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What Pope Leo Can Teach Liberals About Power

The pontiff just excommunicated a reactionary splinter group committed to undermining the church. Democratic leaders could learn something.

The ultra-traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X kept poking the bear.

Pope Leo XIV was already in a tough spot when he acceded to the highest office of the Catholic Church just over a year ago. His predecessor and ally Pope Francis managed to move the needle on migrant and LGBTQ rights globally from within one of the world’s oldest institutions—which antagonized many of the church’s most revanchist elements. Observers the world over were eager to see whether the onetime bishop of Chiclayo, Peru, would pursue a similarly progressive pontificate, or attempt to conciliate the reactionaries. He answered decisively with a recent surprise move that political leaders contending with growing reactionary movements could stand to learn from.

As he ascended the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica for his public introduction, the Chicago-born pope was already caught between constituencies that wanted to build on Francis’s transformations and those intent on turning back the clock. Archconservative elements of the church eager to take back the reins after a decade-plus of Francis were initially mollified by Leo’s “traditional” presentation. Less of a public firebrand than his mentor, he cut a diplomatic figure that a friend memorably called “a dignified middle of the road.” But the most hard-line traditionalists proved impossible to satisfy. The fringe, ultraconservative Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), long a thorn in the Vatican’s side, forced a showdown earlier this month. Dignified, middle-of-the-road Leo responded by unilaterally excommunicating not only the leaders but potentially adherents of the order.

SSPX was formed in 1970 by French prelate Marcel Lefebvre in direct opposition to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which among other things gave individual churches more leeway to run their own affairs, eased up on requiring traditional practices like the Latin mass, expanded dialogue with other religions and—somewhat ironically—diluted the pope’s own power by expanding the power of bishops. The order took its name from the early-20th-century Pope Pius X, whom it lionizes for his “unmasking of Modernism,” which it considers the ultimate heresy. (“Modernism,” in a Catholic context, is a term a bit like “woke”—it can mean drastically different things depending on who’s deploying it, but generally refers to attempts to reconcile the church with modern culture.)

While many of SSPX’s specific grievances would be arcane even to practicing Catholics, at its root is disgust with a (slightly) more open and democratic church that had understood that it needed to adapt to changing times, and a desire to strong-arm it back to insularity and intolerance. Its concerns map neatly onto the culture-war outrages that animate the contemporary far right, political and religious. The order, which counted under 1,500 members as of 2025, trains seminarians and holds liturgies around the word. The number of laypeople who attend their masses is........

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