Fact-based journalism that sparks the Canadian conversation

Articles Business Environment Health Politics Arts & Culture Society

Special Series Hope You’re Well For the Love of the Game Living Rooms In Other Worlds: A Space Exploration Terra Cognita More special series >

For the Love of the Game

In Other Worlds: A Space Exploration

More special series >

Events The Walrus Talks The Walrus Video Room The Walrus Leadership Roundtables The Walrus Leadership Forums Article Club

The Walrus Video Room

The Walrus Leadership Roundtables

The Walrus Leadership Forums

Subscribe Renew your subscription Change your address Magazine Issues Newsletters Podcasts

Renew your subscription

The Walrus Lab Hire The Walrus Lab Amazon First Novel Award

Amazon First Novel Award

Vatican Casts Out Traditionalist Sect. What’s Next for Canadian Followers?

An excommunication story, fifty-six years in the making

Forget The Da Vinci Code. The Catholic Church has been brewing better plots for 2,000 years: catacomb-deep conspiracies, operatic conclaves, bitter doctrinal battles, forged gospels, disputed miracles, and rival popes. It’s enough intrigue to keep dozens of Dan Browns busy. Some of those dramas fade. Some don’t. One saga has finally come to a head. The Vatican has cast out the decades-old Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), the defiant splinter sect founded by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. I spoke with Michael W. Higgins, one of the leading scholars on the papacy and contemporary Catholicism, about how this ecclesiastical family feud began, why it finally boiled over, and what it says about the Church today.

Maybe you can start by explaining a bit about who the Society of St. Pius X are and why they’ve been such a headache for the Church.

The Fraternitas Sacerdotalis Sancti Pii X—or the Priestly Fraternity of St. Pius X—was created in 1970 by Marcel Lefebvre, a disgruntled French missionary prelate. Lefebvre repudiated the Second Vatican Council, which ran from 1962 to 1965. The council had modernized many aspects of the Roman Catholic Church. New teachings included the use of the vernacular during mass, as opposed to Ecclesiastical Latin, and affirmed the holiness of other faiths.

Lefebvre would have none of this. He became the pre-eminent voice of traditionalist dissidents and founded his own seminary in Econe, Switzerland, to train like-minded future clerics and drew disaffected lay Catholics by appealing to their unhappiness with the changes in the liturgy. By rejecting the teachings of the council, even as they profess loyalty to the pope, they saw themselves as the “true” Catholics, devoted to maintaining the authentic voice of the tradition, the rightful heirs of an apostolic Church that—they believe—had lost its way.

Several popes attempted to bring him and his following back into full communion. Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis tried to maintain dialogue, offered some goodwill concessions, and refrained from censure. Lefebvrevists, after all, were not heretics or apostates but leaned toward being schismatics—meaning they were rupturing the unity of the Church without abandoning its faith. Of the Church’s gravest offences, schism is perhaps the least severe.

The archbishop was not for turning, and papal efforts to avoid a formal schism were unsuccessful. In 1988, following the consecration of four of his priests in open defiance of the pope, all the clerics involved in the episcopal ordinations were excommunicated. It seemed like the end for the Society of Pius X, but it proved otherwise. More conversations ensued; some compromises were made by Rome; and then, in 2009, the excommunications were lifted. But the Lefebvrevists were not mollified by papal efforts at rapprochement, and their doctrinal intransigence remained.

So what final line did they cross?

On July 1, they conducted a........

© The Walrus