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Pope Leo’s Showdown With the Church’s Radical Right

Opinion
June 30, 2026 · 1:20 PM
Pope Leo’s Showdown With the Church’s Radical Right

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Opinion|Pope Leo Faces the First Crisis of His Pontificate

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/30/opinion/pope-leo-latin-mass-catholic-church.html

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Pope Leo Faces the First Crisis of His Pontificate

June 30, 2026

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By David Gibson

Mr. Gibson is the director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University.

See more of our coverage in your search results.Encuentra más de nuestra cobertura en los resultados de búsqueda.Add The New York Times on Google Agrega The New York Times en Google

When terms like “schism” and “excommunication” crop up in news stories about the Catholic Church, you start looking around for a momentous event that will change the course of history, like the Protestant Reformation in 1517 or the Great Schism in 1054 dividing the Western and Eastern churches. The Vatican’s likely censure of a tiny anti-modernist Catholic sect is none of those things. But the attendant furor is sparking a lot of schismatic-sounding declarations and eye-glazing arguments about the arcane details of Catholic liturgy.

The focus of the uproar is a breakaway faction based in Ecône, Switzerland,the Society of St. Pius X, which is devoted to the celebration of an outdated version of the Mass in Latin. Why is the group, named after Pope Pius X, a fiercely anti-liberal early-20th-century pontiff, causing such problems? Why should anyone care about such a recondite internal church dust-up?

One reason is that Leo has made unity a centerpiece of his pontificate. A formal split would undermine that goal. More broadly, the society’s hyper-traditionalism represents a troublesome current in the church, one that is channeling the politics of fear and resentment that are hallmarks of many populist movements. Ecclesial nostalgists and national chauvinists are following the same path: a shared focus on maintaining cultural and religious purity and restoring past glories of church and state.

The crisis is threatening to drag Leo into the polarizing conflicts tormenting so many societies just as he is emerging as the world’s most prominent moral voice on human rights, war, A.I., migrants and the poor.

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The immediate cause of the crisis is a vow by the society to consecrate its own bishops, on Wednesday, a direct violation of papal authority. If the group goes ahead with the consecrations, the Vatican has said the new bishops and those who ordained them will incur excommunication, as happened under similar circumstances in 1988. The main source of suspense is whether Leo will extend the excommunication to all priests and even lay leaders in the society.

That would be a powerful signal that Rome has finally lost patience with a group that was born out of a rejection of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). Those reforms ended centuries of anti-Jewish teachings, sought reconciliation with Protestants and other churches and embraced religious liberty and engagement with the modern world. Vatican II also led to liturgical changes such as allowing Mass in the vernacular and having the priest face the congregation. The Society of St. Pius X says those changes undermine the faith.

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