Posted on 08/28/2026 3:52:54 PM PDT by ebb tide
On June 8, 2026, a journalist named Wouter J. Suenens published an article at The Catholic Herald entitled “The Traditional Latin Mass does not need the SSPX.” In this article he claimed that the crisis through which the Church is passing today is just one of many in her history, and not even the worst. On this basis he maintains that the Society of St. Pius X is guilty of poor judgment of the situation and, thus, makes a disproportionate response to it, and, finally, that the SSPX makes things worse by linking the desire for the TLM with schismatic tendencies.
I sincerely wonder if Mr. Suenens had done his homework. This is an abiding concern of mine, as I find that most who wade into these waters are still in the shallow end of the pool, and have not gotten beyond waist-deep familiarity with the issues. I decided to send a letter to him.
He never responded.
But that doesn’t mean the letter might not be of benefit to others – either those who might be tempted to think along his lines, or those who wonder what to reply to such folks. The letter has been amplified a bit.
Dear Mr. Suenens:
While I am undoubtedly sympathetic to the SSPX’s concerns, I do not attend their chapels (I attend an FSSP oratory), and I can certainly see weak elements in their position. You have pointed out some of them in your June 8 article in The Catholic Herald; I have pointed them out on my Substack.
However, whether or not you are correct that we don’t need the SSPX today (I will return to that claim in a moment), I strenuously disagree with you that we didn’t need them before. The Fraternity of St. Peter, the Institute of the Good Shepherd, the monastery of Le Barroux, and many other places emerged from Lefebvre’s movement. Only weak and isolated priests, usually elderly, were holding out against the juggernaut of the modern rite’s implementation. It was Lefebvre who gave the movement a face, a voice, an organization, and a direction.
You write:
There have been crises far worse than ours: the scandal of the Western Schism, curial corruption, simony, political captivity and moral decadence in Rome…. The claim that our crisis is so unprecedented that public disobedience has now become necessary reveals, in that sense, a remarkable lack of historical memory.
This is simply an astonishing claim. It is manifestly the case that the modern(ist) crisis is far worse than all the earlier ones put together. Why do I say this?
Combine them all and you still won’t get something that adds up to the pervasive drip-line modernism, mission drift, global liturgical devastation, and demographic collapse we have seen in the past six decades. During this time, there has not been a single truth of doctrine, morals, or liturgy that has not been repeatedly and widely called into question or violated in practice, with the beliefs of millions contaminated as a result.
Why else would St. Pius X have called modernism “the synthesis of all heresies”? To me, as someone steeped in Church history, I can’t imagine not seeing the current crisis as quantitatively and qualitatively worse, because it goes to the very roots of the Catholic faith: it concerns natural law, divine law, ecclesiastical traditions, “the whole works.” It is a total crisis, not a particularized one. It goes farther than Arianism, farther than Protestantism, farther than any previous aberration.
Cardinal Walter Brandmüller is an eminent Church historian. Here is how he put it:
We face serious challenges to the integrity of the Deposit of the Faith, the sacramental and hierarchical structure of the Church and its Apostolic Tradition. With all this has been created a situation never before seen in the Church’s history, not even during the Arian crisis of the fourth and fifth century.
Rorate Caeli commented on the above:
That the Church is today facing its worst crisis ever – worse than the Arian crisis, worse than the Reformation – is not a new verdict. Many a Traditionalist layman and a handful of clerics have said as much for decades. For a Cardinal to say pretty much the same thing (even if limited to the current [i.e., at the time, Francis’s] pontificate) is entirely something else. A Cardinal who is not an ordinary prelate, but one of the most accomplished ecclesiastical historians of our time: President of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences from 1998 to 2009, one of the foremost experts on the history of the Ecumenical Councils, author of the definitive history of the extraordinarily convoluted Council of Constance, a scholar who has written on some of the worst episodes of the Church’s story, a man whose red hat was widely seen as Benedict XVI’s recognition of his brilliant historical work. One is almost embarrassed to have to say against the inevitable naysayers and self-decorated apologists that Brandmueller does know his Church history.
Fr. Thomas Weinandy, who is no traditionalist (remember that series he co-authored with John Cavadini and Mary Healy against the TLM? – a series so harmfully erroneous that a book was published in refutation of it) nevertheless concluded: Francis was worse than the bad popes of the past. You may recall that Fr. Weinandy, who used to be head of doctrine for the USCCB, published two articles (in 2019 and in 2023) in which he asserted that Francis was virtually in schism from the Catholic Church and was, as it were, the head of two opposed churches – the true one and a false one.
If one goes deeply into the subject of Lefebvre and the SSPX, one will inevitably reach a point that can be considered the nub of the matter: the “state of emergency” (or “state of necessity”) argument. Put simply, if there is a “state of emergency” in the Church, then all faculties are considered to be supplied for doing what is necessary to keep the Faith alive and to continue the traditional sacramental life. There’s a lot packed into such a claim, and one might well dispute whether certain acts, such as episcopal consecrations, are ever permissible without the requisite authorization.
But one thing seems absolutely clear to me: the typical off-the-cuff anti-Lefebvrist counterargument that “only the pope or the bishops can declare a state of emergency” is incoherent. The worst kind of Church crisis is precisely one in which the pope and the bishops are failing in their duties (as has occurred before in Church history, though never to the same extent as in the period since the Second Vatican Council). Obviously, in such a case, these hierarchs – the very causes of the crisis – are not going to acknowledge it to be such, because they themselves are either too doctrinally corrupt to recognize it, or too morally corrupt to wish to change the status quo, due to vested interests or fear or other selfish motives. This creates a vicious circle. They created the crisis, and they benefit from it.
Put in common-sense terms: saying that a pope or bishops must declare a state of emergency that consists in their own corruption or dereliction is like asking Congress to be the sole judge of whether Congress is spending money wisely, or asking the industrial food supplier to be the only one who verifies the safety standards of its products. Epistemologically, there must be an independent standard by which we can judge whether a given reality is measuring up to what it is supposed to be and to do. In the case of the Church, this standard exists. In fact, it is a dual standard: faith and reason.
On the side of faith, the standard is Scripture and Tradition as received and interpreted consistently by the Church’s creeds, canons, anathemas, liturgical rites, and other authoritative documents that one finds in a collection like Denzinger. On the side of reason, it is the principle of non-contradiction and the laws of logic, by which we can recognize incompatibility, inconclusiveness, sophistry, and plain nonsense. An ecclesiastical state of emergency is – at least in principle – discernible by the faculties of faith and reason, brought to bear on the available evidence.
In this sense I completely agree with historian Dr. Darrick Taylor:
Perhaps there is some esoteric reason for it that I am simply too ignorant to understand, but the assertion that the Church is obviously not in a state of emergency seems – well, it seems deranged to the point of madness, as of someone who is suffering a psychotic break with reality….
If you are part of a unicorn Novus Ordo parish, a wonderful Newman Center, or a parish run by a solid religious order, you are not crazy for thinking I am overdoing things. The Catholic Church is vast and contains many mansions within it. You are not wrong to insist upon the reality of these oases of faith. But they are a drop in an ocean of spiritual rot, deformation, and malaise.
They are not what most people in and outside the Church think of when you mention the Catholic Church to them because that is not how the Catholic Faith is practiced in most places. It is easy to shut yourself up in one of these oases (I have done this myself) and imagine there is nothing fundamentally wrong. This is a very human thing to do, but it is completely divorced from the harsh reality of the situation….
There literally can be no “state of emergency” for an institution that has decided there can be none – no matter how many people fall away from the Faith; no matter how few vocations it produces; no matter how many parishes close; no matter how many abuse cases come to light; no matter how many scandals occur. This is the logic of bureaucrats suffering from psychosis who simply do not want to be bothered by the chaotic mess that confronts them. And which, of course, allows Church leaders to avoid any responsibility for doing something about it….
I can understand why so many take offense at the Society of St. Pius X, and I make no judgment about any statements their leaders have made one way or the other. But those leaders have at least recognized, openly and honestly, the catastrophic nature of the situation that confronts Holy Mother Church, which is more than I can say for the rest of the Catholic hierarchy and its leadership. All hope is not lost, but recognizing the enormity of what needs to be done and what it will cost is not something most Catholics seem ready to contemplate.
To use faith and reason to make a judgment about reality is not a form of subjectivism. In fact, the worst subjectivism would be that which would arise from offloading all judgment of reality to Church authorities, as if they, in their persons, in their mere positing of volitional acts, were equal or superior to the virtue of faith and the exercise of reason. Unquestionably, the judgment of the pope or any bishop would have to be taken seriously, but it could not be assumed to be necessarily correct, much less adequate, except under very precise circumstances (as in an ex cathedra declaration by the pope).
As we can smell a rotting fish without the need to call in a perfume specialist or an otolaryngologist, we can see that the Church is in a state of emergency without the need to call in the USCCB or the Vatican’s Secretary of State.
I said earlier that I would return to the question of whether the SSPX is needed today to preserve the TLM. On this point, I will limit myself to one simple observation: in vast areas of the Church, especially outside of the United States of America, the only access that the faithful have to the TLM is through the Society. Just have a look at an online Latin Mass directory that includes all TLMs, not just so-called “approved” ones, and you’ll quickly see the reality on the ground. Since I agree with Joseph Ratzinger when he writes: “I am convinced that the crisis in the Church that we are experiencing today is to a large extent due to the disintegration of the liturgy,”1 therefore, to me the single most decisive goal is the perpetuation and propagation of the authentic Roman rite, and its availability to all the faithful.
At this time, the Society is contributing in a huge way to this goal, and for that reason alone, they are needed today, although I hope and pray that eventually, through steps taken on both sides, the Society and the Vatican will be reconciled.
A last comment. You write:
In the Latin Church, the appointment or confirmation of bishops belongs to the Roman Pontiff.
This has been true for about 150 years now (in a few cases, not even that long). Prior to Vatican I, it was very common for bishops to be appointed in a variety of ways, to which the pope would react with consent and recognition: election by canons, secular nominations, that sort of thing. The absolute centralization of all episcopal affairs in the hands of the pope is a very recent phenomenon in Church history, and it is by no means required for the unity and catholicity of the Church. Indeed, this is one of the greatest sticking points for the reunion of the Christian East. Yes, we can say the pope has always had a supreme authority that extends to all dioceses, at least implicitly; but this is far different from saying he personally must choose every bishop.
That’s the way it is now, but one is free to believe that this is not the best or the ideal setup, and to wish that it would someday change. Can we have local chapters of canons or even distinguished laity involved in choosing, or at least proposing, bishops once again, as was the norm for much of Church history? At this time in the West, or at least in the United States, such procedures would almost certainly yield better results than we have been getting since the days of Paul VI. Such wishes don’t affect the actual status of the SSPX, but we should be careful not to speak as if popes have always functioned as the centralized absolute monarchs they have come to be.
Yours in Christ,
Dr. Kwasniewski
P.S. I have discussed this entire issue further in an article at OnePeterFive: “Have There Been Worse Crises Than This One?”
Reprinted with permission from Pelican+.
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Ping
I bet the food doctor had to look up “otolaryngologist”.
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