Traddyland Group

On May 5, 1988, Archbishop Lefebvre signed an accord with Rome that gave him what he had asked for. Weeks later, he reneged. Thirty-eight years on, the Society of St. Pius X is running the same play — and the same excuses no longer add up.

On May 5, 1988, in the offices of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre placed his signature on a Protocol of Agreement with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. The Protocol, negotiated at length and with the personal involvement of Pope John Paul II, was straightforward. Rome would grant Lefebvre what he had spent nearly two decades asking for: permission to consecrate a successor bishop to continue the ordinations of his Society. The Traditional Latin Mass would be preserved. A canonical structure — what would eventually take the form of an Apostolic Administration or a Personal Prelature — would be erected for the faithful attached to the Society. The rupture that had grown between Rome and Écône since 1970 would be stitched.

Lefebvre took the pen. He signed.

He also, three weeks later, took it back.

On June 30, 1988, less than two months after the Protocol, Lefebvre stood in the chapel of the Society's seminary in Écône, Switzerland, and consecrated not one but four of his priests as bishops — Bernard Fellay, Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, Alfonso de Galarreta, and my family's own former pastor, Fr. Richard Williamson — without the mandate of the Pope who had just personally agreed to give him one.

The next day, Rome responded. Under canon 1382 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law, all six men — Lefebvre, his co-consecrator Bishop Antônio de Castro Mayer, and the four new bishops — were declared excommunicated ipso facto. By the very fact. No trial was required. They were no longer in canonical communion with the Roman Catholic Church.

This is the founding act of the world I grew up inside. I was fourteen years old. My parents wept for weeks that summer. In the household I lived in, it was a wound Rome had inflicted on Lefebvre. In the years since I have come to see it was a wound Lefebvre inflicted on himself — and, by extension, on the four generations of traditionalist Catholic families who have inherited the wreckage.

What Lefebvre had actually decided

We know now what Lefebvre thought in the weeks around his signing. He wrote to Fr. Williamson, in letters that would later surface, that he had gone into the Rome negotiations "with a faint hope that these churchmen had changed. They have not changed, except for the worse… I do not think one can say that Rome has not lost the Faith. As for an eventual excommunication, its disagreeableness diminishes with time."

Read that letter carefully.

Lefebvre had already decided, before he sat down across from Cardinal Ratzinger, that the men on the other side of the table had "lost the Faith." He had already decided that any excommunication his actions provoked would grow less disagreeable "with time." He was not, in the theological sense of the word, negotiating. He was performing a formality.

The pen he held on May 5, 1988 was not extended in good faith. It was extended, by his own testimony to Williamson, as an act of political optics — the appearance of trying — before an act of separation he had already resolved to commit.

Twenty days later, he withdrew. His stated reason was that the Vatican had not committed a firm date for the consecration Rome had promised, and that the delay was evidence Rome could not be trusted. He announced he would consecrate his successors himself, on his own timeline. The four consecrations followed on June 30.

"We couldn't trust Rome"

The phrase that came to dominate the Society's defense of what Lefebvre did that summer — the phrase I heard from my father, from Bishop Williamson at our dinner table, from every SSPX apologist over the four decades since — was some version of this: we couldn't trust Rome.

I want to sit with that phrase for a moment, because it is not a Catholic phrase.

Rome is not a corporation. Rome is not a competitor. Rome is the See of Peter — the visible institutional embodiment of the promise Christ made in Matthew 16 that the gates of Hell would not prevail against the Church He founded. To be Catholic is not, in the ordinary human sense, to "trust" the men in Rome. It is to trust the promise underneath the men. The Holy Spirit protects the Church even when her ministers err. The Communion of Saints holds even when a particular cardinal is a scoundrel. Christ's promise is what makes the Church the Church, and that promise does not become negotiable when a Council or a pontiff produces work that a bishop, however well-meaning, disagrees with.

The bishop who says "I cannot trust Rome" has, in the deepest theological sense, said something almost prior to Catholicism. He has said that his own judgment of the men in Rome is a firmer ground of communion than the promise of Christ to the Church. He has, in strict terms, ceased to hold the Catholic position on Peter and moved to a position more familiar in the Protestant tradition — that the visible Church can be right or wrong depending on how it lines up with what the observer already believes.

When I was fifteen years old, in the house I grew up in, I could not name this. But I felt it. In the days after the consecrations, as my parents ran through every apologetic they could find for what Lefebvre had done, one sentence from Brother Jeremy in my eighth-grade religion classroom in the spring of 1988 kept surfacing in me. Schism, Brother Jeremy had told our thirteen-year-old class four months earlier, was a sin against charity — against love itself, against the unity of Christ's Body. To be Catholic, he said, meant to accept the governance of the Pope even when you thought the Pope was wrong. He quoted Matthew 16. Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.

A week after Brother Jeremy said this, he vanished from campus. A family had complained. The Society did not tolerate the diagnosis.

But the diagnosis was correct. The "we couldn't trust Rome" position was not a defense of the Faith. It was a departure from the Faith. It was the elevation of a bishop's private judgment over the Holy Spirit's guidance of the Church He promised to protect. It was, at its root, an act of pride dressed as an act of fidelity.

Charity is the missing word

The Catechism defines schism as "the refusal of submission to the Roman Pontiff or of communion with the members of the Church subject to him." That is the canonical definition. But what schism actually is, in the moral order, is a specific failure of charity.

Consider what charity would have required of Lefebvre in the weeks after May 5, 1988.

Charity would have said: Rome has agreed to give me what I asked for. I signed the Protocol in good faith. If Rome is slow, I will be patient. If Rome hedges, I will insist — through letters, through emissaries, through the ordinary means of ecclesiastical patience. I will not, having received a yes, turn it into a no because Rome's yes did not come on my schedule.

Charity would have said: the men across the table from me, whatever I think of their theology, are my brothers in the priesthood. I will treat them as men capable of good faith unless they prove otherwise. I will not, having spent my career decrying uncharitable readings of the Church, offer an uncharitable reading of Rome the moment Rome does what I asked.

Charity would have said: I am 82 years old. I will one day, and soon, face Christ. When I meet Him, I would rather explain a delay than an excommunication.

None of these considerations governed the summer of 1988. What governed was Lefebvre's private conviction, months before his own consecrations, that Rome had "lost the Faith." That conviction — expressed in the letter to Williamson — was a conviction against charity. It was a decision that the men in Rome could not be trusted, could not be believed, could not be received. It presumed bad faith on the part of a Pope who had just personally agreed to give the Society what it had spent twenty years demanding.

This is the founding uncharity of the Society of St. Pius X. Everything since has been an extension of it.

Thirty-eight years later, the same play

On July 1, 2026, the Society will consecrate four more bishops without the Pope's mandate. The justification, from the Society's communications and from its defenders on social media, will be some version of what was said in 1988. Rome is untrustworthy. The Faith is at stake. Necessity demands it.

Ask, this time, what has actually changed since 1988.

John Paul II — the Pope Lefebvre could not trust — has been canonized. The Traditional Latin Mass has been recovered across dioceses that had lost it. Benedict XVI, in Summorum Pontificum, explicitly stated that the Traditional Mass had never been abrogated and belonged to the treasury of the whole Church. Confessions heard by SSPX priests have been declared valid by Pope Francis, and marriages celebrated in Society chapels have been juridically regularized. Overtures for canonical reconciliation have been extended by Rome, negotiated in Rome, and left on the table by the Society, not by the Pope.

In March 2022, Pope Francis consecrated Russia and Ukraine to the Immaculate Heart of Mary — the precise act Our Lady of Fatima had asked for, and the act the SSPX had insisted for four decades was the litmus test of a Pope who took Fatima seriously.

Every one of these acts was Rome, so to speak, saying yes.

And every one of them has been received by the Society, and by its defenders, the way Rome's yes was received in the summer of 1988: as insufficient, as suspect, as further evidence that Rome cannot be trusted. Francis, the Society's harder voices concluded, was not really the Pope, so his consecration of Russia was not really the consecration, so the litmus test was not really passed. Bergoglio, my own father decided, was an impostor. The forty years of prayers were not answered because the answer, when it came, was not one my father would receive.

This is what thirty-eight years of institutional uncharity looks like. It is not that Rome has never given the Society what it asked. It is that the Society, having asked, has been unable to receive.

There has never been a justification

There has never been a justification for the illicit consecrations of 1988. Lefebvre's own letter to Williamson establishes that he approached the accord in bad faith and used the delay as pretext for an act he had decided upon before he signed. That is the historical record.

There is even less of a justification for the illicit consecrations of 2026.

The Faith has not fallen. The gates of Hell have not prevailed. Rome has, imperfectly but really, done many of the things the Society said Rome would never do. The Latin Mass is offered legally in ordinary dioceses on every continent. The Society's sacraments have, in most respects, been juridically recognized. Fatima has been answered. And still the Society will, next month, consecrate four more bishops without a pontifical mandate — because to receive Rome's yes would be to admit that the ground of the last thirty-eight years was never really there.

What sits under 1988 and under 2026 is not the state of necessity. What sits under both is a founding refusal — dressed as fidelity, defended as necessity, sustained by a thousand daily whataboutisms — to believe that the Holy Spirit is still active in the Church Christ promised to protect.

Ask, of any bishop who tells you he cannot trust Rome, the harder question.

Do you trust Christ? And if you do, why can you not receive the Church He founded — the one He said the gates of Hell would not prevail against — from the hands of the men He has permitted to govern her in your lifetime, even when those men are imperfect, even when their yes comes on a timeline that is not yours, even when receiving requires you to lay down a certainty you had spent your life sharpening?

That is the Catholic question.

Lefebvre could not answer it in 1988. The Society, thirty-eight years later, still cannot.

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Louis Massett is the author of Traddyland*, Memoir of a Radical Traditional Catholics. Read the book on Amazon: https://a.co/d/008LS54r