What Happened
On the morning of July 1, 2026, four priests of the Society of St. Pius X were consecrated bishops at Écône, Switzerland — Marc Hanappier and Michel Poinsinet de Sivry of France, Michael Goldade of the United States, and Pascal Schreiber of Switzerland. None had papal approval; under the Roman Catholic Church’s own canon law, only the pope may authorize the naming of a bishop. The consecration is a legal reflex as much as a ceremony: the four newly consecrated bishops and the two bishops who consecrated them were automatically excommunicated the moment the rite was performed, six men in total.
The Vatican made it formal the next day. Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, issued a decree declaring the ordinations a schismatic act carrying automatic excommunication, calling it the strongest action taken against the Society since Lefebvre’s original 1988 consecrations. Pope Leo XIV, elected only months earlier, had personally appealed to SSPX leadership beforehand asking them not to proceed. They proceeded anyway, in front of a crowd estimated at roughly 15,000. Vatican commentators were careful to note what the dispute is actually about: not primarily the Latin Mass, which Rome now permits far more freely than it once did, but the Society’s continued rejection of the authority of the Second Vatican Council itself.
1970: How Lefebvre Got Here
Marcel Lefebvre was not a fringe figure before any of this began. A former missionary bishop and superior general of the Holy Ghost Fathers, he sat on the Second Vatican Council’s own preparatory committee in the early 1960s, appointed by Pope John XXIII. What followed was, in his own account, a bitter disappointment: the texts he had helped draft were set aside, and the council adopted more liberal alternatives in their place, especially on the liturgy, religious liberty, and the Church’s posture toward other religions.
He did not leave quietly. When French seminarians asked him for a more traditional formation than the post-council seminaries offered, he opened a house at Fribourg in 1969 and moved it the following year to Écône, a village in Switzerland’s Valais canton. The local bishop, François Charrière, approved it, and on November 1, 1970 the Priestly Society of St. Pius X was born with the Church’s own blessing — a detail traditionalists are right to point out, since it means the Society did not begin as a renegade body but became one.
The break came gradually and then all at once. By 1974 Lefebvre was writing that the council’s reforms were contributing to the destruction of the Church itself, and that a conscientious Catholic could not in good faith follow “the Rome of neo-Modernist and neo-Protestant tendency.” Rome withdrew its approval of the Society in 1975; Pope Paul VI suspended Lefebvre’s priestly faculties in 1976 after writing to him three times and sending trusted emissaries to Écône, all refused. Lefebvre kept ordaining priests anyway.
1988 and 2026: The Pattern Repeats
The final rupture came in 1988, when Lefebvre — convinced he needed bishops of his own to guarantee the Society’s survival after his death — consecrated four without Rome’s consent. John Paul II excommunicated him and the four new bishops immediately: the first schism the Roman church had suffered since 1870. In 2009 Benedict XVI lifted the excommunication of those four bishops in a gesture of reconciliation, though he was careful to clarify that the Society itself still held no canonical status and its ministers’ authority remained, in Rome’s eyes, illegitimate.
| 1988 | 2026 |
|---|---|
| Lefebvre consecrates 4 bishops without papal mandate | SSPX consecrates 4 more bishops without papal mandate |
| Lefebvre and the 4 bishops excommunicated — 5 total | 4 new bishops and 2 consecrating bishops excommunicated — 6 total |
| Pope John Paul II issues the decree | Cardinal Fernández issues the decree on Pope Leo XIV’s behalf |
| Excommunications on the 4 bishops lifted by Benedict XVI, 2009 | Outcome not yet determined; Leo XIV says he continues to pray for reconciliation |
Thirty-eight years apart, the same society made the same calculation for what it says is the same reason: a conviction that the Mass and the priesthood it was formed to preserve required bishops Rome would not give it. Rome, for its part, has now twice ruled that no cause justifies stepping outside the pope’s own authority to appoint them — because for Rome the deeper question was never really the Latin Mass, but whether the Second Vatican Council, and the popes who have governed by it since, may be simply refused.
A Fair Word for Traditional Catholics — and Why It Isn’t Enough
Something should be said for the SSPX and the wider traditionalist movement that a fair reader ought not skip past. Traditionalists have consistently opposed the softening of the Church’s posture toward the officially atheist governments of the old Eastern Bloc, a diplomatic accommodation many of them regarded, not without reason, as a betrayal of Catholics suffering under those regimes. Their instinct against Marxism’s hostility to God, to private property, and to the family is not a small thing, and it is one this website’s readers can recognize and even share in part.
But standing against communism does not amount to standing with the gospel. The SSPX has never disputed the Roman system that this website exists to answer — the Mass re-presented as a sacrifice, salvation mixed with merit and penance, Mary and the saints given a mediating role Scripture reserves for Christ alone, the pope’s authority treated as binding on the conscience. Whatever else divides Rome from its own traditionalists, both sides agree that grace comes through the Roman Catholic Church and its sacraments. Scripture allows no such mixture: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9). A traditionalist who rejects Vatican II while keeping the Mass as sacrifice and merit as a path to heaven has changed his liturgy, not his gospel. Opposing communism is a point in a man’s favor; it is not a substitute for the righteousness of Christ received by faith alone.
Leo XIV: Augustinian by Habit, Jesuit at Heart
One detail makes 2026’s schism different from 1988’s: the man now sitting where John Paul II once sat is not, formation-wise, anything like his immediate predecessor. Robert Prevost, elected as Leo XIV, is a member of the Order of St. Augustine — the first Augustinian ever to become pope — not the Jesuit order that shaped Pope Francis. He was formed at an Augustinian seminary and at Villanova, professed Augustinian vows in 1981, and later led the entire Augustinian order worldwide as prior general for two terms before his elevation.
And yet on nearly every point where traditionalists hoped an Augustinian pope might mark a real break from Francis, Leo has instead confirmed the Francis-era course. Cardinal Fernández — kept in place by Leo as the Vatican’s doctrinal chief — has stated plainly that Fiducia Supplicans, the 2023 provision allowing blessings for same-sex couples, remains firmly in place. Leo has repeated Francis’s framing of migrant welcome as a matter of human dignity rather than national discretion, telling the Spanish Congress in June that borders should become “spaces of protection” rather than places of abandonment, and criticizing American immigration enforcement directly enough to endorse the U.S. bishops’ own statement against it. Traditionalist critics have separately raised concern that he has tolerated Francis-era gestures like the reception of Fr. James Martin, a priest known for advocating acceptance of same-sex relationships within the Church.
None of that makes Leo a Jesuit by canon law, and it would be sloppy to pretend otherwise. But a different habit has not produced a different doctrine. Whatever one calls the order he belongs to, the pattern he governs by — on sexuality, on migration, on the vocabulary of “human dignity” applied to both — is the pattern Francis left him, kept rather than reconsidered. If the habit is Augustinian, the governance, so far, has been Jesuit at heart.
A Christian Perspective
A believer watching this dispute should resist the temptation to pick a side within Rome, because both sides remain inside the same false gospel. The SSPX is right that the modern papacy has drifted toward doctrines and postures the Church never held before — the traditionalists did not invent that complaint, they inherited a real one. But the answer to a corrupted authority is not an older claim to the same kind of authority; it is the authority Scripture itself claims for the written Word over every man who would govern the conscience by his own office: “But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed” (Galatians 1:8). That verse does not spare Leo XIV for continuing Francis’s course, and it does not spare Lefebvre’s heirs for offering an older version of the same Roman system in its place.
The believer’s confidence rests nowhere in this fight — not in a Council, not in a Society, not in whichever pope currently occupies the chair. It rests in Christ alone, received by faith alone, on the authority of Scripture alone: “Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:24). Rome will keep excommunicating its own for centuries yet, on both its left flank and its right, and neither excommunication will bring either side one step nearer the gospel. Pray for those inside that system — traditionalist and progressive alike — that they would see past the argument over which authority to obey, to the One who alone had the right to say, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6).
Sources drawn from reporting by Encyclopædia Britannica, Catholic News Service and the USCCB, Vatican News, and the Society of St. Pius X’s own published history on the 1970 founding, the 1988 and 2026 excommunications, and Archbishop Lefebvre’s biography; and prior Vatican-affairs reporting cited on this site regarding Cardinal Fernández’s confirmation of Fiducia Supplicans, Pope Leo XIV’s June address to the Spanish Congress, and his statements on immigration enforcement. Updated August 8, 2026.