Someone should warn Leo XIV and Cardinal Fernández that they are making a fundamental mistake in managing the case of the Society of Saint Pius X: acting as if we were in 1988. We are not. Back then, (the consecration in) Écone (Switzerland) was a small earthquake in a slow, hierarchical, and easily framed information ecosystem from the centers of power. Today the scenario is radically different.
We live in the era of social networks, of transnational digital communities that organize and mobilize in hours. The traditional world is not an isolated periphery. It has seminaries, priories, vocations, and a direct communication capacity with millions of faithful. In some countries, the vocational vitality of the traditional sphere contrasts strikingly with the decline of entire diocesan structures. The post-45 certainties on which the postmodern world and the post-conciliar world were built have been crushed, the Overton window has exploded.
Playing this conflict with a strategy typical of the nineties is playing with fire. An “Écone” in 2026 would not be an encapsulated episode. It could become an uncontrollable explosion, amplified globally, capable of consolidating a stable structural counterweight. Thinking that the dynamic will be the same as almost forty years ago is ignoring the ground one is treading on.
Rome offered a “specifically theological dialogue,” making it clear that the conciliar texts would not be revised and that the legitimacy of the liturgical reform was not up for debate. From a doctrinal standpoint, the position is coherent, but it is disconcerting that this area was chosen as the central focus of the negotiations. What was at stake was not an academic symposium on documents from the 1960s and 70s, but the sacramental continuity of the traditional rite and its largest community in the world.
Can you imagine a Pope personally receiving a dissident and listening, instead of delegating everything to a controversial prefect? Can you imagine a charitable proposal in which Rome offered to guarantee ordinations and confirmations through bishops in communion, in parallel with the doctrinal debate? Can you imagine a Rome more concerned with ensuring that souls can fulfill their religious obligations and validly receive the sacraments than with dredging up disputes over documents from the 1960s and 70s?
That move would have changed the landscape. It would have forced the Society to take a stand before millions of the faithful. Instead, they opted for a hasty statement, necessarily prepared before the meeting itself, incorrectly labeling a defiance as a schism, and placing at the center an abstract, technical debate with a predictable outcome and a rigged system.
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