VATICAN CITY — One day ahead of a planned ceremony that church leadership calls a fundamental break from Catholic teaching, Pope Leo XIV has issued an urgent, heartfelt appeal to the leadership of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), a breakaway traditionalist Catholic group, to abandon their plan to consecrate four new bishops without Vatican approval. In a public letter addressed to SSPX Superior General Rev. Davide Pagliarani, the pope labeled the proposed act as schismatic and a “sin of extreme gravity.”
“I plead with you and ask you with all my heart: please turn back,” Leo wrote in the missive, released by the Vatican a day before the scheduled consecration ceremony at the SSPX’s seminary in Econe, Switzerland. Under longstanding Catholic canon law, any episcopal consecration carried out without explicit papal approval automatically incurs a sentence of excommunication for all parties involved: the four bishop nominees and the prelate who will lead the ceremony. The Vatican has already confirmed that the same penalty imposed during the group’s 1988 schism will apply to this new act if it proceeds.
The SSPX has stood in opposition to the Catholic Church since its founding, formed to push back against the sweeping modernizing reforms of the 1960s Second Vatican Council. The landmark council reshaped core tenets of Catholic life, updating the church’s approach to interfaith relations, expanding the role of lay worshippers in parish life, and allowing the celebration of Mass in local vernacular languages instead of the traditional Latin that had been standard for centuries.
The original rift between the SSPX and the Holy See dates back to 1988, when group founder Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre consecrated four bishops without formal papal consent — an act classified as a grave canonical offense in church law. The Vatican moved immediately to excommunicate Lefebvre and all four new bishops, and the SSPX has remained without official legal status within the global Catholic Church to this day. Even without that formal recognition, the group has expanded steadily over the past three and a half decades, according to the SSPX’s own published statistics. It now counts 2 active bishops, 751 priests, 264 seminarians, 145 religious brothers, 88 oblates, and 250 religious sisters across 50 countries, operating as a parallel ultra-traditional Catholic institution aligned with pre-Vatican II teachings that poses an ongoing challenge to papal authority.
In his letter, Pope Leo XIV reiterated the Vatican’s longstanding offer of open dialogue to reconcile the SSPX with the global church, arguing that moving forward with the consecrations would undermine the spiritual interests of the SSPX’s own followers. “I urge you to consider carefully the spiritual good of the faithful, because the schismatic act you are about to undertake would deprive them of the licit, and in some cases, even valid reception of the sacraments,” the pope wrote.
This report is based on original coverage from the Associated Press, which receives funding for religion reporting through a collaboration with The Conversation US, supported by the Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP retains full editorial responsibility for all its content.