Above: Fr. Benoît Paul-Joseph, Superior of the District of France, and Fr. Vincent Ribeton, Rector of St. Peter’s Seminary in Wigratzbad, with the Holy Father on February 4, 2022, shortly before the FSSP completed an urgent Novena and consecrated itself to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, just as His Holiness signed an explicit decree protecting the FSSP. Source: FSSP press release.
The Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter (FSSP) released a statement on Sept. 27 announcing that it had recently been informed by the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life of the “opening of an apostolic visitation of the Fraternity.” According to the statement, the Prefect of the Dicastery, Cardinal João Braz de Aviz, emphasized to the FSSP Superior General John Berg and his assistants during a meeting in Rome that the visit “does not originate in any problems of the Fraternity,” but is instead intended to enable the Dicastery to better understand the FSSP, “so as to provide [them] with any help [they] may need.”
The Dicastery issued its own statement signed on Sept. 30 confirming that it had announced an apostolic visitation of the FSSP in order to “deepen the knowledge of the Society of Apostolic Life of pontifical right and to offer it the most appropriate help in the path of following Christ.” The Dicastery’s mandate, as outlined in Article 121 of the apostolic constitution Praedicate Evangelium (promulgated by His Holiness Francis in 2022) and reiterated in the Dicastery’s statement, is to “promote, encourage and regulate the practice of the evangelical counsels, how they are lived out in the approved forms of consecrated life and all matters concerning the life and activity of Societies of Apostolic Life.”
To translate these announcements into layspeak, the Fraternity is getting audited.
The mandate for the visitation, as implied in both statements, originates in Pope Francis’ 2021 motu proprio Traditionis Custodes, whichofficially shifted the Ecclesia Dei groups, including the FSSP, under the competency of the Dicastery. Previously, these groups fell within the jurisdiction of the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei, instituted in 1988 under John Paul II and vested with additional powers under Pope Benedict XVI with the view to implementing the conciliatory agenda outlined in Summorum Pontificum.
In 2019, Francis decommissioned the Ecclesia Dei Commission and assigned its responsibilities to the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. In 2021, after a “detailed consultation with bishops,” Francis vested both the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, and the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life, with the authority of the Holy See with respect to the observance of the provisions proscribed in Traditionis Custodes.
Traditionis Custodes is, therefore, the unmistakable backdrop against which the declared audit will be staged. The stated aims of Francis’ apostolic letterare clear: “to press on ever more in the constant search for ecclesial communion.” Also evident is Francis’ conceptualization of “ecclesial communion,” which assumes that “the liturgical books promulgated by Saint Paul VI and Saint John Paul II, in conformity with the decrees of Vatican Council II, are the unique expression of the lex orandi of the Roman Rite [my emphasis].”
In the Responsa ad dubia on some provisions of the Apostolic Letter, Cardinal Arthur Roche, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, emphasized this point: “This is the direction in which we wish to move,” he wrote, insisting that “sterile polemics, capable of creating division, in which the ritual itself is often exploited by ideological viewpoints” must be avoided.
Naturally, “creating division” means worshiping in the non-Vatican II prescribed way in which Mass was celebrated for hundreds upon hundreds of years until the 1970s. Similarly, “ideological viewpoints” is a euphemism for the doctrinal orthodoxy of the Trads who, like a dog with a bone, just won’t let it go.
Although I’m loath to speculate on what, specifically, the audit of the FSSP might entail, recent high-profile apostolic visitations have done little to instill confidence that the process will be carried out with justice, due cause, and transparency.
In 2021, Francis ordered an apostolic visitation of the archdiocese of Cologne to investigate the mishandling of sexual abuse allegations. The inquiry found that Archbishop Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki had made serious communication errors in suppressing the scandalous results of an independent report he himself had commissioned on the response of church officials within his diocese to allegations of sexual misconduct. Archbishop Stefan Hesse of Hamburg, who served as the Cologne archdiocese’s vicar general from 2012 to 2015, was faulted for 11 cases of neglecting his duty to inform and report abuse allegations. Auxiliary Bishop Dominikus Schwaderlapp was faulted for eight cases of neglecting his duty in this regard.
Yet despite offering their resignations, none of these bishops were shown the door. Schwaderlapp and Hesse were temporarily released from their duties. Woelki, whom the Vatican acknowledged had “contributed significantly to a crisis of confidence in the archdiocese that has disturbed many of the faithful,” was offered a “spiritual timeout”, only to be promptly reinstated by Francis when his time in the naughty corner was up.
Meanwhile in France, an apostolic visitation was announced in 2022 for the archdiocese of Strasbourg, with the goal of helping the Church in Strasbourg to “fulfill its mission as a witness to the Risen Lord”. In that case, Francis did accept the resignation of Archbishop Luc Ravel. His crime? Apparently, it was his “authoritarian governance.” It probably didn’t help Ravel’s case that as archbishop he had warned of the rising Muslim birth rate, condemned the widespread promotion of abortion, and welcomed to the diocese traditionalist priests from the Missionaries of Divine Mercy, whose work evangelizing Muslims is evidently out of step with the Vatican’s preferred message of “interreligious dialogue.”
Coincidentally, another French diocese that received an apostolic visitation the following year, was Fréjus-Toulon in the southeast – the very diocese whence the Missionaries of Divine Mercy come, and whose Bishop Dominique Rey is known for harboring communities attached to the Roman liturgy. In 2022, the Vatican dropped a bombshell on the diocese by suspending all priestly ordinations. A coadjutor bishop was appointed, and an apostolic visitation announced in February 2023. In June 2024, the Missionaries of Divine Mercy Superior revealed that, although other ordinations in the diocese had been resumed, those of their five seminarians remained blocked “due to the possibility for future priests to celebrate in the old rite.”
Although the French daily newspaper attributed the drama to Rey’s supposedly direct and determined style of governance, his partiality to the Tridentine liturgy seems to be the real sticking point. In fact, news site Radiofrance ran a feature article on the scandal, quoting a bourgeois boomer from Versailles who was shocked upon arriving in Toulon to encounter a practice she’d never seen before: a Mass said in Latin, with the faithful on their knees, the priest’s back turned. When the individual was repeatedly told she couldn’t receive communion in her hands, she kicked up a stink and made a complaint to the diocese.
Yet by far the most unsettling apostolic visitation in recent years has been the infamous so-called investigation of Bishop Joseph Strickland for reasons that – and I risk repeating myself here – have still not been disclosed to the public, over a year after the visitation was announced. Evidently, he did something far worse than simply covering up some lengthy report revealing widespread and systemic mishandling of sexual abuse allegations by clergy and brother bishops. If he had, we know from the Cologne affair that he’d still be swanning around Tyler, after a brief sabbatical “to reflect, to renew, and to reconcile.” No, if the French precedent is anything to go by, it’s more likely that Strickland’s crimes include being too orthodox, direct, and partial to the Roman rite celebrated reverently.
As for the FSSP’s impending visitation, some Catholic reporters have suggested that those of us who raise our eyebrows at this latest news are merely fear mongering disturbers of the peace. Perhaps they are right to be so incurious. After all, Francis did recently sign a decree confirming the continued existence of the Fraternity.
Yet when Archbishops are being directly requested by Rome three years after the issuing of Traditionis Custodes to shut down a thriving Latin Mass with hundreds of regular attendees – in the bishop’s cathedral no less – one can be sure that Francis’ 2022 pledge to the FSSP was not his last word on the matter. This despite the rumored pumping of the brakes regarding “Traditionis Custodes 2.0.”
True to his commitment in Traditionis Custodes, Francis will move forward with the goal of “ecclesial communion.” He must. If the Vatican is to promote the One-World Religion of Universal Brotherhood, it cannot possibly entertain two liturgically, doctrinally, and theologically divergent expressions of the Faith.
It can permit rainbow heresy, Aztec-inspired indigenous dancing, pagan “smudge” ceremonies, rock concert liturgies, and cringe dancing on the altar. But the various elements contained in the Tridentine Rite, including ad orientem worship, communion on the tongue, the minor exorcisms included in the baptismal rite, the profoundly moving Requiem Mass with its arresting sequence Dies irae, simply cannot be incorporated into the Creed of All-Faiths-Look-To-Heaven.
Hence no, I’m not enthusiastic at the prospect of a traditional society of priests receiving an “I’m from the Vatican and I’m here to help” knock at the rectory door. If the patterns and precedents discernable in the present pontificate are to be any guide at all, then I suspect the visitation augurs ill indeed for the Fraternity, for Traditional Catholics, but most importantly, for the Latin Rite.