Pope Leo's Excommunications: Background

I was out of the United States when Pope Leo XIV excommunicated the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), or specifically the bishops of that society who consecrated new bishops without Vatican approval. Leo declared the entirety of the SSPX community—priests and laity--to be in schism, i.e., separated from the universal Roman Catholic Church; there are options and procedures for them to return to full communion with the Church. Wikipedia’s entry on the Society of St. Pius makes for heavy reading, but it does summarize the players and relations of Rome with the SSPX since its founding in 1970 and down to Pope Leo’s most recent disciplinary action this summer.
 
WHAT ARE THE ROOTS OF THE SSPX?
 
Despite the documents of Vatican II [1962-1965] and the overwhelming votes of support by the bishops in attendance, in truth there were major disagreements in some quarters about the Council’s theological stances on ecumenism, religious liberty, and collegiality. Regarding ecumenism, Vatican II taught that the Trinitarian Baptism with water, i.e., “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” is valid in all Christian Churches—not just Roman Catholic ones--because we all share the same intent of being born again “by water and the Holy Spirit,” as the Bible puts it. Converts to Catholicism do not need to be rebaptized if they were baptized with the Trinitarian formula in, say, the Methodist Church. The Council’s teaching on closer relations to other non-Catholic Christians was a sea change from the days of my growing up, when our understanding of relations with other religions was summarized in the Latin phrase extra Ecclesiam nulla salus or “outside the [Catholic] Church there is no salvation.  
 
There was a similar reaction by a minority of bishops on the question of religious liberty discussed at Vatican II. The bottom line: It was during discussion of this question that an American theologian, the Jesuit Father John Courtney Murray, [1904-1967], was chosen to articulate the principle that “the church could and should support religious freedom in secular states.” Put another way, Murray argued that a human being has an innate right to choose any religion he wishes—or none—without coercion by the state. This is another Vatican II teaching that seems like a statement of the obvious, but in its long history the Catholic Church had held that its mandate called for the establishment and maintenance of Christendom across the globe; the state would be the subservient protector of the Church. Those who opposed Murray at the Council recalled that Martin Luther’s break from Roman Catholicism had been protected by the German princes of the sixteenth century. Two years before the Council, John F. Kennedy ran for president of the United States, pledging that he would not be unduly swayed by his Catholic faith in matters of U.S. governance. To the old guard in Rome, this was an untenable situation.
 
The third point of contention among the Council fathers was collegiality, or shared responsibility. Less than a century before, in 1870 the Council Vatican I had declared the doctrine of the Infallibility of the Pope in matters of faith and morals. After 1870 there were many who held that councils would be irrelevant in the future, because the popes enjoyed full authority. But by the time of Vatican II, church scholars were making the argument that the early church in the New Testament was led by the college of the apostles with Peter as their head. Bishops at Vatican II supported more communion with the pope in the spiritual mission of the Church. Pope Paul VI, who succeeded John XXIII in 1963, would during his reign inaugurate some form of regular consultation or synods with bishops from around the world. The traditionalists at the Vatican II Council saw broader input by the bishops as a threat to the absolute doctrine of Infallibility of the Pope.
 
For those of you with a historical sense of irony, it is worth noting that U.S. bishops were strong practitioners of synod government, going back to the 1840’s. In the 1880’s our bishops actually mandated that every Catholic parish have a Catholic school. It was a brilliant concept, debated after Vatican I. Clearly our bishops felt independent enough to establish bold initiatives collectively. However, in 2020 when Pope Francis called for the first steps to “synodality” in which bishops and pastors and laity would gather to discuss the ministry of the local churches, there was an episcopal disinterest, and U.S. Catholics missed their opportunity.
 
BUT THERE WAS MORE TO IT THAN THAT
 
The Council Vatican II has been blamed for all sorts of problems in the Church since 1965. One major miscue, maybe the major miscue, was the absence of a critical reading of the sixteen documents when they were released. As Catholics, we didn’t take time to read the fine print, and we just went full speed into changes we wanted. Speaking for myself, I was a high school seminary senior in 1965. I was generally aware that the Council had relaxed some old prohibitions and obligations and added new dimensions to worship and religious life.
 
But the introduction of the actual Council directives and processing them into the life of the Church took years and is still quite incomplete. Our seminary professors were hit with the new spirit of the Council like the rest of us, and few were prepared for it. The Mass Missal—the official ritual approved by Pope Paul on Vatican II principles—was not ready until 1970. The seminary Masses in my junior college years [1966-1968] were a mix of the old and the new—Latin Gregorian Chant, Renaissance polyphony, and of course the new guitar/folk Masses. I was in the choir and very sad to see the Latin polyphony go, but still, I learned to play the guitar, bought a Martin 12-string, and played Saturday nights at Mass at Arlington Cemetery and countless other D.C. locales till my ordination in 1974. I never had formal instruction in “saying Mass,” either. My religious superior said, “You’ve seen enough of them.” My generations of priests, and probably the next one, were trained to do whatever was necessary to boost the energy of the Church. Did we go overboard at times and roughshod the devotions and manners that many people still found [and find] precious? I’m afraid we were guilty on that count. 
 
Today’s Mass, as celebrated in most parishes in the U.S., is a curious hybrid that is long overdue for a reexamination by the principles of the Council. It is not an exaggeration to say that the missalette companies have as much influence as the official church texts, particularly in music. Our Mass today is doctrinally correct, of course, but there are guidelines of Vatican II’s Sacrosanctum Concilium that get routinely trampled in the rush. People attend Mass today with good will and religious loyalty, but are they emotionally and spiritually drawn into the central mysteries of the Eucharist?  Pope Leo has indicated that he wants to see Church worship reformed uniformly, and by the Vatican II directives. I doubt that his wishes will be set aside in the fashion that Pope Francis’ pastoral directives on synodality were. See his recent address on Church Mass music given August 19, 2026. Pope Leo is quite serious about this.
 
My thinking is that Leo’s excommunication of the SSPX bishops, and his declaration that all SSPX adherents, priests and laypersons, are “in schism” or formal separation from the Church of Rome is not his last word on the subject. I believe that he genuinely does not want to lose the artistic, historical, and devotional attraction of the older rite. The Vatican II document Sacrosanctum Concilium goes to considerable lengths to preserve the best of this past while extending more opportunities for all the attending faithful to actively engage in the ultimate prayer that is the celebration of the Eucharist. This may win back the SSPX-inclined while demonstrating Pope Leo’s effort to achieve unity in the Church.
 
THE “EMPTY CHAIR” BRETHREN
 
However, there is another factor to consider. There are clergy and laity who believe that Vatican II itself, in its entirety, should never have been convoked. Going further, they are convinced that the Church, dating to the election of Pope John XXIII in 1958, fell into grave error with the election of Angelo Roncalli, Pope John XXIII. There are individuals and groups who hold that there has been no valid pope since the death of Pius XII [r. 1939-1958], that all the popes since then have embraced accommodations to modern society versus the true teachings of the Church, have gone too far in accommodating other religions in dialogue, and have destroyed the “true Mass” or 1570 Tridentine Mass of Pius V in favor of the Novus Order [“new rite”], the Mass we celebrate in our churches. Those who hold to the idea that the Chair of Peter has been vacant all these years are called “sedevacanists,” from the Latin “the chair is empty.” I follow a Facebook site called “Sedevacanists Society.” Sedevacanists present a different sort of problem. While their literature is aggressive, there is a sadness, too, because sedevacanists lament that they have nowhere to go. The SSPX is not sedevacanist because it does not deny the office of the Roman Catholic papacy, even if it does not presently obey the papacy. Sedevacanists present a different challenge altogether. I pray for them.
 
In a future post I will take Vatican II directives from Sacrosantum Concilium and lay them side by side with typical American practice. at Mass.
A copy of the Vatican II teaching on liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, is available on this link.