One Church, One Faith, One Lord: A Critique of the SSPX’s Profession of Faith

Full incorporation in the Catholic Church requires professing the same one faith, sharing the same seven Sacraments — especially Baptism and the Eucharist — and communion with the Pope and College of Bishops.¹ This union is most beautifully expressed at every Mass, above all on Sundays, where we are united in worship through a priest who co-labors with his diocesan bishop, himself a member of the College of Bishops in union with its head, the Pope. We are further made one by professing the same Creed and by right worship of the one true God, Jesus Christ, through the common and ministerial priesthood, offering the sacrifice of Calvary for the forgiveness of sins and entering communion with God in the Eucharist. Whatever ruptures this unity is not from God.²

The Church has recently experienced a schism — a rupture of communion with the Pope and College of Bishops³ — by the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), which did this once before in 1988 but had spent thirty-eight years in the process of reconciliation. Ordaining bishops without a papal mandate and thus creating bishops out of communion with the Pope and College of Bishops, places the whole society — clergy and laity who remain with them rather than with the Catholic Church — in a state of schism.⁴

A subsequent papal act can revoke the faculties Pope Francis extended to SSPX priests to validly absolve sins,⁵ as well as delegation to preside over marriages. Anyone married by an SSPX bishop or priest will not validly receive Matrimony under any condition, and will validly receive Penance only when access to a priest in full communion is impossible.⁶ Those who attend SSPX Masses — valid, though offered outside full communion — place themselves at risk of violating the first commandment. (See CCC, 2089.)

Beyond the act of schism, the SSPX has published a Profession of Catholic Faith of the Society of Saint Pius X to enlighten souls in the face of modern errors. This document raises several problems: 1) the hypocrisy of articles 69, 73, 75–77, and 80, which acknowledge the Holy Spirit preserving the Pope and College of Bishops from error, including at an ecumenical council, yet reject key elements of Vatican II and the subsequent papal magisterium; 2) the SSPX conflates academic theory with actual doctrine, an error also found within Catholic theological, liturgical, and canonical circles; 3) like many Catholics, the SSPX misunderstands the nature and purpose of Vatican II; 4) the SSPX fail to acknowledge the pastoral circumstances preceding and surrounding the Council, presenting its aftermath instead as rotten fruit; 5) the SSPX fail to distinguish a pope’s ordinary statements from the exercise of his supreme, infallible teaching authority, missing the real diversity of levels of teaching in the Church; and 6) the SSPX cannot hold two seemingly discordant truths in mind at once. Because these problems pervade the document, a pastoral response is necessary.

General Critique of the Profession of Faith

1) The Profession misunderstands the nature and purpose of the Second Vatican Council. Vatican II was pastoral in nature — called in a spirit of aggiornamento (“bringing up to date”) to address the Church’s pastoral challenges of the time. This does not diminish its dogmatic value. Pope St. John XXIII held a threefold vision for the Council: Christian unity, especially with the Orthodox; reform of the Code of Canon Law; and human dignity, grounded in man’s being made in the image of God.⁷ The Council was never meant merely to complete Vatican I, but to accomplish its own distinct work.

atican II defined no new doctrines or dogmas. Rather, its two dogmatic constitutions — Lumen gentium, on the Church, and Dei verbum, on Divine Revelation — completed the treatment of ecclesiology and fundamental theology left unfinished when the Franco-Prussian War cut short Vatican I, addressing lingering challenges from modernism, Gallicanism, conciliarism, and ultramontanism. The soteriological question, with its ecumenical and interreligious implications; the role of bishops and laity; and the universal call to holiness all needed clarification and development. Lumen gentium is thus the reference point for interpreting the Council’s other documents, especially the declarations Nostra aetate and Dignitatis humanae, and the decrees Presbyterorum ordinis, Christus Dominus, Optatam totius, Perfectae caritatis, Unitatis redintegratio, Ad gentes, Apostolicam actuositatem, and Orientalium ecclesiarum. Read apart from Lumen gentium, these documents can appear heterodox or ambiguous to the SSPX; read through it, as the Council intends, such concerns dissolve.

The Council also needed to address human dignity in terms applicable to all humanity, not Christians alone, given the atrocities of the Second World War. Vatican II’s emphasis on the fundamental dignity of every person, regardless of religion, undercuts the very logic Hitler used to impute collective guilt to the Jewish people as justification for the Holocaust.⁸ The pastoral constitution Gaudium et spes thus offered the Church’s first full treatment of Christian anthropology and carries dogmatic value (de fide tenenda), grounding Pope St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body and the Church’s teaching on abortion, contraception, and AI. Written against the backdrop of rising atheism and existentialism in Europe, the Council fathers deliberately grounded this anthropology in Scripture rather than natural law alone, for the sake of Christian unity and outreach. Gaudium et spes is likewise the reference point for Dignitatis humanae, Gravissimum educationis, Unitatis redintegratio, and Inter mirifica.

2) Not everything in the Profession of Faith is contrary to the faith. Many would benefit from some of its content, since certain of these points are under-preached and under-taught, and a healthy increase in emphasis would do good.

3) The writing style is confrontational. “You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.” A core problem with the SSPX is anger — anger that things changed, that what they knew was taken from them. Those who had wholeheartedly embraced the pre-conciliar faith and then experienced its upheaval suffered a real, if unintended, spiritual violence. This has bred anger, resentment, and an entrenched defensive posture among many traditionalists. The Profession of Faith is a clear product of that posture: rather than inviting dialogue — a concept it rejects outright, convinced it alone guards the truth — it offers an aggressive utterance that appeals to those weak in faith, rather than a conversation that would deepen both sides’ grasp of the truth.

4) Whether on ecumenism or the Church’s engagement with the world, the SSPX cannot hold two seemingly discordant things as possible at once. F. Scott Fitzgerald defined first-rate intelligence as “the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” The Church possesses that same genius: she can be simultaneously “the pillar and bulwark of truth” (1 Tim. 3:15), in which the Church of Christ subsists,⁹ and engage in dialogue with other Christians and non-Christian religions without compromising her faith or nature, for the sake of building greater communion. The SSPX says no, insisting the Church must be a monolith incapable of both fidelity and dialogue.

Yet when the pope or bishops, individually or collectively, dialogue with other Christians, non-Christian religions, or the world, this does not mean acceptance, approval, or endorsement. It means approaching those not yet in full communion as brothers within the one human family, inviting them to fraternal relationship in hope of bringing them the Gospel.¹⁰

5) The Profession does identify some legitimate issues — irenicism in ecumenical dialogue, misunderstandings of conciliar teaching, and the like. But these issues — irenicism;¹¹ the necessity of Baptism, the Eucharist, and the Church for salvation;¹² and the unique mediation of Christ together with the Church’s role as the ordinary means of salvation¹³ — have already been addressed. Mainstream theological consensus no longer holds many of the positions the Profession attacks, though some persist in certain “liberal” theological circles.

One example the Profession cites is Karl Rahner’s theory of the “anonymous Christian.” Rahner was a faithful son of the Church who raised questions opened up by Vatican II, questions that were later given greater clarification precisely because theologians like him asked them. He is not to be condemned for that, nor is any scholar to be condemned for proposing a theory in the academic forum, so long as he remains willing to admit error — indeed, even an errant theory can help the Church reach greater clarity. Rahner and his contemporaries never intended their theories as settled doctrine, but their newness proved attractive to the discontented, while those who had cherished the pre-conciliar Church grew polarized against them.

Pope St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI sought to restore stability to the Church’s profession of faith after this period of experimentation, without foreclosing legitimate academic inquiry, reminding the Church that Vatican II is an organic outgrowth of, and remains in continuity with, her prior doctrine and living tradition. Pope Francis did not deny this framework but invited the Church to explore new theories again for the pastoral challenges of our day. Synodality, itself rooted in Tradition, will endure; the blessing of same-sex couples has already fallen into desuetude.

The question the Church must confront today is: How do we meet new pastoral challenges with new theories without disinheriting Tradition, while offering real, concrete solutions that bring people to Jesus? Vatican II effected a pastoral gestalt shift that opened new possibilities — unsettling to some, exciting to others, but properly an opportunity to recover beauty by addressing contemporary issues with renewed pastoral creativity, grounded in Tradition. Vatican II was not a new Pentecost abrogating Tradition, but an aggiornamento of the inherited faith for new pastoral challenges, and every generation faces its own. Artificial Intelligence, for instance, is a wholly new issue the Church never addressed directly — yet we meet it from the Tradition of Christian anthropology already in hand. As then-Fr. Joseph Ratzinger wrote on Gaudium et spes: “Certainly the Church is tied to what was once and for all, the origin in Jesus of Nazareth, and in this sense it is obliged ‘chronologically’ to continuity with him and the testimony of the beginning. But because ‘the Lord is the Spirit’ (2 Cor 3:17) and remains present through the Spirit, the Church has not only the chronological line with its obligation of continuity and identity, it has also the moment, the kairos, in which it must interpret and accomplish the work of the Lord as present. The Church is not the petrification of what once was, but its living presence in every age. The Church’s dimension is therefore the present and the future no less than the past.”¹⁴

Some Specific Critiques of Articles of the Profession of Faith of the SSPX

The SSPX’s Profession contains many errors already addressed in general above; some of the more egregious are treated below, following the document’s own order, so that faithful Catholics confused by the ongoing controversy might be helped. No one attached to the Traditional Latin Mass within the Catholic Church should mistake these errors for authentic tradition. As Cardinal Hosius told the Council of Trent: “Catholicus non est, qui a Romana ecclesia in fidei doctrina discordat” — one is not Catholic who deviates from the Roman Church in matters of the doctrine of the faith. If we believe Matthew 16:18 and papal infallibility, we cannot believe that the Pope and College of Bishops erred and taught heresy at Vatican II. This is the fundamental hypocrisy of the SSPX’s Profession of Faith.

I. Divine Revelation, the Faith, and Tradition

Article 9 denies the sensus fidei and sensus fidelium. To treat these as a substitute for Divine Revelation, or to confuse the sensus fidelium with the vox mundi, would indeed be a grave error — but so is denying that the Church possesses a sense of the faith authenticated by the faithful. When thousands fill St. Peter’s Square in acclamation at a canonization, is that not, while not strictly necessary, an authentic expression of the sense of the faithful? The key word is “faithful” — those in union with the Church’s profession of faith.¹⁵ When they give instinctive voice or action to the faith, that is a genuine expression of the sensus fidelium.

II. God, Principle and End of All Things, Holy Trinity

Article 22 attacks recent popes for omitting the Filioque when professing the Creed with Orthodox counterparts. Two responses apply: holding two seemingly discordant things at once, and history.

First, omission is not denial. One can profess the Creed without the filioque and still believe it — many Eastern Catholics do so routinely, since the original Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed lacked it and their liturgies still do. Full communion nonetheless requires believing that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.

Second, the history: under Charlemagne (d. 814), whose Carolingian Empire (800–887) held great sway even in Rome, Constantinople — having styled itself the New Rome since the Fall of Rome in 476 — resisted Frankish influence. The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, adopted at Nicaea (325) and Constantinople I (381), did not enter the liturgy until the fifth century. Crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 800, Charlemagne accused Patriarch Tarasios of Constantinople of heresy for omitting the filioque, though it was no part of the Creed’s original text. Pope Leo III resisted Charlemagne’s pressure to insert it and rejected the charge against Tarasios. In 809, Leo III accepted the Council of Aachen’s judgment that the filioque formula was orthodox, yet still declined to add it to the Creed. Only in 1014, at the insistence of German King Henry II — aghast to find it absent at Roman Masses — was the filioque inserted into the Latin liturgical Creed. Pope Benedict VIII, whose papacy Henry had restored after the usurpation by Antipope Gregory VI, had it sung at Henry’s coronation Mass out of gratitude.

The filioque contributed to the Great East-West Schism of 1054, but was twice conceded from the Eastern side: at the Second Council of Lyons (1274), Emperor Michael Palaiologos professed it; and at the Council of Florence, the Greeks accepted it by summer 1439, reasoning that since saints cannot err and many saints had professed it, it must be orthodox — though the resulting decree of union, Laetentur caeli, proved short-lived when Patriarch Joseph II died two days after agreeing to it, and it was not promulgated until July 5, 1439. More recently, Popes St. John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Francis, and Leo XIV have all professed the Creed without the filioque at ecumenical services with the Orthodox, and the Ukrainian, Melkite, Ruthenian, Maronite, and other sui iuris Catholic Churches still omit it. Equating non-use of the filioque with denial of the Spirit’s procession from the Father and the Son is thus not only erroneous but ahistorical — which is to say, untraditional.

IV. Original Sin and the Condition of Man

Articles 32–34 conflate the Church’s appreciation of humanity’s accomplishments with an alleged denial of original sin and humanity’s need of redemption. One can extol humanity while still affirming original sin and the absolute necessity of the Paschal Mystery for salvation.

Article 36’s insistence on a literal reading of the Genesis creation narrative is troubling. Genesis contains two distinct creation narratives with differing emphases. Does a literal-only reading, contrary to the Church’s longstanding recognition of the sensus plenior, amount to the same fundamentalism found among some Protestants — “God just went click, and everything was there”? And does it fail to distinguish history from Geschichte, a distinction that need not deny historicity while recognizing that Genesis is inspired and inerrant less in the “how” than in the “what”?

V. Jesus Christ, Word Incarnate, Sole Mediator and Redeemer

Article 43 affirms the ordinary means of salvation. But does failure to worthily receive the Sacraments foreclose salvation entirely? Cannot the Holy Spirit, in a manner known to him alone, unite a person through supernatural faith in God’s existence and trust in his Providence to the Paschal Mystery,¹⁶ making salvation uniquely Christocentric and ecclesiocentric without excluding non-Christians?¹⁷ This is the fruit of communio theology developed before and after the Council. To deny the value of communio ecclesiology, as the SSPX does, is to deny the value of St. Augustine’s Christology and pneumatology, from which communio ecclesiology is born.¹⁸

VI. The Most Holy Virgin Mary in the Economy of Salvation

Articles 50–51 treat Mary as Co-Redemptrix and Mediatrix of All Graces. I have addressed Co-Redemptrix elsewhere, showing the title’s potential for confusion and inadvisability, while defending Mediatrix of All Graces as a proper title.¹⁹

VII. The Catholic Church, Mystical Body of Christ and Sole Ark of Salvation

Articles 57–66 amount to pure Feeneyism, condemned by the Holy Office of Venerable Pope Pius XII based on the foundation for a votum inscio (unconscious desire) sufficing on the part of a non-Christian for salvation.²⁰ Without even invoking Lumen gentium 8, 9, 13, and 16, it is clear the SSPX here condemns not only Vatican II but Pius XII himself. This is an ab initio failure. Notably, St. Cyprian’s principle Extra ecclesiam nulla salus was never meant for those outside visible communion, but as a warning against apostasy, heresy, and schism directed at those already incorporated into the Church.²¹ Never formally defined by pope or council as doctrine, the principle stands today as a warning against disunity, which remains perilous to one’s salvation.²²

IX. The Roman Pontiff, the Episcopate, and the Hierarchical Constitution of the Church

Article 76 rejects Lumen gentium’s restoration of the diocesan bishop as Vicar of Christ in his own diocese, rather than a mere delegate of the Pope dependent on renewable faculties. Vatican II recovered the ancient understanding that episcopal ordination itself confers authority to teach, govern, and sanctify in one’s diocese — against an ultramontanist tendency to restrict that authority in favor of the papacy.

Articles 77–79 present collegiality in ignorance of the Nota praevia explicativa appended to Lumen gentium; Ratzinger’s explanation in the Vorgrimler Commentary would resolve these objections.²³

Article 85 recalls a conversation between a canonist and a theologian at the Catholic University of America, wondering whether attaching anathemas to Vatican II’s teachings would have produced greater clarity and less dissent. But where would that have left the SSPX — as heretics rather than mere schismatics? Perhaps they should appreciate the Council’s pastoral character, and that its teachings may be discussed without incurring a latae sententiae censure.

XII. The Social Kingship of Christ and Christian Civilization

This section attacks religious liberty, freedom of conscience, and the separation of Church and State — a myopic view. Outside Catholic countries, how else is the Church to engage a state whose established religion is not Catholic? Should we wage war to liberate fellow Catholics, or foster religious liberty — without denying the truth of Jesus Christ (Jn. 14:6) — so Christians everywhere can practice their faith?

XIII. The Sacraments of the New Law and XV. Christian Life, Holiness, and the Perfection of Charity

Articles 113 and 129 speak of “combat” against evil. Spiritual warfare is real, but I have found that one thrives spiritually not by one’s own effort but through surrender to Jesus, who wins the battle and grants freedom from evil. I would rather have Jesus fight for me; I am no greater than an angel, even a fallen one.

XIV. The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the Holy Eucharist, and the Catholic Liturgy

Article 123 refers to the Church’s “sacred language” — limited to Latin? Koine Greek was the lingua franca of the New Testament and of the liturgy on the Italian Peninsula, Rome included, until 69 AD; Jesus himself spoke and prayed in Hebrew and Aramaic. Even the Traditional Latin Mass was never celebrated exclusively in Latin, since provision existed for Old Church Slavonic.

Articles 124–126 are despicable. The Novus Ordo Missae is the valid and beautiful celebration of the Paschal Mystery in word and work. To suggest the Mass is deficient, or has caused lost vocations and spreading heresy, implies either that Jesus permits evil in his own presence or that the Mass is invalid — neither of which can be accepted. No Catholic, even one who attends only the Traditional Latin Mass, may deny an approved form of the Mass given by a pope. The Eucharistic celebration of Jesus Christ, Son of God, in either form of the Roman Rite or any ecclesiastically approved Rite, can never be called deficient, evil, heretical, or problematic. The Mass must always be addressed with reverence.

XVI. The Last Things and Christian Hope

Article 137 implies every contemporary priest preaches mercy without justice — a classic SSPX move of generalizing the failings of a few into the Church’s approved teaching. Generalizations and stereotypes are unjust.

Conclusion

No one seeking full communion with the Catholic Church can make this Profession of Faith and remain a faithful Catholic, or claim genuine understanding of the faith, its history, its traditions, or the reasons behind the Church’s actions — especially at Vatican II. If this document reflects what Pope Francis confronted, one might find new sympathy for his sometimes harsh actions toward traditionalist Catholics — though painting us all with the SSPX’s brush would be neither true nor just. Generalizations about people always fall short, since the human person is a far richer reality of reason, conscience, free will, and experience than any label allows. Mutual respect and charity, exercised through dialogue — which is not evil, but the essential path to mutual understanding — remain necessary.

On the positive side, this Profession lays bare the terms for a dialogue toward reconciliation and unity, if only the SSPX were open to the very dialogue it explicitly rejects. Negatively, it has drawn what looks like an uncompromising impasse and risks misleading the faithful away from our living tradition and authentic Catholic faith — hence this critique. After all, the SSPX itself teaches that proper pastoral care requires correcting doctrinal error.