AP News52%
Vatican cracks down on a traditionalist group by excommunicating its bishops 41%
By Nicole Winfield0%
7/2/2026, 7:32:57 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 20 faulty reasoning types, including In-Group Bias, Appeal to Emotion, and Availability Heuristic, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 26.8% saturation with 149 hits. Analysis detected 990 faulty-reasoning hits from 555 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 45.6% and a BS Rank of 41% (12,280 of 20,515 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 59.90% of the article peer group.
VATICAN CITY (AP) — The Vatican responded aggressively Thursday to a traditionalist group that consecrated bishops without the pope’s consent, declaring the Society of St.
Pius X had formally broken with the Catholic Church.
It also excommunicated its bishops and priests, and warned its faithful that they too face the harshest sanctions in the church.
By declaring a schism and extending sanctions to potentially thousands of Catholics, the Vatican’s doctrine office went above and beyond the minimum sanctions foreseen by the church’s canon law to respond to the consecrations Wednesday of four new bishops.
The society, known by its acronym SSPX, celebrates the ancient Latin Mass and opposes the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council.
Among other things, the 1960s meetings known as Vatican II revolutionized the church’s relations with other Christians, Jews and people of other faiths and allowed Mass to be celebrated in the vernacular rather than Latin.
The Vatican has previously described “adherence” to the SSPX as including those faithful who share in the schism by placing their loyalties to the society above the pope, and those who participate exclusively in SSPX Masses.
As a result, Thursday’s decree could potentially involve the excommunications of thousands of rank-and-file SSPX faithful who attend SSPX Masses.
The harshness of the response suggested that after trying to negotiate with the SSPX, the Vatican under Pope Leo XIV has had enough.
In a decree, the Vatican excommunicated the four new bishops and the two bishops who participated in the ceremony.
It declared the consecrations a “schismatic act” and declared the society itself had created a schism, or intentional rupture with the Catholic Church.
The sanctions, especially those targeting the priests, the faithful and the sacraments they can receive, were particularly harsh and reversed concessions the Vatican had granted the SSPX in recent years as part of its outreach to bring the group back under Rome’s wing.
The SSPX has accused the church of being rife with errors, such as modernism and liberalism, and that only it is upholding the true faith of Christ.
It has justified the consecrations, citing a “state of necessity” to minister to its faithful.
Only two of the original four bishops consecrated in 1988 are alive, and the SSPX has said they simply are too old to minister to all the SSPX faithful.
In his homily during the consecrations Wednesday, the Rev.
Davide Pagliarani, the SSPX superior, insisted the consecrations served Leo and the church.
“We are accused of not respecting the pope,” Pagliarani said.
“But it is precisely because we love the pope as the vicar of Christ, as the head of the church, that we don’t want to see the pope humiliated anymore, on the side of false shepherds representing false religions.”
One of the thousands of worshippers at Wednesday’s consecrations was Allison Isermann, a 24-year-old from St.
Marys, Kansas, who grew up as a society member and strongly defended its teaching in opposition to Vatican II, specifically its openness to those of other faiths.
“It is actually very anti-Catholic and anti-charitable to affirm others and their beliefs when it is our duty and our mission to actually convert and sanctify the world and to restore all things in Christ,” she said.
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Jamey Keaten contributed from Econe, Switzerland.
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