Rome and the Society, 1988–2025¶

After the Gantin decree contact effectively ceased. The Society consolidated: seminaries, schools, priories, districts, and a settled account of itself as Catholic Tradition operating under a state of necessity. Rome's attention went to the communities that had left the Society — the FSSP, and from 1990 the Institute of Christ the King — and to the machinery of the Ecclesia Dei commission.

Two deaths in 1991 closed the founding generation: Archbishop Lefebvre on March 25 and Bishop de Castro Mayer a month later, both under censure. The Society elected Bishop Bernard Fellay Superior General in 1994, and his generalate — it would run to 2018 — was the period in which every serious negotiation took place.

In the Jubilee Year of 2000 several thousand Society faithful made a pilgrimage to Rome. Contacts followed through Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, then president of the Ecclesia Dei commission, and by 2001 an outline had emerged that would recur for two decades: a personal structure of some kind, in exchange for a doctrinal commitment.

The pattern of these years is worth naming because it repeats. Rome would offer a canonical form; the Society would answer with preconditions — in 2001, and again in 2006, the two standing demands were the withdrawal of the 1988 excommunications and the free use of the traditional Mass for every priest of the Latin rite. Rome regarded both as things to be settled inside an agreement; the Society regarded them as gestures required before one. Benedict XVI, elected in 2005, granted both — and the Society then declined to convert them into an agreement.

Bishop Fellay was received in audience by Benedict XVI on August 29, 2005, the first such meeting since 1988.

On July 7, 2007 Benedict XVI's motu proprio Summorum Pontificum declared that the Roman Missal promulgated by John XXIII in 1962 had "never been abrogated," established it as an extraordinary form of the one Roman Rite, and provided that any priest of the Latin rite could use it without permission in Masses without a congregation, and with the pastor's consent where a stable group of faithful requested it.

This was the Society's first standing demand, granted universally and without conditions attached to the Society. The accompanying letter to bishops made the motive explicit: the Pope wrote of reaching "an interior reconciliation in the heart of the Church," and of the need to make room for those attached to the older form so that "internal reconciliations" could follow.

The concession did not produce an agreement. It did, however, remove the liturgy as a plausible account of the dispute — a point Rome has made in every subsequent exchange, and made again in 2026.

Benedict XVI, Summorum Pontificum, July 7, 2007

Pope Francis changed the approach without changing the requirement. Where Benedict had pursued a doctrinal settlement first, Francis granted pastoral provisions for the faithful's sake while leaving the canonical question open.

• September 2015 — for the Jubilee of Mercy, faithful approaching Society priests "will validly and licitly receive the absolution of their sins."
• November 2016 — Misericordia et Misera extends the confession faculty indefinitely, "lest anyone ever be deprived of the sacramental sign of reconciliation."
• April 2017 — the Ecclesia Dei commission asks local ordinaries to secure canonical form for the marriages of Society faithful, by delegation where necessary.
• January 2019 — the Ecclesia Dei commission is suppressed and its competences transferred to the CDF, which had absorbed its doctrinal work since 2009.
• July 2021 — Traditionis Custodes reverses the framework of Summorum Pontificum, making the Missal of Paul VI "the unique expression of the lex orandi of the Roman Rite" and returning regulation of the older books to diocesan bishops.

Each of the first three was an act of jurisdiction supplying what the Society lacked, and each therefore presupposed exactly the papal authority the Society's position holds in reserve. That paradox — accepting faculties from a Pope whose Council one refuses — is the subject of one of the sharper exchanges of the whole period. "Francis's grant of faculties proves the SSPX has jurisdiction"

Traditionis Custodes cut the other way. By restricting the older Missal in dioceses, it removed the practical alternative that had made staying in communion easy for many traditional Catholics, and the Society said so openly. Whatever one makes of the document, its effect on the Society was to strengthen rather than weaken it.

Francis, Traditionis Custodes, July 16, 2021

Fr. Davide Pagliarani was elected Superior General in July 2018, ending Fellay's twenty-four years and, with him, the generalate identified with negotiation. The Society's General Chapter of that year set out the position that would hold to 2026: no canonical agreement without a prior resolution of the doctrinal question, and no urgency about obtaining one.

Rome, for its part, had spent a decade discovering that concessions did not produce movement. Under Pope Leo XIV, elected in 2025, contacts continued at a low level. The Society's own accounts of these years describe patience; Rome's describe a file that had stopped moving.

The stasis ended on February 2, 2026, when the Society announced episcopal consecrations for July 1. The five months that ended the negotiation