This question is asked by Bishop Chandler Holder Jones in SSPX.
Here is his article:
The Priestly Society of Saint Pius X, the most well-known Latin Rite traditionalist movement, now appears to be, by the description of its Superior General Bishop Fellay, Old Catholic. That is, its position is precisely analogous to the status of the Old Catholic Church of the Netherlands, the Dutch Roman Catholic Church of the Old Episcopal Order, in the years 1723, 1870 and 1889, as it has refused definitively to accept the ordinary magisterial authority of the modern papacy. The SSPX places the Tradition of the old Latin Fathers of the ancient Church and the consensus of the Fathers above the teaching office of the contemporary Roman Communion. This has been exactly the historical position of Old Catholicism, and yes, Anglicanism, from the Reformation forward…
Fascinating.
Orthodox Anglicans and orthodox Old Catholics are, of course, sister Churches and have historically enjoyed full sacramental communion on the basis of the shared Faith of the ancient and undivided Church of the first millennium, the Faith of the One Church East and West, as expressed in the Western Rite. What could the future hold for the SSPX?
Yes and no… The story is incredibly complex. The SSPX upholds post-Tridentine and nineteenth-century Ultramontanist ecclesiology, so the historical and doctrinal questions are just not the same. They have (officially) avoided the sedevacantist solution – see my recent articles A Few Links to the “Intégrisme” Theme and An Excellent Explanation of French “Intégrisme”.
There is a certain analogy to Old Catholicism – schism from Rome in the name of Tradition and resistance to innovations, whether they be the papal bull Unigentus against Jansenism, papal infallibility, religious liberty or the Novus Ordo. Comparisons are possible, but they are only very rough and about as different as apples from oranges.
Will they go the way of ecumenism and liberalism like the Union of Utrecht, or like the Raskol (Old Believers) of seventeenth-century Russia? Speculation is possible.
Any religious community needs a foundational myth, a reason for its existence. With the SSPX, it is not the liturgy but intransigent Roman Catholicism claiming spiritual, moral and political ownership of the entire world. How they will do that without being in communion with the Pope or becoming sedevacantists, I cannot imagine. The mind boggles, and I don’t envy them.
The Blue Flower 
I am a former Roman Catholic happily attending an ACC parish in the USA. I don’t want to speak ill of my former communion, but I would like to second your comment about the incoherence of the SSPX’s position. It has been characterized as “recognize and resist,” i.e. recognize the Pope and his authority but resist it under the salus animarum prima lex principle. You are correct, and Bishop Jones is incorrect, in stating that the SSPX is nothing like the Old Catholics. They are Ultramontanists who endorse Robert Bellarmine’s definition of the Church, which makes submission to the Roman Pontiff a necessary condition of salvation.
At this time, they show no signs of developing a model of non-papal Catholicism. Interestingly, Bishop Fellay, in one of his many conferences, stated that Tradition is what has been believed always, everywhere, and by all, whereas Rome required of the Society the declaration that Tradition was what the current papal Magisterium said it was. But Bishop Fellay’s appeal to the Lerintian canon is in vain. The Lerintian canon is simply not what the Roman Church teaches. This has been clear long before Vatican II changed Tradition; it has been clear ever since Pius IX’s declaration that “I am Tradition.”! The only difference is that the SSPX agrees with Pius IX, whereas it disagrees with Vatican II and John Paul II.
If you accept Ultramontanism and the concept of “development of doctrine,” then you must accept the consequences.
I myself could not take the cognitive dissonance any longer. I have found Catholicism concretely existing in the “platypus church” of continuing Anglicanism.
Thank you. I would also add that the SSPX would have nothing to do with Anglicans (Canterbury or Continuing) or with any Old Catholic Church. That alone proves a radically incompatible ecclesiology. The only way for the SSPX is going sedevacantist or for what happened to the TAC to happen to it: dissolution, handing over the property and for each priest and seminarian to be sifted and filtered through the diocesan selection system, or being allowed to join the Fraternity of St Peter, Institute of Christ the King, etc.
This has been exactly my experience with the Society as well. Their ecclesial position makes virtually no sense; they accept in totality the dogmatic definitions of Vatican I, including the infallibility of the person of the Pope. Unlike true Old Catholics, whose reason for leaving Rome are theological, that of the Society makes no sense, either dogmatically, or in the end even liturgically since they do not celebrate the rite of 1570, but of 1962.
Like the Old Catholic Churches before them, both the SSPX and the Sede Vacantists (SSPV, CMRI, et. al.) raise the question of which has ultimate authority whether it be the Tradition or the Papacy.
What make the positions of the latter untenable, however, is that the SSPX and the Sedes both understand “the Tradition” in such a way so that it includes ultramontanism and the Decrees of the First Vatican Council. Given that, the Sedes position is far more coherent than that of the SSPX.
This is where you will find some of the clearest explanations of the sedevacantist position –
http://sedevacantist.com/sede.html
Taking Ultramontanism as a premise, sedevacantism is the most coherent position, that or capitulating to Rome.
It was this dilemma that brought me to reject papal infallibility and the primacy of jurisdiction as a kind of “super bishop”. When one has arrived at the position the Orthodox, Old Catholics and Anglicans hold – conciliar ecclesiology, there is no longer a problem. Then a dialogue with Rome takes on another dimension.
However, the picture accompanying the linked article seems to illustrate a similarity I’ve observed. That long line of bishops (I counted 8) with practically no one else in sight seems to illustrate a determination to safeguard a separate ‘line’ of apostolic succession, in just the same way one sees with the smaller would-be heirs of Old Catholicism. They may be hyper-ultra-montanists, but they act very much like all the others called episcopi vagantes. I do tend to see them as eccentric examples of the same phenomenon. Ultimately they do need either to break with Rome altogether, or to be absorbed.
Is the SSPX like or unlike the Old Catholics? It’s really too early to say yes or no to that question. They have a “weird” ecclesiology because they’re still in formation. Wait until the leadership of the SSPX were all trained by people who were never in the Roman church in the first place, and you might see a new Old Catholic church, or you might see something entirely new. Or they might not make it. But I doubt the current conception is stable. (Or perhaps Rome will “admit its error” and “return to the Truth” and by extension the SSPX 🙂
My guess is no better than anyone else’s, but I’ll try something.
For the rest of Benedict XVI’s Pontificate, the SSPX will play “cat and mouse” with Rome, hoping to convert Rome back to the old ecclesiology and get the Pope to repudiate Vatican II, especially ecumenism and religious liberty. They have to keep doing this because otherwise they will be treated as a dangerous cult by most European countries and perhaps also elsewhere in the world. This will cause the SSPX to lose credibility and money and therefore its “critical mass”.
Rome shows no sign of re-excommunicating or going anywhere with a canonical regularisation. Rome might react if +Williamson consecrates (a) bishop(s), but that would not concern the SSPX. This “cat and mouse” game does rather remind me of the Archdiocese of Utrecht informing Rome each time a bishop was consecrated, and the excommunication arrived by return of post (courier on horseback or whatever they had in the 18th century to deliver letters).
Under a successor to Benedict XVI. With the nomination of Archbishop Müller to the CDF, I see in Benedict XVI a slow reversion to the Montini / Paul VI papacy. This Pontificate may well begin to stagnate as with John Paul II in the late 1990’s and first half of the 2000’s. I doubt anything much will happen. It would have to be under the next Pontificate, but unless the new Pope has a strong position, the situation would continue to stagnate.
With the theological position the SSPX shows in writings and sermons, there are only three possibilities:
– Capitulation to Rome and adoption of a “conservative” position, which, according to Archbishop Müller of the CDF, involves more or less what happened to the TAC and clerics joining dioceses or approved traditionalist institutes individually,
– Sedevacantism, the only way to conciliate formal schism with belief in the Ultramontanist and infalliblist position,
– Conclavism, which is extremely unlikely, electing their own “pope” and claiming to be the “true Catholic Church”,
– Keeping to the status quo in a more or less formalist manner and continuing despite declining numbers of laity, declining credibility and sense of purpose and more of what has happened with Bishop Williamson, stupidity and silliness of speeches, conspiracy theories, implosion, fragmentation, more lines of succession for whoever wants them, and so forth…
I am open to other ideas, but each schism is isolated from another, and unions between schisms from different historical origins rarely happen. Rome has really painted itself into a corner with papal infallibility, and that can only destroy its credibility. Indeed Pius IX succumbed to the Third Temptation! Now the Devil has to be paid, and he is collecting…
“Peter, when you are converted, strengthen your brethren.”
I think that you have more or less nailed it. Another alternative might be to go the route of Russian Old Ritualists…simply forming communities that keep the older rites (but in the case of the Society they do not really do this) and becoming more and more removed from the modern world; becoming a community unto themselves. This would involve not worrying about their relationship to Rome at all.
But even in the case of the Russians, now that there is some modicum of religious freedom in Russia, for the first time, the Old Ritualist have elected a Patriarch of Moscow.
Luckily, the Old Believers kept the priesthood (if they were not Безпоповцы – priestless), otherwise they would have ended up like the Petite Eglise in France. If that degree of stagnation happens with the SSPX, a lot of the young people would leave to marry “regular” Roman Catholics.
The SSPX will continue to make sure it has bishops, therefore the valid priesthood and Sacraments. The trouble is the foundational myth, the reason why people should be with them rather than in the Novus Ordo establishment (which is rotting away, at least over here in Europe). The more it gets repeated over and over again and no one comes up with anything original, then people will get bored with it all.
I think the key problem here is, as Father Chadwick alludes to, the assertion of papal infallibility. In all fairness to the SSPX, however, cognitive dissonance is not confined to them but I would say, to most Catholics, both liberals as well as conservatives. They all want the Pope to say what they want to hear; they all have the mindset of depending on his pronouncements. None of them are totally satisfied with the current Pope, whoever he may be. Paul VI, a mentally fastidious and tortured administrator and chief executive, alternately uncomfortable with the No 1 spot but imbued with a sense of fatalistic destiny and jealous of the responsibility, is also selectively hero-ised and demonised. He is remembered approvingly by conservatives for Humanae Vitae but nor for Populorum Progressio or for “his” new Mass; the liberals look back, perhaps, now wistfully for his pontificate after that of JPII and Benedict but it may be the attitude of a torture victim wishing for the time when he only suffered from splitting migraines.
The truth seems to be that most Catholics are psychologically dependent on a concept of an infallible authority figure but are never happy with the ones they get. This is one of the reasons why I have come to reject or be suspicious of theology and ecclesiology that puts “catholic” things in one basket and “protestant” things in another: to some degree, if we are honest, we are all “protestants” in some respects, even Popes!
No, I think the whole concept of infallibility – whether of Pope or the Church visible – is simply misguided at best and blasphemous at worst, and damaging and confusing to the average Christian’s spirituality in both cases. A concise rejection of infallibility is set out in “The Protestant Dictionary” (H&S, 1904) ed. Charles Wright, Charles Neil, in a two page article by the Rev Fredrick Meyrick, late Fellow and Tutor of Trinity College, Oxford, Rector of Blickling, Norwich and Canon of Lincoln. He distinguishes between significant but naturally limited moral authority on the one hand and infallibility on the other, and argues that infallibility undermines the historical as well as the theoretical notion of tradition. Well, he’s no more infallible than the Pope, of course (although one might find him persuasive!). But to my mind, the SSPX may in this respect be no more self-contradictory or selective than anyone else.