The consequences of the Society of St Pius X carrying out episcopal ordinations (“consecrations”) without permission from the Pope were predictable in part, because in Canon Law this act carries an automatic penalty of excommunication for those directly involved. What was open to question was exactly if and how the Holy See would comment on the situation. This – or at least the first part of this – has now been revealed in a Decree and Explanatory Note from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), which reiterates and amplifies the legal implications in very strict terms.
It builds on two earlier documents: the response of Pope St John Paul II to the previous consecrations of bishops by the SSPX, back in 1988, and the clarification of that response by a body called the Pontifical Council for the Interpretation of Legislative Texts in 1996. This is important because the 1988 document from Pope St John Paul II did not come across as quite so severe as the 1996 interpretation took it to be. In 1988 we were told that Archbishop Lefebvre’s consecration of four bishops was a “schismatic act”, but it did not explicitly say that the SSPX was henceforth in a state of schism, and a succession of people, including Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos, who was given responsibility for these matters as prefect of the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei, denied that this was a schism.
Could it be that the consecrations tended towards schism, without actually taking the SSPX the full distance? After all, the SSPX did not claim that their bishops exercised jurisdiction, and continued to pray for the Pope in the Canon of the Mass: they did not set out to create a separate hierarchy, let alone one with their own pope. As time went on, the Holy See cooperated with the SSPX in dealing with problem priests who needed to be laicised; under Pope Francis they were explicitly given the jurisdiction needed to hear Confession both validly and licitly, and could officiate at marriages validly with the cooperation of the local bishop. This certainly does not look like schism, and the more stringent view of the Pontifical Council for the Interpretation of Legislative Texts began to look more like an isolated move in a complicated dance between the SSPX and the Holy See, in which the SSPX was gradually being drawn back into the orbit of the Pope.
Things are different this time round. The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith refers to the 1996 ruling and makes it part of its “Explanatory Note”. This Note tells us that the “sacred ministers belonging to the Society of Saint Pius X are in schism and must therefore be considered schismatics”. This schism is something individuals may be part of, or not, and the DDF tells us that clergy members of the SSPX can clearly be taken to be part of it, while the laity could be if they fulfil subjective and objective criteria. In simple terms, attending an SSPX Mass does not make you schismatic, but doing so exclusively with a “schismatic intention” would do so. A schismatic intention would involve a rejection of the authority of the Pope and of the magisterium of the Church, something that is certainly more than just a theoretical possibility for the more extreme lay adherents of the Society, while by no means applying to everyone in their congregations.
Further implications are that their Confessions and marriages will henceforth be invalid. This has, again, been made explicit in a way it was not in 1988. SSPX priests can validly hear the Confession of someone who is dying in a road accident, like other suspended priests, but not of those who simply prefer to confess to them rather than to a priest down the road.
The pastoral implications of this are extremely serious: there are going to be a great many people over the coming decades who will, rightly or wrongly, be concerned about the absolution of their sins and the validity of their marriages, and this is going to cause real harm. I’m not assigning blame here, just stating a fact, based on what happened between 1988 and Pope Francis’s decree dealing with these problems in 2015.
Another aspect of the DDF’s Note is provision for the reconciliation of SSPX clergy to the Holy See. This parallels, in a small way, provision made in 1988 for SSPX priests and seminarians who rejected the episcopal consecrations and formed the Priestly Fraternity of St Peter in communion with Rome. The detailed procedure for the reconciliation of these priests has now been published.
These documents seem to me a little chilly in the welcome they extend to the straying sheep. It would be good if they were to say, as Pope John Paul II said in 1988, that the desire for the Traditional Mass is a “rightful aspiration”, and that former SSPX priests will be guaranteed the right to continue to celebrate something whose value is fully recognised. The DDF is handicapped here, unfortunately, by Pope Francis’s Apostolic Letter Traditionis custodes, which is still in force, together with its accompanying Letter to Bishops, which tell us that the celebration of the Traditional Mass is harmful to the unity of the Church and therefore seek “to return to a unitary form of celebration”.
This claim and programme are, to put it mildly, problematic in a number of ways, and they certainly will not reassure SSPX priests who value the unity of the Church and also love the Traditional Mass that they will be welcomed home with great enthusiasm. The need for Pope Leo to clarify the position on the Traditional Mass has, in this delicate situation, gained a new urgency.
