(Source)

The formerly-Catholic Society of St Pius X triggered the schism by consecrating bishops without the Pope’s approval, a key part of the ceremony for Catholic believers.

(Also excommunicated)

A lot. The Vatican is really reluctant to get into this with secular political leaders. There have been similarly ostentatious and awful Catholic political figures in other countries (Matteo Salvini in Italy; Santiago Abascal in Spain; a surprising number of examples in Japan of all places) whom nothing has happened to. It's unfortunate, but the alternative is probably much more moralistic meddling in day-to-day politics than most left-leaning Americans would be comfortable with.

What might happen instead is the Archbishop of Washington, Robert McElroy, who is one of the most pugnaciously left-wing cardinals in the world, taking matters into his own hands and telling Groyper Jayden to get the fuck out of the communion line. Now that I'd love to see.

Since I'm on the subject, here's a post I've been meaning to make today:

Monstrougourmandizingcats Explains the Lefebvrite Schism

What happened?

Today, July 2, 2026, a Vatican subcommittee called the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) announced the excommunication of the Catholic fringe group the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX). The immediate reason for this is that yesterday, July 1, the SSPX consecrated four new bishops without the Vatican's consent. They did this because their current leadership is aging and in Catholicism you need new bishops to ordain new priests; they didn't seek the Vatican's consent because the Vatican would have conditioned that on taking steps that they're not willing to take.

What steps?

Repudiating a whole raft of fringe conservative ideas, mostly. Some of these aren't conservative in the political sense, only in the sense of harking back to an earlier era of doing things in the Church. They're most known for doing the Mass in Latin, for example (I have some aesthetic sympathy for this, but the vibes of places that do this are so bad for other reasons that I've stayed away from them for many years). Other characteristic SSPX ideas, though, are much more troubling, such as antisemitism, Islamophobia, misogyny (even compared to mainstream Catholic culture), and sympathy for past and present fascist political movements. In the SSPX worldview, this is connected to the relatively benign stuff, and they refuse to get rid of any of it entirely, although they do have limits (such as kicking out an avowed Holocaust denier at one point).

How is it connected?

Most of these ideas are ones that the mainstream Catholic Church used to adhere to or at least tolerate, unfortunately. They were all jettisoned or mostly-jettisoned at the same time in the early 1960s, in what was called the Second Vatican Council or Vatican II. Church councils are rare events that can change Catholicism's direction and institutional structure in strange and unexpected ways, and Vatican II made especially sweeping changes. The SSPX objects to Vatican II and hence retains all these ideas and practices that the Council attempted to deep-six.

Why are they called Lefebvrites?

It's a disparaging nickname that the Vatican only just started using now, implying a cultish attachment to their deceased founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.

Who was he?

Lefebvre was a French priest who became Archishop of Dakar in what was then French West Africa and, later, the leader of an order of monks and missionaries called the Holy Ghost Fathers. He participated in the Second Vatican Council, as did every other bishop in the world at the time, but he objected to almost everything it did. After a few years of trying to thread the needle as best he could, he founded the SSPX to preserve what he saw as "true" Catholicism. He had a series of awkward and sometimes stormy communications about this with the Pope for most of the 60s and 70s, Paul VI (not to be confused with the Locked Tomb character, although they might be named after him). Lefebvre, say what you will about him, said what he believed and believed what he said; unfortunately, a lot of what he believed, and said, was especially bellicose antisemitism and Islamophobia of the kind mentioned above. When Pope John Paul II appointed an Archbishop of Paris, Jean-Marie Lustiger, who had converted to Catholicism from Judaism as a teenager, Lefebvre attacked Lustiger in the most disgusting terms, and some younger SSPX priests got into a physical altercation with Lustiger.

Wasn't Paul VI Pope?

John Paul I and then, almost immediately, John Paul II, succeeded Paul VI in 1978.

What happened then?

John Paul II was more conservative than Paul VI, but not by enough for Lefebvre, and after another ten years Lefebvre consecrated bishops in exactly the same way we're seeing now. John Paul II excommunicated these bishops, as well as Lefebvre himself. When Benedict XVI succeeded John Paul II, he lifted the excommunications and started negotiations with the SSPX, which generally went badly but which both sides kept working on for many years (including under Pope Francis, whom the SSPX, unlike other very conservative Catholics, didn't have any particular problem with; he was a faggy, Jew-loving, Latin-Mass-hating heretic, just like his five immediate predecessors, so no change from their point of view).

Lefebvre had died in 1991. The leader of the SSPX who was involved in these negotiations was Bernard Fellay, one of the bishops consecrated and excommunicated in 1988; he's now been excommunicated again because he helped consecrate these new bishops. Fellay was a moderate by SSPX standards and tried his best, but was succeeded by a hardliner, Davide Pagliarani (not actually a bishop). Pagliarani is a secretive figure who's known to have liked Pope Francis personally--they moved in some of the same charity/social services circles in early-2010s Buenos Aires, apparently--so when Francis died and was succeeded by someone Pagliarani had no particular feelings about, things deteriorated.

What's next?

The head of the DDF, a man named Victor Manuel Fernandez (people call him Tucho), has laid down a much sterner banhammer than in 1988. It extends to rank-and-file SSPX members as well as the leadership, which the previous one didn't. In order to get out of the excommunication, they have to submit, in writing (handwriting, in priests' case), requests to "normal" bishops to be reinstated in the "normal" Catholic Church. For priests who do this there will then be a one- to three-year probation. For contemporary Catholicism, this is very severe. Tucho was not previously known as a disciplinarian; in fact he's been controversial for being too liberal for the DDF, which is traditionally a hard-ass component of the Vatican's operations.

What's more, Tucho revoked the SSPX's ability to perform valid marriages and confessions, which Pope Francis had extended to them as a goodwill gesture in 2015. Pope Francis had a soft spot for the SSPX because he saw them as oddballs and outcasts, despite disliking and distrusting other traditionalists. Pope Leo does not have a soft spot for the SSPX, and evidently Tucho--who, fun fact, was Pope Francis's ghostwriter before he was DDF Prefect--doesn't either.

How many of these people are there?

A couple thousand priests, nuns, etc., and a little over half a million laypeople.

Will any of them go through this process?

At least one person on Catholic Tumblr already has, thanks be to God for her repentance. I expect a lot of others will double down, though, sad to say.