Is the SSPX a Cult?

The honest answer, worked through the way a serious person would work it through, by someone who spent his adolescence inside

The first thing people ask when they find out I wrote a memoir about growing up in the Society of Saint Pius X is usually some version of: “So… is it a cult?”

For a long time I danced around the answer. The word “cult” is a loaded word, people can’t help but think of—Jonestown, Waco, Heaven’s Gate, Scientology. I didn’t want to denigrate and demonize people I still care about  or hand my old community a strawman, an easy cartoon they could laugh off or get defensive about. The SSPX does have validly ordained priests and real Catholic sacraments. The Latin Mass they offer is the traditional one. Plenty of decent families found something genuine there.  Many are good citizens striving to raise their families to be good people There’s no living guru demanding absolute personal loyalty, and people can leave--if they’re willing to pay the price.

So I’d say things like, “It depends on how you define it.” I don’t say that anymore. Since writing Traddyland, I finally sat down and worked the question—using a clear framework, applied honestly—and once you stop hedging, the answer isn’t murky at all.

The word “cult” isn’t really a technical term. Scholars prefer things like “new religious movement” or, when the group is clearly harming people, “high-demand religion” or “totalist group.” “Cult” is misleading and too broad.  To answer honestly, you have to look past the label at what’s actually happening inside.

The most useful study I’ve found is Robert Jay Lifton’s model of ideological totalism from 1961. Lifton was a psychiatrist who interviewed survivors of Chinese Communist re-education camps. He identified eight features that mark a totalist group—whether people call it a cult, a movement, or something else. Here they are:

1.     Milieu control – locking down the information people can see.

2.     Mystical manipulation – everything that happens is secretly serving the group’s mission.

3.     Demand for purity – the world is split into pure and impure.

4.     Confession – required disclosure of thoughts and sins to the authorities.

5.     Sacred science – the group’s doctrine is beyond serious challenge.

6.     Loading the language – insider jargon that short-circuits thinking.

7.     Doctrine over person – the theory always wins over individual experience.

8.     Dispensing of existence – the group decides who’s in and who’s damned.

When one measures a community against these markers, you can begin to see where they fall on the spectrum.  Score high on most of these, and you’re looking at a totalist group. Any honest look at the SSPX has to consider these aspects.

I’ll take them one by one, using what I lived, what other survivors have put on the public record, and the evidence that’s piled up since my book Traddyland came out.

1. Milieu Control

This is control of the information environment. Outside media is filtered, restricted, or treated as dangerous. Isolation from outsiders, controlled schools, the works.

In the SSPX you hear constant teaching about the spiritual dangers of television, social media, the mainstream Catholic (Novus Ordo) Mass, friendships outside the Society, and secular schools. Homeschooling and boarding schools are the norm. People are actively discouraged from reading even official Catholic media from Rome.

In my own family, when we joined in the mid-1980s, the television disappeared, my siblings were homeschooled.  My sister and I were sent to St. Mary’s Academy in Kansas, a boarding school deliberately designed as a nine-month information bubble. Whatever the teachers told us about the world was the world.  We began to detach from old friends and family that took issue with the SSPX. After the illicit consecrations of four bishops in 1988, the SSPX strongly discouraged its parishioners from attending any Latin Mass that wasn’t offered by them or groups affiliated with them.   The newly created Fraternity of St. Peter were labeled “Judases” for leaving the SSPX after their schism.

Dr. Marisha McAuliffe described the exact same setup in her recent submission to the Victorian Parliament about the SSPX community in Hampton, near Melbourne, in the 1980s: TV gone, kids homeschooled, priests in the house, the outside world treated as a spiritual hazard.

2. Mystical Manipulation

This is the feeling that events in the world are secretly arranged to confirm the group’s mission. Coincidences become signs. History becomes a tidy story that always points the same way.

It’s partially present in the SSPX. Almost every crisis in the Church or the wider world gets folded into proof that Archbishop Lefebvre was right all along. Vatican II, the sexual revolution, the abuse scandals, collapsing vocations—they all become chapters in the same narrative: the SSPX is the remnant of the true Faith, and the world’s decay proves it.

The prologue of my book opens with my father’s Rasputin-and-Fatima story. It was a family origin myth: the atheist revolution of the twentieth century had been foretold by the Virgin Mary at Fatima in 1917, and my father’s role—and by extension mine—was to be a soldier in the final act of that revelation. That wasn’t casual religious talk. It was the frame through which every later event in our family life was interpreted.

3. Demand for Purity

The world is split into pure and impure, saved and damned, us and them. Members have to keep themselves pure in behavior, thoughts, clothing, associations.

This one is strong. Women especially carry a heavy load—dress codes, veils, intense chastity teaching, the sacralization of female modesty. The outside world is impure by definition.

In the spring of 1990, the headmaster at St. Mary’s, Fr. Ramon Angles, denounced my sister Marie by name from the pulpit during the packed Sunday High Mass. Her crime: attending an ordinary young-adult bonfire where there was beer and someone playing rock music on an acoustic guitar.  Me and my classmates were encouraged to shun our own friend.  His crime?  He simply decided to transfer out of St. Marys Academy.  I was encouraged to break up from my girlfriend simply because she hadn’t bought in to the SSPX worldview.  She was too “worldly.”

McAuliffe’s Australian submission includes her own parents, on the advice of SSPX priests, refusing to help her leave a violent first marriage—because she had left the movement, and in her mother’s words, “the situation was sent from God to punish me.”

4. Confession, Weaponized

Required disclosure of thoughts, sins, and doubts to group authorities, who then use that information for surveillance and control.

Confession is a common practice amongst faithful Catholic.  In the SSPX context it gets weaponized. More and more stories are coming about about priests routinely dig into sexual thoughts, obedience, loyalty to the community, and doubts about doctrine in ways that go beyond normal pastoral care.

In Chapter 20 of the book, I describe talking with Mr. Butler, a father in our community. His son Ryan had just been expelled from St. Mary’s. The Butlers had grown worried when Fr. Angles hired a man with a documented history of misconduct against children. They wrote an anonymous letter warning other parents and mailed it themselves so no one would see them. Within weeks, Ryan was expelled in retaliation.

When I asked Mr. Butler how Fr. Angles knew the letter came from them, he said: “Confession.” He and his wife had both confessed it to two separate SSPX priests. Shortly afterward, Fr. Angles knew it was them. And when he confronted Mr. Butler, he had details that weren’t even in the letter—things that could only have come from the confessional.

That’s not metaphorical. The seal of confession is one of the most inviolable protections in Catholic canon law. A priest can be automatically excommunicated for breaking it. According to Mr. Butler, two priests broke it independently in the same week to help their headmaster retaliate against a couple whose only offense was warning other parents about a documented offender working at their children’s school.

McAuliffe describes the same thing from the other side. Her abuser—a priest she calls Fr. Welsh at the Hampton chapel—used Confession to force her to confess the “sin” of the abuse he was committing against her. She was fifteen. She’s carried that particular shame for forty years.

5. Sacred Science

The group’s doctrine sits beyond serious question. Evidence that contradicts it is automatically invalid. Academic work that challenges it is compromised by definition.

This element is strongly present in the SSPX. Lefebvre’s positions and the movement’s founding ideas are treated as settled truth. They teach that Vatican II is inherently corrupting. Any Catholic scholarship that supports the Council is dismissed as a part of the Modernist “heresy.”

One night in the school cafeteria my senior year, Fr. Angles—the headmaster—casually explained to me that Hitler had been misunderstood. Once you got past the propaganda, he’d been a rather good man. He said it the way you’d read a weather report. That was the sacred science of my adolescence. There was no doctrinal ground on which to challenge him. I didn’t even have the categories.

Bishop Richard Williamson, who was the rector of the SSPX seminary in the United States during my years at St. Mary’s and later a consecrated bishop of the Society, was tried in Germany in 2010 for Holocaust denial. At the time he was one of the movement’s most senior figures. The sacred science at the highest levels included the deliberate rejection of documented twentieth-century history.

6. Loading the Language

The Society of St. Pius X develops its own dense insider vocabulary that short-circuits thought and marks who’s in and who’s out. Words do more emotional work than analytical work.

You hear them constantly: Traditional. Novus Ordo. Conciliar. Modernism. The Consecrations. Ecclesia Dei. Vatican II. The Great Apostasy. Spiritual danger. The crisis in the Church. Any insider can produce a whole paragraph in this vocabulary without thinking. Anyone who doesn’t use the words is immediately marked as not one of us.

Two examples from thousands. First, “Modernist.” The word originally came from a 1907 papal encyclical condemning specific early-twentieth-century theological positions. In the SSPX decades later it became a blanket insult for essentially any Catholic influenced by post-Vatican II thinking. Being called a Modernist wasn’t a technical description; it was a blanket judgment that you were no longer one of us and that whatever you said next could be safely ignored. My father used it about priests. My headmaster used it, Bishop Williamson used it about Pope John Paul II over dinner. It’s a word that ends conversation.

Second, the community’s phonetic joke for the mainstream Mass. The reformed Mass of 1970 is the Novus Ordo—literally “new order.” In the kitchens and around the dinner tables of my adolescence, it was the “Nervous Disorder.” The people who attended it were “Nervous Disorder Catholics.” The pun does exactly what Lifton described. You don’t need to argue that the 1970 reform was theologically deficient. You just say the phrase and the argument is over. Nine hundred million Catholics become simultaneously ridiculous and pitiable in rhetorical phrase. The tribal marker arrives as a joke, and the joke does work no actual argument could.

7. Doctrine Over Person

The SSPX’s theory of what should be happening always takes precedence over what any individual is actually experiencing. If your suffering doesn’t fit the doctrine, the problem is you.

This may be the most consequential of the eight, and it’s clearly present. People who report abuse are told their suffering is a cross to bear. Women in violent marriages are counseled to stay for their husbands’ souls. Kids who don’t fit the mold get shamed from the pulpit. People who leave are described as having lost the Faith, no matter what actually drove them out.

When McAuliffe finally reported her abuse, decades later, to a Society priest his first response—quoted word for word in her parliamentary filing—was: “What a wonderful gift from God! This cross is his will for you, a gift, as it were, so you can achieve a higher place in heaven.” That’s the doctrine, unmediated by the human being sitting in front of him. Lifton’s seventh criterion in a single sentence.

Michael Gonzalez, a former classmate of mine at St. Mary’s, took his own life at twenty-five. His family later said the debt they owed the Academy was quietly forgiven after his death—an arrangement described in the Kansas City Star and Church Militant’s April 2020 reporting as a hush-money arrangement. Michael’s alleged abuser has denied the claims through his attorney. The standing answer to what happened to boys like him was, and still is, “offer it up.”

8. Dispensing of Existence

The group decides who’s saved and who’s damned. Membership determines your ultimate standing. People who leave aren’t just wrong—they’re eternally lost.

“Outside the Church there is no salvation” is a legitimate historical Catholic doctrine. In the SSPX it’s interpreted narrowly enough that the nine hundred million mainstream Catholics attending ordinary Novus Ordo Masses on ordinary Sundays are treated, functionally, as damned. People who leave the movement are shunned. Families are often counseled to cut contact, sometimes for decades.

In Chapter 32 of the book, my mother was dying. Her only clear wish in her final lucid months was that the rupture between my siblings and me—encouraged by the SSPX priests in our community—be healed before she died. For a moment it was. Then, in the weeks after her funeral, my father, newly widowed, drove the wedges back in with the counsel and approval of those same priests. When I emailed the pastor of the SSPX parish in Syracuse, in writing, asking him to help mediate peace in the name of my mother’s dying wish, he declined. He backed the family member still loyal to the community over the truth and over family peace.

McAuliffe was disowned by her parents at twenty for leaving—on the explicit advice of SSPX priests in Melbourne, who told her mother that her continued presence in the house would be a spiritual danger to her siblings. She hasn’t seen most of her family in the thirty-three years since.

The verdict

Six of Lifton’s eight criteria are strongly present. One (mystical manipulation) is partially present. One (confession) is present in the ordinary Catholic sense and clearly weaponized in this specific setting.

By the framework, the SSPX is a totalist group.

That doesn’t mean it’s Jonestown or Scientology. It doesn’t mean it’s ordinary Roman Catholicism either. It’s a specific finding: on a six-of-eight test developed the SSPX has the same interior architecture.

Whether you want to call that a cult is up to you. The word carries more emotional freight than the finding itself. Steven Hassan, using his BITE model, would call it a cult without hesitation. Janja Lalich would probably call it a bounded-choice totalist group. People sympathetic to the movement will insist it’s simply traditional Catholicism. A careful person picks the phrase that fits the conversation and doesn’t insist on the emotionally loaded word when the technical description is clearer.

Why it matters

It matters because of what the mechanism actually produces. That’s on the record.

It’s in the Kansas Bureau of Investigation’s clergy-abuse inquiry. The diocesan phase finished in 2023 and identified 188 suspected clergy abusers across four dioceses. The SSPX phase is now in its seventh year and still open.

It’s in the June 2023 French court sentence given to Fr. Pierre de Maillard, an SSPX priest: twenty years for the rape and sexual assault of twenty-seven minors. Sixteen boys, eleven girls, all between twelve and fifteen. Some siblings. Some abused in their own parents’ homes. One of the harshest clerical sex-abuse sentences ever handed down in France. He’s not the only one. Fr. Christophe Roisnel is serving nineteen years for rape and torture. Fr. Arnaud Rostand has admitted a fifteen-year pattern of sexual misconduct with minors across France, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States.

Here is another dimension of the record worth mentioning, because it is one outsiders often miss when they think about the SSPX. The community's totalist formation — its isolation from mainstream civil society, its teaching that the American government and mainstream American culture had gone irretrievably astray — did not only produce religious dissenters. It produced political ones. In April of 1997, one of my own classmates at St. Mary's Academy, Richard Keyes, ended up caught inside the armed standoff between the Republic of Texas separatist militia and the Texas Rangers in the Davis Mountains — calling a former classmate of ours to ask him, in the phrase I recount in Chapter 36 of Traddyland, to*"bring the cavalry."*Ronald Griesacker, a member of the Montana Freemen, who has the longest standoff in FBI history, was a key member of the Kansas Freemen militia figure whose weekend musters took place in the fields around the same SSPX academy I attended, later became the subject of an ongoing investigation into whether he was John Doe #3 — the figure sighted alongside Timothy McVeigh in the days before the Oklahoma City bombing. McVeigh himself, according to reporting I detail in Traddyland, had passed through the Kansas SSPX area in the same window. None of these connections has been established in a court of law; the theories described in that portion of the book have not been confirmed by federal authorities. But the pattern — a totalist religious community whose formation produced, alongside priests who broke the seal of the confessional and bishops who denied the Holocaust, lay members who found their way into armed sovereign-citizen militia movements — is on the record, in Kansas, on the ground, across the two decades of my adolescence and young adulthood there.

It’s in McAuliffe’s thirty-page submission to the Victorian Parliament. It’s in the Church Militant exposé of April 2020. It’s in the Kansas City Star reporting on Fr. Angles and Michael Gonzalez.

And it’s happening in real time. This summer there was a deluge of harassment of Dr. Taylor Marshall and his family simply for declining to fully endorse the SSPX’s July 1st episcopal consecrations at Écône (which the Vatican formally declared schismatic on July 2nd). Marshall, a mainstream Catholic apologist who spent years publicly defending the SSPX, sat in front of a camera in late July and said what the treatment of his family amounted to. He called it uncharitable. He called it a spiritual problem inside the movement.

Christine Niles, the traditionalist Catholic journalist whose Forward Boldly podcast has covered SSPX abuse cases for years, has been documenting the same patterns far longer. Marshall is mainstream conservative. Niles is traditionalist-adjacent. I’m a former member writing from outside. We don’t share a lane. We share the same observation.

A last word

The SSPX is not a cult in the cartoon sense popular culture uses. It has real Catholic sacraments and validly ordained priests. The Latin Mass is authentically traditional. Many of its members are decent, faithful families who found a genuine spiritual home there. There’s no living founder demanding personal fealty. It’s not a criminal enterprise.

It is, however, a totalist religious movement in Lifton’s precise sense of the term.  I spent five years writing Traddyland to describe: adults who can’t stand an accurate description of themselves, families who shun their children who leave, priests who moved abused victims across continents rather than report them, communities where the abused are told to offer up their suffering instead of seeking help.

The problem is real. The scholarly term is totalist. The folk term is cult. Whether the difference between those two words matters to you probably depends on whether you’re still inside the movement or looking at it from outside.

What isn’t up for debate is what “Traddyland” produces. It produces the Kansas file. It produces the French verdicts. It produces the Australian submission. It produces the Michael Gonzalezes and the Marisha McAuliffes and the harassment of Taylor Marshall and the kids told at fourteen they weren’t wanted. It produces the anonymous review posted to my website last week by a family member hiding behind a pseudonym. It produces Richard Keyes, it produces Ronald Griesacker, it drives people to extremes.  In its extreme form, it produces twenty-seven children in a French court file.

Call it whatever you want.

The human wreckage doesn’t care about the noun.

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