When the Vatican excommunicated the priesthood of a rebel conservative faction last week, creating the biggest schism in Roman Catholicism in decades, it also hoped to drive the group’s many followers back to the mainstream church.
Instead, according to interviews with some of the faction’s followers in Argentina, Italy and Switzerland, the punishment has been met with defiance.
“It changes nothing,” said Blandine Guillaumin, 42, a teacher at a school run by the group in France. Ms. Guillaumin said she would remain part of the faction, called the Society of St. Pius X, even if the Vatican went ahead with its threat to excommunicate worshipers who stayed loyal to the breakaway group.
“We are sure we are doing God’s will,” Ms. Guillaumin said. It is the society, not the Vatican, she said, that represents “pure, authentic Catholicism.”
Ms. Guillaumin’s defiance embodied the climax of a 56-year-old impasse between the Vatican and the society, founded in 1970 to protest the Roman Catholic Church’s modernizing turn after the Second Vatican Council, which took place between 1962 and 1965.
The society bemoans the council’s change to the form of Catholic services. Though the council allowed priests to hold services in vernacular languages, the society still celebrates the Traditional Latin Mass, arguing it preserves a sense of reverence and mystery.
The society also rejects the substance of the council’s teachings, which it says contradict the church’s millennial teaching. The society’s members oppose the council’s acceptance of other religions and its push for interfaith dialogue and outreach to other Christian denominations.
They point to the council as the beginning of the end for the Catholic church, resulting in fewer people in European pews, fewer priests in pulpits, and all manner of perceived heresies and errors. (The number of Catholics is, in fact, rising, at least in America and Africa.)
Vatican leaders, including Pope Leo, naturally dispute the faction’s position, saying that it has broken with key church teachings. Leo said last month that its followers “refuse to accept certain fundamental elements of the church.”
Andrea Tornielli, a senior Vatican official who helps run its communications department, wrote in an editorial on Thursday that the group was “very far removed from the Catholic faith” because it refused to accept the diversity of Catholic teaching.
These disagreements culminated last week in the tiny Swiss hamlet of Écône, where the society’s founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, oversaw the construction of its first seminary in 1970. In a ritual-laden ceremony on Wednesday, the society’s new leaders defied Pope Leo XIV by consecrating four bishops against his will, an event that the group said attracted some 17,000 people.
A day later, the Vatican declared the society was in schism with the church and issued an excommunication decree against its bishops — six in all, after Wednesday’s ceremony — as well as its priests, barring them from officiating marriages and hearing confessions, which were to be considered invalid.
Other clergy and the lay faithful were told that they risked excommunication if they continued to follow the society’s teachings. The Vatican offered an olive branch to those who wanted to leave the society, issuing specific instructions as to how they could return to the Catholic fold.
At Écône on Friday, that entreaty appeared to have been ignored.
In a public statement the society’s superior general, the Rev. Davide Pagliarani, did not reverse or apologize for the consecrations and described the Vatican’s decision as “objectively unjust and invalid.” Still, he wrote in a letter — the society’s first formal response to the excommunication — that it accepted the Vatican’s position without “bitterness or revolt” and promised “to love the Holy Church even more.”
Though Écône wasn’t as bustling as it had been in recent days, the hamlet was still a beehive of activity as the group’s members worked to tidy the place after a week of ceremony.
Wearing a bright gold cross, Bishop Marc Hanappier, one of the newly minted prelates, stopped to bless the faithful who knelt reverently at his feet. Children knelt to kiss a ring on his right hand. He said he did not have time to speak to a reporter.
The society has only about 1,500 formal members, half of whom are priests, but its officials say they can count on between 300,000 and 600,000 lay followers worldwide.
Seminarians stacked hundreds of chairs, dismantled wooden daises and scampered up electricity poles to unhook wiring, surprisingly agile despite their long black cassocks.
The hall outside the chapel where Archbishop Lefebvre is buried had been transformed into an impromptu bookshop. There were biographies of the founder, a table-full of children’s books about sundry saints and one book raising doubts about the holiness of John Paul II, the former pontiff.
John Paul excommunicated Archbishop Lefebvre and the four bishops he consecrated during an earlier standoff in 1988. Relations improved under Pope Benedict XVI, who lifted the excommunications of the surviving bishops in 2009, and Pope Francis, who allowed the priests to celebrate marriages and hear confessions.
Claire-Marie Brunet, 55, a teacher at a society school in Lyon, France, challenged the Vatican’s decision.
“Excommunication is a punishment imposed for a mistake, but if there is no mistake, it’s just unfair,” she said. “Excommunicating the faithful, excommunicating the bishops, it’s as though the Vatican excommunicated two thousand years of Christian history, because we have not changed anything that the apostles taught,” she added.
That defiance was echoed across The Atlantic in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where an S.S.P.X. congregation gathered for Mass on Thursday evening in a church tucked behind one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares.
“Apparently we are breakaway heretics,” said Thiago Berlanga, 23, an economics student, as he stood outside the church’s gates.
Like other attendees, Mr. Berlanga bristled at Pope Leo’s excommunication order. “I am going to keep coming here,” he said. “The heretics are the others.”
Mr. Berlanga said that the modernizing wing of the church, not the St. Pius X society, was violating Catholic rules. He listed his grievances: priests blessing gay unions, giving communion to divorced people, and treating Catholicism as if it were on equal footing with Judaism or Buddhism. He complained that some “sermons sound like TED Talks,” and that at Mass, “they play music with some little guitars and stuff.”
“Today the church welcomes everybody,” he said. “You can be homosexual, you can be an adulterer — you can do everything except be a traditionalist.” There were no guitars at the Mass in the St. Pius X Priory in Buenos Aires — not even a piano or any songs. There was more kneeling than at a standard Mass, more striking of the breast, no signs of peace, and much more Latin.
“We pray for the Pope,” Mr. Berlanga said: “How can you call ‘schismatic’ a congregation who prays for the Pope?”
In Albano Laziale, outside Rome, the Rev. Gabriele D’Avino said the faction had prepared their followers for two years for the consecrations — and their possible fallout. “We have spoken about it in our writings, in our homilies,” said Father D’Avino, who leads the society’s roughly 2,000 followers in Italy.
Only one family had left his flock since the excommunications, he said. The others “understood the problem and they do not feel polluted by these sanctions,” he added.
Emma Bubola contributed reporting from Buenos Aires.
