At an open-air Mass in Écône, Switzerland, before a crowd of about 16,000 people, four priests became bishops last month.
The men professed their fidelity to tradition against “heretics, schismatics, and those who rebel against our Holy Father.”
They did so knowing full well that, in becoming bishops, they lacked something the Catholic Church deems essential: permission from the pope.
All four of these men are members of the Society of Saint Pius X, or SSPX, an arch-traditionalist group of clergy founded in 1970 by the French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.
For decades, SSPX has battled with the Vatican over the group’s fear that, as one theologian told me, “in reading the signs of the times, the Catholic Church is more beholden to the times than she is a light to the nations.”
Now tensions have reached a breaking point.
The Vatican warned SSPX before the Écône Mass that consecrating bishops without a papal mandate would be considered a “schismatic act,” a formal separation from the Catholic Church.
After the Mass, the Church issued a decree saying that the new bishops, plus the two who ordained them, incurred an automatic excommunication:
They can neither receive communion nor celebrate licit Masses nor officiate valid marriages and confessions.
The 700 or so SSPX priests worldwide will also fall into schism, and thereby be excommunicated, if they remain with the society.
Even lay churchgoers who “formally adhere” to the group may face the same sanction.