Why Priests Are Joining the SSPX: A Shift in Tradition

Since the July consecrations Rome has provided an explicit route for priests to leave the Society of St Pius X. By mid-September only two had reportedly sought to use it. In the opposite direction, priests formed entirely within dioceses and religious communities continue to move towards the SSPX, with Poland providing the clearest measurable example. At the same time, men and women who committed themselves to Tradition forty and fifty years ago remain in active service across a range of traditional Catholic apostolates. The phenomenon is not nostalgia but continuity: an older generation has persevered while new clergy continue to discover the same inheritance.

Three months after Rome attempted to draw the sharpest possible canonical boundary around the Society of St Pius X, another diocesan priest has crossed it. Fr Philip Conklin was ordained for the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis on 25 May 2024. On 30 September Archbishop Bernard Hebda informed parishioners that Conklin had affiliated himself with the SSPX and had confirmed that he “does not intend to cease this affiliation”. Archbishop Hebda has consequently begun a canonical process concerning his status and instructed him not to exercise public priestly ministry.¹

Conklin matters because of his age and formation. He was born long after the liturgical reform, formed entirely within the contemporary diocesan system, trained at Saint Paul Seminary and ordained barely two years ago. On the eve of his ordination his own archdiocesan newspaper ran a profile entitled “Love for the liturgy will define Deacon Conklin’s priesthood”. He spoke of wanting the Mass to be “holy, reverent and beautiful” so that souls might be fed.² Two years later he has retained an affiliation with the SSPX despite the consequences for the diocesan career for which that same system prepared him.

The cost is concrete. A diocesan priest making such a move places parish appointments, housing, recognised faculties, financial provision, pension arrangements, eligibility for office and the entire structure of ecclesiastical advancement in jeopardy. Yet priests still make the exchange.

Fr David Fulton represents the same phenomenon at the other end of a priestly career. Ordained for the Archdiocese of Omaha in 2002, he spent more than twenty years in ordinary diocesan ministry. By 2025 the official SSPX podcast was interviewing him under the unambiguous title “Why a Diocesan Priest Joined the SSPX”. Fulton spoke about problems he had encountered concerning liturgy, catechesis, formation and the transmission of the Faith, and about finding in the Society the intellectual, liturgical and common priestly formation he sought.³ This was not a seminarian dazzled by an unfamiliar rite but a priest who had known contemporary diocesan Catholicism from within for two decades and finally judged that his priesthood required something he was finding elsewhere.

Fr Ailbe Michael O’Reilly supplies similar evidence from religious life. Formerly a member of the Canons Regular of the Holy Cross and possessed of serious Roman theological formation, he now serves the SSPX apostolate in Ireland. Speaking after the July consecrations, he put the deeper issue plainly: “Has Catholic doctrine been diluted over the last 60 years? Our answer is that it has.”⁴ The argument therefore cannot be reduced to Latin, Gregorian chant or ceremonial preference. It concerns doctrine, formation and what the Church has received and is obliged to hand on.

That distinction matters because the SSPX is not the only place where the traditional Roman liturgy can be found. The Priestly Fraternity of St Peter, the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest and other canonically recognised communities exist precisely to preserve the older rites within regular structures. A priest seeking the traditional liturgy alone therefore has alternatives which do not carry the SSPX’s canonical burden. Those who nevertheless choose the Society are choosing something broader: its analysis of the post-conciliar crisis, its theological formation, its understanding of priesthood and its insistence that Tradition is not a pastoral preference to be granted today and withdrawn tomorrow.

Poland is where individual cases become a pattern. On 29 June 2026 Fr Wojciech Kmak of the Diocese of Łowicz began his period of probation with the SSPX. His arrival at the Warsaw priory was announced publicly on 4 July, three days after the episcopal consecrations at Écône.⁵ By then Poland had already become perhaps the clearest documented example of diocesan and religious priests moving towards the Society in measurable numbers.

In October 2021 the Polish SSPX reported that during the preceding three years ten diocesan and religious priests had expressed the desire to join the Society. It described a “significant influx” during the preceding months and explicitly connected that increase with Traditionis custodes. Special formation meetings were being organised for priests entering probation.⁶ This was written only three months after Pope Francis issued the motu proprio. The connection between restrictions upon the traditional liturgy and priests seeking the Society was therefore being reported contemporaneously, not manufactured retrospectively after the confrontation of 2026.

The movement continued. On 8 December 2022 Fr Piotr Dzierżak, Fr Piotr Świerczek and Fr Michał Wierzejewski made their first oblations and formally entered the Society.⁷ On 8 December 2023 another two already ordained priests, Fr Tomasz Kolendo and Fr Marcin Leszczynowicz, made their first oblations.⁸ Other publicly identifiable Polish clergy associated with the same movement include Fr Cezary Winiarek, Fr Piotr Winiarek and Fr Daniel Glibowski. Kmak followed into probation in June 2026. A statistical report published this September put the number of priests moving from Polish dioceses or religious communities towards the Society since 2020 at approximately fifteen.⁹ Set beside the Society’s own 2021 report, the subsequent public oblations and later arrivals, the estimate describes something considerably more substantial than an occasional disgruntled priest.

The harder question is why the ecclesiastical system which recruited, educated, housed, ordained and employed these men is producing priests prepared to abandon its considerable advantages in order to associate themselves with a Society in conflict with Roman authority. There is an uncomfortable institutional irony here: dioceses and religious communities identify the vocations, finance years of formation, provide philosophy and theology, ordain the men and place them in pastoral ministry. Some of those priests subsequently encounter the older Roman liturgy, theological tradition and pre-conciliar Magisterium more deeply, compare these with the ecclesiastical culture in which they were formed, and conclude that traditional priesthood can be lived more coherently elsewhere.

That alone disposes of the easy nostalgia argument. Conklin was ordained in 2024. The Polish cases include clergy whose entire formation occurred under the reformed liturgy and contemporary ecclesiastical culture. These men are not preserving memories of a vanished childhood Church; they are reaching conclusions from within the Church as they have actually known it.

The other side of the story is longevity. Sister Mary Michael, the first professed Sister of the SSPX, celebrated fifty years of religious profession on 29 September 2026. She arrived at Écône from Australia in 1973, received the habit in 1974 and made her first vows in 1976; half a century later she remains in the religious life she embraced at the Society’s beginnings.¹⁰

The priestly record is equally striking. Bishop Anthony D. Ward SSF was ordained by Archbishop Lefebvre on 14 April 1973 and has now completed more than fifty-three years of traditional priestly ministry. Fr Franz Schmidberger, ordained by Lefebvre in 1975, celebrated his golden sacerdotal jubilee in 2025 and remains active in the SSPX. Fr Emmanuel du Chalard and Fr Louis-Paul Dubroeucq, both ordained in 1976, reached fifty years of priesthood this year; du Chalard celebrated that anniversary while eighteen young Consoling Sisters of the Sacred Heart made their first professions.¹¹ ¹²

The same longevity appears even among men whose later institutional or theological paths diverged sharply. Fr Josef Bisig, ordained by Lefebvre in 1977, left the SSPX after the 1988 consecrations and helped found the FSSP; almost fifty years after ordination he remains active in traditional priestly formation. Bishop Donald Sanborn, ordained by Lefebvre in 1975, and Fr William Jenkins, ordained in 1978, later adopted sedevacantist positions rejected by the SSPX, yet both remain in active traditional ministry nearly half a century or more after their ordinations.¹³ ¹⁴ ¹⁵ These cases are not cited to erase their real theological differences, but because they demonstrate the durability of traditional priestly commitment across very different ecclesiastical trajectories.

Nor is such longevity peculiar to Écône and the institutions which emerged directly from it. The traditional movement developed through several distinct apostolates, often disagreeing profoundly over ecclesiology while displaying the same persistence in liturgy, doctrine and clerical life. Old Roman missions were maintaining the traditional Roman Mass during the immediate post-conciliar period, before the SSPX had developed the international network familiar today, and contemporary Old Roman apostolates continue to organise their work around the unreformed Roman liturgy, traditional sacramental rites and pre-conciliar Catholic doctrine.¹⁶

The Institute of the Mother of Good Counsel provides another example. Founded in December 1985 by four Italian priests who had left the SSPX, among them Fr Francesco Ricossa, it adopted the Cassiciacum position the following year. Four decades later the Institute still maintains clergy, religious, a seminary and apostolates across several countries; Ricossa, himself ordained by Archbishop Lefebvre in the early 1980s, remains its Superior.¹⁷ Its ecclesiological conclusions differ fundamentally from those of the SSPX and other traditional apostolates, but the relevant fact here is institutional persistence.

The same principle is visible across the wider traditional Catholic landscape. The FSSP grew from the priests and seminarians who left Écône in 1988 into an international priestly society with its own seminaries and successive generations of clergy. The SSPV and associated American chapels likewise continue decades after their founding generation entered traditional ministry. Different jurisdictions, different canonical arguments and sometimes irreconcilable theological positions have not prevented a common historical fact: traditional Catholic life has proved capable of sustaining institutions, clergy and religious across generations.

Priests personally ordained by Archbishop Lefebvre in the 1970s and 1980s also remain active across the SSPX and other traditional apostolates. Fr Edward Black, Fr Jacques Emily, Bishop Alfonso de Galarreta, Bishop Bernard Fellay, Fr Stefan Frey, Fr Niklaus Pfluger, Fr Daniel Couture and Fr Christian Bouchacourt all belong to generations once expected to disappear with Lefebvre. Instead, the movement acquired continuity of formation, government and succession.

That continuity matters because it changes the character of the present defections. Conklin and the Polish priests are not joining a dying remnant sustained by memory. They are entering a traditional world which has already demonstrated that it can preserve vocations, institutions and clerical formation for decades.

This is why the story is about more than preference. A woman does not give fifty years of vowed religious life to an aesthetic enthusiasm, nor does a priest give half a century to a passing ecclesiastical fashion. An apostolate does not survive forty or fifty years, reproduce itself institutionally and train successor generations on nostalgia alone. Likewise, a young diocesan priest does not lightly endanger his ordinary clerical future merely because he prefers Gregorian chant. Such choices become intelligible only when the people making them believe something substantial is at stake.

That conviction exposes the limitations of treating the present crisis principally as a problem of canonical management. Rome can determine jurisdictions, prohibit acts, withdraw faculties and impose penalties. It cannot by those acts make the underlying questions disappear. If priests formed entirely within the post-conciliar settlement independently discover the older Tradition and conclude that serious discontinuities exist, another decree does not answer their discovery.

The liturgy remains central because it is often where the contradiction becomes visible first. A diocesan priest attracted to the traditional Roman Rite can find his ability to celebrate it dependent upon permissions, buildings, appointments and changing episcopal policy. Traditionis custodes treats the older liturgical books as something to be restricted and ultimately superseded. An SSPX priory, by contrast, treats that liturgy as the ordinary Roman Catholic inheritance to be celebrated, taught and transmitted without apology.

But the attraction extends beyond the Missal. The traditional priest encounters a coherent system: Roman liturgy, Thomistic philosophy and theology, traditional moral teaching, clerical discipline, Catholic social doctrine, missionary ecclesiology and a conception of priesthood centred upon sacrifice, doctrine and the salvation of souls. The Society presents these not as disconnected historical interests but as parts of a received Catholic whole. Priests confronting fragmentation elsewhere therefore encounter not merely another liturgical option but an alternative understanding of continuity.

This helps explain why Traditionis custodes may prove historically self-defeating. Restricting the traditional liturgy inside ordinary diocesan life does not extinguish attachment to it. The Polish evidence demonstrates that priests began approaching the SSPX in increased numbers at almost exactly the moment Rome made the traditional rite more precarious within their own dioceses. The policy intended to isolate the older liturgy may instead have removed one of the strongest reasons for traditionally minded priests to remain within ordinary diocesan structures.

The broader ecclesiastical culture compounds the difficulty. Priests confront shrinking parishes, collapsing vocations in much of the West, weakened clerical identity, experimental pastoral structures, doctrinal ambiguity and an apparently endless succession of synodal processes intended to reconsider matters which earlier generations regarded as settled. At the same time, aspects of the Church’s inherited worship, discipline and teaching are repeatedly treated as problems requiring regulation. Against that background, an institution organised explicitly around continuity becomes increasingly intelligible.

The contrast with the aftermath of the July 2026 consecrations reinforces the point. On 2 July Rome published a defined procedure by which SSPX priests could leave the Society and enter dioceses, religious institutes or other approved communities. A priest could find an Ordinary willing to receive him, seek remission of censures, make the required declarations and undergo a period ad experimentum. Rome deliberately constructed a doorway out of Écône.¹⁸

By 14 September Fr Franz Schmidberger reported that two priests had applied to pass through it into Roman jurisdictions. The Society had more than 730 priests.¹⁹ Whatever else the July sanctions accomplished, they did not precipitate a clerical flight from the SSPX.

The contrast with 1988 is stark. Archbishop Lefebvre’s consecration of four bishops produced an immediate rupture inside the traditionalist movement. Priests and seminarians left the SSPX and founded the Priestly Fraternity of St Peter; by the autumn the new Fraternity counted twelve priests, one deacon and twenty seminarians. Cullum Smith’s statistical comparison places the immediate loss at close to ten per cent of the Society’s priests and seminarians.²⁰ In 1988 disagreement within Tradition was visible, immediate and numerically substantial.

Thirty-eight years later Rome again supplied both the canonical condemnation and the institutional means for an organised departure. The comparable rupture has not followed. Only two priests had reportedly sought the Roman exit route by mid-September, while priests formed outside the Society continued travelling in the opposite direction. The asymmetry is difficult to miss.

Nor can it be explained by saying that priests attracted to Tradition have nowhere else to go. The FSSP exists because priests made precisely that alternative choice in 1988. The Institute of Christ the King and other communities provide further possibilities. A priest can seek the old Mass while remaining within structures recognised by Rome. Some nevertheless choose the SSPX and accept the greater institutional cost which accompanies that choice. They are therefore choosing something more than liturgy. They are choosing a diagnosis of the crisis.

That diagnosis is now being encountered by priests whom Écône never formed. Fulton spent two decades inside diocesan ministry before leaving. O’Reilly speaks explicitly of doctrinal dilution. Poland has produced a continuing stream of diocesan and religious priests approaching the Society, with the increased influx publicly connected with Traditionis custodes as early as 2021. Kmak began probation this June. Conklin, ordained only in 2024, has retained his SSPX affiliation despite the consequences for his diocesan ministry.

The significance is not that every traditional priest or apostolate has followed the same institutional path; manifestly they have not. It is that traditional Catholicism has survived division, canonical condemnation, the deaths of its founders and repeated predictions of extinction while continuing to sustain institutions and attract clergy.

Numbers do not determine doctrine. Truth does not become truth because fifteen Polish priests or fifteen thousand laymen profess it. But numbers can reveal direction, and lives can reveal conviction. Fifty years of religious profession reveals conviction. More than fifty years of traditional priesthood reveals conviction. Forty years of an apostolate continuing to form clergy reveals conviction. A young diocesan priest prepared to surrender his ordinary career reveals conviction. And two priests accepting Rome’s invitation to leave a Society of more than seven hundred priests reveals something as well.

Rome built a door out of Écône. Almost nobody has walked through it. Meanwhile priests whom Écône never formed continue arriving at the other door, while the wider traditional movement demonstrates that attachment to the received Roman liturgy and perennial Catholic Faith has survived long enough to become inheritance rather than memory.

That is considerably more difficult to dismiss than nostalgia.