On a July morning in Adams County, the Latin Mass is being said in a brick building that does not answer to Rome, and the faithful are kneeling, and the priest behind the altar will be dead to the Church the moment he walks out the door. According to Holly Meyer’s reporting for the Associated Press, the Vatican has declared the Society of St. Pius X in schism. Its bishops and priests are excommunicated. The sacraments they administer are, some of them, declared invalid. And in the pews, life continues — baptisms, pilgrimages, the old liturgy, the same world as last week.
I have written before about what it costs a community when the thing that held it together breaks. I know a little about this parish’s tradition, and I know a little about the man in Rome who now presides over it. Pope Leo XIV — the American pope, the unity pope, the pope who extended his hand to the traditionalists Francis had let drift — has now done what no modern pontiff wanted to do, and he had no choice. An unauthorized consecration of bishops without the Holy See’s consent is not a protest; it is a counter-church. The Church has always understood this. You cannot ordain a bishop without the Bishop of Rome and pretend you are still in communion with him. That is not a rule. It is what the words mean.
The SSPX’s defenders will say they were forced to this pass. That the post-conciliar church abandoned the Mass of ages, that the reforms gutted the faith, that the olive branch was never sincere, that Pope Leo’s outreach was a trap. I have some sympathy for the grief underneath that argument. The liturgical reform of the 1960s was handled badly — imposed from above, sometimes brutally, on people for whom the old rite was not a preference but the faith itself. I have watched parishes split over a communion rail and a Latin canon. The wound is real.
But a wound is not a warrant to set up a separate altar and call it fidelity.
What the SSPX has done is the sedevacantism of everyday life: to treat the visible Church as so corrupted that one must leave it in order to be the Church. It is the same logic that has hollowed every Protestant denomination that ever split over a single point of doctrine — each schism justified by the claim that we are the faithful remnant, and everyone else has fallen away. The claim is always true enough to feel true, and never true enough to justify the rupture. Kierkegaard understood this. He spent his life attacking the Danish State Church, calling Christendom a fraud, insisting that faith was an inward terror and not a social performance. But Kierkegaard never started his own church. He knew that the moment you do, you become the institution you fled.
Pope Leo reached out to the traditionalists who had felt alienated under his predecessor, according to the AP. He did this at considerable cost to his standing with the church’s progressive wing, which never wanted the old rite at all. And the SSPX’s answer was to present Rome with a fait accompli, consecrating four bishops without papal authorization. This is not the behavior of a reform movement. It is the behavior of a sect that has already decided the Church is irredeemable and is simply waiting for the rest of us to admit it.
The tragedy is that the people in the pews are not the ones who made this decision. They came for the Latin Mass and the baptism and the summer camp. They came because the parish down the road had a guitar Mass and a felt banner and a homily about inclusion. They came because the faith they inherited felt thin and they wanted the thicker version — the incense and the chant and the old prayers that their grandparents’ grandparents had said. I understand that. I am a Catholic in a county where the small frame parish my ancestors built was closed and consolidated, and I go to Mass in a building that was once a different denomination, and I do not always recognize what I find there. The pull toward the old is the pull toward the real — toward a faith that costs something, that is not just another lifestyle choice.
But the real costs are the ones paid in communion, not in separation. The SSPX has now done the one thing that makes the whole traditionalist argument collapse. They have said, in effect, that the institutional Church is so corrupt that one cannot receive valid sacraments from it. That is not a negotiating position. That is a declaration of war. And the faithful in the pews — the ones who just wanted the old Mass — are now caught in the middle, having to choose between the Eucharist they love and the Church that gives it.
They could stay where they are and receive sacraments whose validity is now in dispute. Or they could walk into a diocesan parish where the liturgy is not the one they were raised with, and try to start over. That is not a free choice. It is a tragedy inflicted on them by men in cassocks who decided that their conception of the Church mattered more than the Church herself.
There is a counter-model here, and it is not a new schism. It is the work of renewal from within — the kind Wendell Berry writes about in The Work of Local Culture, the kind that takes the broken thing and repairs it by hand rather than abandoning it for a perfect one. The Church has survived Arianism, the Avignon papacy, Renaissance popes who kept mistresses, the Reformation, and the sexual-abuse crisis that nearly broke it entirely. It will survive the SSPX. The question is whether the people who love the old Mass will survive their own leadership’s decision to set up a separate table.
In my county, the Catholic parish that was once German and Bohemian and Polish is now mostly seasonal and mostly elderly. The young people drive to the Dells or to Madison, and they do not come back. The faith is being handed on, but thinly. What I would not give for a church that was full of young families, even if the hymns were from the 1970s. What I would not give for a priest who was there, even if he said the Mass face-forward in English. We are not in a position to divide ourselves further over the way the canon is prayed. We are in a position to hold the line together.
The SSPX has chosen division. The faithful in the pews — the ones who just wanted to kneel and receive what their grandparents received — have been left to make the choice their bishops should have spared them. I hope they come back. The Church is not a resort you leave when the management changes. It is a family. And you do not get a different one.