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In February, Rev. Davide Pagliarani, the superior general of the SSPX, said the decision to consecrate new bishops was made after he requested an audience with Pope Leo XIV in August 2025, and the pope turned down his request. Instead of a meeting, Father Pagliarani received a letter from the Vatican “which does not in any way respond to our requests.â€[1]https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/why-leo-wont-meet-t...e-sspx Once again the SSPX turned the tables on the Vatican, causing me to wonder whether Jews are calling the shots at the SSPX. For almost 40 years now, the SSPX has been the aggressor in a war against legitimate Church authority beginning with Archbishop Lefebrve’s illicit consecrations in 1988 that bears uncanny resemblance to the war the Israelis have been waging against the Palestinians during the same period of time. Ed Condon, writing for The Pillar, noticed the same pattern, pointing out that “the society’s leadership has appeared to strike a tone of aggrieved seekers of compromise, while insisting their illicit consecrations will go ahead without papal mandate.â€[2]https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/why-leo-wont-meet-t...e-sspx

For over 40 years now the SSPX has claimed that “a state of emergency†exists in the Church as justification for their defiance of Church authority. The claim made no sense because it was always accompanied by disclaimers admitting the authority of the pope and the validity of the vernacular Mass. Pagliarani’s latest ultimatum has changed the terms of engagement. Taking his state of emergency claim to its logical conclusion, Pagliarani is now saying that the gates of hell have prevailed against the Church Christ founded, because in his words, “in an ordinary parish, the faithful no longer find the means necessary to ensure their eternal salvation.â€[3]https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/why-leo-wont-meet-t...e-sspx

My initial reaction to this preposterous statement was stunned silence, but upon reflection that changed to a feeling of relief. The SSPX is finally being honest about its position, which is Extra SSPX nulla salus. This came as no surprise to me because I had spent a long frustrating afternoon speaking with Bishop Richard Williamson at SSPX headquarters in Wimbledon.

“So, correct me if I’m wrong,†I said to his excellency then, “but it sounds as if you’re saying that Rome is going to have to come to Wimbledon to ask for readmission to the Catholic Church.†The embarrassed silence which followed my question was a tacit admission on Williamson’s part that I had formulated his position correctly, even if he didn’t like the bluntness of my formulation.

In response to the consecrations which made Williamson a bishop in 1988, Pope John Paul II wrote his motu proprio Ecclesia Dei, in which he said “this act was one of disobedience to the Roman Pontiff in a very grave matter and of supreme importance for the unity of the Church, such as is the ordination of bishops whereby the apostolic succession is sacramentally perpetuated. Hence such disobedience—which implies in practice the rejection of the Roman primacy—constitutes a schismatic act.â€

In a statement which both reaffirmed papal authority and denied the gravity of the current situation, Bishop Fellay announced on Sunday April 26 that “there is an enormous probability that all of you, we included, may be excommunicated, declared schismatic†by the Vatican if the consecrations proceed as expected.[4]https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/why-leo-wont-meet-t...e-sspx Pagliarani then doubled down in the passive-aggressive style we have come to expect from the SSPX, by reaffirming his defiance in words that simultaneously suggested reconciliation, on his terms of course: “In the shared recognition that we cannot find agreement on doctrine,†Pagliarani wrote, “it seems to me that the only point on which we can agree is that of charity toward souls and toward the Church.â€

For once I found myself in complete agreement with the SSPX. The main issue here is charity, not doctrine. In St. Augustine’s treatise “On Baptism, Against the Donatists†(De Baptismo contra Donatistas, ca. 400–401 AD), particularly in Books I–IV), he repeatedly attributes the harm of schism to a lack of charity (caritas), drawing heavily on what St. Paul said in 1 Corinthians 13:1–3 on the essential nature of charity:

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. … And though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.

In Book I and Book IV, Augustine explains that even valid sacraments (like baptism) outside the Catholic Church’s unity profit nothing for salvation without charity, which is the bond of unity in the Holy Spirit. Schism severs this bond, making separation a “fatal wound†that nullifies spiritual benefits. Sacraments which are confected and received in schism remain valid in form but lack salvific effect until unity and charity are restored:

“What will it then profit a man that he has sound faith, or perhaps only soundness in the sacrament of faith, when the soundness of his charity is done away with by the fatal wound of schism, so that by the overthrow of it the other points, which were in themselves sound, are brought into the infection of death?â€[5]Grok citing cwhisonant.wordpress.com

Augustine based his claim that the Donatists were outside the Church St. Cyprian’s famous phrase “Extra Ecclesiam nulla Salus.†Even those who celebrate valid sacraments cannot attain eternal salvation if they lack fraternal charity, because charity, not mere doctrinal or sacramental correctness, holds the Church together.

The impending excommunications should be seen as an act of mercy on the part of Pope Leo XIV. Charity has no meaning divorced from the truth. If Pope Leo were to overlook the gravity of the SSPX illicit consecrations, he would be facilitating the damnation of those who break communion with the vehicle of salvation which Christ created when he made Peter the first pope and gave him the power to forgive and retain sins (my emphasis).

Charity toward souls demands that the Church draw a clear line between those in the Church and those who pertinaciously remain outside her communion because of fear of contamination. Both Bishop Fellay and the late Bishop Williamson articulated this position clearly when Fellay claimed that “the Church has cancer (Williamson said “tuberculosisâ€), and if we stay in the Church we will get cancer too.†Christ disproved the theological version of guilt by association when he ate with tax collectors and prostitutes. There is no salvation outside of the Church no matter how many sinners find refuge there. That means the faithful should leave the SSPX immediately lest they be damned, a state the SSPX trivializes with its glib and mendacious defiance.

Glib defiance of God is a trait which the American founding fathers learned from reading John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In his speech to the fallen demons, Satan said that it was “better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.†Huck Finn carried that tradition of glib defiance forward when, full of regret that he had revealed Jim’s location to Miss Watson, ensuring that he would be captured and returned to slavery, he said:

“It was a close place. I took [the letter] up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell’—and tore it up.â€

Before the SSPX says to itself “All right, then, I’ll go to hell,†they would do well to read chapter III of James Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which Father Arnall, the Jesuit retreat master, delivers a vivid, multi-part description of Hell’s physical torments:

O, how terrible is the lot of those wretched beings! The blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast glowing and bursting, the bowels a red-hot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls. . . . Hell is a strait and dark and foul-smelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke. … It is a never-ending storm of darkness, dark flames and dark smoke of burning brimstone, amid which the bodies are heaped one upon another without even a glimpse of air. … Every sense of the flesh is tortured and every faculty of the soul therewith: the eyes with impenetrable utter darkness, the nose with noisome odours, the ears with yells and howls and execrations, the taste with foul matter, leprous corruption, nameless suffocating filth, the touch with red-hot goads and spikes, with cruel tongues of flame.

This sermon was taken from James Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but it was based on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, which inspired the Jesuits who taught Joyce, who is probably only relaying what he heard in their retreats. Father Arnall began his homily by telling his retreatants to:

Place your finger for a moment in the flame of a candle and you will feel the pain of fire. But our earthly fire was created by God for the benefit of man, to maintain in him the spark of life and to help him in the useful arts, whereas the fire of hell is of another quality and was created by God to torture and punish the unrepentant sinner.

Before he goes ahead with the consecrations, I would respectfully ask Bishop Fellay, “Place your finger for a moment in the flame of a candle†and call of the consecrations before the demons drag you and your congregation into the eternal fires of hell.

Notes

[1] https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/why-leo-wont-meet-the-sspx

[2] https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/why-leo-wont-meet-the-sspx

[3] https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/why-leo-wont-meet-the-sspx

[4] https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/why-leo-wont-meet-the-sspx

[5] Grok citing cwhisonant.wordpress.com