The French-born Tissier de Mallerais “fell asleep in the Lord on 8 October 2024” at the group’s main seminary in Écône in southwestern Switzerland, the SSPX announced.
Considered the theologian among the four bishops consecrated by the SSPX’s founder Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, Tissier de Mallerais was at various times the Ecône rector, the group’s secretary general and a biographer of Lefebvre.
Ordained by Lefebvre without Vatican consent, the four bishops were excommunicated latae sententiae until Pope Benedict XVI gave them a pardon in 2009.
The British-born Bishop Richard Williamson was dismissed from the SSPX in 2012, leaving the group with only two bishops – Bernard Fellay of Switzerland and Alfonso de Galarreta of Argentina – to ordain new priests after Tissier de Mallerais’ death.
It already faced questions over the need for new bishops to ordain its clergy. The SSPX leader in France, Fr Benoît de Jorna, has predicted at least one episcopal ordination in the near future, which would rescind the 2009 pardon and incur automatic excommunication for both parties.
Founded in 1970, the SSPX rejects the Second Vatican Council and uses only pre-conciliar texts and liturgies. From roughly 200 priests in 1988, the membership has grown to more than 700 priests with an estimated 600,000 people worldwide attending its Masses in the old rite.
“We are clearly feeling a growth in rural France linked to the pandemic,” an SSPX priest recently told La Croix. “Particularly because we were the only ones to keep our chapels open at all costs.”
SSPX churches in Paris have attracted some Catholics who oppose Traditionis custodes – the motu proprio restricting old rite liturgies – and the Synod on Synodality. “We are credited with a certain coherence and this leads to a small positive dynamic,” another of its priests said.
However, most of the group’s growth comes from within its own ranks, through large traditionalist families (which produce vocations) and SSPX schools providing complete primary and secondary education.
Although Pope Francis has declared SSPX confessions and marriages to be “valid and licit” sacraments, the group has limited contact with either Rome or local Catholic dioceses. Its superior general since 2018, the Italian Fr Davide Pagliarani, has taken a harder line against Pope Francis than his predecessor Bishop Fellay.
Anticipating an episcopal ordination, Fr Jorna predicted “a media outburst against the ‘fundamentalists’, the ‘rebels’, the ‘schismatics’, the ‘disobedient’ and so on” in response to its announcement.
But he insisted that “the argument of necessity to preserve doctrine and tradition, which was invoked by Archbishop Lefebvre, will always remain the same”.