On 1 July 2026, four priests were consecrated bishops at the SSPX seminary in Écône, Switzerland. Bishop Alfonso de Galarreta presided, Bishop Bernard Fellay co-consecrated, and both men did it knowing Rome had told them in May that the act would be schismatic. The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith issued its decree within the month: excommunication, latae sententiae, reserved to the Apostolic See. The SSPX called the new bishops auxiliaries without jurisdiction and said necessity excused the missing mandate. Rome said the act was schismatic in nature regardless of what it was called.
That is the occasion, not the subject. The subject is what makes several hundred young men want to be in that room at all — what makes a movement Rome now formally treats as schismatic look, to a growing number of converts and cradle Catholics, like the place where the faith still has its proper shape.
The grievances are not invented. I saw them firsthand, not long after I converted, and they were not aesthetic irritations. Communion given by self-intinction, the host dipped by the recipient’s own hand into the chalice, done routinely, without correction. Congregations gathering around the altar during the consecration as if proximity were participation. Both practices the Church’s own law forbids; both defended, when I asked, as though they were nothing. These were not abstractions to me. They read, at the time, as disrespect shown to a Lord I had just given my life to.
So I went church-hopping from parish to parish, looking for one where the liturgy was treated as something other than raw material for improvisation. My search did not end with a settled parish. It ended in the traditionalist world.
For a few months I moved between my local SSPX chapel and other Latin Mass communities. The liturgy held. Every gesture had been handed down rather than improvised, every rubric observed rather than negotiated. I am autistic, and structure that repeats itself exactly is not a small comfort to me — it is closer to a need. After the self-intinction and the huddle around the altar, watching a priest perform the old rite correctly, in order, without inventing anything, felt like arriving somewhere solid after a long time on uneven ground.
Different Rooms, or Different Houses?
What the liturgy did not carry with it, in some of these communities, was the atmosphere around it. I heard young white men making jokes about other races, jokes that were not really jokes. And in every one of these communities, without exception, a running contempt for what they called the woke agenda and the LGBTQ cult taking over the world and the Church. Not every chapel carried the racial undertone. Every chapel I visited carried that second thing. I loved the Mass. I could not fully relax inside that temperature and call the whole room worship. Eventually I stopped going, because too much of what surrounded the liturgy had gone bad.
The pivot came before that though, in confession, at the SSPX chapel. I had read the Society’s arguments against the reformed Mass and told the priest so. He told me that, having read and understood those arguments, it would now be sinful for me to attend the new Mass. Not imprudent. Not spiritually risky. Sinful.
I could not accept that. A priest who tells a penitent that attendance at a validly offered Mass of the universal Church is a sin is drawing a line around communion and putting himself on the inside of it. That is the shape of schism, whatever name is given to the men who draw it. I recognised it for what it was and stopped attending.
What the Search Suggests
What I was doing, without having language for it at the time, was reaching for a structure that still held its shape because so much around me did not. The old rite does not improvise. Every gesture is inherited, checked, repeatable.
The documents of the Second Vatican Council themselves say Latin is to retain pride of place in the liturgy. That instruction was never widely implemented. I have found it honoured, in any serious sense, only in a handful of places, a cathedral here, an abbey there.
A person who does not experience a smooth religious formation does not stop needing form. They tend to go looking for the nearest structure still standing, and take what is on offer, whole, unsorted. I still find the old rite more beautiful than what I mostly encounter now, and that hasn’t changed.
The question I’m left with is not which liturgy is correct. It is what the Church would need to become, in its ordinary parishes, so that the hunger for form did not have to travel that far, or risk finding what I found, to be fed.