Cardinals Müller and Sarah urge SSPX to submit to papal authority

Two prominent Catholic cardinals have expressed their profound concern and sorrow over a recently announced decision by the Society of St Pius X — which rejects the authority of the Second Vatican Council — to ordain bishops this summer without papal approval.

“The only solution possible in conscience before God is for the Society of St Pius X … to recognise our Holy Father Pope Leo XIV as the legitimate Pope not only in theory but also in practice, and to submit to his teaching authority and his primacy of jurisdiction without preconditions,” wrote Cardinal Gerhard Müller, former prefect of what is now the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, in a February 21 piece published by Kath.net.

“Can one who abandons the Chair of Peter still claim to be within the Church of Christ?” asked Cardinal Robert Sarah, prefect emeritus of the Dicastery for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, in a statement published in part February 22 in the French weekly Le Journal du Dimanche.

The cardinals’ statements followed a February 18 letter from SSPX superior Fr Davide Pagliarani declining further dialogue with the Vatican on terms proposed by the latter.

Fr Pagliarani also advised the Vatican that his order — founded in 1969 by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre — would proceed with planned episcopal ordinations on July 1.

“We both know in advance that we cannot agree doctrinally, particularly regarding the fundamental orientations adopted since the Second Vatican Council,” Fr Pagliarani wrote in the letter to Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández.

In their respective statements, Cardinal Müller and Cardinal Sarah urged Church unity, even as they respectively acknowledged frustrations with certain liturgical abuses and deviations from Church teaching among some clergy.

However, both firmly asserted that SSPX’s defiance of papal authority — while claiming to preserve Church tradition — was theologically untenable and schismatic.

“I know only too well how the Deposit of Faith is sometimes scorned even by those who have the mission to defend it,” wrote Cardinal Sarah. “But the surest protection against error and heresy remains our supernatural and canonical attachment to the Successor of Peter.”

“Rightly so, not only the Society of St Pius X, but a large part of the Catholic population laments that under the guise of Church renewal — with the process of self-secularisation — great uncertainties regarding dogmatic questions and even heresies have infiltrated the Church,” wrote Cardinal Müller, who also pointed to Germany’s controversial Synodal Way, which he said “is indeed about introducing heretical doctrines.”

“But,” Cardinal Müller said, “even in the 2000-year history of the Church, heresies from Arianism to Modernism were only overcome by those who remained in the Church and did not turn away from the Pope.”