Yves Congar opened his 1976 book on the Society of Saint Pius X by asking: “Ecône and Monsignor Lefebvre again?” Fifty years later, we’re asking the same basic question.
The SSPX story, even as it reached its latest turning point, has long been unfolding. SSPX communities—official sources claim 733 priests, 264 seminarians, 250 sisters, and close to half a million faithful, which is a tiny minority of the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics—are what Congar in 1977 called “centers of Syllabus Catholicism” (a reference to Pius IX’s 1864 Syllabus of Errors). The society views everything that came after that as a betrayal of true Catholicism. Today’s SSPX would probably have a hard time accepting even Pius XII’s 1943 encyclical that ended the Catholic Church’s longstanding opposition to historical critical exegesis of the Bible.
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