The Heavenward Schism of the SSPX

In second-century Phrygia, a group of spiritual Catholics—the Montanists—claimed a greater authority than the institutional Church. Montanus and his two prophetesses said they had new and direct revelations from God: The end was nigh, and the faithful were to prepare with more stringent spiritual and moral disciplines. They fell into conflict with the bishops and were eventually excommunicated.

Twelve hundred years later, in Italy, another spiritual group—the Fraticelli—began proclaiming that there were actually two churches. The first, they said, was a false church: the carnal church of Rome corrupted by the world. The second was the true church: a remnant of purified Franciscans still faithful to God. The Fraticelli denied the validity of the pope and the sacraments, electing their own bishops from among their number—leading to the pope’s condemnation of the movement.

There is nothing new under the sun, said Qoheleth, and another seven hundred years later, history seems to be repeating itself.

The Society of Saint Pius X (or the SSPX), a splinter group of traditionalists, recently consecrated four of its own bishops in Écône, Switzerland—despite a last-minute plea from Pope Leo XIV for the group to change course. The next day, the Vatican issued a decree declaring the bishops excommunicated and the group in schism—a decree the SSPX has since appealed. With this doubling down on episcopal consecrations (a similar situation happened in 1988), earlier efforts to draw the group back into the fold—the SSPX’s status had been “irregular,” not schismatic, and their Masses valid, if illicit—have broken down, possibly for good.

Of course, the SSPX’s particular resistance to the Catholic Church is, in some ways, unique to its own period of history. Central to the group’s formation and identity is a rejection of the Second Vatican Council—particularly its declarations on religious liberty and non-Christian religions—and of the new Mass of Pope Saint Paul VI, commonly called the Novus Ordo. But beneath the group’s fixed adherence to preconciliar doctrines and the Traditional Latin Mass, we find, at bottom, the same pretension of spiritual purity that gripped both the Montanists and the Fraticelli—a turn “heavenward” at the expense of the Church’s life of earth.

Indeed, shortly after the SSPX’s unauthorized consecration, I stumbled on a Vespers sermon from Michael Goldade, one of the four men consecrated as bishop by the Society. And his message of two churches is one that the Fraticelli would have recognized and applauded:

If the Catholic Church in her tradition brings forth life, the modernist Church is a desert. It kills. It kills everything that it touches. It kills the supernatural life. It kills the sources of grace. It dries up everything—because it has placed man in the place of God, and therefore turned away from the sources of life. So this is a reminder today to be faithful.

When I saw the video, I recognized Golade almost immediately: I had heard this same man preach fifteen years ago at an SSPX Mass—my first and only experience with the Society. At the time, I didn’t realize what the SSPX was; I was simply drawn in, as many still are to this day, by the promise of a more tradition-minded community. Instead, what I experienced there was an unsettling, self-conscious coldness—the sense that this church was a time machine to a preconciliar past and was supposed to feel that way. It felt set apart from the real life of the Church, with all its problems—but set apart not so much by holiness as by haughtiness.

We see in the SSPX’s sharp resistance to the modern and to change the particular character of their heavenward schism. The Society, like the Montanists and the Fraticelli before them, dream of a smaller, more spiritual, more purified Catholic community. But whereas the Montanists and Fraticelli fell into an apocalypticism looking ahead to the future, the Society falls into antiquarianism that looks back to the past—a fixation on what came before at the expense of the Church’s mission to evangelize the world as it is, here and now. It’s a reduction of tradition to a kind of static, untouchable objet d’art—a divine article sealed off from the messiness of historical development.

One Canadian layman in Écône was asked about the accusation that the SSPX is “stubborn,” and he responded, “We’re not the stubborn ones. . . . It seems almost paradoxical to say, ‘Well everyone else is stubborn except me.’ But that’s what’s going on.” He was then asked what he would say to Pope Leo if he could send him a message, and he responded: “The faith doesn’t change.” We see in this exchange how a good and healthy instinct rooted in Scripture—that the faith “was once for all entrusted to the saints” (Jude 3)—becomes dangerous when taken as a one-sided absolute.

Without the counter-truth of the Church “being transformed” in good and healthy ways (2 Cor. 3:18), stability not only becomes ossified but also isolated and confused about itself. The insight of Saint John Henry Newman remains apposite as ever: “In a higher world it is otherwise; but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.” The Church’s doctrines develop, and its expressions evolve—not because the faith is open-ended but because it’s incarnational, and not because we don’t deal with heavenly mysteries but because we do so on earth.

Will the SSPX—assuming they refuse to join the stubborn souls holding on to the barque of Peter—fade away? It seems unlikely as long as the equal and opposite tendency remains alive and well: the “earthward” error of endlessly adapting the Church to the world. Many Catholics do embrace innovation at the expense of Catholicism’s perennial teachings and stabilizing continuities.

We’ve seen this liturgically: In the period immediately following Vatican II, an informal and often experimental mindset became the norm. This led, at the extreme, to what Larry Chapp has called the “silly season” in the 1970s—from “clown Masses” to priests entering the church on a motorcycle (a real-life anecdote recalled by Bishop Barron). We’ve also seen it doctrinally: The Church, progressives have insisted, has to “get with the times,” especially on sexual matters—even if it means a reversal of Sacred Scripture and Tradition. The SSPX and radical traditionalism are best understood as a counterreaction to these subversive trends.

There are indications, however, that this “worldly” Catholicism (in the negative sense of the term) is already fading away. A 2025 study found that whereas 70 percent of priests ordained before 1975 describe themselves as theologically progressive, the number flips completely for younger priests: 70 percent identify as conservative/orthodox or very conservative/orthodox. The inflection point between these generations isn’t on the horizon; it’s already here. And as the average parish becomes more theologically conservative and liturgically traditional—including through a new influx of SSPX expats—the seemingly endless dialectic between the two that has defined so much of our lives as Catholics might just fade away.

The Catholic Church, it seems, is gradually finding a postconciliar balance—a privileging of God, heaven, and tradition that nevertheless embraces man, the world, and authentic development. The Church thinks in centuries, and such rebalancing efforts take time. It will entail, as Pope Leo seems to intuit with his ongoing catechesis, a reclaiming of the documents of Vatican II over against any progressive “spirit of Vatican II” or its traditionalist anti-spirit. It will entail the worship of the eternal God without losing sight of the magnificence of man in history.

And it will entail a return to the center of gravity for all things Catholic: Christ and his one, true Church.

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