VATICAN CITY (AP) — The ultratraditionalist Society of St. Pius X is planning to defy Pope Leo XIV by consecrating four bishops without his consent. The move incurs an automatic excommunication for the bishops involved, and amounts to a “schismatic act” — or a willful rupture of unity in the Catholic Church.The ceremony marks the first major crisis for Leo, who has prioritized church unity and healing tensions with traditionalists that worsened during the Pope Francis pontificate.
A group founded in dissentThe society, known by its acronym SSPX, was founded in opposition to the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Among other things, the 1960s church meetings revolutionized the Catholic Church’s relations with other Christians, Jews and people of other faiths, and allowed Mass to be celebrated in the vernacular rather than Latin.In 1975, the SSPX founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, was suspended and the society was suppressed by the Vatican.In 1988, 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 church.
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