The Wrong Defense of Tradition
Conservative Catholics are being misled into seeing the SSPX as a victim. The Society is not a victim. It is the architect of its own separation.
In the past three years, a particular story has been told to American conservative Catholics with rising volume and rising success. The story goes like this. The Latin Mass is being persecuted. The FBI has placed traditional Catholic parishes on its threat-vector list. Pope Francis cracked down on the old rite with the heaviest hand a pontiff has used in a generation. And in the middle of all of this — the steady, beleaguered remnant — stands the Society of St. Pius X, the breakaway Catholic society founded by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, holding the line on tradition while the rest of the Church drifts.
That story is being pushed by the SSPX’s own communications, by sympathetic accounts on conservative social media, and by a small but growing class of Catholic and right-coded influencers who believe — earnestly, often passionately — that to defend tradition is to defend the Society.
It is also, in its current form, a deception. And the false dilemma at its center has been quietly costing conservative Catholics their judgment, their relationships, and in some cases their place in the Church they claim to love.
Name the false dilemma
The story being sold gives you two options. Either you stand with the Society of St. Pius X as the last faithful remnant of pre-conciliar Catholicism, or you accept the modernist takeover of the post–Vatican II Church and lose everything you cherish about your faith. There is no third option. Tradition is the SSPX. The SSPX is tradition. Reject one, reject both.
I am telling you, from inside, that this is false on its face.
I was raised in the Society. I spent the formative years of my education at its boarding school in St. Mary’s, Kansas. My father invited Bishop Richard Williamson to say Mass at his union hall in Syracuse when I was twelve years old. I knew the men, the families, the institutions. I watched my father, over forty years, slide from devout Catholic to traditionalist to sedevacantist — the position that the man currently on the Chair of Peter is not really the Pope at all.
The SSPX did not produce, in my family, a stronger fidelity to Catholic tradition. It produced an exit from the Catholic Church.
That is what the trajectory actually delivers.
The record the narrative is asking you to ignore
In 1988, Archbishop Lefebvre, having signed an agreement with Cardinal Ratzinger and Pope John Paul II that would have regularized his community within the Church, broke that agreement and consecrated four bishops in defiance of the Pope. Rome declared all six men — Lefebvre, his co-consecrator, and the four new bishops — excommunicated ipso facto. By the very fact. No trial required. They were out of the Roman Catholic Church.
One of the four bishops Lefebvre consecrated that day was Bishop Richard Williamson — eventually expelled from the Society itself, for, among other things, denying the Holocaust on camera. Six years before the 1988 consecrations, in 1982, another SSPX-trained priest, Father Juan María Fernández Krohn, attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II with a bayonet at Fatima. Krohn had been ordained by Lefebvre. In Krohn’s mind, the Pope was the enemy. He had to be stopped.
Most recently, Father Ramón Ángles — my own headmaster at St. Mary’s Academy — was at the center of the 2020 reporting on the Society’s sexual abuse coverups.
This is not the record of a persecuted remnant. This is the record of an institution that has, with depressing consistency, produced precisely the figures the rest of the Catholic Church spends its time disavowing.
The Society’s victimhood narrative is a marketing strategy. It is not the truth.
What I am not saying
I am not saying that every SSPX parishioner is a Williamson, a Krohn, or an Ángles. They are not. Most SSPX faithful are devout, frightened, decent Catholics who feel abandoned by the institutional Church and have found, in the Society, a parish where the Mass feels reverent and the catechism feels solid. Their love of the old liturgy is real. Their concern for the Church is real. I share both.
I am saying that the narrative being sold to them — that the Society of St. Pius X is the only defense of that love and that concern — is false, and the cost of believing it is high.
The third option the narrative will not name
The Latin Mass is available in almost every American diocese, celebrated by priests in full communion with the Pope.
The Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest, the Personal Apostolic Administration of Saint John Mary Vianney, and many diocesan TLM communities exist precisely for Catholics who love the old rite and refuse to accept the false dilemma the SSPX has built around it. My wife and I attend one of those communities at our diocesan parish in Richmond. I love the Latin Mass. I am also in communion with Peter. There is no contradiction. There has never been one.
The Society’s pitch survives only by pretending that the third option does not exist. Look around. It does. It has existed the entire time.
What July 1 actually means
On July 1, 2026, the Society of St. Pius X will perform another set of illicit episcopal consecrations — four more bishops, in defiance of the man currently on the Chair of Peter. The same play it ran in 1988, with the same expected justification: that the modern Church has lost the Faith and that the Society alone can preserve it.
Some of you reading this will see those consecrations and feel a swell of sympathy for the brave men who are willing to lose communion with Rome rather than betray the Faith.
I would urge you, instead, to ask a harder question. What kind of community needs to be in chronic rupture with the Vicar of Christ to feel like it is being faithful? What does it say about the spiritual diagnosis at the center of the Society — that the cure has consistently been more separation, more bishops without papal mandate, more parishes outside the diocese, more talks with Rome broken — that for forty years it has produced not unity, not reconciliation, not even a stable peace, but only the next round of consecrations and the next generation of cradle traditionalists raised inside a parallel Church?
The doctrine the narrative wants you to forget
The Catechism teaches that schism is a sin against charity — against love itself, against the unity of Christ’s Body. It is not a sin against the New Mass, or against modernism, or against whatever else the SSPX’s defenders want to make it about. It is a sin against love. The defiance is the public moment. The conviction that precedes it — that one’s own reading of the Faith is so important that the visible unity of the Church can be sacrificed to it — is the actual sickness.
You can love the Latin Mass without sliding into schism. Millions of Catholics already do.
The Society of St. Pius X has built a marketing pitch on convincing you otherwise — convincing you that without them, your tradition is lost. That pitch has cost my family forty years and counting. It has cost me my father, who no longer accepts the Pope. It has cost me siblings who no longer accept me. It has cost a hundred thousand other families, in their own particular configurations of cost, the same kinds of losses.
Don’t let it cost yours.
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Louis Massett is the author of Traddyland" Memoir of a Radical Traditional Catholic .https://a.co/d/0gWUWq8P