What is the SSPX? A look at the controversial traditionalist Catholic group

A group of Carmelite nuns in Arlington, Texas (United States), announced this month that from now on they will be associated with the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X (FSSPX), a traditionalist group that is not in full communion with the Catholic Church and has a canonically irregular status.

The nuns have been at the center of considerable controversy since last year after the Diocese of Fort Worth launched an investigation into alleged sexual misconduct by the order’s reverend mother superior.

The nuns They defied a Vatican decree over the governance of their monastery and requested a restraining order against Bishop Michael Olson of Fort Worth. The nuns’ rejection of authority “is scandalous and tainted with the odor of schism,” Bishop Olson said last week.

Church leaders have sometimes argued the same thing about the SSPX, a controversial fraternity of priests known for its strict traditional celebration of the Latin Mass and its opposition to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

The group’s animating principle “is the priesthood, everything that concerns it and nothing more than what concerns it,” says the SSPX on your website. The group was founded in 1970 by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, a French prelate who was a sharp critic of many of the changes brought about by Vatican II.

In addition to modern revisions of the Mass, Lefebvre also opposed “ecumenism, a view that considered all religions as beneficial and valid, and collegiality, which insisted that the Church be governed primarily by the democratic process and episcopal conferences,” according to the group’s website.

The group runs priories, chapels and missions around the world, as well as seminaries. It has several hundred priests and a few hundred more seminarians.

Perhaps the group’s most controversial moment came in 1988, when Lefebvre consecrated four bishops in Écône, Switzerland, in explicit defiance of Pope John Paul II. Within hours, the Vatican declared that Lefebvre and the four bishops had incurred excommunication upon themselves.

In your motu proprio Ecclesia DeiJohn Paul II argued that “no one can remain faithful to Tradition if he breaks the ties and bonds with him to whom Christ himself, in the person of the Apostle Peter, entrusted the ministry of unity in his Church.”

Pope Benedict XVI lifted this excommunication in 2009, although he explained in a letter that the SSPX does not have canonical status and therefore “nor do its ministers exercise legitimate ministries in the Church.”

Pope Francis further expanded the group’s privileges, determining during the 2015-2016 Extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy that the confessions heard by SSPX priests were valid. He subsequently extended this order indefinitely.

In 2017, meanwhile, it approved a way for the group’s priests to validly witness marriages, giving diocesan bishops or other local ordinaries the ability to authorize such decisions.

Can Catholics attend a Mass celebrated by SSPX priests?

Some Catholics seek out Masses celebrated by the SSPX because of their solemnity and fidelity to earlier forms of the liturgy. But is this allowed by the Church?

Jimmy Akin, an apologist for Catholic Answers, told CNA that the SSPX “is not currently in schism.”

“In 1988, John Paul II ruled that the episcopal ordinations that society had carried out in disobedience to the Roman Pontiff implied in practice the rejection of the Roman primacy and, therefore, constituted a schismatic act,” he noted.

“This triggered the automatic penalty of excommunication for schism for the bishops involved and, in the words of John Paul II, for anyone who gave ‘formal adherence’ to the schism.”

The lifting of those excommunications by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009 “implies that the SSPX is no longer in schism, since schism carries automatic excommunication,” he said.

“If they were still in a state of schism, the excommunications could not have been lifted without the law immediately reimposing them. Therefore, they are no longer in schism.”

But the society’s priests are “celebrating Mass without proper permits, creating a canonically irregular situation,” Akin said.

He noted that the Code of Canon Law stipulates that Catholics “may participate in the Eucharistic sacrifice and receive holy communion in any Catholic rite.” Since the SSPX is using the rite of Mass approved in 1962, “the faithful can attend it and receive Holy Communion.”

“The fact that it is celebrated in a canonically irregular situation does not change this,” Akin said.

He noted that “every time a priest commits liturgical abuse, he creates a canonically irregular situation,” but that the Church “does not want lay people to have to judge which canonically irregular situations involve ‘too much’ departure from the law.”

In this way, “the right of the faithful to attend and receive Holy Communion in any Catholic rite is protected.”

Although the faithful are not strictly prohibited from attending SSPX Masses, Church leaders have in several cases warned Catholics not to do so except in serious circumstances.

“The Masses that they (SSPX) celebrate are also valid, but it is considered morally illicit for the faithful to participate in these Masses unless they are physically or morally prevented from participating in a Mass celebrated by a Catholic priest of good standing,” said Mons. Camille Perl, then secretary of the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei, in 1995.

A letter from Mons. Perl from 1998 noted that the “schismatic mentality” of the SSPX led the pontifical commission to “systematically discourage the faithful from attending Masses celebrated under the aegis of the Society of Saint Pius X.”

Translated and adapted by the ACI Prensa team. Originally published in CNA.