Once upon a time there was a king who had three daughters. The least fortunate of them was hideous in his sight because she had three eyes. It happened that one day the poor girl found herself banished from her father’s house and table, with only a piece of old bread to eat and a brown cow to keep her company. But the girl (whose name, though I cannot imagine why it would matter, was Mary) found that she loved the heifer, who nourished her until she had “as much to eat and drink as she liked.” Soon the girl found herself wandering home again from the wild heath to resume her place at the table. Everyone wondered how she had survived.

The Society of Saint Pius X is the Church’s three-eyed daughter. Most Catholics have never heard of her, but among those who have she attracts very little sympathy. Those who frequent her chapels are treated like ecclesiastical untouchables. Until a few months ago I had planned on writing a long-ish historical essay about the S.S.P.X., one that would have begun not in 1988 or even in 1971 but in the fourteenth century, with the legend of William Tell: this “defamiliarizing” approach, presenting Marcel Lefebvre as a kind of Manfred figure, would have been baffling to the society’s admirers and critics alike.

Instead of pursuing this strange design, or adding to the already enormous heap of commentary occasioned by the recent episcopal consecrations, I am going to say something about why Catholics might feel the way they do about the S.S.P.X. The answer, I suspect, is bound up in the riddle posed by the very existence of the society.

Before proceeding I would like to say at the outset that no one can afford to be indifferent to the S.S.P.X. Some six hundred thousand laymen and women currently receive the sacraments from them on six continents. They have nearly eight hundred priests, four hundred religious, and just shy of three hundred seminarians. If the society were an American diocese, it would have the best ratio of seminarians to laypeople in the country. Pope Leo’s vague letter warning against the consecrations—issued on June 30, several months after the society requested a meeting with him—was decidedly unpaternal. It suggested ignorance or contempt; perhaps it was meant to signal both.

Leo is not alone in his feelings. Long before July 1, most traditionalist Catholics—by which I simply mean people who attend the Latin Mass in diocesan settings or in churches administered by groups such as the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter—spoke of the S.S.P.X., both their clergy and those who receive the sacraments from them, as if they were lepers. This is more or less of a piece with how they are regarded by many “conservative” Catholics, some of whom insisted upon calling them “schismatic” even after Pope Francis had granted them faculties. (For reasons that will become clear, his own attitude toward the S.S.P.X. is a significant clue.) “At times,” Pope Benedict XVI wrote in a letter to the world’s bishops in 2009, “one gets the impression that our society needs to have at least one group to which no tolerance may be shown; which one can easily attack and hate.”

This visceral hatred always struck me as bizarre, but after the promulgation of Traditionis custodes in 2021 it was almost inexplicable. After all, many would-be respectable traditionalists agree with the S.S.P.X. about a great many things apart from the old Mass—the correct interpretation of Dignitatis humanae, for example, or the moral status of the death penalty—while continuing to benefit from privileges they would not have enjoyed had it not been for Lefebvre’s glacial implacability in 1988. (While Benedict firmly denied that Summorum pontificum was simply an attempt to conciliate the S.S.P.X., it is striking that the older missal whose use it liberalized was that of 1962, which is to say, the one upon which Lefebvre himself had settled.)

Above I mentioned the riddle at the heart of the S.S.P.X. itself. How one answers the riddle depends upon one’s orientation toward a problem with which all Catholics sooner or later find ourselves faced. How can we reconcile the claims the Church makes for Herself—an immutability and indefectibility explicitly guaranteed by Christ—with the reality that since the 1960s almost every aspect of Her self-presentation has been altered?

Here it would be easier if readers simply accepted my characterization—which is in fact a value-neutral one—of the situation. Even a short summary of what I mean by “almost every aspect of Her self-presentation” would exhaust the space of a much longer essay than this one and ultimately add very little of importance to the argument. It would be like asking me to produce an itemized list of beams from the Ship of Theseus. The famous paradox is not, in fact, a bad analogy. The only problem is that for our purposes the implicit timeline is insufficiently compressed. Whatever else can be said for it, the Second Vatican Council and its implementation did not resemble the slow, dutiful work of replacing a few stray boards here and a tattered sail there, or throwing away tetanic nails and grimy rope-ends; instead it was more like the wholesale, bit-by-bit rebuilding of the ship in mid-voyage amid the bafflement of passengers (not a few of whom jumped or were tossed overboard by waves) and occasionally equivocal attitudes toward the repairs by the crew themselves. We can debate whether a storm was already on the way or whether the alterations made the vessel better able to withstand it, but the question is more basic.

Is the ship really the same one that once carried Theseus?

✥ ✥ ✥

For Lefebvre and his successors this question has a clear, if unfortunate, answer: the ship is not his. If they are right about this, then the S.S.P.X. is providing a necessary and grudging act of resistance in the face of perhaps the gravest crisis the Church has seen since the fourth century. Groups such as the Institute of Christ the King and the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter and ordinary diocesan clergy who were granted what Lefebvre (rightly it seems) called “limited and provisional privileges” only after denouncing him were ungrateful and naïve. Without arriving at a theory of how any of this is possible, it is necessary for the society to hold out as long as possible, like Spengler’s ill-fated Pompeiian soldier, without hope of relief until “modernist Rome” is converted to the true faith.

Now suppose that the S.S.P.X. is mistaken about all or most of this. (For some of my readers this will probably not require a great leap of the imagination.) The problem does not go away; there are, after all, many ways of being wrong. It could be that what the S.S.P.X. is fighting for—not only the most phenomenologically legible and symbolically rich aspects of the faith but the stable, visible, unambiguous, and textually embodied doctrinal continuity which they believe must necessarily undergird the former—is not an immutable part of the Christian religion but the embarrassing detritus of the Middle Ages. The S.S.P.X. is “wrong” on this view because what its adherents openly (and some politer trads privately) call “the Novus Ordo religion” is in fact the Church of Christ. The Second Vatican Council and its admittedly messy implementation were a Promethean liberation of Her from the shams and errors of a hubristic Latin Christendom, the Counter-Reformation, and even Pius X’s heavy-handed campaign against modernism.

This is probably the simplest answer. It is also one that, in the barest negative sense anyway, is acceptable both to liberal Catholics and to most conservatives. But there are other possibilities. In unguarded moments less careful observers on both sides have unburdened themselves of an answer that roughly amounts to saying that what Lefebvre fought for was once true but no longer is—not because there has been a mere adjustment of disciplinary norms or a change in rhetorical emphasis, much less what since Newman we have become accustomed to thinking of as “development” of doctrine, but something more like an irruption of the Holy Ghost or the result of a quasi-Hegelian process of unfolding that has brought about an addition or clarification to the deposit of the faith. If pressed, I would be prepared to say that this is what millions of Catholics over the age of seventy actually believe, which is why they feel comfortable saying things like in the old days you “had” to go to confession but now you don’t “have” to anymore. Conservative Catholics, especially those who live in neoconservative enclaves, will find it difficult to believe that such attitudes survived the pontificate of John Paul II. The rest of us know that these and similar sentiments applied to an astonishing range of topics are ubiquitous.

Whatever problems this answer poses for the Church’s immutability and indefectibility, it is obviously a logically possible one. The same is true for the position that functions as a more or less explicit premise in secular media reporting, according to which most of what we mean by “Church teaching” is simply a matter of the positivist will of the current pope. On this understanding, the S.S.P.X. is “wrong” because the Church operates more or less like the executive branch of the federal government—these seeming discontinuities are not matters of truth and falsehood but of preference; permission to say the old Mass is basically reversible, like the so-called Mexico City Policy; and the Church’s supposed “ban” on female ordination could and probably will be “lifted” by a future pontiff.

This does not exhaust the number of possibilities. One which I suspect is more frequently entertained in Europe than on these shores is what might be called the “plural” or “accommodationist” answer: the S.S.P.X.’s conception of the faith can and may neatly co-exist alongside the post-conciliar one and I daresay many others (e.g., the Synodale Weg) in a Church which is universal and multivocal, one with which the Body of Christ is not strictly synonymous but in which it merely “subsists,” a truly “catholic” ecclesial vision that would have been recognizable to those saintly moderate reformers who prayed for unity on the eve of the Council of Trent. Lefebvre was right, but only up to a point, just as the Germans are right! As I say, this view does not seem to have many adherents in the United States, but it seems to explain the thinking of Cardinal Zuppi, for example, and of Pope Francis, the greatest friend the society ever had in Rome.

An even more radical view is the one that is at least implicit in the writings of educated liberal Catholics, especially ecclesiastical historians. If forced to summarize it, one might say that it consists of the belief that in the past the Church was simply mistaken about the scope of Her authority. It is not that the post-conciliar Church was always the Church and the medieval/Counter-Reformation Church a kind of Babylonian Captivity—all of these competing pseudo-paradigms are limited intellectually and in some sense anyway culturally contingent attempts at expressing the reality, always semi-occluded at best this side of Heaven, of what the Church is, and it is wrong to assume that texts, documents, and so on contain stable, non-timebound meanings that adhere for all of us. Thus, the Tridentine decrees concerning transubstantiation were true according to the conceptual grammar of their age, but the Real Presence cannot be reduced to categories such as Aristotelian “substance.” (Benedict XVI himself came very close to saying something like this in his famous Christmas address on the hermeneutic of continuity.) It is a position that, within limits which will always be debated, allows us to face the reality of seeming discontinuities while accounting for what Newman called

the great Note of an ever-enduring cœtus fidelium, with a fixed organization, a unity of jurisdiction, a political greatness, a continuity of existence in all places and times, a suitableness to all classes, ranks, and callings, an ever-energizing life, an untiring, ever-evolving history, which is her evidence that she is the creation of God, and the representative and home of Christianity.

This leaves, of course, what one might call the genteel traditionalist position—namely, that Lefebvre was in some sense right about the scope and nature of the “crisis” but was wrong to do anything about it under the circumstances. On this view the pre-conciliar teaching on, for example, Church-state relations was not mistaken, nor has it been superseded, but lives, rather, in polite obscurity, buried in a single sentence of Dignitatis humanae. For this group, the self-appointed guardians of orthodoxy, the continuity problem is solved by a kind of hypothetical textual survival of a series of truths unacknowledged by the last six popes. This position is, at least in its crudest form, as attractive to certain enthusiasts as it is obviously untenable to most of us. Moreover, as we will see, it suffers from the same defect as the S.S.P.X.’s position.

✥ ✥ ✥

Here I would like to return again to my little squib about the Ship of Theseus. In the seventeenth century, Hobbes famously expanded the scope of the original paradox:

For if that Ship of Theseus (concerning the Difference whereof, made by continual restoration, in taking out the old Planks, and putting in new, the sophisters of Athens were wont to dispute) were, after all the Planks were changed, the same Numerical Ship it was at the beginning; and if some Man had kept the Old Planks as they were taken out, and by putting them afterward together in the same order, had again made a Ship of them, this would, without doubt, had also been the same Numerical Ship with that which was at the beginnings and so there would have been two Ships Numerically the same, which is absurd. . . . But we must consider by what name anything is called when we inquire concerning the Identity of it . . . so that a Ship, which signifies Matter so figured, will be the same, as long as the Matter remains the same; but if no part of the Matter is the same, then it is Numerically another Ship; and if part of the Matter remains, and part is changed, then the Ship will be partly the same, and partly not the same.

For Hobbes, the unignorable co-existence of two ships is simply an illustration of the difference between form and matter. The one stubbornly persists through time despite changing material conditions by the efforts of its custodians which, perversely, enable the existence of the other. Which should be identified as the “real” Ship of Theseus depends upon our understanding of the nature of identity. Since Hobbes there have been a number of proposed solutions, many of them ludicrous. For our purposes we can ignore these speculations. Accept that the first ship is that of Theseus. Does it require any of the old timbers? In what sense might it need them? Were they really all of them defective, or were any discarded in unbecoming haste? Is their proposed restoration a question of the ship’s being a more seaworthy vessel or mere nostalgia? And what of the crew and those who have booked passage in the second, reconstituted ship? Even if they are right in valuing some or all of the old materials, are they justified in remaining on their chosen (or inherited) vessel until the other crew undertakes the necessary work?

This, I think, is the real issue. In 1988 one could plausibly identify Lefebvre and the first four S.S.P.X. bishops with the crew of a reconstituted Ship of Theseus, preserving the old timbers until modish carpenters were ready to make use of them. But the second ship was never a museum piece; it has actually been at sea, and in the meantime the crew have been forced to make necessary repairs of their own in order to keep themselves afloat. The society’s claims about the nature of maritime identity no longer apply strictly even to their own vessel but to some kind of hypothetical third ship made up of the wood even they have been forced to replace (e.g., ultramontanism); the strictly curatorial argument for their refusal to come aboard has been belied by the exigencies of time. If the sermon given at the consecrations in July is any indication, it would seem that the S.S.P.X. now proposes that all of us, from Pope Leo on down, abandon ship and accept a lifeline to the vessel they have so lovingly outfitted, H.H.S. Eternal Rome. Imagine a world in which His Holiness abjures the new Mass, denies the normative status of “religious liberty,” admits the salubriousness of capital punishment, and excommunicates more than half the episcopate while an incredulous global body of more than a billion people calmly accepts this evidence of divine providence.

Even if I had no prior beliefs about this matter, I would still be forced to say what is, or should be, obvious: this is never going to happen, not in a decade or a century. The ship that will carry all of us to Heaven—the “realms foredoom’d by Jove”—is the barque of Peter, constructed out of whatever shoddy material it has accumulated from the bric-a-brac of twenty centuries, ably or indifferently captained, with a crew of trustworthy sailors or else rank pirates—or it is nothing. This is a brute fact. One can be as certain of it as of the testimony of our various organs of sense and yet in the face of so many other uncertainties experience no other consolation. Numquid Deus repulit populum suum? Absit.