Why the SSPX Keeps Repeating 1988

Some church fights have that stale smell to them, like parish coffee that's been sitting on the burner since the 7:30 Mass. This SSPX letter is one of those. New packaging, same bitterness.

The Society of St. Pius X has put out an open letter to Pope Leo XIV and the cardinals, along with a long profession of faith, while pressing ahead with plans to consecrate four bishops without papal approval. If that sounds familiar, it's because we've been here before. In 1988 Archbishop Lefebvre did essentially the same thing, and the whole thing tore open a wound that never quite healed.

I don't say that lightly. Catholics can disagree sharply about liturgy, church discipline, bad catechesis, sloppy preaching, ugly architecture, all of it. Lord knows I've stood in enough beige parish halls to understand why some people go hunting for incense and Latin. I get the ache for reverence. I do. What I don't get is how defiance keeps getting dressed up as guardianship.

Tradition isn't a private bunker

One line in the SSPX material caught my attention, the insistence that they are simply holding fast to the Church's tradition while others treat it like something outdated and endlessly adjustable. That's clever language because it lets them sound like the grown-ups in the room while implying Rome has become unreliable.

That move always bothers me.

Tradition in Catholic life isn't a museum wing that one group gets to lock from the inside. It's not a private inheritance you protect by cutting yourself off from your family. Tradition lives in the Church, with Peter, with bishops in communion with him, with saints who often endured confusion without appointing themselves the emergency replacement Magisterium.

A few years ago after RCIA, one man lingered behind and asked me if Vatican II had ruined everything. He had found some online videos, which is almost always how these conversations begin now, and he looked half embarrassed even asking it. We talked for forty minutes by the office door while our maintenance guy vacuumed around us like we were furniture. What struck me was this man's hunger for solidity. He wanted something firm under his feet. Fair enough. Most people do.

But certainty can become a narcotic. It can make a person prefer a smaller church where he always gets to be right.

The old temptation to save the Church from the Church

That's what this feels like to me. Not courage. Not clean fidelity. The old temptation to save the Church from the Church.

I've seen little versions of this in parishes for years. A choir director decides she alone understands sacred music and treats everyone else like barbarians. A pastor starts acting as if chancery oversight is persecution because someone asked about budgets. A lay movement becomes so convinced of its charism that ordinary parish life starts looking beneath it. Same spiritual instinct, just on different scales.

The SSPX says pressures are pushing the Church in every direction except the right one. Maybe so. The Church does get pushed around by fashion, politics, fear, ego, bureaucracy, all kinds of nonsense. On that point I won't pretend they're hallucinating.

Still, when your answer to confusion is another illicit episcopal consecration after Rome explicitly tells you not to do it, you've stopped sounding like a son speaking hard truths at the family table. You sound like a cousin revving his truck across the front lawn because nobody listened at Thanksgiving.

And yes, I know some Catholics will say Rome should have answered faster or handled dialogue better or shown more patience. Probably true in spots. Church administration has never been mistaken for Olympic sprinting. We can misplace paperwork with an elegance that deserves its own liturgical rank.

Even so, delay from Rome does not create a parallel right to make bishops on your own authority.

Reverence matters, communion matters more

This is where I think many ordinary Catholics feel torn. They look at irreverence in some corners of church life and think, well, maybe these traditionalist groups have a point. Sometimes they do have a point. Silence at Mass matters. Beauty matters. Doctrine matters. Priests should preach as if heaven and hell are not metaphors invented by nervous committee members.

I'm warm to all of that.

What I'm not warm to is turning valid concerns into permanent rebellion with lace cuffs on it.

Communion is not an optional accessory for Catholics who happen to like Gregorian chant less than you do. It's constitutive of the thing itself. To be Catholic is not merely to preserve old forms or quote older documents more confidently than everybody else at dinner. It is to remain inside the living body of the Church even when parts of that body annoy you terribly.

Frankly, that's holiness for most of us. Not dramatic gestures. Endurance.

I thought about this walking past our parish sacristy last night after weekday Mass. One altar server had left one shoe under a chair and someone had dripped candle wax on the floor again. There was nothing cinematic about it. Just ordinary Catholic messiness, human beings trying and failing and trying again inside one communion bigger than their preferences.

That's what I'd hate to lose here, this basic Catholic instinct that staying matters.

The SSPX wants to present itself as defending continuity against collapse. Maybe some people will find that heroic. To me it looks more like repeating an act that already wounded souls once before and then insisting the wound proves your sincerity.

At some point fidelity has to mean obedience even when obedience feels humiliating, slow, or painfully unsatisfying.

Otherwise every aggrieved faction becomes its own little Vatican with better vestments.

And then what exactly are we preserving?