Over the past few weeks, I have felt very reserved about writing about the decision of the Society of St Pius X to consecrate a number of bishops and their having informed the Pope. I am not a Roman Catholic, nor am I a member of the SSPX. I write about this subject because of the experience I have been through in the early 1980’s. I have just written an autobiography, Priest and Sailor, with no reference to the title that was given to Pope John XXIII Pastor et Nauta. I am simply a priest and I go sailing in my little boat around the coasts of Brittany and the Charante.

Shortly after the interview between the head of the Society Fr. Davide Pagliarani sent a letter to Cardinal Fernández telling him that he was not interested in afternoon tea small-talk. Whereupon, he answered Rome to say that episcopal consecration would go ahead on 1 July 2026 and that the conditions given by Cardinal Fernández were unacceptable. Here is the letter in French, and translations in English are available. Fundamentally, the Society is demanding that Rome should roll back the second Vatican Council and the liturgical rites promulgated by Paul VI.

I could outline what I suspect to be the problems between them, and I would probably be wrong. I limit myself to saying that the conflict has become increasingly bitter, the SSPX has become more of a totalitarian cult. I saw recently a video about teams of High Court Enforcement Agents recovering unpaid debts and evicting tenants from their rented lodgings for rent arrears. From the moment there is the first knock on the door, anxiety sets in as does denial of being responsible for a debt. The self-defence instinct kicks in, especially with people of a low intelligence level and a feeling of entitlement to special favours. Those enforcement agents, like the police, are trained to deal with conflict, firstly by refusing to retaliate even to physical violence. Generally, faced with the prospect of having assets seized and seeing the amount of the debt rise, the debtors find a way to borrow money from their family and sort it out with them privately. The agents have just done their job. We have to get the emotion out of these church conflicts too.

It remains to be seen what Pope Leo XIV will do about the liturgy. The ideal would be the status quo left by Benedict XVI in Summum Pontificum providing for an extraordinary form or use and the ordinary form. That allowed the freedom for the Fraternity of St Peter, the Institute of Christ the King and several monasteries and religious orders. I refer the reader to Dominic J. Grigio’s The Disastrous Pontificate about the drifts and excesses of the late Pope Francis. There is no doubt that the Roman Catholic Church has changed and is becoming an Anglican-inspired body motivated by political and social concerns, using theological language in the fashion of liberation theology.

The fact remains that Rome did not ask anything from the Society of St Pius X. The Society wants to be “recognised” as Roman Catholic without following the rules.

I have the experience of being a young organist and singer in the Church of England. You just get on on life without caring what other people believe. My decision to “swim the Tiber” (via the SSPX) in 1981 was an error on my part. I persisted for some fifteen years and it broke me. The example of traditionalist Roman Catholicism took me to Continuing Anglicanism, through the Traditional Anglican Communion and through the Anglican Catholic Church (in which I have been incardinated for thirteen years). We do not have the Papalist ideology to worry about, so we consider our Bishops as forming the basis of the canonical Church with jurisdiction as well as order.

My proposition about the Society of St Pius X is hard, but analogous to a dealing with a dog that has tasted blood from killing sheep. It has to be destroyed. It needs to be treated as a dangerous cult, removed from all registers of associations and charities, and its assets seized by the EU, its clergy excommunicated and declared to be expelled from the clerical state. Individuals could later be dealt with by Roman Catholic diocesan bishops. I do not believe that Leo XIV would strike the Ecclesia Dei communities in the same way. The bitterness would continue for decades, but there seems to be no alternative. We all have to come to terms with our suffering, stop blaming others and live our long Lent of years of purgation.

Maybe, I am wrong and almost sadistic in my proposition, but such is not my intention, since I care about people in their suffering and their spiritual pain. I have been through enough myself. Writing my recent book, I was taken back to some memories about the Cranks of Saint Pads about which I wrote in other details in Psychotic Religion, mostly about the cult of Palmar de Troya in Spain. Only a small minority gave any credence to Pope Gregory XVII, but many of the psychiatric traits were similar. I emphasise in my book that this “sick religion” has to be addressed, but by kindness and education. Oscar Wilde’s great Epistola in Carcere et Vinculis (complete text) relates the notion of imitation in religion:

And so he who would lead a Christ-like life is he who is perfectly and absolutely himself. He may be a great poet, or a great man of science ; or a young student at a University, or one who watches sheep upon a moor ; or a maker of dramas, like Shakespeare, or a thinker about God, like Spinoza; or a child who plays in a garden, or a fisherman who throws his nets into the sea. It does not matter what he is, as long as he realises the perfection of the soul that is within him. All imitation in morals and in life is wrong. Through the streets of Jerusalem at the present day crawls one who is mad and carries a wooden cross on his shoulders. He is a symbol of the lives that are marred by imitation.

To be a Christian is to be ourselves, to wake up and take the rubbish out to the bin.

There have been periods in history when this kind of sickness has pervaded religious communities. Reading Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose will show us the severely retarded Salvatore tortured as a heretic. We see the distorted faces of Fransciscans denouncing corrupt bishops. I think of Umbertino:

Have you not heard the devil is hurling beautiful boys out of windows? There was something feminine something diabolical about the young one who died. He had the eyes of a girl seeking intercourse with the devil. Beware of this place! The beast is still among us. I can sense him… now… here… within these very walls. I’m afraid, William. For you, for me. For the outcome of this debate… Oh, my son. The times we live in.

It is obviously a caricature. Evil and dark spirits are very real, but God and prayer / fasting are stronger. I have seen a SSPX priest look as if he were possessed by a demon. I hope that was misjudgement on my part. The event took place at the episcopal consecrations of 1988. I will not be going this year! If Pope Leo XIV seems not to care, he is treating the situation like the bailiffs dealing with nasty aggressive people owing money, and he is probably right now praying to discern the right thing to do. But, that is only conjecture on my part.

The Prophets of Doom are still among us. Instead of recognising that I am an alien to this world, I will still show courtesy and kindness to people. I will still be open to make friends with those I can trust. Some people make misanthropy a part of their religious ideology, their subculture of misery. They war against a world that does not exist.

In my own life, my mind is fixed on a New Renaissance, and Enlightenement, a new Age of Reason – not the materialist metaphysics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but an awakening in each one of us who does not seek ourselves in the group. I refer to the Florentine Renaissance and the rediscovery (or “rebirth”) of ancient wisdom. Perhaps some of those faces distorted by hatred will discover a new light. Perhaps a few priests from the ruins of the SSPX will discover something new, not, of course, with a secularised liturgy – but with an intense contemplative life around an ancient liturgy that will have been released from its fetters and chains of rubricism and legalism.