The Schism Cardinal Koch Cannot Find
On 2 July, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith declared every sacred minister of the Society of St Pius X to be in schism. On the same day, Cardinal Kurt Koch admitted that he was “not entirely sure whether we can speak of a schism yet”. His interview exposes the juridical overreach, theological caricatures and Roman failures concealed beneath the certainty of the official condemnation.
The most damaging criticism of Rome’s treatment of the episcopal consecrations at Écône did not come from the Society of St Pius X. It came from Cardinal Kurt Koch, Prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, in an interview published on 2 July 2026.
That was the day on which the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith issued both its decree against the six bishops involved in the consecrations and an accompanying Explanatory Note concerning the whole Society. The decree named Bishops Alfonso de Galarreta and Bernard Fellay and the four newly consecrated bishops, declaring that they had incurred excommunication. The Explanatory Note went considerably further. It stated categorically that “the sacred ministers belonging to the Society of St Pius X are in schism and must therefore be considered schismatics”, and that they are consequently subject to the excommunication prescribed by canon 1364 §1.
Yet Cardinal Koch, speaking on the same day, said: “I am not entirely sure whether we can speak of a schism yet.”
The contradiction could hardly be clearer. Rome’s doctrinal dicastery declared collectively what a senior cardinal of the Roman Curia acknowledged had not yet been established.
A Schismatic Act Is Not Necessarily a Schism
Koch recalls that John Paul II described the episcopal consecrations of 1988 as a “schismatic act”. He then makes the distinction the DDF’s Explanatory Note obscures: “That is not necessarily identical, because a schismatic act affects those who performed the act and those who allowed it to be performed on them. That is not yet the actual schism itself.”
This is not a minor qualification. It concerns the precise canonical nature of the offence.
Canon 751 defines schism as the refusal of submission to the Supreme Pontiff or of communion with those subject to him. Canon 1387 separately provides that a bishop who consecrates another bishop without a pontifical mandate, together with the recipient of the consecration, incurs a reserved latae sententiae excommunication. Canon 1364 applies the same penalty to a person who is actually a schismatic. These provisions may converge where an illicit consecration manifests a genuine refusal of papal submission, but they are not identical offences.
The fact of episcopal consecration without mandate proves the external act penalised by canon 1387. It does not, without further juridical and moral analysis, prove everything required by the canonical definition of schism.
This distinction was preserved even in Ecclesia Dei. John Paul II called the 1988 consecrations a schismatic act, but subsequently warned against “formal adherence” to the schism. Had every priest and layman connected with Archbishop Lefebvre automatically become a formal schismatic through the consecrations themselves, the additional category of formal adherence would have been unnecessary.
The 2026 decree itself names only six bishops. It warns clergy and lay faithful against adhering to the Society’s alleged schism, but it does not individually identify, investigate or judge the hundreds of priests whom the Explanatory Note proceeds to characterise collectively as schismatics.
Whatever interpretative authority the Note may possess, it is not a penal sentence against each unnamed priest. Nor can a general assertion replace the personal determination required to establish that a particular individual has refused submission to the Roman Pontiff or communion with the members of the Church subject to him.
The Society’s own public declarations make such a determination more necessary, not less. In its Declaration of Catholic Faith of 14 May, the Society addressed Leo XIV as the Holy Father, professed its filial devotion and stated that it had “no other desire than that of living and being confirmed in the Roman Catholic Faith”. After the consecrations, it expressly regretted that they had taken place without the Holy Father’s authorisation. These professions do not automatically disprove schism, especially where conduct may contradict words, but they do mean that the schismatic refusal required by canon 751 must be demonstrated rather than assumed.
The DDF’s argument proceeds too rapidly from disobedience to schism. Grave disobedience may reveal a practical rejection of papal authority, but not every act of disobedience is schism. Otherwise every obstinate violation of a papal command would constitute a refusal of the Roman primacy, and the canonical distinction between disobedience and schism would collapse.
Koch understands the difficulty. The DDF declares an established collective schism; Koch finds, at most, an act whose schismatic character must be attributed first to those directly involved.
A Parallel Church Without a Parallel Hierarchy
Koch’s second concession is equally important. Asked whether an “episcopally structured parallel church” had now been created, he questioned whether the description was accurate.
The Society has no bishops claiming ordinary territorial jurisdiction. It has erected no rival dioceses and appointed no competing bishops of Paris, London, Rome or New York. Its bishops exercise the power of orders, principally for ordinations and confirmations, but the government of the Society remains in the hands of a priestly Superior General.
Koch remarks that this separation of episcopal orders from ordinary jurisdiction presents an ecclesiological difficulty. He is right that the Catholic episcopate cannot ultimately be reduced to sacramental functions detached from hierarchical communion and governance. But the very limitation he identifies disproves the claim that the Society has constituted a conventional parallel Church.
A parallel hierarchy requires more than the possession of bishops. It requires a rival claim to ecclesiastical government: competing ordinaries, dioceses, tribunals and structures of jurisdiction established in opposition to those of the Catholic Church.
The Society has undoubtedly preserved episcopal succession outside regular canonical structures. That is serious and injurious to ecclesiastical order. But it does not follow that its bishops claim to replace the bishops appointed by Rome or possess ordinary jurisdiction over the faithful whom they serve.
Rome cannot coherently insist that SSPX bishops possess no canonical jurisdiction while simultaneously presenting their existence as proof of a fully constituted parallel hierarchy. The absence of jurisdiction may demonstrate irregularity, but it weakens the claim of institutional separation.
Koch therefore concedes a second essential point. The Society has acted against the express will of the Pope, but the ecclesiological structure normally associated with a completed schism has not been erected.
A Collective Condemnation Without Individual Judgement
Koch’s third concession concerns the nature of excommunication. He correctly describes it as a medicinal penalty intended to call the offender to repentance and restore communion. It is not an irreversible declaration that the offender has ceased to be an object of pastoral solicitude.
The medicinal character of excommunication requires juridical precision. A medicine must be directed to the person and disorder it is intended to heal. The offence, the offender, the degree of imputability and the means of reconciliation must therefore be identified.
Canon 1321 states that every person is presumed innocent until the contrary is proved and that no one may be punished unless an external violation is gravely imputable through malice or culpability. Canons 1323 and 1324 recognise necessity, grave inconvenience and even an erroneous belief concerning such circumstances as relevant to exemption from or mitigation of penalties. Where the attenuating circumstances described in canon 1324 §1 are present, the offender is not bound by a latae sententiae penalty, although a lesser penalty or penance may subsequently be imposed.
This does not mean that any invocation of necessity renders an unlawful act lawful. The objective prohibition against episcopal consecration without a pontifical mandate remains. Nor must ecclesiastical authority accept the Society’s assessment of the crisis merely because the Society asserts it.
The relevant canonical questions are whether those concerned genuinely believed a necessity existed, whether that belief was culpable or inculpable, whether the act was thought necessary to protect souls, and how those circumstances affected the personal imputability required for the automatic penalties asserted by Rome.
The Society has advanced its case openly for months. It claims that the condition of the Church, the age and number of its remaining bishops, the need to preserve priestly ordinations and confirmations, and the absence of an adequate Roman solution created a state of necessity. Rome may conclude that this judgement was erroneous. But a penal determination should explain why the asserted grounds of necessity did not excuse or mitigate the penalty in each case.
The DDF decree does not provide that analysis. It announces that the penalties have been incurred. Its Explanatory Note then attempts to extend the characterization of schism to every sacred minister of the Society without demonstrating the personal act, intention and culpability of each.
The weakness becomes more pronounced because canon 1387 and canon 1364 address different juridical realities. The consecrations are publicly verifiable acts. The alleged schism requires a determination concerning the relationship of the offender’s will to papal submission and ecclesial communion.
The first cannot simply be redescribed as the second.
Koch’s distinction between a schismatic act and an established schism therefore reflects the structure of the law more accurately than the DDF’s collective formula. The consecrations may have been illicit, gravely disobedient and damaging to ecclesial order without every priest of the Society thereby having personally committed the canonical offence of schism.
Rome’s Contribution to the Crisis
The most consequential part of Koch’s interview concerns not the Society’s failures but Rome’s own.
Koch warns that it would be self-righteous simply to condemn the Society without asking whether the contemporary Church suffers from deficiencies to which traditionalists have legitimately drawn attention. He identifies three: the treatment of the traditional Roman liturgy, an ecclesiological pluralism that treats churches and ecclesial communities as practically equivalent, and a religious pluralism that presents different religions as interchangeable ways to God.
On the liturgy, Koch is remarkably direct. Benedict XVI, he says, had opened a path by recognising the relationship between the two forms of the Roman Rite. Pope Francis then “curbed it somewhat radically”. Koch concludes that Rome must rethink this policy, especially for Catholics who are attracted to the traditional liturgy without accepting what he calls the Society’s ideological superstructure.
This is a substantial criticism of Traditionis custodes. It amounts to an admission that Rome has too readily treated attachment to the inherited Roman liturgy as evidence of ecclesiological rebellion.
Benedict XVI had stated that the older Missal was never juridically abrogated. He recognised that Catholics who accepted the authority of the Pope and the Council might nevertheless desire its celebration, and he insisted that what earlier generations held sacred could not suddenly be regarded as forbidden or harmful. He also acknowledged that Church leaders had sometimes failed to do enough to prevent divisions from hardening.
The subsequent policy reversed that pastoral presumption. Traditional communities were restricted, diocesan provision became insecure, new groups were discouraged, and attachment to the older liturgy was treated as something ultimately to be extinguished rather than integrated.
Rome then condemned Catholics for turning towards the Society while progressively narrowing the lawful provision capable of keeping them within ordinary diocesan structures.
This does not excuse the Society’s consecrations. It establishes that responsibility for the resulting alienation cannot honestly be placed upon the Society alone.
A credible appeal to unity must ask why so many Catholics believe that the ordinary structures of the Church will not preserve the liturgy, doctrine and formation they wish to hand to their children. It must ask why episcopal tolerance is extended to nearly every progressive experiment while the traditional Roman Rite remains subject to exceptional restrictions. It must also reckon with the five months during which the announced consecrations advanced publicly without any acknowledged personal papal audience for Father Davide Pagliarani.
Koch’s call to rethink the Franciscan policy concedes the essential point: Rome has not merely reacted to the crisis. Its decisions have helped to deepen it.
The Caricatures That Prevent a Resolution
Koch’s broader theological arguments are much weaker than his ecclesiological concessions.
He contends that the Society possesses a fragmentary idea of Tradition because it accepts the inheritance preceding Vatican II while resisting the Council’s subsequent developments. He presents the Council’s own conception as more comprehensive because its documents retrieve Scripture, the Fathers and earlier papal teaching.
But the citation of earlier authorities does not itself prove continuity with them. The theological question is whether earlier doctrine is received and applied according to the same principles, meaning and judgement. A later text cannot establish its own continuity merely by referring to the authorities with which continuity is disputed.
Benedict XVI’s hermeneutic of reform was a method for interpreting renewal within the continuity of the one Church. It was not an instruction to dismiss every alleged discontinuity before it had been examined. If traditionalists identify apparent contradictions involving religious liberty, ecumenism, collegiality or the relation of the Church to non-Christian religions, the answer must consist of theological distinctions capable of demonstrating continuity. Repeating the existence of a hermeneutic does not perform the work the hermeneutic requires.
Koch also compares traditionalists and progressives as patients in different wards of the same hospital because both engage in “self-authorisation”. The comparison notices a formal similarity but neglects the moral object of the respective acts.
A movement claiming authority to alter moral doctrine, sacramental discipline or the constitution of Holy Orders is not morally identical to a body claiming—rightly or wrongly—that an exceptional act is required to preserve received doctrine, sacraments and priestly formation. The latter claim may be erroneous, disproportionate or unlawful, but it must be judged according to its object, intention and circumstances rather than assimilated to the progressive programme it opposes.
His treatment of extra Ecclesiam nulla salus is similarly reductive. Koch suggests that the Society effectively consigns everyone outside visible Catholic unity to hell and thereby contradicts the Scriptural teaching that God wills all men to be saved. Yet the traditional Magisterium had long distinguished the necessity of the Church from the culpability of those who, through no fault of their own, do not visibly belong to her. Salvation remains entirely through Christ and His Mystical Body, while invincible ignorance and implicit desire may affect the personal judgement of those outside visible communion.
Koch therefore refutes a caricature rather than the doctrine historically professed by the Church.
His discussion of Judaism requires the same distinction. Catholic doctrine rejects antisemitism, inherited personal guilt and hostility towards the Jewish people. It also teaches that the Old Testament is divinely inspired, that God’s providential promises cannot be dismissed, and that Christianity is rooted in Israel. But none of this requires a dual-covenant theory in which the Mosaic economy remains an independent salvific path apart from Jesus Christ. The New Covenant fulfils the Old precisely because the God of Israel has fulfilled His promises in the Messiah.
These disputed theological questions cannot be resolved by depicting traditional doctrine as cruelty, anachronism or extremism. They require the very precision Rome has conspicuously failed to provide in its treatment of the consecrations.
Koch eventually admits as much regarding the postconciliar situation. He acknowledges that ecumenism has often degenerated into practical denominational indifferentism and that religious dialogue has fostered the belief that all religions are equivalent ways to God. He insists that these errors are distortions rather than teachings of the Council, citing the corrective provided by Dominus Iesus.
That distinction is important, but it does not make the crisis imaginary. If these errors are widespread, have endured for decades and have not been effectively eradicated by ecclesiastical authority, then the Society’s diagnosis cannot be dismissed as an ideological invention.
Rome may contest the Society’s explanation of the crisis and reject the remedy it chose. Cardinal Koch has nevertheless conceded that the disease itself exists.
The Admissions Matter More Than the Accusations
Koch intended to expose the contradictions of the Society of St Pius X. Instead, his interview exposes those of Rome’s response.
The DDF says that every sacred minister of the Society is in schism. Koch is not certain that an actual schism has yet been established. The DDF presents the Society as a body from which clergy and faithful must return to full communion. Koch denies that it has created a conventional parallel hierarchy. Rome condemns traditionalist alienation as disobedience. Koch admits that Traditionis custodes restricted the older liturgy too radically and must be reconsidered. Rome dismisses the Society’s account of the postconciliar crisis. Koch acknowledges that ecclesiological and religious indifferentism have become serious realities within the Church.
These concessions do not make the episcopal consecrations lawful. They do prevent Rome from treating every disputed conclusion as already proved.
The canonical offence of consecrating bishops without a pontifical mandate must be distinguished from the separate offence of schism. The actions of the consecrating and consecrated bishops must be distinguished from the status of priests who did not participate in the ceremony. The position of the clergy must be distinguished from that of lay faithful who attend Society chapels for liturgical or spiritual reasons. Objective illegality must be distinguished from personal imputability. A sacramentally functioning episcopate must be distinguished from a rival hierarchy claiming ordinary jurisdiction.
A genuinely medicinal response would make those distinctions. It would limit penal declarations to persons whose offences and culpability had been individually established. It would explain why the plea of necessity failed under canons 1323 and 1324. It would define what conduct constitutes formal adherence to schism. It would restore secure access to the traditional liturgy, resume substantive doctrinal discussion and address the postconciliar disorders whose existence Koch himself acknowledges.
Authority does not prove itself by the breadth of its condemnation. It proves itself by the justice and precision of its judgements.
On 2 July, the DDF declared that every sacred minister of the Society was in schism. On the same day, Cardinal Koch admitted that he could not be certain the schism existed.
His uncertainty is more theologically honest and canonically credible than Rome’s certainty.
- Pius XII, Encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi, 29 June 1943; Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Declaration Dominus Iesus, 6 August 2000.
- Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Decree concerning the episcopal consecrations of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X”, 2 July 2026; Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Explanatory Note regarding the situation arising from the episcopal consecrations celebrated by the Society of St Pius X without a pontifical mandate”, 2 July 2026.
- Kurt Cardinal Koch, interview concerning the episcopal consecrations at Écône, Communicatio, 2 July 2026.
- Code of Canon Law, cann. 751, 1321–1324, 1364 and 1387.
- John Paul II, Apostolic Letter Ecclesia Dei, 2 July 1988, nos 3 and 5; Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts, “Explanatory Note on the Excommunication for Schism Incurred by Adherents of the Movement of Bishop Marcel Lefebvre”, 24 August 1996.
- Society of St Pius X, “Declaration of Catholic Faith Addressed to Pope Leo XIV”, 14 May 2026; Society of St Pius X, “General House Statement Following the Episcopal Consecrations”, 1 July 2026.
- Benedict XVI, Letter to the Bishops accompanying Summorum Pontificum, 7 July 2007; Francis, Apostolic Letter Traditionis custodes, 16 July 2021.
- Benedict XVI, Address to the Roman Curia, 22 December 2005.
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