A very postmodern schism

By now, most people reading this will probably have heard mention somewhere or other of the excommunication and declaration of schism to members of the Society of St Pius X (SSPX) by the Vatican on 2nd July, following the SSPX’s consecration of four new bishops in direct contravention of papal instruction the day before. 

Reading that opening sentence might feel like you’ve entered some strange parallel universe where people still live in a peculiar medieval realm, like a Hilary Mantel novel or a film about St Thomas Becket. The news reports certainly had their fair share of shady cardinals engaged in complex power games, and bishops playing ecclesiastical brinkmanship while giving forth dubious public proclamations about their concern for the salvation of souls.

The differences between such scenes and the events of the year of Our Lord 2026 are, however, legion. Martin Luther’s followers who witnessed his excommunication in 1521 didn’t have the opportunity to watch the scene unfold in real time via a livestream. Yet anyone interested in SSPX-gate could survey the Mass featuring the offending consecrations via Pelican Plus, an “all-in-one digital platform for Traditional Catholics, combining streaming, prayer, reading, and educational resources in a single app”. The moment of the episcopal consecrations was thus captured on screen, and presumably viewed on thousands of gadgets worldwide as it happened. 

This particular breach of canon law brings with it latae sententiae excommunication — meaning it happens automatically at the very moment the breach occurs. Viewers were thus treated to witnessing the precise moment a soul was cast away from the means from salvation and thus subjected to everything that entails. Or they witnessed the decisive moment when the Catholic Church of Rome in our age was exposed as woefully fallen and ridden with heresy, dragging great swathes of humanity down to hell with it. It depends who you ask, of course. Most people I know are actually somewhere in the middle, and would pull back from both those positions.  

Only a very small number of those souls who were faithful to Patriarch Michael I Cerularius when he was excommunicated in 1054 could have witnessed his excommunication irl. This wasn’t the case for the thousands who attended the SSPX seminary in Écône, however. They could register on the event-specific website which promised “Four Days of Grace”, included profiles of the four priests to be consecrated, and had downloadable PDFs of the service books for the Consecration Mass, the Gregorian Melodies for the liturgical chants, and a guide to the Mysteries of the Rosary.

Those souls lucky enough to have seen the meatspace consecrations could exit the holy sanctuary through the gift shop. There they could purchase a memorial gift box of four bottles of wine, one for each of the newly consecrated bishops, for 75-Swiss-francs. The Telegraph reports that the bottles of Syrah and Pinot Noir were decorated with the episcopal ring, cross, crozier and mitre. 

When Pope Paul III excommunicated Henry VIII, I’m sure the event was not without much earnest discussion and argument in dining halls all over this land. I doubt, however, that even that most controversial event had quite the same level of chatter which a 2026 excommunication has via social media. #SSPX trended across all platforms for a few hours, inevitably, as the clips of the event went viral, in my echo chambers at least. 

A particularly important reel/short/TikTok-able few seconds was when the consecrating bishop usually asks “Habetis mandatum apostolicum?” (“Do you have the Apostolic mandate?”). This mandate is the formal permission for the ensuing consecration from the Pope, which was lacking in this instance. The usual answer would be “Habemus” (“We have it”).  When the SSPX last did this, in 1988, the adored founder, Bp. Marcel Lefevbre, answered “Habemus” as usual. Interestingly, at this week’s Mass, the word “Habemus” was skipped, with the notary going straight to giving a rationale for how their mandate should be seen as functioning outside the existing structures of canon law because  “the authorities of the Roman Church are animated by the spirit of modernism”, and so on.

This is an interesting change. I can’t help but wonder if this was done with the video livestreaming in mind. Otherwise the stream would capture a moment which might seem to onlookers straightforwardly dishonest, claiming to have a mandate which hasn’t been granted. Instead, the notary went straight to proclaiming how their mandate is different to the (papal) mandate, and why a papal mandate isn’t their more authentic mandate. In 1988 the implication was that there is one mandate, and only one. In 2026 there was a subtle implication that there are two, and one is more authentic than the other. 

Anyone familiar with the TradCath online sphere will know there are in fact more than two proposed mandates online, at least. Sedevacantists argue that the SSPX are inauthentic for recognising papal authority at all after the Second Vatican Council. Sedeprivationists inhabit an interim space between SSPX and “normie Catholics”. Other groups exist within the “normie” ranks but practice an exclusivist approach to many aspects of preconciliar Catholic life while offering filial obedience to the existing authorities. I myself am somewhere between this last group and the dreaded normies. I’ve been calling myself “trad adjacent” for a while now, for reasons too complex to adumbrate here. 

Then truth was as binary as a Dominican’s habit, and you were either in or out

To me, my position is entirely authentic, the optimal expression of “the One Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church”. Awkwardly for all of us, however, this is the same self-identification that is also recited by Anglicans and Orthodox and a great many besides every Sunday morning. The difference in this case is that once clear creedal lines in the sand were drawn. The reality of what St John Henry Newman called “the dogmatic principle” was always at work — that “there is a truth” and “there is one truth”. Then truth was as binary as a Dominican’s habit, and you were either in or out. 

It is extremely difficult for people today to hold such a binary view of truth when human subjectivity is involved in the matter at hand, as it invariably is. This is why the most enthusiastic critics of postmodernism have tended to celebrate science as the ultimate rebuttal to what they consider its worst consequences, like transgenderism. Biology doesn’t care about your feelings, they reminded us, but even they always tempered that 2016-era edginess by affirming your freedom to think you are whatever you want as long it wasn’t imposed on others.  

Canon Law should in theory play a similar role in Catholic life. Jurisprudence partakes, at least to some extent, in a healthily binary logic. Indeed, the weakening of this sort of logic brings us back to the very origins of the SSPX. Faced with the modern world, the Catholic Church renewed its binary logic toward other Christians. The true Church remained the Catholic Church, but language of “fullness” and “deficit” has replaced the binary in which all Anglicans are going to hell and Catholics aren’t. Other Christians who profess the name of Jesus were approached as having significant elements of truth within their confessions, without possessing the fullness of truth which subsists in Rome. Followers of certain other religions, similarly, were approached as having significant elements of truth within their respective beliefs, without reaching the fullness of Christianity, and so on. 

One of the arguments in favour of the 1960s renewal of the Church against which the SSPX rebelled was that the modern world was so unavoidably different to the premodern world that change was inevitable. While this was probably a factor, there are to my mind more accurate ways to understand it. That is, there was growing concern, forged by history, that premodernity wasn’t the problem so much as modernity. Historians of ideas tell us that modernity is an era of the unassailable grand narrative, when everyone can stand with Newman in saying “there is one truth” and therefore the only alternative is untruth. But historians of ideas also tell us that, while the premodern age certainly held firm that there was one truth — it was a synthetic, developing, assimilative truth, combining complex histories within the overarching Catholic vision with God at the centre. It wasn’t relativism by any means, but neither was it likely to issue in the tersely triumphant proclamations spoken by James Lindsay at some Ivy League campus and echoed, strangely, by some pro-SSPX sentiments this last week.  

The postmodern era is aptly described as involving a “recombinational delirium” in which people construct their own narratives out of an “infinitely available” range of overlapping options. By rephrasing truth in terms of “fullness” and “deficit”, the Catholic Church were not only offering a renewed continuity with premodernity, but also resituating its tenor and tone so it was fit to ride the storms of postmodernity. 

We may have seen those same epistemological splinters very subtly work their way into the SSPX Consecration Mass. These assumptions have been at work in much of the online debriefing about what the decree of excommunication means. Lay persons are not excommunicated unless they “formally adhere” to the schismatic act. The crime itself, then, commentators assure us, lies precisely in the world of human subjectivity. In the degree, that is, to which one internally subscribes to something as authentic — not whether you’re baptised by an SSPX priest or receive communion in one of their chapels.  

This will provide welcome reassurance to many. They can remain in a “recombinational delirium” of half-certain commitment and attend a range of traditional Masses without incurring excommunication. Ironically, a bulwark against this surrender to the fluidity and ambiguity of authenticity is the process by which a lay SSPX person might rejoin the Catholic fold. In order for the excommunication to be lifted, they will have to commit something like Newman’s dogmatic principle: formally declaring that there is one truth, and this truth belongs unassailably to the Apostolic See of Rome. I can’t help but wonder, therefore, if it’s really the Roman Church who “are animated by the spirit of modernism”, or actually many of those on the opposing side.