In the days after the SSPX consecrations of July 1 and subsequent excommunications, the ever-perceptive Gregory DiPippo of New Liturgical Movement offered an interesting observation on the actions of the Holy See. Posting on his Facebook page, he noted:
The Holy See is hideously, scandalously wrong to treat the visible, corporate unity of the Church as if it were the only principle worth defending. That doesn't change the fact that the visible, corporate unity of the Church is still very much a principle worth defending, and the Holy See is right to defend it.
Mr. DiPippo’s statement rightfully identifies the Catholic Church’s corporate unity as the fundamental principle at the heart of the Holy See’s response to the SSPX situation and highlights the tension in how the modern papacy tends to approach to the issue.
The corporate unity of the Church is obviously of tremendous importance. In our Lord’s final discourse to His followers on this earth, He prayed for their unity: “Holy Father, keep them in thy name, which thou hast given me, that they may be one, even as we are one” (John 17:11). The oneness our Lord wills is not a practical directive for the sake of mere institutional efficiency; it is an essential component of the Church’s constitution. Notice how our Lord draws a connection between the Church’s oneness and the unity within the Trinity—“that they may be one even as we are one.” The corporate unity of the Church is itself a reflection of the Trinitarian union between the Father and the Son. The Church’s unity is a metaphysical, literal unity that is based on the unity of the divine persons.
The visible principle of the Church’s corporate unity is the Chair of Peter. The Chair of Peter is the conduit through which one has communion with the universal Church; to be in communion with Rome is to be in communion with the Church, and to be in communion with the Church is to be in communion with Rome. Hence St. Cyprian famously wrote:
On [Peter] He builds the Church, and to him he gives the command to feed His sheep, and although He assigns a like power to all the apostles, yet He founded a single chair, and He established by His own authority a source and an intrinsic reason for that unity. Indeed, the others were that also which Peter was, but a primacy is given to Peter, whereby it is made clear that there is but one Church and one chair. So too, all are shepherds, and the flock is shown to be one, fed by all the apostles in single-minded accord. If someone does not hold fast to this unity of Peter, can he imagine that he still holds the faith? If he desert the chair of Peter upon whom the Church was built, can he still be confident that he is in the Church? (1)
For most of us, this should be review, but it is good to brush up on it, because in times of scandal and disorder it is easy to regard the Church’s corporate unity as a thing of little consequence. It’s not. It is a matter of grave consequence. This is why, to go back to Mr. DiPippo’s point, the Holy See is not wrong to defend this principle and to do so strongly. Did people really expect the Holy See to not defend the corporate unity of the institution over which it presides? The Holy See would be utterly derelict if it did not defend the corporate unity of which it is the divinely sanctioned principle. Those who, therefore, expected the Holy See to simply stand down in the face of threats to its institutional unity have lost sight of the importance the Church’s corporate unity holds in the place of our religion.
And yet, neither can we forget that the unity of the Church is not an end in itself; Christ willed it for a very specific purpose. Our Lord relates the Church’s oneness to the efficacy of the Church’s witness. In John 17, Christ prays “that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me”; the same is reaffirmed a few verses down, where Christ yet again prays, “that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that thou hast sent me” (John 17:21, 23). In other words, if we want the world to believe, we need to take the oneness of the Church very seriously. Conversely, the corporate fragmentation of the Church impairs the Church’s witness, making it less likely that the world will believe.
The Church’s unity has an evangelical purpose geared towards saving souls.
But what happens when the Holy See insists that corporate unity be observed while acting disconnected from the purpose for its observation—when it seems to forget that its institutional integrity is a means for saving souls? Does the Catholic Church today act like it is interested in saving souls? We Traditionalists know the answer, and the world is starting to notice as well. Back in July Rod Dreher published a pair of articles addressing this matter in light of the SSPX consecrations. In his piece “Vatican: The Real Enemy is the SSPX” from July 2 (which is regrettably paywalled), Dreher observes that the modern Church’s stubborn reluctance to stand behind its own teaching damages its evangelical credibility. Dreher says:
People outside the Catholic Church see what is tolerated, and what is forbidden, and draw their own conclusions....[D]efenders of Catholicism should try to understand what the actually existing Catholic Church today looks like to many outsiders. It looks like a Church led by men who don’t actually believe what it teaches. And, as I’ve said, when the Catholics who set Rome’s hair on fire are the Traditionalists—well, what does that tell you? It won’t do to rest on the crisp, logical argument for why this excommunication was necessary (though it might have been!); what ordinary people see is Pride masses celebrated, while Traditional Latin masses are suppressed. And they naturally draw conclusions.
Dreher’s second article explores this further, drawing heavily on demographics and history. In his July 7 piece “Authority, Modernity, and Church Disintegration” (which is thankfully not paywalled) Dreher opines:
The SSPX put Pope Leo in an impossible position. Theirs was a direct challenge to papal authority. Their claim that they are loyal to the Pope, except when they don’t think they are obliged to be, is hard to make sense of. So he excommunicated them. That said, the reason a lot of people are bothered by that is because the Vatican tolerates all manner of open dissent against Catholic teaching, and does nothing. The strategic genius of a James Martin, the Jesuit LGBT advocate, is that he has been careful never to openly defy Church authority, even though what he fights for is directly contradictory to Catholic doctrine and Scripture.But this is an inside game. Ordinary people—orthodox Catholics as well as non-Catholics—can see that the James Martins of the world are getting away with it.You can explain to them why, from the point of view of canon law, the SSPX challenge had to be dealt with in this way, while the James Martin “reforms” aren’t as serious. And you might be correct, strictly speaking! But what it looks like from the outside is that Rome will crack down hard on Latin mass traditionalists, while giving a pass to factions within the Church who de facto defy Church authority, but who are strategic enough not to press the point. It looks like the leaders of the Church don’t really believe their own teaching. If they won’t explain and defend the teaching, not only in words, but in actions, then why should the laity take the teachings seriously?
Indeed, the heart of the Traditionalist critique is that the Church had ceded the field to her enemies. She no longer treats the perennial deposit of faith as worthy of defense; she seems positively embarrassed by it. When the Holy See strenuously insists on corporate unity while methodically undermining its own worship and teachings at every turn, it is acting with monumental stupidity. As Mr. DiPippo said, “the Holy See is hideously, scandalously wrong to treat the visible, corporate unity of the Church as if it were the only principle worth defending.”
This reflects, I think, the Church in an advanced stage of bureaucratic torpor. To perpetuate an institution for the sake of the institution is the essential characteristic of bureaucracy, like any federal agency whose highest priority is to merely assure its own continued existence (this was also something I explored in my recent YouTube video essay "The Myth of Post-Conciliar Decentralization," if you care to delve more into this issue of bureaucratization).
This isn't just my opinion; we can put it to an empirical test. If the Holy See were truly defending the its corporate unity on principle, the severity of its reactions would be proportional to the gravity of the offense against that unity. If instead it is defending the bureaucracy as such, its severity will be anchored to something else entirely: the material cost of enforcement. The evidence points overwhelmingly to the latter. The Vatican’s treatment of groups that resist or diverge from Roman authority varies dramatically depending on where money, property, and coercive civil power actually reside. Three contemporary cases illustrate the pattern:
This isn't just my opinion; we can put it to an empirical test. If the Holy See were truly defending the its corporate unity on principle, the severity of its reactions would be proportional to the gravity of the offense against that unity. If instead it is defending the bureaucracy as such, its severity will be anchored to something else entirely: the material cost of enforcement. The evidence points overwhelmingly to the latter. The Vatican’s treatment of groups that resist or diverge from Roman authority varies dramatically depending on where money, property, and coercive civil power actually reside. Three contemporary cases illustrate the pattern:
(1) Germany presents Rome with the most theologically alarming case. Through the Synodal Way, the German episcopate has openly pressed for changes that undermine Catholic doctrine and discipline: blessings for same-sex unions, permanent lay governance structures over bishops, reconsideration of the Church’s teaching on sexual morality, and challenges to the male-only priesthood, etc. We all know what they are about. Any one of these, coming from a religious order or a lone theologian, ought to invite swift censure. So why are they not disciplined? The answer is that the German dioceses control enormous wealth through the Kirchensteuer, the state-collected church tax that yields billions of euros annually. Since this is a state-collected tax, any property dispute that would inevitably arise from excommunication or schism would have to be adjudicated in German civil courts, where Rome enjoys no strategic advantage. The Vatican’s response has therefore been a long campaign of letters, warnings, and negotiations—scolding rather than actual discipline. A corporate war against so well-funded an adversary, fought in a foreign legal system, would be ruinous even if won. Rome simply cannot prevail with canonical censures in Germany, and hence it does nothing.
(2) The Society of St. Pius X presents the opposite situation. Its offense against Roman authority is, on paper, graver in form: Archbishop Lefebvre consecrated four bishops in 1988 in direct defiance of a papal prohibition; the Society did so again in 2026 and continues to operate outside ordinary canonical structures. But the Society’s material resources are negligible compared to the German church; it holds no state funding, and the one thing it hypothetically wants (recognized canonical standing and access to mainstream ecclesial life) lies entirely within the Vatican’s giving. Suppression here carries no material cost to Rome, and so the Society has been strongly suppressed with various censures, even as its doctrinal positions are arguably closer to the historic faith than those held by the German bishops.
(3) The third case is China. The Communist Party claims the authority to appoint bishops through the state-run Catholic Patriotic Association, imprisons or disappears clergy loyal to Rome, and demands that the Church submit to “sinicization” under Party supervision, which functionally means a usurpation of papal prerogatives on a level more methodical and thorough than anything attempted by the Germans or the SSPX. Both wealth and the civil sword belong to the Party, and Rome can influence neither. The Vatican’s response has been the 2018 provisional agreement on episcopal appointments (renewed since) which concedes to the Party a role in selecting bishops in exchange for a continued Catholic presence in society. Not only is there no censure, but Rome folds entirely, bending over backwards to placate the Chinese government. To use commercial terms, Rome has contracted its brand licensing out to the Communists in order to maintain a nominal market presence. Again, the cost of enforcement is too high and Rome lacks the leverage necessary to make a difference.
Taken together, the three cases suggest that the enforcement of canonical penalties follows the physical and material realities of each jurisdiction rather than the text of the law itself. Where Rome holds the levers, the law is applied with rigor; where others hold them, the law bends or negotiates—or, in the case of China, falls entirely silent. In these cases the severity of the offense against corporate unity is almost irrelevant to the severity of the response; what ultimately matters is the cost of enforcement.
None of this negates the legitimacy of what Rome did on July 1; the Holy See is the divinely appointed guardian of the Church’s corporate unity, and it cannot simply shrug when that unity is defied. But a unity enforced only where enforcement is cheap is not the unity Christ prayed for in John 17; it is the self-preservation of a bureaucracy paying lip service to principle. Until the Holy See defends the faith with the same vigor it defends the institution, the world will keep drawing the conclusion Dreher describes: that the Church is led by men who do not believe what she teaches. And a Church that does not appear to believe her own teaching will win no souls, however zealously she guards her institutional integrity.
(1) St. Cyprian, The Unity of the Catholic Church, 4
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