Who are SSPX? Inside breakaway Catholic group excommunicated twice by Vatican
By Dan Kauna, July 4, 2026The Society of St Pius X (SSPX) is back in the headlines after the Vatican excommunicated its bishops for the second time in less than 40 years.
Here is what the group is and why Rome keeps clashing with it.
Founded in defiance, excommunicated once already
French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre founded the SSPX in Écône, Switzerland, in 1970. He rejected the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which introduced Mass in local languages and pushed for closer ties with other faiths.
The local bishop suppressed the society in 1975, but it carried on regardless. In 1988, Lefebvre consecrated four bishops without the Pope’s permission.
Under Catholic law, only the Pope can authorise such ordinations. The act triggered automatic excommunication for Lefebvre and the four bishops. Pope Benedict XVI lifted their excommunications in 2009, though the SSPX never regained official standing in the Church.
History repeats as Vatican excommunicates bishops again
On Wednesday, July 1, 2026, the SSPX consecrated four new bishops at the same Écône seminary, again without papal approval. Pope Leo XIV had personally appealed to the group beforehand, warning that the move would be a “sin of extreme gravity.” The SSPX went ahead anyway, citing a shortage of bishops able to ordain new priests.
The Vatican responded a day later. Its Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith declared all six bishops involved excommunicated and placed the SSPX in formal schism, a term for a group that rejects the Pope’s authority.
This time, the penalty went further than in 1988. It extended to SSPX priests and to lay Catholics who “formally adhere” to the society. Marriages and confessions conducted by SSPX clergy are now considered invalid.
Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, addressed the fallout directly. “We know that episcopal ordinations performed without a papal mandate break the unity of the Church and incur very specific sanctions,” he told journalists, adding that the sanction is “fundamentally, excommunication.”
He said he still hoped dialogue with the society could resume.
The SSPX has roughly 700 priests and 600,000 followers worldwide, a small fraction of the 1.4 billion-member Catholic Church. But its network of chapels and seminaries stretches across Europe, the United States and beyond, meaning the ruling could affect thousands of ordinary worshippers who attend its Masses.
For now, the SSPX remains outside the Catholic Church’s official structure, exactly where it started more than three decades ago.