ROME (AP) — With Pope Leo XIV’s first big crisis looming, the Vatican on Wednesday issued a final warning to a breakaway group of traditionalist Catholics that their planned consecration of bishops without papal consent constitutes a schismatic act that incurs automatic excommunication.Leo is praying for enlightenment so that the leaders of the Society of St. Pius X “may reconsider the extremely grave decision they have made,” said a statement from the Vatican’s doctrine czar, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández.The statement appeared to be a last-ditch effort to head off the group’s planned July 1 consecrations of four new bishops. If they go ahead, they will amount to the gravest challenge to Leo’s authority to date, as he seeks to heal divisions with traditionalist Catholics that worsened during the Pope Francis pontificate.
A traditionalist group formed in opposition to Vatican IIThe SSPX, as the group is known, was founded in Écône, Switzerland in 1970 in opposition to the modernizing reforms of the 1960s Second Vatican Council, which among other things allowed Mass to be celebrated in the vernacular rather than Latin.The group, which celebrates the pre-Vatican II Latin Mass, first broke with Rome in 1988, after its founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, consecrated four bishops without papal consent. The Vatican promptly excommunicated Lefebvre and the four other bishops, and the group today still has no legal status in the Catholic Church.
