Vatican excommunicates SSPX after unauthorized bishop consecrations

The Vatican excommunicated the Society of Saint Pius X after the group consecrated four new bishops without papal approval in Écône, Switzerland, a move that put about 600,000 followers back under one of the Church’s harshest penalties. The ceremony drew an estimated 15,500 people and their children, underscoring how deeply the breakaway traditionalist movement still reaches beyond a small fringe.

For ordinary followers, the immediate impact is sacramental and personal, not just bureaucratic. The Vatican called the consecrations schismatic, said the bishops and priests are excommunicated, and warned that faithful who formally adhere to the group are also excommunicated. It also said SSPX priests, about 750 by Vatican count, cannot validly administer confession and marriage, leaving people who rely on the group’s chapels in a precarious position over whether their marriages and absolutions are recognized by Rome.

The Society of Saint Pius X, based at its General House in Menzingen, Switzerland, was founded in 1970 by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre as a reaction to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Its latest confrontation with Rome follows a familiar pattern. On June 30, 1988, Lefebvre unlawfully ordained four bishops, prompting Pope John Paul II to issue Ecclesia Dei on July 2, 1988, after the Vatican said the act frustrated efforts to keep the Priestly Fraternity of St. Pius X in full communion.

The Vatican later said those bishops incurred latae sententiae excommunication, formally declared on July 1, 1988. Pope Benedict XVI remitted that excommunication on January 21, 2009, but the Holy See said the group still had no canonical recognition and that its ministers did not exercise legitimate ministry in the Church. Benedict later said the remission stirred unusually heated controversy, in part because of the Williamson affair and broader backlash over the group’s relationship to Jews and the Holocaust.

The latest sanctions also arrive as SSPX presents itself as a much larger worldwide force than in earlier decades. The group said in 2025 that it had 733 priests, 264 seminarians, 144 brothers, 88 oblates and 250 sisters. That growth, paired with the size of the Écône ceremony, shows why the Vatican has treated the movement not as a local disciplinary problem but as a global challenge to papal authority, Vatican II and the Church’s control over who may minister in its name.