Rome vs. SSPX, the true Catholic Church

The visionary Marcel Lefebvre, the founder of the traditional Catholic priestly fraternity of Saint Pius X (SSPX) in 1970, saw the future of the Catholic Church and was inspired by the Holy Spirit to do something. The Society he founded was dedicated to the preservation of the Latin Mass, and opposition to some of the Protestant innovations of Vatican II. By 1970, the pastoral Second Vatican Council (it was not an Ecumenical, dogmatic Council), had already unleashed a terrible revolution in Catholicism. Some today compare that revolution to the French Revolution in its destructive power that was not immediately apparent, although at that time anyone with “eyes” to see could have predicted what lay ahead. What happened after the closure of the Council on December 8, 1965, was tantamount to an atom bomb: Catholic seminaries, monasteries, and convents emptied out. The nuns that stayed in the Church ditched traditional habits and adopted secular dress as well as the social gospel of “inclusion” and “equity.” Liturgical life became a hodge podge of traditional and Protestant elements; church architecture was transformed as high altars morphed into Ikea kitchen tables; the Sacrifice of the Mass lost its mystical character and became a communal meal; from this concept, Communion in the hand developed.

Receiving the Body and Blood of Christ became a manufactured assembly – line process with lay people handing out the “meal” as if passing out peanut butter crackers. Some years passed, and then surveys revealed how millions of Catholics no longer believed in the Real Presence. Big shock. When you dumb down the Mass to a McDonalds-like meal celebrating “the people of God,” what you get is a shared snack devoid of mystery and reverence. Archbishop Lefebre, a true prophet, saw all of this coming. The Modernism that Pope Pius X condemned but was now being hailed as something inspired by the Holy Spirit, but a different Spirit than the One that inspired Lefebvre: clown Masses, puppet Masses, jazz Masses, Argentine Tango Masses, eucharistic ministers, altar girls, the end of Gregorian chant and its replacement with cringe sappy and sentimental hymns like, “Mary Did You Know?” Then came a deeper but just as important crisis, encouraged by Pope Francis’s Synodal Church, which was and continues to be a further radicalization of Vatican II – a Council without end – currently being championed by Pope Leo XIV who promised, come hell or high water, that he was going to continue the work of Francis. The revolutionary Synodal Church continues to elevate and promote clerics who support Jesuit James Martin’s School of Theology, making pro-LGBT theology the new Synodal standard: blessing homosexual couples without “really” blessing the relationship but blessing the “aura” around the relationship, further confusing an already confused laity who no longer believe in the Real Presence or pre-Synodal teachings on abortion, marriage and divorce, premarital sex, contraception, etcetera. It’s also true the laity don’t believe because the priests and bishops don’t believe any of these things themselves. They’ve led the way while persecuting traditional Catholics who want to preserve 2,000-year-old teachings. Consider how casual Catholicism is nowadays. You can go to Mass and receive “the symbolic snack” from an overweight lay woman with exposed cleavage the synodal Church calls a minister. Come to think of it, who needs a priest?

That old time joke, “Is the pope Catholic?” now has real meaning. The pope is Synodal, meaning he wants a new Church to supplant the old, when attitudes change. That is not Catholic according to tradition. Archbishop Lefebvre “saw” all of this coming down the pike. Perhaps he even had an inkling that the future Church under the direction of a quasi-Marxist pope (Robert Prevost) would attempt to blend with the world and its globalist robotics while championing criminal migrants and the overrunning of Europe with Islamists who would eventually seduce Catholic bishops into calling mosques sacred places and even to make room for Islamists in their churches and then call them holy spaces. Pope Leo will meet and cavort with Bad Bunny, Robert De Niro or Spike Lee and even go so far as to call the Hollywood film industry “a workshop of hope,” but he won’t meet with the SSPX. Instead, he has his Vatican henchman, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, head of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, and author of the booklet “Heal Me With Your Mouth” (which sexual organ His Eminence wants to heal is anybody’s guess), issue a formal statement regarding SSPX’s plan to consecrate four bishops on July 1, 2026, and indicating that such an action would be schismatic because it defied Rome. As CRISIS magazine noted recently, “If defying Rome is all you need for schism, then parts of the Church have been in schism for decades. In large, metropolitan cities in the United States, ‘LGBTQ+’ parishes have been openly flouting Church and papal teaching on sexuality for decades – without interference. The German Synodal Way has promoted heresy and radical forms of governance that are closer to schism than anything the SSPX has indulged in – without being disciplined. The Potemkin ‘Patriotic Church’ of the PRC appoints bishops without any regard to Rome whatsoever or public protest from the Vatican.”

Meanwhile, the SSPX continues to grow. The Society’s magnificent cathedral, The Immaculata in Kansas, was built with contributions from 40 countries and 50 states. Its religious orders, seminaries, and convents are booming, all of them traditional (no nuns on the bus; no nuns in hoop earrings and pant suits, and no priests who preform stunts around the altar). CRISIS concludes, “The SSPX keeps growing not because its priests and their lay adherents are horrible monsters lusting to foment schism but because they practice a recognizable form of the Catholic Faith as it has been known historically in the West…. More to the point, the late Hans Küng published a book denying papal infallibility but still died in communion with the Church. It is difficult to see how consecrating bishops without the Holy Father’s permission is worse than denying a solemnly defined dogma concerning papal authority.” In a famous 1969 radio broadcast, Pope Benedict XVI (years before becoming Pope), predicted that the Catholic Church would undergo a massive crisis and shrink significantly. He stated, “From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge—a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning.”

The Church that will become small is not the new Synodal Church, but the SSPX, the true Catholic Church under siege. Thom Nickels