---
title: "Vatican Excommunicates Breakaway Traditionalist Bishops After Defiant Ordinations"
description: "The Society of St. Pius X, an ultratraditionalist Catholic movement, ordained four new bishops in Switzerland without the pope's approval — a defiant act that, under church law, brought automatic excommunication and deepened the group's rupture with Rome. The Vatican, which had warned against the ceremony, declared it a schismatic act."
category: "World"
category_url: https://herald.la/category/world
author: "Naomi Fields"
published: 2026-07-02T11:44:15.000Z
updated: 2026-07-02T11:44:15.000Z
canonical: https://herald.la/article/vatican-excommunicates-breakaway-traditionalist-bishops-after-defiant-ordination
tags: ["Vatican", "Catholic Church", "SSPX", "excommunication", "religion"]
---
# Vatican Excommunicates Breakaway Traditionalist Bishops After Defiant Ordinations

The Society of St. Pius X, an ultratraditionalist Catholic movement, ordained four new bishops in Switzerland without the pope's approval — a defiant act that, under church law, brought automatic excommunication and deepened the group's rupture with Rome. The Vatican, which had warned against the ceremony, declared it a schismatic act.

One of the Catholic Church's most persistent internal fractures has widened. The Society of St. Pius X, a traditionalist group long at odds with Rome, ordained four bishops without papal permission over the weekend — an act the Vatican had explicitly warned would be treated as schism.

## The ceremony

The consecrations took place on July 1 at the society's seminary in Écône, Switzerland, before a large open-air crowd — some 17,000 people, by the accounts of Catholic outlets, [as the National Catholic Reporter described](https://www.ncronline.org/vatican/vatican-news/defying-pope-and-facing-excommunication-sspx-consecrates-bishops-huge-outdoor). The four new bishops — Marc Hanappier, Michel Poinsinet de Sivry, Michael Goldade and Pascal Schreiber — were ordained by existing society bishops, [America Magazine reported](https://www.americamagazine.org/vatican-dispatch/2026/07/01/sspx-ordains-four-new-bishops-in-defiance-of-pope-leo-and-the-vatican/).

## Why it triggers excommunication

In the Catholic Church, only the pope may authorize the ordination of a bishop. Consecrating one without that mandate is among the gravest offenses in canon law, and it carries automatic excommunication — a penalty incurred by the act itself, for both the bishops who perform the ordination and those who receive it. By proceeding, the society's leaders and their new bishops fell under that penalty, and the Vatican has said the ordinations amount to a schismatic act that ruptures communion with the church.

This is not the first time. The society was founded by the French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who in 1988 consecrated four bishops in defiance of Pope John Paul II and was excommunicated for it — the event that pushed the group into open breach with Rome. Pope Benedict XVI lifted the excommunications of those bishops in 2009 in an effort at reconciliation, but full unity was never restored. This weekend's ordinations reopen the wound.

## Rome's response

The current pope, Leo XIV, had appealed to the society to call off the ceremony, and Vatican officials made clear beforehand that going ahead would bring canonical consequences. Afterward, the Vatican's secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, expressed "deep sorrow" over the ordinations, [Crux reported](https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2026/07/parolin-deep-sorrow-over-sspx-ordinations). Church officials framed the act as a wound to Catholic unity rather than a step the society was free to take on its own authority.

## What it means

At issue is a long-running divide over the Second Vatican Council, the 1960s reforms that reshaped Catholic worship and the church's relationship with the modern world and other faiths. The society has never accepted key elements of those changes, and it regards its mission as preserving an older tradition. Rome, for its part, insists that no such disagreement justifies ordaining bishops outside the pope's authority.

For the roughly 1.4 billion-member church, the society remains a small movement. But the dispute touches something central — who holds authority in the church, and on what terms a breakaway can claim to remain Catholic. With the bishops now excommunicated and the society showing no sign of retreat, the path back to reconciliation, difficult before, looks harder still.

## Sources

- [SSPX ordains four new bishops in defiance of Pope Leo and the Vatican](https://www.americamagazine.org/vatican-dispatch/2026/07/01/sspx-ordains-four-new-bishops-in-defiance-of-pope-leo-and-the-vatican/)
- [Defying pope and facing excommunication, SSPX consecrates bishops at huge outdoor Mass](https://www.ncronline.org/vatican/vatican-news/defying-pope-and-facing-excommunication-sspx-consecrates-bishops-huge-outdoor)
- [Parolin: 'Deep sorrow' over SSPX ordinations](https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2026/07/parolin-deep-sorrow-over-sspx-ordinations)