There can be no union between the SSPX and the Synodal Church
Leo XIV and his Synodal Church must reject the SSPX because the SSPX tenaciously holds on to the antidote to the synodal poison.
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Thu Jul 23, 2026 - 11:29 am EDT
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(LifeSiteNews) — As LifeSiteNews reported on July 16, Cardinal Raymond Burke recently sounded the alarm on the need to stop the Synod on Synodality:
“We have to insist that this whole synodality business stop,” the cardinal declared. “And there be a very serious study done of the whole matter because we’re talking about the very life of the Church and we’re talking about the salvation of souls.”
Sincere Catholics around the world doubtlessly agree with Cardinal Burke’s opposition to the Synod on Synodality. The fact of the matter, though, is that the Synod on Synodality is precisely what Rome wants today. As discussed below, the Synodal Church is the most fulsome development to date of the (false) vision for the Catholic Church espoused by the leaders of the most liberal currents of Vatican II. Francis openly promoted those liberal ideas, as has Leo XIV, so one probably cannot stop the synod without opposing the liberal ideas themselves.
Questions about the liberal ideas fueling the Synod on Synodality are also important in connection with Rome’s punishments of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX). Leo XIV’s comments about the SSPX before the July 1 episcopal consecrations indicated that the fundamental problem was their ideas about the Faith rather than their plans for consecrations without his approval:
Certainly, division among Christians is always a painful matter. But they refuse to accept certain fundamental elements of the Church, beginning with various points of the Second Vatican Council. And if they make those choices, I am sorry. But we must move forward.
It is opportune to think about the “fundamental elements of the Church” that the SSPX does not accept. In so doing, we will see why the SSPX does not fit into Leo XIV’s Synodal Church.
At first glance, one would think that the SSPX would be just as welcome in Leo XIV’s Synodal Church as every other Christian. After all, almost everything about the synod seems to suggest that all Christians are welcome. Here, for example, is a passage from the Final Document of the 2024 synodal session:
Much suffering has been caused by the scandal of division between Christian communions and the hostility between sisters and brothers who have received the same Baptism. The renewed experience of ecumenical momentum that marks the synod’s journey opens the way towards hope.
Ecumenism and synodality teach us that anyone who wants to be part of the Synodal Church is welcome, whether or not they accept Catholic teaching. The SSPX has made it clear that their disobedience does not mean that they want to separate from Rome, so it seems odd that they have been excommunicated against their will by those who lead the Synodal Church.
However, when we look more closely, it becomes evident that it is absolutely necessary for the Synodal Church to reject what the SSPX represents. We can see this by considering the antagonism between Fr. Yves Congar and Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the SSPX opposition to doctrinal evolution, and the Synodal Church’s rejection of the “fourth actor” (Traditional Catholics).
Fr. Yves Congar vs. Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre
As Francis told us in his October 9, 2021 opening address for the Synod on Synodality, Father Yves Congar is the inspiration behind creating a “different church,” the Synodal Church:
Dear brothers and sisters, may this Synod be a true season of the Spirit! For we need the Spirit, the ever-new breath of God, who sets us free from every form of self-absorption, revives what is moribund, loosens shackles, and spreads joy. The Holy Spirit guides us where God wants us to be, not to where our own ideas and personal tastes would lead us. Father Congar, of blessed memory, once said: “There is no need to create another Church, but to create a different Church” (True and False Reform in the Church). That is the challenge. For a “different Church,” a Church open to the newness that God wants to suggest, let us with greater fervour and frequency invoke the Holy Spirit and humbly listen to him, journeying together as he, the source of communion and mission, desires: with docility and courage.
In hindsight, it seems that Francis’s stated desire to “create a different church” ought to have led serious Catholics to call for it to stop before it even began. But, in a real sense, we can benefit from seeing the fully developed evil of the Congar/Francis/Leo XIV Synodal Church if it facilitates real reflection on the evils that have made it possible.
READ: The forgotten lessons from the SSPX’s 1988 episcopal consecrations
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One man who would have opposed it from the beginning was Archbishop Lefebvre, who introduced his discussion of Congar as follows in They Have Uncrowned Him:
Father Congar is not one of my friends. A [peritus] at the Council, he was, with Karl Rahner, the principal author of the errors that I have not ceased combatting. He wrote, among others, a little book entitled Archbishop Lefebvre and the Crisis in the Church.
Archbishop Lefebvre went on to quote the following passage from Congar’s anti-Lefebvre book:
By the Declaration on Religious Liberty, by the Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et spes, On the Church in the Modern World – a significant title, this! – the Church of Vatican II has openly placed herself in the pluralist world of today; and, without disowning anything great that there may have been, has cut the ropes which were mooring her to the banks of the Middle Ages. You cannot stay stuck at a particular moment in history. Mgr Lefebvre speaks of ‘the Reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ over persons, over families and over civil societies’. One would have thought it was Pius X or Pius XI who was speaking.
With these words, one of the most respected theologians of the Council asserted that, through Vatican II, the Church cut ties with the Middle Ages to place herself “in the pluralist world of today.” Archbishop Lefebvre summarized these words from Congar as follows:
There it is! The sense of history pushes on to pluralism. Let us allow the bark of Peter to go in that direction, and let us abandon the Kingship of Christ on remote shores of past time.
This is what we see from the Synodal Church today, and serious Catholics know it is wrong even if they cannot clearly articulate their objections. Archbishop Lefebvre saw it clearly over fifty years ago, which is one reason why he and his SSPX are not welcome in the Synodal Church that welcomes all other Christians.
SSPX opposition to doctrinal evolution
Another reason why the SSPX is not welcome in the Synodal Church relates to its position on doctrinal evolution. The SSPX’s Profession of Catholic Faith states its position clearly in points 81-83:
81. I further profess that the power of the Magisterium in the Church is essentially ordered to the safeguarding of the revealed Deposit and, through this means, to the salvation of souls. The Holy Ghost was not promised to the successors of Peter so that they might manifest new doctrine, but so that they might guard holily and expound faithfully the Deposit transmitted by the Apostles.
82. This is why the present Magisterium cannot substantially contradict the prior Magisterium. The living Magisterium is not current preaching set in opposition to past preaching; it is the continual and uninterrupted preaching of the same truth of Faith with the same meaning throughout the centuries. The Pope and the bishops are not the masters of Revelation; they are its guardians and are subject to it as a disciple is subject to his master. They can neither change the Faith, nor modify the divine constitution of the Church, nor declare good what is contrary to the law of God.
83. I therefore reject every evolutionist conception of dogma, according to which revealed truths would change their meaning over the course of history. There can be within the Church a homogeneous progress in understanding, which perceives better, in a more distinct and explicit manner, the meaning of revealed truth, but never a mutation in the meaning of that truth. What has already been taught by the living Magisterium of the Teaching Church, and believed in the profession of Faith of the Church Taught, cannot become false; what has been condemned as contrary to the Faith cannot become legitimate; what belongs to the divine constitution of the Church cannot be remodelled according to the categories of the modern world or the historico-cultural context.
This position follows key provisions in St. Pius X’s Oath Against Modernism and the standard teaching on permissible doctrinal development set forth by the First Vatican Council:
For the doctrine of the faith which God has revealed is put forward not as some philosophical discovery capable of being perfected by human intelligence, but as a divine deposit committed to the spouse of Christ to be faithfully protected and infallibly promulgated. Hence, too, that meaning of the sacred dogmas is ever to be maintained which has once been declared by holy mother church, and there must never be any abandonment of this sense under the pretext or in the name of a more profound understanding. “May understanding, knowledge, and wisdom increase as ages and centuries roll along, and greatly and vigorously flourish, in each and all, in the individual and the whole church: but this only in its own proper kind, that is to say, in the same doctrine, the same sense, and the same understanding.”
While the SSPX is on safe ground in agreeing with St. Pius X and the First Vatican Council, the problem is that the entire purpose of the Synod on Synodality is to discern doctrinal evolution through a process of listening to all baptized souls to find consensus. If the synodal architects had to follow the principles set forth by St. Pius X and the First Vatican Council, they would not be able to accomplish any of their desired aims. Accordingly, those – such as the SSPX – who insist on the actual Catholic teaching on how doctrine can legitimately develop must be silenced and excluded.
The Synodal Church’s rejection of the ‘fourth actor’
One of the most direct indications that the SSPX is not welcome in the Synodal Church comes from the July 9, 2021, Preparatory Document for the 16th Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, one of the first official documents of the Synod on Synodality. To see this, we should first recall the way in which Francis routinely denounced Traditional Catholics as rigid and backwards. For a sense of this, we can look to Francis’s words in Hope: The Autobiography:
From a sociological point of view, it is interesting to consider the phenomenon of traditionalism, this “backwardism” that regularly returns each century, this reference to a supposed perfect age that each time is another age. With the liturgy, for example. It has now been ruled that the possibility of celebrating Mass in Latin, following the missal prior to the Second Vatican Council, must be expressly authorized by the Dicastery for Divine Worship, who will allow it only in special cases. For the reason that it is unhealthy for the liturgy to become ideology. It is curious to see this fascination for what is not understood, for what appears somewhat hidden, and seems also at times to interest the younger generations. This rigidity is often accompanied by elegant and costly tailoring, lace, fancy trimmings, rochets. Not a taste for tradition but clerical ostentation, which then is none other than an ecclesiastic version of individualism. Not a return to the sacred but to quite the opposite, to sectarian worldliness. These ways of dressing up sometimes conceal mental imbalance, emotional deviation, behavioral difficulties, a personal problem that may be exploited.
So, according to Francis, Traditional Catholics have mental imbalances that lead to “backwardism,” rigidity, and a worldly sectarianism. With that reminder about how Francis viewed Traditional Catholics, we can consider how the 2021 synodal document refers to a so-called “fourth actor” who stands in opposition to three figures (or actors) welcomed at the synod: 1. Jesus, the protagonist; 2. all the people who follow Jesus; and 3. the apostles. The fourth actor is a contemptible “extra”:
Then, there is the “extra” actor, the antagonist, who brings to the scene the diabolical separation of the other three. Faced with the perturbing prospect of the cross, there are disciples who leave and mood-changing crowds. The insidiousness that divides – and, thus, thwarts a common path – manifests itself indifferently in the forms of religious rigor, of moral injunction that presents itself as more demanding than that of Jesus, and of the seduction of a worldly political wisdom that claims to be more effective than a discernment of spirits. In order to escape the deceptions of the “fourth actor,” continuous conversion is necessary.
This does not specifically identify the fourth actor as “Traditional Catholics,” but the description is clear: the “extra” brings separation, believes in religious rigor and demanding morality, and eschews the synodal “discernment of spirits.” While this fourth actor could theoretically include groups other than Traditional Catholics, there seems to be no careful reading of the passage that would exclude Traditional Catholics.
And so from the very beginning, the Synod on Synodality included this truly bizarre rejection of Traditional Catholics.
Even if the Synod on Synodality had not already rejected the SSPX, though, the SSPX’s Profession of Catholic Faith rejects synodality in its entirety:
72. I therefore reject every claim to invoke the Holy Ghost in order to justify doctrinal adaptations that break with Tradition, moral reversals, or synodal procedures by which what the Church has received from God is put in question. The Spirit of truth cannot today inspire the contrary of what He inspired yesterday. He does not invite the Church to listen to the world in order to receive its aspirations from it; on the contrary, He impels her to teach the world, to convert it, and to sanctify it. His work consists neither in stirring up anarchic inspirations, nor in encouraging doctrinal creativity, nor in grounding spiritual life upon the search for extraordinary charismatic phenomena; it consists in guiding souls by enlightening their faith and defending them against their spiritual enemies, in order to complete in them the work of their salvation and to lead them into the light of eternity.
…
79. I likewise reject the synodalist conceptions which tend to transform the hierarchical Church into a consultative, parliamentary, or democratic structure, subject to the fluctuating opinions of the Christian people or to the pressures of the world. The collective conscience of the faithful, pastoral surveys, cultural sensibilities, and the expectations of the world are not sources of Revelation. The legitimate hearing of souls can never become a continual adaptation of the life of the Church, her doctrine, and her divine constitution to the spirit of the world, under pretext of interpreting the “sensus fidei” of the people of God.
Thus there can be no union between the SSPX and the Synodal Church. Unless and until God intervenes to restore order, Leo and his Synodal Church must reject the SSPX because the SSPX tenaciously holds on to the antidote to the synodal poison. Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us!
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