On one side, Sarah Mullally, the newly installed Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, arrives in Rome for the full ecumenical treatment. She is scheduled to meet Leo XIV at the Vatican, worship with Anglican communities in Rome, pray at the tombs of Peter and Paul, meet officials from the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, and join Leo for midday prayer in the Apostolic Palace. The official ecumenical framing is not subtle. This is about “deepening dialogue,” “shared witness,” “bonds of communion,” and the familiar postconciliar language of walking together toward visible unity.
On the other side, rumors are now circulating that Rome is preparing to treat the Society of St. Pius X as the next great ecclesial emergency. Rorate reports that Roman sources say Leo XIV intends to follow the “1988 jurisprudence” if the SSPX proceeds with episcopal consecrations on July 1, with a decree similar in tone and content to the 1988 Gantin decree against Archbishop Lefebvre and the bishops he consecrated. That decree, if issued as described, would declare excommunication for the consecrating and newly consecrated bishops and denounce the act as “schismatic.”
Then came the more explosive claim from Niwa Limbu: that the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith is preparing for the possibility of excommunicating not merely the bishops involved, but the “whole SSPX.” His clarification narrowed that phrase to Society members in holy orders, meaning bishops, priests, and clerics, not the lay faithful who attend SSPX chapels. Still, the point remains radioactive. Rome appears ready to place the canonical gun on the table, not against German bishops blessing homosexual couples, or against ecumenical theatre at the tomb of St. Peter, or against Anglican sacramental cosplay in Rome, but against priests whose central offense is that they continue to exist outside the approved postconciliar containment system.
That is the story.
The real dividing line in Leo’s Rome is becoming painfully clear. Anything Protestant, synodal, feminized, Anglican, German, gay-friendly, or ecumenically theatrical can usually be managed with smiles and carefully worded press releases. Tradition gets the hammer.
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