When terms like “schism” and “excommunication” crop up in news stories about the Catholic Church, you start looking around for a momentous event that will change the course of history, like the Protestant Reformation in 1517 or the Great Schism in 1054 dividing the Western and Eastern churches. The Vatican’s likely censure of a tiny anti-modernist Catholic sect is none of those things. But the attendant furor is sparking a lot of schismatic-sounding declarations and eye-glazing arguments about the arcane details of Catholic liturgy.
The focus of the uproar is a breakaway faction based in Ecône, Switzerland, the Society of St. Pius X, which is devoted to the celebration of an outdated version of the Mass in Latin. Why is the group, named after Pope Pius X, a fiercely anti-liberal early-20th-century pontiff, causing such problems? Why should anyone care about such a recondite internal church dust-up?
One reason is that Leo has made unity a centerpiece of his pontificate. A formal split would undermine that goal. More broadly, the society’s hyper-traditionalism represents a troublesome current in the church, one that is channeling the politics of fear and resentment that are hallmarks of many populist movements. Ecclesial nostalgists and national chauvinists are following the same path: a shared focus on maintaining cultural and religious purity and restoring past glories of church and state.
The crisis is threatening to drag Leo into the polarizing conflicts tormenting so many societies just as he is emerging as the world’s most prominent moral voice on human rights, war, A.I., migrants and the poor.
The immediate cause of the crisis is a vow by the society to consecrate its own bishops, on Wednesday, a direct violation of papal authority. If the group goes ahead with the consecrations, the Vatican has said the new bishops and those who ordained them will incur excommunication, as happened under similar circumstances in 1988. The main source of suspense is whether Leo will extend the excommunication to all priests and even lay leaders in the society.
That would be a powerful signal that Rome has finally lost patience with a group that was born out of a rejection of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). Those reforms ended centuries of anti-Jewish teachings, sought reconciliation with Protestants and other churches and embraced religious liberty and engagement with the modern world. Vatican II also led to liturgical changes such as allowing Mass in the vernacular and having the priest face the congregation. The Society of St. Pius X says those changes undermine the faith.
What is really at play in the old Latin Mass issue is a wider objection to the reformist trajectory of the church that was given new life by Pope Francis. Francis, who died last year, was routinely accused by a wide range of conservative groups and leaders of embracing heresy and sowing doctrinal confusion. The impending split by the Latin Mass reactionaries is reigniting that fury among many right-wing Catholics. Sometimes they defend the Swiss society; sometimes they criticize it for hurting their own cause. But the crisis has generally become a way to second-guess or flat-out oppose the reforms of Vatican II.
Bishop Athanasius Schneider of Kazakhstan, a global leader among conservatives, has said that excommunicating the society would be “unjust” and that “the demand to accept Vatican II” and the church’s current path are “the root of the problem.” Leila Marie Lawler, a conservative commentator, called the society “almost a distraction.” “They could vanish, and the trouble we’re in will remain.”
Rather than leading to a narrow, canonical schism, the discontent threatens to become an enduring state of alienation marked by reflexive anger. It is an attitude that now threatens to end Leo’s honeymoon.
A driving force behind this opposition is nostalgia, or rather “nostalgism,” the unquestioning belief among some in the church that things were better in the past, that Catholics were holier and the Mass was truly sacred and celebrated in exquisite style by clerics in sumptuous vestments accompanied by the strains of lovely Renaissance music.
In fact, if today’s “trads” were sent back in time, they would discover that the old Mass was often a perfunctory affair celebrated in dodgy Latin with little participation by the faithful. Nor should it be forgotten that the Mass has undergone revisions over the past 2,000 years to adapt to social changes, such as the switch from Greek to Latin or the incorporation of Old Testament readings.
Linked to the traditionalist pining for a lost golden age is a reaction against a tectonic demographic shift in Catholicism. Yes, Christianity was born in the Middle East, but Catholicism grew up in Europe. “Europe is the faith and the faith is Europe,” the Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc wrote a century ago. No more. Thanks in large part to Vatican II, Catholicism has grown enormously, more than doubling from 653 million members in 1970 to 1.4 billion today. The vast majority of that growth has come in the Southern Hemisphere. Catholicism is far more African, more Asian, more Latin American than it is European.
That’s not the story that the traditionalists want to tell. For them, modernization has been the death knell of the church, because the reforms of Vatican II correlated with the sharp decline of practice in Europe and the West. Their faith is tethered to Western Christendom, which the numbers illustrate. Latin Masses celebrated by the society and those celebrated with Vatican approval are overwhelmingly confined to the United States and parts of Europe. But thanks to their base in the industrialized West, traditionalists have money, influence and visibility.
What will happen? Strong action by Leo could prompt a backlash from the right, but it could also divide it. Conservatives have so far tried to put the best spin possible on Leo’s year-old pontificate and may be loath to turn on a 70-year-old pope who could be around for a long time.
They may also view Leo’s censure as a warning to temper their own divisive instincts, isolating the radical traditionalists and leaving their movement to fade away. That’s the benefit of being pope. Modern democracies facing right-wing blood-and-soil insurgencies don’t always have the option of acting so decisively. You might like that if you agree with the man in charge.
David Gibson is the director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University and has covered the Vatican as a journalist for four decades.
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