Vatican doctrine chief to hold talks with SSPX leader
Cardinal Fernández told The Pillar he hoped to “find a fruitful path of dialogue”
Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández will meet with the leader of the Society of St. Pius X next week, days after the traditionalist group announced plans to consecrate new bishops without a papal mandate.
Announcing the step Feb. 2, Fr. Davide Pagliarani, the superior general of the SSPX, said the decision to consecrate new bishops in July came after he requested an audience with Pope Leo XIV in August 2025 and after he recently received a letter from the Vatican “which does not in any way respond to our requests.”
Cardinal Fernández told The Pillar Feb. 4 that the letter Pagliarani referred to was sent by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.
The DDF prefect said the letter “merely responded negatively to the possibility of proceeding now with new episcopal ordinations.”
“We have been exchanging letters in recent times. Next week I will meet with Fr. Pagliarani in the DDF to try and find a fruitful path of dialogue,” Fernández explained.
Several sources told The Pillar that past conversations also involved two other SSPX bishops, Bishop Bernard Fellay and Bishop Alfonso de Galarreta, and on the Vatican side, Cardinal Kurt Koch, prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, and Archbishop Guido Pozzo, the former secretary of the now-defunct Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei.
Fernández told The Pillar, however, that the upcoming meeting would be limited to him and Pagliarani.
The SSPX is a priestly fraternity founded by the French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in 1970 in response to the reforms of Vatican Council II. Lefebvre was excommunicated by Pope John Paul II in 1988 for schism, after he consecrated four bishops without a papal mandate. For many years, the SSPX was widely considered a schismatic organization.
Lefebvre died in 1991. Only two of the four bishops consecrated in 1988 survive: Bishop Bernard Fellay, 67, and Bishop Alfonso de Galarreta, 69.
Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais died in 2024, and Bishop Richard Williamson was expelled from the group in 2012 and died in 2025.
The society said in a Feb. 2 statement that Pagliarani had requested an audience with Leo XIV in August, “making known his desire to present to the Holy Father, in a filial manner, the current situation of the Priestly Society of St. Pius X.”
It said the decision to consecrate new bishops came after “having received from the Holy See, in recent days, a letter which does not in any way respond to our requests.”
If plans for the consecration proceed without Vatican authorization, they would mark a new act of canonical schism by participants, with excommunication automatically incurred by both the bishop or bishops performing the consecration and the men who receive it. Such a move would effectively reset relations between the Holy See and the society back to their original nadir in 1988.
In recent decades, the Vatican has described the society as having “institutional irregularity” with the Church, rather than describing it as a schismatic group.
In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI lifted the penalty of excommunication incurred by the society’s bishops through their illicit episcopal consecrations. The German pope clarified that the SSPX has no canonical status in the Church, and said its priests could not exercise legitimate ministry.
The society has had ongoing discussions with Vatican officials over the years about normalizing its status in the Church.
The Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei, which was constituted within the DDF but suppressed in 2019, had said that while some communion exists between the Church and the SSPX, it is “imperfect communion” and further reconciliation, or “institutional regularization,” is needed.
Pope Francis continued Benedict’s dialogue with the SSPX, aiming toward reconciliation. While the theological distance between the Vatican and the SSPX appeared to increase under the Argentine pope, institutional regularization also seemed to draw nearer in practical terms.
Francis extended to SSPX priests the faculty to hear confessions during the Year of Mercy in 2015, and extended that faculty indefinitely the following year.
Francis met in 2016 with then-superior of the SSPX, Bishop Bernard Fellay.
The meeting “lasted 40 minutes and took place under a cordial atmosphere,” the society said at the time. “After the meeting, it was decided that the current exchanges would continue. The canonical status of the society was not directly addressed, Pope Francis and Bishop Fellay having determined that these exchanges ought to continue without haste.”
In 2017, Archbishop Guido Pozzo, the secretary of the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei, who was in charge of dialogue with the SSPX at that time, said in an interview that a working group was “currently working on improving certain aspects of the canonical structure [of the SSPX], which will be a personal prelature,” indicating that a potential agreement could be close.
In 2017, Pope Francis also said that, under very limited circumstances, diocesan bishops could give priests of the SSPX the faculty to witness Catholic marriages validly.
That same year, the society’s then-superior Bishop Fellay claimed in an interview that he had received a letter in 2016 from Rome that said that the society could ordain priests without the permission of the local ordinary.
Rome’s sacramental concessions have focused on the spiritual good of Catholics who attend chapels administered by the SSPX, with Pope Francis emphasizing that he did not want Catholics who attended those chapels to be without the possibility of confession, or a way to marry validly.
But many bishops have continued to discourage Catholics from attending SSPX chapels because of their irregular canonical status. In 1996, one bishop declared that Catholics who join SSPX chapels can be subject to excommunication, which remains particular law in the Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska.
The group reportedly has some 700 priests in ministry around the world, mostly concentrated in Europe and the U.S. The group claims that some 600,000 Catholics attend its Masses, with 25,000 regularly attending in the U.S.
Ah, good, our top mind is on it, then.
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