On June 8, 2026, a journalist named Wouter J. Suenens published an article at The Catholic Herald entitled “The Traditional Latin Mass does not need the SSPX.” In this article he claimed that the crisis through which the Church is passing today is just one of many in her history, and not even the worst. On this basis he maintains that the Society of St. Pius X is guilty of poor judgment of the situation and, thus, makes a disproportionate response to it, and, finally, that the SSPX makes things worse by linking the desire for the TLM with schismatic tendencies.
I sincerely wonder if Mr. Suenens had done his homework. This is an abiding concern of mine, as I find that most who wade into these waters are still in the shallow end of the pool, and have not gotten beyond waist-deep familiarity with the issues. I decided to send a letter to him.
He never responded.
But that doesn’t mean the letter might not be of benefit to others—either those who might be tempted to think along his lines, or those who wonder what to reply to such folks. The letter has been amplified a bit.
Dear Mr. Suenens:
While I am undoubtedly sympathetic to the SSPX’s concerns, I do not attend their chapels (I attend an FSSP oratory), and I can certainly see weak elements in their position. You have pointed out some of them in your June 8 article in The Catholic Herald; I have pointed them out on my Substack.
However, whether or not you are correct that we don’t need the SSPX today (I will return to that claim in a moment), I strenuously disagree with you that we didn’t need them before. The Fraternity of St. Peter, the Institute of the Good Shepherd, the monastery of Le Barroux, and many other places emerged from Lefebvre’s movement. Only weak and isolated priests, usually elderly, were holding out against the juggernaut of the modern rite’s implementation. It was Lefebvre who gave the movement a face, a voice, an organization, and a direction.
You write:
There have been crises far worse than ours: the scandal of the Western Schism, curial corruption, simony, political captivity and moral decadence in Rome.... The claim that our crisis is so unprecedented that public disobedience has now become necessary reveals, in that sense, a remarkable lack of historical memory.
This is simply an astonishing claim. It is manifestly the case that the modern(ist) crisis is far worse than all the earlier ones put together. Why do I say this?
