For a diocesean priest to go off to work with the SSPX without the blessing of his Bishop is for him to become a "wandering priest", since he is acting without canonical power and outside the diocesean structure.
The punishment for saying Latin masses was for direct disobedience to an order from his ecclesiastic superior, when said superior had already been very lenient to the extent that he felt he could at that time in indulging his desire to say the Latin Mass.
Perhaps, had Fr. Zigrang obeyed his Bishop, he would have gained enough trust in time to receive a situation like Mater Ecclesiae or St. Boniface. He didn't have such patience, and we'll never know what the Bishop might have done, only how he did respond to Fr.'s disobedience.
Yes, it is simply the cause and effect that I was disputing. Fr. Zigrang did not become a wandering priest and then was disciplined. He was disciplined first (for saying the Latin Mass) and then when his normal canonical position was taken away, he was forced to find another situation.
The punishment for saying Latin masses was for direct disobedience to an order from his ecclesiastic superior, when said superior had already been very lenient to the extent that he felt he could at that time in indulging his desire to say the Latin Mass.
Here then is the precise situation that I was describing in a previous post. If an officer commands a soldier to kill innocent civilians, he must refuse to obey immediately. He cannot obey an intrinsically wrong order and then worry about the consequences later.
So the question comes down to this, "Should Fr. Zigrang have followed the order to cease offering the Latin Mass, or was he required in conscience to refuse this order?" He decided that he was required in conscience to refuse the order, because to obey the order would be to make oneself complicit in the deaths of many innocent souls.
As it turned out, Fr. Zigrang only said the Latin Mass once in his parish, because the bishop responded with such lightning speed. When a pederast is sodomizing young parishioners, bishops seem to require years or in some cases even decades to respond. But when a priest commits the unpardonable sin of offering the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, he is locked out of his rectory the very same day.