Vatican issues final warning to breakaway traditionalist group attached to old Latin Mass

ROME: The Vatican on Wednesday issued a final warning to a breakaway group of traditionalist Catholics that their planned consecrations of bishops without papal consent constitute a schismatic act that incurs automatic excommunication.

Pope Leo XIV 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 Victor Manuel Fernandez.

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 Pope Leo's authority to date, as he seeks to heal divisions among traditionalist Catholics that worsened during Pope Francis's pontificate.

The SSPX, as the group is known, was founded in Econe, Switzerland, in 1970 in opposition to the modernising 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 still has no legal status in the Catholic Church today.

Yet the group has continued to grow in the decades since that original schismatic act, with schools, seminaries and parishes around the world and branches of priests, nuns and lay Catholics who are attached to the traditional Latin Mass.

The growth poses a real threat to Rome since it amounts to a parallel Catholic church. Today, it counts two bishops, 733 priests, 264 seminarians, 145 religious brothers, 88 oblates, and 250 religious sisters, representing 50 nationalities, according to SSPX statistics.

The current SSPX superior, Rev Davide Pagliarani, announced earlier this year that new bishops would be consecrated on July 1 to tend to the faithful, arguing that the SSPX's two remaining ageing bishops can no longer minister to such a global reality.

The Vatican invited Pagliarini for talks, but the same theological and practical problems that have prevented rapprochement for 50 years seemingly left the two sides at an impasse.

In recent comments on the SSPX website, Pagliarani reiterated the need for the new bishops. He expressed satisfaction that his announcement had triggered debate about what the SSPX considers to be a crisis afflicting the church, including religious pluralism and confusion about the faith.

"Now, what is at stake today is not an opinion, nor a sensibility, nor a preferential option, nor a particular nuance in the interpretation of a text, but the faith and morals that a Catholic must know, profess, and practise to save his soul and reach paradise," he said.

The looming consecrations, which would incur automatic excommunications, have created the first tangible crisis for Pope Leo, who has sought to pacify relations with Catholic traditionalists that worsened under Pope Francis after the Argentine pope cracked down on the spread of the old Latin Mass.

While the SSPX is out of communion with the Holy See, plenty of Catholic traditionalists who are loyal to Rome but attached to the old Mass are sympathetic to the SSPX's plight and are watching how Leo handles the challenge.