SSPX bishops broke the church to save it.
Two weeks ago, four men were consecrated as bishops without the consent of Pope Leo XIV — the act the Vatican names as one of the faith’s gravest crimes. The Society of St. Pius X, which has positioned itself for decades as the last guardian of Catholic tradition, has done the one thing tradition names as a rupture: broken communion with Rome. The Holy See has declared the Society in schism. Its priests and bishops are excommunicated. Catholics are instructed to stop attending SSPX services. The Vatican had warned them. They consecrated anyway.
Inside the churches, the old Latin Mass is still being celebrated. Baptisms are being performed. Camps and pilgrimages are moving forward. Some faithful say they have no intention of leaving. That is what should trouble every Catholic — not because the faithful are wrong to love what they love, but because the institutional church helped build the conditions for this. When Pope Francis restricted the Latin Mass that had formed these communities, many of the faithful heard the church telling them that the worship which shaped their souls was no longer welcome. That wound is real. We who are part of the institutional church must own it before naming what the SSPX has done.
But owning our part does not excuse theirs. The unauthorized consecration of bishops is an act the church has named schism — the refusal of communion with the Pope and the body subject to him. When the SSPX leadership laid hands on four men and sent them into a ministry Rome did not authorize, they did not preserve Catholic tradition. They tore it. Ezekiel warned of shepherds who scatter the flock while claiming to tend it: “You have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the strayed, you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them.” The SSPX bishops say they are guarding tradition. They have scattered the sheep.
Jesus prayed “that they may all be one” — not that they may all worship in the same rite, not that they may all agree on the liturgical calendar, but that they may be one. The schism wounds not only those who leave but those who remain: the SSPX faithful who now must choose between the Mass they love and the communion Christ prayed for.
Paul wrote to the Corinthians that if one member suffers, all suffer together. The bishops who consecrated without consent have forced that suffering on the entire body — on the SSPX faithful who did not ask for a schism, on the wider church that must now reckon with a fracture it helped provoke, and on Pope Leo XIV, who has especially reached out to the conservative and traditionalist wing of the church only to watch it break further away.
To the SSPX faithful weighing your ties to Rome: the Mass you love is real. Its silences teach what no synod document can replace. The institutional church failed you, and I say that as someone inside the institution that failed you, not as your accuser. But the four men your bishops consecrated cannot bring you what Rome can — the communion that is the church’s oldest name for itself.
The bishops who chose rupture chose the easier path. Óscar Romero was a cautious, conservative man who became the most prophetic voice the Catholic Church produced in the twentieth century — and he never broke communion. He wrote letters to the Vatican, he preached cese la represión from his cathedral, and when Rome was slow to listen he pressed harder from inside — he did not consecrate bishops without Rome or build a church apart. He challenged Rome’s silence from inside Rome’s house. The door was open then. Pope Leo XIV has reached out to the very communities the SSPX claims to speak for — the faithful who wanted the old Mass kept alive, not a breakaway church built in its name. That door is open now. Walk through it.