Following the statements of Leo XIV claiming that the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X would be outside the Church for not accepting certain points of the Second Vatican Council, rivers of ink—and, worse still, rivers of confusion—have been flowing. Does it now mean that Catholics cannot criticize the Council? Is merely expressing a reservation about a conciliar text enough to fall under suspicion of schism?
The answer is no. It is worth recalling this every time the debate degenerates into the usual false dilemma: either unconditional acceptance of every line of the sixteen conciliar documents, or rupture. That dichotomy does not withstand scrutiny, and the best proof is that Rome once erected an institute whose founding statutes recognized its members’ right to serious criticism of certain conciliar texts.
The precedent of the Good Shepherd
On 8 September 2006, the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei erected the Institute of the Good Shepherd, made up of priests who had come from the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X and were returning to full communion. The decree, signed by Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, approved its statutes ad experimentum for a five-year period. Among those statutes was the recognition that its members could exercise serious and constructive criticism of certain texts of the Council, always within an academic framework and in communion with the Apostolic See.
What matters is not the later fate of that clause—which was later reframed in the course of a statutory revision and an internal crisis within the Institute—but the very fact that Rome granted it. By granting it, the competent authority implicitly affirmed something many today refuse to admit: that it is possible to discuss the Council theologically without leaving the Church. If such critical scrutiny were in itself schismatic or heretical, no pontifical commission could have authorized it for even a single day, neither ad experimentum nor with all the safeguards in the world.
The Council defined no dogmas
The underlying argument predates the case of the Good Shepherd. Vatican II was, by the express will of those who convoked and closed it, a council of an eminently pastoral nature. It proclaimed no dogmas in the technical sense, issued no extraordinary definitions, and did not accompany its teachings with the anathemas by which earlier councils safeguarded truths defined de fide. Paul VI himself stressed that the Council had avoided pronouncing solemn dogmatic definitions, preferring the tone of ordinary magisterium.
It follows that the relationship of the faithful and of the theologian to the conciliar texts is not identical to the one owed to a defined truth. What the Council reaffirms of already established dogma does indeed bind, but it binds because it is dogma, not because it appears in a conciliar text. And what belongs to the pastoral, prudential, or directive order admits, by its very nature, study, questioning, and nuance.
What the Church regulates
The Church does not consecrate free and undifferentiated criticism; it consecrates graduated and regulated criticism, which is a very different and far more solid thing. The framework is provided by three post-conciliar magisterial documents.
The Professio Fidei of 1989 precisely distinguishes the degrees of assent owed to truths of defined faith, to truths taught definitively, and to non-definitive authentic magisterium. Ad Tuendam Fidem (1998) canonically reinforced that same gradation. And the instruction Donum Veritatis (1990), on the ecclesial vocation of the theologian, draws the decisive map: it expressly recognizes that, faced with non-definitive teachings, the theologian may raise difficulties, doubts, and even respectfully submit objections to the Magisterium, carefully distinguishing that legitimate attitude from what it calls “dissent.”
To the teachings of non-definitive authentic magisterium is due the obsequium religiosum—the respectful assent of intellect and will—of which Lumen Gentium 25 speaks. Yet that religious assent is not the absolute and irrevocable assent of theological faith. It admits, in matters that allow it, the sincere expression of difficulty.
Hermeneutics, not demolition
The great misunderstanding dissolves when the question is moved from the terrain of “yes or no to the Council” to the terrain of hermeneutics. That is precisely what Benedict XVI did in his celebrated address to the Roman Curia on 22 December 2005, contrasting the “hermeneutic of reform in continuity” with the “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture.”
The problem, he said in effect, is not whether the texts may be studied in depth—even pointing out their ambiguities or formulations that could be improved—but with what key they are read: whether as organic continuity with Tradition or as the inauguration of a new Church.
What is truly at stake: Traditionis Custodes, not Lumen Gentium
When the episcopal consecrations announced by the Fraternity are discussed, the immediate reflex is to link them to the doctrinal question: to reservations about the religious liberty of Dignitatis Humanae, about ecumenism, or about the ecclesiology of Lumen Gentium. Yet that link, though convenient for those who wish to present the matter as a problem of faith, is to a large extent an illusion.
The consecrations respond not so much to Lumen Gentium as to Traditionis Custodes. The traditional Mass—the liturgy in which centuries of saints have been sanctified and which Benedict XVI recognized in Summorum Pontificum as never abrogated—is today actively persecuted by ecclesiastical authority itself: restricted, cornered, subjected to authorizations granted drop by drop and withdrawn with ease, in practice condemned to a programmed extinction by administrative means.
It is that persecution, and not a dispute from a theology manual, that many Catholics experience as a genuine state of necessity. The argument is elementary logic: when a sacramental good of the first order runs a real risk of extinction, and when the ordinary channels for securing it are closed one after another, an extraordinary situation arises that, for many Catholics, calls for extraordinary measures.
Bishops are not consecrated to disagree with a conciliar paragraph; they are consecrated to guarantee the survival of a liturgy and a priesthood that are threatened with death by those who should be guarding them.
One may debate whether that state of necessity objectively exists, whether it canonically justifies what it seeks to justify, whether unexplored alternatives remain. It is a legitimate and necessary debate. But to falsify it from the outset by presenting it as a problem of adherence to documents from the 1960s helps neither truth nor communion.
The boundary with schism
That Rome erected an institute with statutory license for serious criticism of the Council was neither an eccentricity nor a rashness that needed correcting. It was the institutional recognition of a truth that fundamental theology has always taught: that faith is owed to what is defined, religious assent to what is authentically non-definitive, and honest study to everything else.
The conflict that truly bleeds is not that of theological reservations to old and fruitless documents serenely expressed, but that of a persecuted liturgy that pushes many to the brink. Whoever responds to a liturgical problem with the artillery of an instrumental doctrinal accusation misuses the Council. And, in doing so, makes more difficult the only truly Catholic way out: that of continuity, peace, and the real guardianship of Tradition.