younger siblings from him. That is the picture an SSPX priest paints for SSPX laity — the Vicar of Christ as a drunken and violent father, and the Society as the older children stepping in to protect the family from him.

These seem to be commonly held beliefs in the SSPX: ordinary Catholic parishes cannot save souls, the bishops have spent sixty years attacking the faith, the Mass most Catholics attend each Sunday delivers (per Bishop Fellay’s analogy) one or two drops of grace where SSPX Masses overflow. They describe the pope as a mentally impaired abusive father who is actively trying to obstruct the salvation of the faithful. They describe the entire Church (minus the tiny SSPX movement) as its enemy — its parishes, its bishops, its liturgy, and its supreme pastor — and they say it freely and openly, apparently not caring who hears them. The ordinary, faithful Catholic in the pew on Sunday is not seen as a brother or sister in Christ struggling through life’s challenges, but a heretic on the road to perdition.

A great irony, as I have pointed out, is that Pagliarani is not speaking from experience. He entered the SSPX seminary as a teenager in the late 1980s. He has spent his entire adult life outside the institutional Church that he condemns, but he is very confident that it has nothing to offer. What does he really know about our priests and our parishes? He has built a career proclaiming that ordinary Catholics are mired in heresy and have fallen into apostasy (not to mention infiltrated by communists, Jews, and Freemasons), presumably because that is what he was taught by men like Lefebvre and Fellay.

For five decades, the SSPX has spoken with two voices. They use one voice in communications aimed at their own people — sermons, seminary classrooms, podcasts, and interviews. In this voice, the Society describes the institutional Catholic Church (the one most Catholics belong to) as the enemy of the faith, with parishes incapable of saving souls, wicked bishops engaged in a sixty-year campaign to destroy the faith, and the equivalent of a drunken and violent father leading it. And the SSPX sees itself as the solution to this “crisis.”

In their other voice (found in letters to Rome and in defenses of their position directed to non-members), the SSPX speaks about their submission and obedience to the pope, of their mission to save souls, and their desire to worship in the same way their great-grandparents did.

These contradictory voices have coexisted in the SSPX since the beginning. It doesn’t seem to bother them.

There are encouraging signs that Pope Leo has read the situation for what it is. He has not, as of this writing, responded publicly to the SSPX, and he has not agreed to meet with Pagliarani. Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict, and Francis each met with the SSPX superior on various occasions, and none of these meetings moved the situation forward. Agreements were nearly reached in 1988 and 2012, but fell through for the same reason: the SSPX refused to grant religious submission of intellect and will to the teachings of the Second Vatican Council and the subsequent popes. They haven’t moved an inch on this point.

If the consecrations proceed on July 1, the canonical situation will resolve itself in the same way it resolved in 1988. Latae sententiae excommunications will fall on the consecrators and the consecrated, and the Society will pass from a group in irregular communion with Rome into formal schism. There have been unconfirmed rumors that the priests of the Society will be excommunicated as well. If schism is formally declared, it is difficult to foresee why Pope Leo would continue granting faculties to the SSPX for marriage and confession. If Leo revokes these faculties, that would mean the faithful would no longer be able to marry validly or receive valid absolution from SSPX priests.

Pope Leo XIV and the Holy See have told the SSPX what they need to do in order to avoid schism, and the conditions for returning to full communion. Sadly, the SSPX is poised once again to answer with an act of grave disobedience. For those of us who remain in our imperfect parishes with our ordinary, hardworking priests, these events aren’t an occasion for joy or despair. Perhaps all this will serve as a reminder that we need to stay with Peter, stay close to the sacraments in the Church he leads, and trust Christ’s promise that the gates of hell will not prevail.

[1] Translated from French: « Cette Eglise conciliaire est une Eglise schismatique parce qu’elle rompt avec l’Eglise catholique de toujours. »