Vatican drops SSPX pilgrimage from official Jubilee 2025 calendar

The Vatican appears to have quietly removed all mention of the Society of St Pius X from the official Jubilee 2025 website calendar, despite earlier listings.

On 14 August 2025, The Catholic Herald was the first to report that the Vatican’s Jubilee 2025 calendar included the Priestly Fraternity of St Pius X (SSPX) pilgrimage scheduled for 21 August, which comprised a public Rosary at Colle Oppio, a Solemn High Mass, and a procession through the Holy Door of the Lateran Basilica. It was estimated that around 8,000 pilgrims took part in the procession.

However, that mention has now disappeared from the official Iubilaeum 2025 calendar. While all other pilgrimages past, present, and future remain listed, the SSPX pilgrimage is conspicuously absent.

Bishop Rino Fisichella, prefect of the Dicastery for Evangelisation and delegate for the Jubilee, had previously stated publicly: “The Jubilee belongs to the people; it is for all.”

Some critics and defenders of the Society have asked why this acceptance seems to have bypassed pilgrims from the SSPX, who no longer find evidence of their pilgrimage on the Jubilee website. According to SSPX DICI News, the implication of the omission is that Bishop Fisichella’s phrase might just as well have read: “I don’t see why anyone should be excluded – except the Society of St Pius X.”

The current Jubilee Year, which formally began on 24 December 2024 to coincide with the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, marks another Ordinary Jubilee in the Church’s tradition of renewal every 25 years.

The Society of St Pius X (SSPX), founded in 1970 by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre to preserve the Traditional Latin Mass, has intermittently participated in Jubilee pilgrimages despite its “canonically irregular” status. In 1975, just five years after its founding, the SSPX was permitted to send pilgrims to Rome to enter the major basilicas and pass through the Holy Doors as part of the Jubilee Year. This was before the 1988 Écône consecrations, which left Lefebvre and the four bishops he consecrated excommunicated.

The Society similarly took part in the Great Jubilee of 2000, during which SSPX pilgrims were allowed entry to the Holy Doors and to pray in sacred spaces in the Eternal City.

Most recently, for the 2016 Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy, Pope Francis granted SSPX members the faculty to “validly and licitly receive the sacramental absolution of their sins”, a privilege extended indefinitely beyond the Jubilee year.

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