Following the statements of Leo XIV claiming that the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X would be outside the Church for not accepting certain points of the Second Vatican Council, rivers of ink—and, worse still, rivers of confusion—have been flowing. Does it now mean that Catholics cannot criticize the Council? Is merely expressing a reservation about a conciliar text enough to fall under suspicion of schism?
The answer is no. It is worth recalling this every time the debate degenerates into the usual false dilemma: either unconditional acceptance of every line of the sixteen conciliar documents, or rupture. That dichotomy does not withstand scrutiny, and the best proof is that Rome once erected an institute whose founding statutes recognized its members’ right to serious criticism of certain conciliar texts.
On 8 September 2006, the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei erected the Institute of the Good Shepherd, made up of priests who had come from the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X and were returning to full communion. The decree, signed by Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, approved its statutes ad experimentum for a five-year period. Among those statutes was the recognition that its members could exercise serious and constructive criticism of certain texts of the Council, always within an academic framework and in communion with the Apostolic See.
What matters is not the later fate of that clause—which was later reframed in the course of a statutory revision and an internal crisis within the Institute—but the very fact that Rome granted it. By granting it, the competent authority implicitly affirmed something many today refuse to admit: that it is possible to discuss the Council theologically without leaving the Church. If such critical scrutiny were in itself schismatic or heretical, no pontifical commission could have authorized it for even a single day, neither ad experimentum nor with all the safeguards in the world.
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