By Joshua McElwee
VATICAN CITY, July 2 (Reuters) – Pope Leo said during his inaugural Mass last year that he would seek to unify the Catholic Church after years of fraught divisions and vowed he would not rule like an “autocrat” over its 1.4 billion members.
But the Vatican’s decision on Thursday to tell the members of a breakaway traditionalist Catholic group that they were excommunicated showed that he is also not afraid of making firm decisions, experts said.
The Vatican’s top doctrinal watchdog said that priests and lay Catholics who are part of the Swiss-based Society of St. Pius X are now in schism with the wider Church, after they ordained four new bishops on Wednesday without Leo’s approval.
“Leo … is somebody that does not work in blurred lines,” Elise Allen, author of a biography of Pope Leo for Penguin Peru, told Reuters. “He’s not afraid to be extremely clear or firm when he needs to be.”
“That’s not going to be his immediate instinct, but he’s not going to back down from doing that when he thinks it’s needed,” said Allen, the only journalist to interview the pope since his May 2025 election.
A NON-CONFRONTATIONAL POPE GETS CONFRONTATIONAL
Massimo Faggioli, an expert on the papacy, likened Thursday’s response from the Vatican to how Leo has interacted with U.S. President Donald Trump.
Over the first 10 months of his papacy, the first U.S. pope never publicly referred to Trump by name. Then in April, Leo began firmly criticizing the violence of the Iran war, which drew unprecedented social media attacks by Trump on Leo.
After Trump’s first attack on him, the pope told Reuters he planned to keep criticizing the conflict.
“Leo is a nonconfrontational figure but … when he has to say something, do something, so far he has done that,” said Faggioli, a professor at Villanova University, outside Philadelphia.
The Society of St. Pius X denies the central teachings of the Second Vatican Council, a landmark Vatican gathering of bishops in the 1960s that pursued a range of reforms for the global Church and sought to repair its relations with Jews and with other Christian denominations.
The Council allowed for the Mass, until then said only in Latin, to be celebrated in local languages. The society rejected that change, citing a desire for the Latin rite’s sense of mystery and formality.
Popes have tried to normalize the Vatican’s relations with the group for decades. Even the late Pope Francis, who widely sought to restrict the Latin Mass, made several symbolic overtures and reauthorized them to hear confessions on behalf of the Church.
Leo “said the time has come to stop bending over backwards and to send a message,” Allen said. “What he wants to do is draw a very clear line in the sand and say, ‘This is what the Catholic Church is, either you’re with it or you’re not.'”
Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich, a close ally of Leo’s, told Reuters the pope is making clear that the reforms of the Council are “not an optional chapter in Church history or a ‘matter of opinion’ up for perpetual debate.”
“What is required is a commitment to the Council’s teachings,” Cupich said.
POPE SHAPED BY CHURCH’S REFORMS IN 1960s
It is a strict teaching of the Church that only the pope can authorize the consecration of new bishops, in order to maintain the Church’s ties to Jesus’ 12 apostles, who are considered the first priests and bishops.
The Church considers unauthorized ordination of bishops as so serious that it causes those taking part in the ceremony to be automatically excommunicated, or “out of communion” with the wider Church, and unable to receive sacraments until they repent and ask for forgiveness.
The Society said it needed to ordain new bishops to have enough prelates to lead the group. It currently counts 733 priests among its numbers worldwide.
David Gibson, a Vatican expert and academic at Fordham University in New York, said the reforms of the Council, often referred to by Catholics as “Vatican II”, had shaped the pope’s entire life.
Leo was ordained as a priest 17 years after the Council’s end. He spent decades before becoming pope as a missionary and bishop in Peru, one of many countries in Latin America where prelates became forceful proponents for the Council’s reforms.
“At heart he sees this move by the Society … as opposition to the authority of the Council of the entire Church,” Gibson said.
“That opposition is a red line for him,” the academic added. “He is tolerant but not foolish. It’s not just disobeying the pope. It’s about showing contempt for the entire Catholic community and tradition.”
(Reporting by Joshua McElwee; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Will Dunham)
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