Above: the other recent unauthorised consecration. Photo credit: InfoVaticana.
The SSPX has now consecrated bishops without a papal mandate. OnePeterFive has noted the comparisons to the Chinese Church situation (see two views on China here and here).
Here I want to quickly note another similar situation that took place quite recently. Joseph V. Brennan, Catholic Bishop of Fresno (California), participated in an unauthorized consecration of an American Episcopalian bishop without an apostolic mandate 18 April 2026.
Despite this, he remains in his see with jurisdiction and no announcement of canonical trial or penalties.
The Episcopalian Church in America still uses the 39 articles of religion from the Church of England (subtracting those naming the monarch as head of the Church), even if they are guideposts and things of honor, not doctrinally binding. (In fact, it would take quite a specialist to understand what indeed binds consciences under sin in today’s Episcopalian Church in the USA.)
Be that as it may, we shall expect that a communicatio in sacris with a religious body, including consecration of their bishop, without papal mandate will show that the CIC 1983 is only selectively operative.
The instance vitiates rule by law in the Vatican prior to the 01 July 2026 SSPX equally unauthorized consecrations.
What is the scandalous difference: The Episcopal Church rejects the extraordinary and universal ordinary magisterium (and the ordinary magisterium of Vatican II), but no penalties will be applied to Brennan, whereas the SSPX only provisionally rejects some limited decrees of post-Vatican II magisterium until they can be reconciled with the Extraordinary and Universal Ordinary Magisterium. Cardinal Müller, as former head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, sees no threat in Brennan for Church unity at the Consistory. Somehow unity is preserved in California but gravely threatened at Ecône.
The mistake the Vatican keeps making is to reduce these absurdities as inconsequential to its publicly perceived teaching authority in the ordinary magisterium. In a first-world Catholic Church where many faithful are better educated and more learned than their clergy, the Church looks unserious, and they are not wrong to join with the traditionalists.
