Vatican Excommunicates Society of St. Pius X, in First Major Crisis for Pope Leo

The Vatican on Thursday excommunicated all formal followers of a breakaway conservative faction of the Roman Catholic Church, a day after its leaders defied a personal plea from Pope Leo XIV and consecrated four new bishops without his permission.

The Vatican announced in a decree that the group, the Society of St. Pius X, was in schism with the Church. In an explanatory note about the decree, it also said the society was barred from officiating marriages and hearing confessions, and it warned the society’s followers to stop attending its Masses and participating in its events.

The Vatican’s note added that all formal followers of the society “are to be considered schismatics and excommunicated” after its leaders consecrated the bishops in a ceremony in Switzerland on Wednesday “against the will of the Holy Father and in open violation of canon law.”

The society did not immediately comment on the excommunication.

The schism is the biggest internal crisis of Leo’s young papacy, and a blow to his stated efforts to bridge divisions between Catholics who want to modernize the church, including by ordaining female priests, and conservatives, like followers of the Society of St. Pius X, who hold fast to tradition.

The Vatican’s decision heightened a decades-long standoff between the Church’s leadership and the society, which is widely known by the acronym S.S.P.X.

The society was founded in 1970 by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in protest against the Church’s efforts to modernize after the Second Vatican Council, held in the 1960s, including by allowing priests to hold services in vernacular languages instead of only in Latin. The society also objects to the council’s efforts to soothe tensions between Catholicism and other Christian faiths, and to take part in interreligious dialogue. And it insists on the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church even as it accuses the modern leaders of heresy.

Those tensions peaked in 1988, when the society first consecrated four bishops without the permission of Pope John Paul II, who swiftly excommunicated them and Archbishop Lefebvre.

Relations thawed somewhat in 2009, under Pope Benedict XVI, who lifted the excommunications of the surviving bishops in a gesture of outreach to all Catholics still attached to celebrating the traditional Latin Mass. But one bishop had provoked outrage by denying the Holocaust.

That rapprochement ended on Wednesday, after the society defied Leo by proceeding with a consecration ceremony that the group said had brought some 17,000 worshipers to Écône, a small village in Switzerland where the society installed its first seminary in 1970.

The Vatican’s sanctions on Thursday were even harsher than those imposed in 1988 under John Paul II, when the Vatican only excommunicated its five senior prelates.

This time, the excommunication applies to all of the society’s priests and formal followers. The Vatican added that the sacraments administered by the society’s priests, including confession and matrimony, were invalid, reversing concessions that Pope Francis had made to the society in recent years.

The Vatican’s decree left open the possibility of reconciliation for those who renounced the society, saying that “the Church, as a caring mother, will welcome with sincere affection and lively solicitude all those who wish to return to full communion.”

The Rev. Ian Andrew Palko, an S.S.P.X. priest in Texas, said he did not expect the excommunication to lead to many defections. “There may be some who are uncomfortable with” excommunication, he said. But, he added, if the faithful “were worried, it would have already pushed them away.”

And the Rev. Paul Robinson, the society’s prior in Denver, said he expected communication with Rome would continue, as it did after the 1988 excommunications. “There were plenty of conversations that took place” even after the fact, he said. “So I think there will still be contact with Rome.”