It may sound paradoxical at first, but the defiant behavior of a schismatic clerical faction devoted to the Traditional Latin Mass may already be pushing the Church toward resolution of some fairly messy unfinished business left over from the Francis pontificate.
If you closely follow the chattering classes in virtual space, you may know what I am talking about.
If not, that’s okay.
The online Catholic world has been abuzz the past two weeks, over a strange and unhappy thing that happened in the foothills of the Swiss Alps on the first day of this month.
Basically, the breakaway traditionalist Priestly Society of St. Pius X – the SSPX – consecrated four bishops without a necessary papal mandate to do so and in defiance of repeated warnings from the Vatican and the pope himself not to go through with it.
If your reaction to the news was to ask, “What’s a traditionalist?” and “Who are the SSPX?” well, you belong to the roughly 99.472 percent of Catholics (according to this journalist’s fairly unscientific reckoning) who have darkened the door of a church in the past 40 years.
RELATED: SSPX declared schismatic, clerics excommunicated
In a very real and important sense, however, the illicit events of July 1 in in Écône, Switzerland, were a very big deal.
The consecrations were what the Church calls a “schismatic act” in her technical legal jargon, and schism – deliberate injury to the unity of the Church – is not a happy thing.
Online pundits have been both quick and thorough in their parsing of what happened.
Many voices have been laying blame with one side or the other and many others either calling for more draconian measures against the breakaway group, while many others have been tying themselves in knots to say the SSPX didn’t really do what they just did.
It is fair to say the entire business has offered the very opposite of an edifying spectacle.
The reasons for the split are many and varied – only God searches the hearts of men – but boil down to the SSPX’s extremely ambivalent stance toward the 1962-1965 Vatican Council II and rejection of the liturgical reforms that came in the wake of the Council.
It’s only fair to note that the SSPX clergy believe themselves – or at least present themselves – as the pope’s “loyal opposition” and as good sons of the Church.
RELATED: DDF issues guidelines for return of SSPX clergy, laity to communion
As a practical matter, it’s equally fair to say they’re trying to be more Catholic than the pope.
The main complaint of the SSPX, by the way, isn’t about the liturgy.
There have been people who didn’t much care for the post-conciliar liturgical reform ever since it came into effect in 1969, and a fair number of people who have been drawn to the traditional liturgy in recent years.
A great many longtime traditionalist Catholics feel they have been treated harshly through the years and have suffered for their devotion to the old rites, while never preferring the SSPX’s particular brand of breakaway traditionalism.
They find the older forms very beautiful, especially when it is done very well, and the priests and bishops who celebrate according to the traditional rites these days tend to be very careful in their celebrations.
In fact, the traditionalists who have stayed in the fold through thick and thin have a much better claim than do the SSPX to the “loyal opposition” label, and they’ve been hard done-by, especially in recent years.
After living through years of suspicion from Church authorities – often accompanied by more than a soupçon of something very like contempt – Catholics devoted to traditional forms of worship received a gift from Pope Benedict XVI.
Benedict passed a law, Summorum Pontificum, allowing any priest in good standing to use the older liturgical books without the permission of a bishop or other superior.
Benedict explicitly stated that ending liturgical controversy was the chief reason for his decision.
“It is,” Benedict wrote in a letter to the world’s bishops that accompanied Summorum Pontificum, “a matter of coming to an interior reconciliation in the heart of the Church.”
“[T]the two forms of the usage of the Roman Rite,” the old and the new, “can be mutually enriching,” he wrote.
A fair number of younger priests became interested in the older liturgical practices – the men trained in the old rites were by 2007 well past middle age – and a fair number of lay people said they discovered something beautiful and worthy in the more widely available rites.
Only fourteen years after Benedict’s liberalizing reforms, however, Pope Francis in 2022 declared his predecessor’s project of reconciliation and mutual enrichment a failure and abrogated Summorum Pontificum, imposing severe restrictions on traditional liturgy.
The reaction of the world’s bishops to Francis’s measures was varied, with some implementing them enthusiastically and a few others defiant, but most were flummoxed and sought to temporize.
When Francis died in 2025, the matter was still unresolved.
Pope Leo XIV, meanwhile, has lamented that the issue has tended for so many years to produce much more heat than light.
“It’s become the kind of issue that’s so polarized that people aren’t willing to listen to one another, oftentimes,” Leo told Crux Now in an interview last year.
RELATED: Pope Leo speaks to Crux’s Elise Ann Allen about the liturgy
More recently, in a March 2026 letter to French bishops, Leo said that healing the wounds caused by the controversy “will require a renewed way of looking at one another, marked by deeper understanding of differing sensibilities.”
He called on the bishops of France – where the SSPX exists alongside a good many traditionalist Catholics who have never been tempted into schism – to work together to seek solutions.
“May the Holy Spirit inspire you with concrete solutions that generously include those sincerely attached to the [old rites],” Leo wrote, “while respecting the liturgical orientations of the Second Vatican Council.”
In the wake of the illicit consecrations and the Vatican decree, meanwhile, several bishops have issued pastoral statements basically advising people to steer clear of SSPX chapels until this business sorts itself out.
Crux Now reported on one this weekend – the Diocese of Cubao – located in the heart of the Philippines’ most populous city and home to the country’s most prominent SSPX chapel.
RELATED: Philippine diocese eyes more Latin Masses after SSPX excommunication
Bishop Elias Ayuban Jr. of Cubao told us he is “discerning how to expand our liturgical services to those who adhere to Latin Masses.”
Ahead of the schismatic consecrations, Leo told journalists the Church is not going to let herself be held on tenterhooks over the breakaway society.
“Certainly,” he told journalists late last month, “division among Christians is always a painful point,” noting that the SSPX “refuse to accept certain fundamental elements of the Church, starting with several points from the Second Vatican Council.”
“If they make that choice,” the choice to go into schism, that is, “I am sorry,” Leo said, “but we must move forward.”
The way forward may be through a definitive end to the “liturgy wars” that have flared up again in recent years.
Follow Chris Altieri on X: @craltieri