“A Sin of Extreme Gravity” — Pope Leo XIV Warns the SSPX Against Schism
The pope has addressed the breakaway society only twice, handing the talks to Cardinal Víctor Fernández rather than meeting its leaders. The morning he begged them to “turn back,” he named his second woman in a month to lead a Vatican office.
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On Tuesday, the Vatican released a letter Pope Leo XIV had signed the day before, on the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, and addressed to a man most Catholics in the pews have never heard of: Father Davide Pagliarani, superior general of the Society of Saint Pius X.
The message ran short. “Please turn back,” Leo wrote to him.
On Wednesday morning in Écône, Switzerland, the breakaway traditionalist society plans to consecrate four new bishops without the pope’s permission — an act the Vatican has already named a schism, and one that would strip the sacraments these Catholics treasure of their standing in Rome’s eyes.
Confessions absolved by the new bishops’ priests and marriages witnessed before them would, the letter warns, be rendered illicit and in some cases invalid.
Pagliarani answered the same day. Within hours of the Vatican posting the appeal, the superior general sent back a long letter of his own — unbending — asking the pope to take more time and reconsider.
This is only the second time Leo has spoken publicly about the standoff, and the restraint is itself the message.
The first came two weeks earlier, when reporters caught him outside his summer residence at Castel Gandolfo and asked about the planned consecrations. His answer carried no heat.
The Lefebvrists, he said, “refuse to accept certain fundamental elements of the church, starting with several points from the Second Vatican Council.” He then offered the words that have followed him since: “If they make that choice, I am sorry, but we must move forward.”
That phrase — we must move forward — is the key to everything Leo has done in the weeks around it.
He has refused to receive the Society’s leadership himself. The negotiations instead went to Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández — “Tucho,” the Argentine theologian who was Francis’s closest doctrinal confidant and whom Francis installed as prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Fernández offered Pagliarani a path forward: keep talking, on one condition — call off the consecrations first. Pagliarani refused, replying that the Society could not suspend its plans while it and Rome remained divided over the Council and the reforms that followed it.
A pope who built his early months in office on the patient work of listening chose not to spend that patience here. He delegated the conversation and kept his distance, and the distance tells you how he reads the men on the other side of it.
The letter itself is remarkably gentle toward the people it is trying to stop. Leo praises the Society’s “devotion to liturgical life, commitment to priestly formation, apostolic zeal and desire for fidelity to Tradition,” and observes that this devotion “has motivated the attentive and generous attitude that my Predecessors have consistently shown to you.”
He is right about that, and the history is worth sitting with. For the better part of two decades, Rome bent toward Écône. Benedict XVI lifted the excommunications of four SSPX bishops in January 2009, a gesture of reconciliation that collapsed within hours when Swedish television aired an interview in which one of those four, Richard Williamson, denied the Holocaust and insisted no Jews died in gas chambers.
The outrage was worldwide. Benedict, who had not known of Williamson’s views, spent much of the rest of his pontificate cleaning up after a kindness that detonated in his hands.
Francis tried another door. He gave SSPX priests the faculty to validly absolve sins during the Jubilee of Mercy and then made it permanent. In 2017, he authorized bishops to recognize the Society’s marriages as valid. Two very different popes shared a single instinct: hold the door open, absorb the insult, and wait for the Society to walk through it.
Leo’s patience for that posture has thinned. The door stays open — “the Church is open to a path of dialogue and understanding,” he writes — but he will not keep holding it while being told the house itself is the error.
Here is the contrast that makes this week clarifying.
On the same Tuesday morning the Vatican published his plea to the SSPX, Leo named Sister Alessandra Smerilli, a Salesian economist, to lead the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development — the office that carries forward the Church’s work for the poor, for migrants, for the wounded planet.
She is the second woman in a single month that he has placed at the head of a Vatican department, after he appointed Montse Alvarado, a 39-year-old laywoman, to head the Dicastery for Communication in early June. No pope had ever entrusted a dicastery to a woman before 2025, and now Leo XIV has done it twice in four weeks.
This is what moving forward looks like in practice, and it is exactly what the SSPX cannot abide. In a 28-page open letter to Leo and the College of Cardinals last week, the Society laid its objections out plainly.
It rejects the religious liberty taught at the Council. Synodality it dismisses as a Trojan horse for turning the Church into a “parliamentary” body subject to passing opinion. Catholic heads of state, the Society argues, retain a “right and duty” to favor the Church and suppress “false forms of worship.” The Council’s opening to the modern world is not a wrinkle they want ironed out; by their own account, it is the wound that severs them from Rome.
So the real divide was never about Latin, incense, or the beauty of the old rite, which the Church has never stopped honoring. It is about whether the Church may move at all. The Society wants the faith sealed at 1962, fortified against the century that came after.
Leo is building a Church that walks toward the poor through Sister Smerilli, hands its public voice to a laywoman, and reads the signs of the times instead of barricading itself against them.
The speed of that reply is worth pausing on.
When Paul wrote to the churches at Corinth and Rome, his letters crossed the Mediterranean over weeks or months, and a reply might take the better part of a year — the Apostle sometimes died before learning how his words had landed. Leo and Pagliarani traded letters across a living schism in less than a day, and all that acceleration closed none of the distance between them.
One line in the reply rewards a second look. “For a long time,” Pagliarani writes, “I had hoped to have the opportunity of meeting You in person, in order to express to You directly our sincere desire to serve the Church. Unfortunately, that opportunity has not presented itself.”
It reads as wounded humility, and it misleads.
A face-to-face audience would have changed nothing. The Society would still reject the validity of the Second Vatican Council, and no amount of warm conversation would make it grant that Leo holds the authority to stop Wednesday’s consecrations. The meeting Pagliarani mourns could not have bridged that gap; it would only have given it a handshake.
Which is what makes Wednesday’s rite so clarifying. As the liturgical books prescribe, the consecrating bishop will be asked aloud, before the congregation, whether he holds the apostolic mandate to ordain these men as bishops. He will presumably say that he does. He does not. He is lying.
It is the same false note Archbishop Lefebvre struck at Écône in 1988, and beneath the theology of emergency and the invocations of tradition, that single untrue answer is the entire issue.
The image Leo reaches for in the letter is ancient and precise. “To tear the seamless garment of Christ,” he writes, “is a sin of extreme gravity.” It is the robe the soldiers would not divide at the foot of the cross — the unity of the Body of Christ — and the pope is telling the Lefebvrists that the scissors are in their hands, not his.
By Wednesday we will likely know whether they use them. If the consecrations proceed, Leo will not have failed at mercy; mercy was extended for the better part of two decades and answered with an ultimatum. What he will have refused is to confuse unity with surrender — to pretend a Church can honor the Council and apologize for it in the same breath.
The Gospel is a summons to follow, and to follow is to move. Leo is moving the Church toward human dignity, toward the stranger at the border, toward the poor whom this pope keeps setting at its very center. The Society of Saint Pius X has been invited onto that road for half a century. The pope has made it plain that he intends to keep walking it, whether or not they decide to come.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with a pope who refuses to mistake nostalgia for fidelity — who understands that the Church is not a museum of 1962 but a living body called to walk toward the poor, the migrant, and the forgotten in every age.
In a moment when so much of public Catholicism has curdled into grievance and the worship of a vanished past, we remain rooted in a faith that moves — toward dignity, toward mercy, toward the world as it actually is, with all its wounds and all its hope.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are starving for something more than resentment masked as tradition.
They want courage, clarity, and a Gospel that asks something of them — and that hunger has rarely felt more urgent than it does this week.
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Thank you for the newsletter, Chris. I am glad Pope Leo is modernizing the Catholic Church. It’s good to see changes that are for these times. I will continue to pray for Pope Leo, and this nation.
Thank you, Christopher, for offering clarification around this issue. I, as do many others, I presume, trust your word in this forum, which I am particularly moved to repeat from today's Letters:
"At Letters from Leo, we stand with a pope who refuses to mistake nostalgia for fidelity — who understands that the Church is not a museum of 1962 but a living body called to walk toward the poor, the migrant, and the forgotten in every age."
Thank you. Sums it up beautifully.