When Easter Wednesday 2024 Mons. Vitus Huonder, bishop emeritus of Chur, passed away, the news that surprised part of the Catholic world was not so much his death—he was 81 and in failing health—as the place chosen for his burial: the crypt of the international seminary of St. Pius X in Écône, in the Swiss canton of Valais.
Not the bishops’ pantheon of Chur, where his predecessors rest, but the basement of the seminary founded by Mons. Marcel Lefebvre.
The decision, communicated in writing to the diocese already in 2022 and reiterated orally to Mons. Joseph Bonnemain and to the Superior General of the Fraternity, Fr. Davide Pagliarani, a few days before his death, had an explanation that Huonder himself formulated in sober terms: he wished to be buried beside the bishop who had suffered so much for the Church.
The posthumous gesture closed a personal itinerary that, viewed in perspective, traces a pattern worth examining. Because Huonder is not an isolated case.
There is a recurring phenomenon, observed with some unease in Roman corridors and with discreet satisfaction in traditionalist circles, according to which the prelates whom the Holy See has in recent years entrusted with entering into contact with the Priestly Fraternity of St. Pius X tend to return from that mission substantially changed. Not always to the same degree or with the same consequences, but with one constant: a growing closeness to the theses, the liturgical sensibility and, in some cases, the doctrinal positions that the Fraternity has maintained since 1970.
The 2015 mandate and Huonder’s trajectory
Huonder himself documented the genesis of his rapprochement.
In the interview given to the channel Certamen he explained that on 9 January 2015 he received, by letter from Cardinal Gerhard Müller, then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the task of initiating a dialogue with representatives of the Fraternity.
The objective, according to the letter itself, was twofold: on the one hand, to establish a friendly and human relationship; on the other, to address the doctrinal questions pending since the Second Vatican Council, in particular those relating to the liturgy, ecumenism, Church-State relations, interreligious dialogue and religious freedom.
Four years after that letter, Huonder presented his resignation as diocesan bishop of Chur upon reaching canonical age.
And instead of retiring to a residence for elderly priests of his diocese, he requested—and obtained with the explicit authorization of the Ecclesia Dei Commission—to move to the Institute Sancta Maria in Wangs, a house of the Fraternity.
There he spent his last five years celebrating the traditional Mass daily, studying the work of Lefebvre and preaching in a tone increasingly removed from the diplomatic prudence usual among emeritus bishops.
He came to speak in terms worth quoting: he said that the deliberate abolition of the traditional rite after Vatican II was “an injustice, an abuse of power,” and described the provisions of Traditionis custodes as “a hunt for the faithful.”
In his celebrated appeal to the Pontiff he asked: “Why do you take the bread from the children? What prompts you to let them starve?”
And he concluded his testimony with a formal request: “I ask for justice for the Priestly Fraternity of St. Pius X. The Church should apologize to this Fraternity, as it has done in other cases.”
The Schneider case
The best-known precedent of the phenomenon is that of Mons. Athanasius Schneider, auxiliary bishop of the archdiocese of St. Mary in Astana.
In 2015 he was appointed by the Ecclesia Dei Commission to join an apostolic visitation to the seminaries of the Fraternity, in particular that of La Reja in Argentina. Schneider, already known at the time for his traditional liturgical sensibility, returned from those visits having become one of the most respectful and understanding interlocutors of the Fraternity within the episcopate in full communion.
What followed is public.
Schneider has published, in collaboration with Angelico Press and in interviews with publications such as The Remnant, increasingly nuanced assessments of the 1988 episcopal consecrations, has defended without ambiguity the right of the faithful to the traditional liturgy, has openly questioned the conciliar formulation on religious freedom and has criticized Traditionis custodes in terms that, except for canonical membership, are hardly distinguishable from the arguments of the General House in Menzingen.
Schneider remains a bishop in full communion with Rome; yet his doctrinal agenda coincides essentially with that of those he was sent to examine.
Other cases
The phenomenon admits nuances and should not be overstated.
Not all prelates who have dealt with the Fraternity have ended up in Écône or Wangs.
Cardinal Müller himself, who signed the 2015 letter, maintains doctrinally positions close to the traditional sensibility but preserves a clear institutional distance from the Fraternity.
Mons. Guido Pozzo, former secretary of Ecclesia Dei and protagonist of the negotiations in the second half of Benedict XVI’s pontificate and the first years of Francis’s, repeatedly defended the possibility of a personal prelature for the Fraternity and publicly acknowledged its “positive work in the Church,” although without reaching the pronouncements of Huonder.
At the opposite extreme, the apostolic visitors of the first period, the years immediately following 1988, did not display this pattern.
The difference seems to have arisen from the systematic contacts begun under Benedict XVI and, above all, from the doctrinal conversations of 2009-2011 between the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Fraternity.
An explanatory hypothesis
What does the Fraternity possess that produces this effect on some of its institutional interlocutors?
The simplest hypothesis, formulated by Huonder himself in his testimony, is that direct contact with the institution and with the writings of its founder disproves the media image that has been constructed of it.
“These contacts allowed me to know the Fraternity from within and not according to the image given by the media,” he said.
The second part of the explanation has to do with doctrinal content: whoever approaches with a minimum of intellectual honesty the liturgical question, the critique of post-conciliar ecumenism or the analysis of religious freedom as formulated in Dignitatis humanae, encounters arguments that are not easily refutable from the classical theology that the Catholic bishops themselves studied in the seminary.
To this is added a factor that is less doctrinal and more existential.
The bishops sent to the dialogue discover, not without surprise, a disciplined priestly life, a carefully celebrated liturgy, full seminaries and a sacramental practice that contrasts with the reality of many dioceses.
The argument of the fruits, which Lefebvre frequently invoked, operates powerfully on whoever verifies it with his own eyes.
The fear of a charism
Some have suggested, not without foundation, that the real reason why the present pontificate has hardened its policy regarding the traditional liturgy and, by extension, regarding the Fraternity, is not so much doctrinal as prudential: the fear that a charism that demonstrates attractive capacity—vocations, families, conversions, sacramental fidelity—may end up proving uncomfortable precisely because of its efficacy.
The Huonder-Schneider pattern, together with the similar drift of not a few diocesan priests who approach the traditional rite, reinforces that reading.
Huonder’s burial in Écône is, in this sense, a symbolic datum that exceeds the personal biography of the bishop emeritus of Chur.
It closes a trajectory and opens a question: if those who are sent to correct end up corrected, if those who come to persuade end up persuaded, perhaps the problem does not lie in those sent, but in what they discover upon arrival.