One of the things I have noticed for some time now is how trends and events in the Roman Catholic Church are reflective of, and roughly parallel to, trends found in the secular society, regardless of any rigid attempts to maintain Church and State in their separate pigeonholes. This phenomenon should not be surprising to any astute observer because the Church herself is a body politic which, in her human element, consists of the same ordinary and fallible men and women who in aggregate constitute civil society as well. Secular attitudes therefore are just as apt to be found among Churchmen as Christian viewpoints permeating the legal and social order to one degree or another. This inevitable cross-pollination has worked at times for the better, but sometimes to the Church’s detriment. Regardless, I would suspect that few today would deny that the trends over the past several generations have steered in a decisively ‘progressive’ direction in both spheres, whether Church or State. And it is those ‘left of center’ trends which have brought us to this present moment which I would describe as a stalemate, be it religious, social, or political.

For the United States this stalemate could be summed up in the current war against Iran, a conflict carelessly entered into with no popular support, no apparent long term strategy, and no clearly enunciated objectives other than to topple a government inimicable to one small client state, Israel. That goal having failed spectacularly, we now find American military assets in the Gulf region under siege, a looming global economic catastrophe due to the closure of the Persian Gulf, and a colossal blow struck to America’s credibility and prestige in the world. Nor does there seem to be any face saving exit from the debacle, this asymmetric war in which the weaker party, Iran, seems to hold all the strategic cards.

Thirty-five years ago, as the Cold War was ending, America seemed to be holding all the aces. We were the sole global superpower. We controlled banking and trade via the de facto global currency, the dollar. We had peacefully defeated the Soviet empire and the time seemed ripe to beat our swords into plow-shares for a dawning era of peace, trade, and prosperity. But in fact we did just the opposite. We doubled down under the influence of war-mongering neo-cons and continued beating our plow-shares into swords. We followed the same dreary path that the British colonial empire had blazed: military adventurism, resource extraction, and power projection by means of stealth, force, or deception. In the end Britain’s wars of avarice bankrupted the exhausted empire, so the Americans simply took on the British mantle and continued down the same futile pathway. That trek dragged us through conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq (again), and a Ukraine proxy war. The result has been multiple failures and embarrassments.

Yet failing to learn from our own history (much less that of Great Britain), our national leaders decided to roll the dice one more time on what history has long shown to be the graveyard of empires, Persia (Iran), all because Mr. Netanyahu assured Mr. Trump that Iran would be “easy pickins.” So here we sit in a logistical military stalemate with a foe that even the mighty Roman empire was never able to tame. There is no tactical option for us short of retreat because we are the ones playing offense, and Iran’s greatest tactical weapon is its own rugged geography which simply cannot be neutralized using drones or air power. And the longer Mr. Trump allows or insists that this stalemate be prolonged, the higher energy prices will rise and the deeper the world will sink into economic depression or even famine. It’s becoming a showdown in which everybody looses (excepting the arms contractors of course, who come out of every needless nasty conflict smelling like roses).

Yet even as this global game of chicken remains unresolved, there is another kind of stalemate which threatens to fracture the cohesiveness of the Roman Catholic Church. It is a deeply spiritual stalemate going back to the tumultuous 1970s when priestly and religious vocations were being abandoned by the tens of thousands, even as a new order of the Mass, the Novus Ordo, was being imposed on Catholics worldwide by the Vatican of Pope Paul VI. Amidst all the liturgical chaos of ‘guitar Masses’ and every sort of liturgical novelty invading the sanctuary, Catholics by the millions fled from the pews. The human face behind this liturgical revolution, Pope Paul VI, had decreed that his Novus Ordo Missae should universally replace the +1,500 year old ‘Mass of the Ages’ codified by the Council of Trent and which Pope St. Pius V had solemnly decreed to be the normative ritual “for all time.”

This meant that the ancient Roman Rite, what we know as the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM), was validated in perpetuity and could never be abrogated, even by some later pope. This position was more recently confirmed by Pope Benedict XVI in his 2007 motu proprio Summorum Pontificum. Though Paul VI realized that he could not officially abrogate the older Mass rite (TLM) he attempted to suppress its use by the clergy in favor of his newly minted Novus Ordo rite. This was the origin of the conflict between Pope Paul VI and Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, an actual Vatican II Council Father, who came out of retirement in 1970 to found a traditional seminary in Econe, Switzerland. Lefebvre and other concerned clerics at the time realized that what Paul VI had promulgated was not merely an updated edition of the traditional Mass but a rite entirely new; a virtual replacement of the ancient central and supreme act of Catholic worship, and which no longer clearly presented the Mass as a sacrifice. Rather the liturgical emphasis was subtly shifted to the more Protestant notion of a commemorative meal setting. It was a breathtaking act of iconoclastic rupture, akin to substituting some marble cubist slab for Michelangelo’s heroic David.

As one who has spent many years both attending and serving ‘conservative style’ Novus Ordo Masses, including the use of some Latin, I can now say with certainty that there is an insurmountable distance separating the Mass of Paul VI from the ancient Roman Rite. That distinction is not merely aesthetic but goes much deeper to the spiritual level. While I still attend both forms regularly, I have come to appreciate their manifest incongruities. The most reverently celebrated Novus Ordo Mass offered in a beautifully appointed church still lacks something of that transcendent, prayerful spirit of the older antecedent liturgy. Though it may strive to elicit the same fervor in believers, the Novus Ordo loses the deep sense of mystery. It remains at best a faint echo of the ancient Mass of the Ages. Experiencing that ancient rite is like discovering a beautiful oasis in the middle of a howling wilderness, a place of spiritual refreshment like no other.

The Mass, no matter what rite in which it may be celebrated, is meant to be the most perfect prayer offered to God. Therefore it is essential that we pray the Mass regularly, but equally important is the manner in which it is prayed, with our full attention laser focused on God alone. The ancient Roman Rite (TLM) does that better than any other because it employs a variety of mystical language: chant, polyphony, Latin, incense, even ornate vestments all of which capture the senses and raise them aloft. Its use of silent moments envelopes us in that sense of holy mystery since God is both all holy and ineffable mystery. By contrast the Novus Ordo presents one with a host of human distractions: lay ministers busying the sanctuary, modern musical instruments and genres, vapid announcements, and only rare moments of silence for meditation.

To be sure, there was more than just the liturgy and its manifest abuses following Vatican II that induced Archbishop Lefebvre to inaugurate a new Apostolic union which he named the Society of St. Pius X, or SSPX. The Council appears to have redirected the entire focus of the Catholic Church from active missionary conversion to endless dialogue and hand holding summed up in Pope John XXIII’s favorite theme ‘aggiornamento’ that is, “getting along with the world / being agreeable.” But simply being agreeable does not in itself save souls or elicit conversions if not accompanied by truth. For instance, selective Catholic doctrines such as extra Ecclesia nula salvi (no salvation outside the Church) were watered down or outright ignored to promote ‘ecumenism.’

For Lefebvre and his SSPX “the only possible path to restoring unity among Christians of different confessions consists in the urgent and charitable appeal addressed to non-Catholics to profess the one true Faith within the one true Church.” Truth and error cannot be reconciled by finding some supposed ‘middle ground.’ Truth is of a whole cloth whereas error, which may have a grain of truth embedded within it, becomes all the more damaging by giving some appearance of truth.

For Lefebvre and his followers, “The Catholic Church can in no way be regarded or treated on an equal footing with a false form of worship or a false church.” This uncompromising view extended to the liturgy as well. “To a unique (Catholic) Faith there corresponds a unique form of worship, the supreme, authentic, and perfect expression of that same Faith,” which of course is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, which “in no way can be reduced to a mere commemoration, to a spiritual meal, to a sacred assembly celebrated by the people, to the celebration of the Paschal mystery without satisfaction of divine justice, without expiation of sins, without propitiation, and without the Cross.” (Fr. Davide Pagliarani, SSPX Superior General, 14 May 2026) While the SSPX may be regarded as ‘schismatic’ in the minds of certain Catholic prelates, the above stated positions should render absurd any contention made by some that the Society is essentially a Protestant cult. If anything it is a prime example of hyper-Catholicism, the unequivocal antithesis of Protestantism.

Archbishop Lefebvre’s intention was simply to teach, practice, and promote the Catholic Faith as had been successfully done for 19 centuries. The rift heightened in 1975 when the local ordinary of Fribourg, under pressure from the Vatican, suppressed the SSPX. The next year the archbishop himself was ‘suspended.’ Lefebvre ignored the suspension on grounds enunciated by St. Thomas Aquinas that an unjust precept (law) is no precept. Pope Paul VI was busy promoting ecumenism and his new rite of the Mass and Lefebvre’s traditionalist seminary in Econe training priests in the sacramental theology of the Council of Trent represented, quite frankly, a thorn in his side.

Life Site News reported that on August 29, 1976, Lefebvre celebrated Mass at Lille in northern France. Rather than the few hundred participants expected, more than six thousand people assisted at the Mass, which was widely reported in the French and international press, bringing the name of Archbishop Lefebvre to a wider audience. In his homily the archbishop defended his position vis a vis the Vatican. “I do not want to be head of the traditionalists, nor am I. Why? Because I also am a simple Catholic. A priest and a bishop, certainly; but in the very conditions in which you find yourselves, reacting in the same way to the destruction of the Church, to the destruction of our faith, to the ruins piling up before our eyes.

“All we want is to be allowed to profess our faith in Our Lord Jesus Christ. So, for that reason, we are driven from our churches. The poor priests are driven out for saying the Old Mass by which all our saints were sanctified: Saint Jeanne d’Arc, the holy Cure of Ars, the little Therese of the Child Jesus were sanctified by this Mass; and now priests are driven brutally, cruelly, from their parishes because they say the Mass which has sanctified saints for centuries.

“It is crazy. I would almost say it is a story of madmen. I ask myself if I am dreaming. How can this Mass have become some kind of horror for our bishops and for those who should preserve our faith?” But we will keep the Mass of Saint Pius V because the Mass of Saint Pius V is the Mass of twenty centuries. It is the Mass of all time, not just the Mass of Saint Pius V; and it represents our faith, it is a bulwark of our faith, and we need that bulwark.”

Then there was the issue of evenhanded treatment, or the lack thereof, on the part of the pope. Although Paul VI had willingly granted a special indult for priests in England to say Mass in the older rite, the so-called Agatha Christi indult (Christi herself was not a Catholic but loved the beauty of the TLM), yet the same pope refused to grant the same privilege to Lefebvre’s society, preferring instead to suspend the archbishop. Meanwhile Paul VI refused to discipline, even mildly, any of the hundreds or thousands of clerics and theologians who were at that very moment publicly defying Paul’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae which condemned the intrinsic evils of artificial contraception. When a mass spirit of disobedience to liturgical rules (e.g. Communion in the hand, women altar servers, etc.) as well as fixed moral precepts was running rampant throughout the Church, Paul VI chose to make an example of one obscure French archbishop loath to swear absolute submission to certain problematic articles in various Vatican II documents.

For Paul the crux of the issue was Lefebvre’s resistance to the uncritical implementation of a Council which Paul himself had himself declared to be non-dogmatic but only ‘pastoral’ in scope. For Lefebvre it was a matter of conscience. Clearly the Vatican II experiment was already going off the rails as any alert Catholic could plainly see. For Paul VI it was a matter of this one archbishop submitting to the papal will. The archbishop, an accomplished missionary over decades in Africa, viewed the conflict in a broader context, however. The Gospel must be preached in its entirety and modernism was diluting the core Gospel message; even withholding it from those who needed it most.

Lefebvre insisted, “Error and truth are not compatible. We must see if we have charity towards others, as the Gospel says: he who has charity is one who serves others. But those who have charity should give Our Lord, they should give the riches they possess to others and not just converse with them and enter into dialogue on an equal footing. Truth and error are not on the same footing. That would be putting God and the Devil on the same footing, for the Devil is the father of lies, the father of error.” (Life Site News, July 18, 2026)

In response Pope Paul VI accused Lefebvre of setting himself up as an anti-pope. During an audience on Sept. 11, shortly after the Mass in Lille, Lefebvre asked for permission for the traditional Mass to continue which Paul VI flatly refused saying, “We are a community. We cannot permit autonomy in behavior in different places.” Ironically at the very time he made these remarks he was tolerating every kind of heresy on the part of his cardinals and bishops and was presiding over the complete disintegration of the liturgical and sacramental life of the Church. (Life Site, ibid) Lefebvre ignored the suspension and continued to train and ordain priests in the ancient Roman Rite to celebrate the older liturgy. It was an act of material disobedience to be sure, but that alone does not make one a schismatic which is the allegation being casually thrown around even today against members of the SSPX by serious Canonists who should know better.

There were uncomfortable precedents for Lefebvre’s brand of “faithful disobedience” such as St. Athanasius who had been excommunicated by Pope Liberius in the 4th century for opposing the Arian heresy. Then there was St. Thomas More who ascended the scaffold with the famous words, “I die the king’s obedient servant, but God’s first.” Had not the very first pope, St. Peter, defied the religious authorities of his day saying, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to obey men rather than God, you be the judges.” (Acts 4:19) St. Paul himself would later take St. Peter to task for his Judaizing, so was Paul being disobedient to his superior? Assuming that he acted in good conscience, it would seem after all that Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre was sitting in pretty good company.

But what the present day chorus of Catholic legal positivists will point to as Archbishop Lefebvre’s great act of schismatic disobedience was the June, 1988 consecration of four new bishops without a papal mandate. This act earned him and the four new bishops a decree of excommunication by Pope John Paul II, issued on July 2, 1988. Lefebvre argued that his decision to consecrate was driven by his advanced age (82) and a necessity for the good and salvation of souls which is, in fact, recognized as the supreme law of the Church in Canon 1752: Salus animarum suprema lex esto. So how could that great pope have reacted so insensitively to the dire exigencies which drove those consecrations? After all, John Paul II himself had dealt with similar circumstances in his own episcopal ministry.

George Weigel notes in Witness to Hope, the Biography of John Paul II, “The archbishop of Kraków also believed he had an obligation to maintain solidarity with a persecuted and deeply wounded neighbor, the Church in Czechoslovakia, where the situation had deteriorated during the years of the new Vatican Ostpolitik. So Cardinal Wojtyła and one of his auxiliary bishops, Juliusz Groblicki, clandestinely ordained priests for service in Czechoslovakia, in spite of… the fact that the Holy See had forbidden underground bishops in that country to perform such ordinations. Cardinal Wojtyła did not inform the Holy See of these ordinations. He did not regard them as acts in defiance of Vatican policy, but as a duty to suffering fellow believers.” Likewise, Jonathan Kwitney in his 1997 biography of John Paul II, Man of the Century writes, “Wojtyla had a greater connection to the Prague Spring than he could let on. Over the years, he had gradually expanded his secret ordination of underground Czech priests. By 1965 he was also training and ordaining covert priest candidates from Communist Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus, where seminaries had also been closed.”

Cardinal Wojtyla’s was not an isolated case. Fr. Raymond De Souza writes that “In 1976, the head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Cardinal Josef Slipyj, living in exile in Rome after 18 years in the Soviet gulag, feared for the future of the UGCC. Would it have bishops to lead it, given that Slipyj himself was now over 80? So he ordained three bishops clandestinely, without the permission of the Holy Father, Paul VI. At the time, the Holy See followed a policy of non-assertiveness regarding the communist bloc; Paul VI would not give permission for the new bishops for fear of upsetting the Soviets. The consecration of bishops without a papal mandate is a very grave canonical crime, for which the penalty is excommunication. Blessed Paul VI—who likely knew, unofficially, what Slipyj had done—did not administer any penalties.”

Peter Kwasniewski adds, “Paul VI certainly knew of the secret episcopal ordinations but declined to punish the Cardinal because he was widely revered as a Confessor of the Faith. One of the bishops secretly ordained was Lubomyr Husar; John Paul II later officially recognized his consecration, appointed him Major Archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, and created him a cardinal in 2001.” Similarly, Pope Benedict XVI would eventually lift the excommunications of the four bishops ordained by Lefebvre, although Lefebvre himself had long passed away in 1991.”

History has now come full circle. All that the current consecrations and subsequent ‘excommunications’ by Cardinal Tucho Fernandez and Pope Leo XIV have accomplished is to recreate the same situation from 1988 which had been amicably resolved by Benedict XVI. The claim that these episcopal consecrations represent a “schismatic act” is highly debatable, even among experts. Schism means to willingly separate oneself from the Church which implies a clear intention to break with the pope or universal doctrines of the Church. Canon 751 defines schism as “the withdrawal of submission to the Supreme Pontiff or from communion with the members of the Church subject to him.” The Latin word used for ‘withdrawal’ is ‘detractio’ which literally means a complete rejection of authority, not simply disobeying a particular command, otherwise one must assume that Cardinals Wojtyla and Slipyi were both guilty of schism at one time or another, itself a preposterous supposition.

In fact, to impress upon the faithful that the SSPX harbors no schismatic intentions, their bishops claim no jurisdiction, something which can only be conferred by the pope. They do not preside over any diocese but their only task is only to confer the sacraments and maintain proper apostolic succession, not to govern. In this way they fully recognize the jurisdiction of both the pope and local ordinaries. They do not reject communion with the universal, apostolic Church and therefore cannot be said to have a schismatic mens rea, (mindset). By contrast, in declaring himself head of the English Church and separating it from Rome, Henry VIII clearly intended to commit schism, yet it took three papal decrees and over five years to effect his excommunication. Compare that with the alacrity at which Cardinal Tucho Fernandez imposed a decree of excommunication on six SSPX bishops, literally one day after the consecrations! Absent, in Fernandez’s lightning quick decree, is any equal application of the law or canonical due process.

A single act of disobedience to the Holy See cannot, in every case, be said to constitute a schism if the reasons for such disobedience are both grave and sincerely held. The best analogy might be the family because the Church itself is a family presided over by a ‘papa’ (Pope Leo XIV). In their wedding vows a husband and wife vow obedience to one another. Now suppose that a father, who has authority over his wife, demands that she do or allow something which is potentially harmful to their children such as sending them to a summer camp run by nudists. At that point she has both a right and a duty to disobey her husband for the good of their children. Would he then be right in divorcing her for insubordination? It is not an overall rejection of her husband’s authority but a prudent act of disobedience for some greater good, the children’s moral safety.

The SSPX now ministers to over a half million faithful Catholic ‘children’ who pray at every Mass for the pope and local ordinary bishop. These are hardly signs of defiance or an attempt to create a parallel Church. In 2018 the Society was even granted faculties by Pope Francis to licitly hear confessions and witness marriages which strongly implies his recognition of the SSPX as an integral part of the Church in spite of its irregular Canonical standing.

That a state of emergency now exists in the Church can hardly be dismissed as a crank theory. Catholic pastors routinely display “rainbow flags” in churches and classrooms, clerics are allowed to bless sodomitic couples, while pagan syncretism creeps into the Mass itself. Life Site News reported the following on Nov. 15, 2024. “The Vatican has approved the Mayan rite of the Mass which will involve ritual dancing, women taking the place of the priest in incensing the altar, and lay leadership of certain prayers in the liturgy. The announcement came via Cardinal Felipe Arizmendi Esquivel, who is bishop emeritus of the San Cristobal de Las Casas diocese in Mexico and one of the leading promoters of this new rite.” A similar Amazonian rite is also in the works. Yet in this omnipresent environment of ecclesial wokeness the SSPX has had the temerity to insist that a state of emergency exists which might justify extraordinary measures. I suspect that they may be right.

Canon law itself tends to the side of leniency, and mandates the suspension of penalties, including excommunications, in instances where (Can 1323) one “acted by reason of necessity or grave inconvenience” also (Can 1324) when “compelled… by reason of necessity or grave inconvenience” even if the perpetrators “erroneously, but culpably, thought thought that some of the circumstances (necessity etc.) existed.” Accordingly, if one truly believes that a state of emergency exists in the Church, then one should act according to conscience without fear of retribution by ecclesial authorities. The act of consecrating new bishops without a papal mandate is definitely a serious act but under extreme circumstances it is not unprecedented, as we saw above. For the SSPX the very real threat of losing the line of apostolic succession within the Society due to Vatican intransigence undoubtedly represents a case of both necessity and of grave inconvenience. Current bishops will not live forever and the salvation of souls hangs in the balance.

I personally have had only a few albeit infrequent contacts with members of the SSPX, but it appears to me that they are being denied the basic norms of justice and charity that the self-styled “Church of accompaniment” freely extends to gay couples, Protestants, and every other heterodox or off-the-wall group. An Anglican “archbishopress” is warmly welcomed by the pope into a Vatican far more concerned these days with climate change, illegal migration, or promoting women to authority over ordained priests. Pope Leo has now formally recognized at least six new bishops in China chosen and installed by the Communist controlled Catholic Patriotic Association absent papal mandates. By contrast his Curial bureaucracy only draws its red lines in the sand when dealing with Traditional Catholics whom it typically views with suspicion if not outright contempt.

Remember that there would be no Ecclesia Dei communities today (Institute of Christ the King, FSSP, etc.) and no Summorum Pontificum which allowed any priest to offer the ancient Roman Rite if it had not been for Marcel Lefebvre consecrating those four bishops without a papal mandate back in 1988. All traditional Catholics today owe a great debt of gratitude to Archbishop Lefebvre’s SSPX for preserving the ancient Roman Rite of the Mass from virtual extinction. Nor should we be so quick to cast them under the bus as unreformed schismatics but perhaps instead offer them the olive branch of true charity. We are too often overly quick to lay blame knowing only a smattering of the facts.

Unhappily we find ourselves at the point of stalemate in both the Church and in the West even as the world totters on the brink of WW III and/or a catastrophic depression. We are brought to this stalemate by proud, obstinate leaders who on the one hand preach liberality, freedom, and ‘dialogue’ but with the other ramrod their iron-fisted personal agendas home, unconcerned with the number of casualties. Such hard nosed demagoguery, whether in ecclesial or international affairs, can only intensify the stalemate which, much like an ice dam, when it finally breaks loose releases a devastating flood downstream.

Downstream in this case means our own children and grandchildren who will ultimately suffer the consequences of any torrential disaster when it finally unleashes its destructive energy. For the unpleasant fact remains that stalemates are inherently unstable phenomena, and no stalemate lasts forever. The sooner these stalemates are reconciled the safer our children will be. The thorny question remains, whether we have leaders wise and courageous, but more aptly humble enough to resolve the dangerous impasse in which humanity and the Church now find themselves collectively entangled?

Francis J. Pierson +a.m.d.g.