(ZENIT News / Rome, 08.18.2025).- For decades, the name of the Society of St. Pius X has evoked both devotion and controversy. Born in 1970 out of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre’s resistance to certain reforms of the Second Vatican Council, the group has lived in a canonically irregular space, committed to the older liturgical rites but estranged from the mainstream life of the Catholic Church. Now, in the context of the Holy Year of 2025, Rome has extended a gesture that few would have imagined possible even a generation ago: the official Jubilee calendar lists a pilgrimage of the Society among its recognized events.
Scheduled for late August, the pilgrimage will bring priests, seminarians, and faithful of the Society to Rome, where they will pray the Rosary, celebrate a solemn Mass, and walk in procession to the Basilica of St. John Lateran to cross the Holy Door. In doing so, the group places itself at the heart of the most ancient expressions of Catholic communion, even as its canonical status remains unresolved.
The symbolism of this moment is striking. When the Society last participated in a Jubilee, in the year 2000, its presence was more discreet and certainly not highlighted on an official platform. Today, their event appears openly on the Jubilee website alongside dioceses, movements, and religious congregations fully in communion with the Holy See. The public visibility signals not a reconciliation—at least not yet—but a willingness on both sides to acknowledge one another in the common language of pilgrimage, penance, and prayer.
The Society has long insisted that its fidelity is not to the shifting politics of ecclesial governance but to what it calls “eternal Rome,” a phrase Lefebvre himself often used. Its leadership under Father Davide Pagliarani continues to frame its mission around the priesthood and the preservation of the traditional Mass, which the Society has guarded through years when the 1962 missal was nearly forgotten in many places. Today, however, that liturgy is no longer a relic but part of a broader conversation in the Church about identity, tradition, and reform.
The Society’s turbulent history with Rome is well known: the illicit episcopal consecrations of 1988 that provoked excommunications; the lifting of those censures by Benedict XVI in 2009; and, more recently, Pope Francis’ decision to grant their priests faculties to hear confessions validly and licitly, and later, to oversee marriages under diocesan authority. Each step has been partial, tentative, and never quite conclusive. Yet each one reflects the conviction that even in tension, dialogue must not be abandoned.
The Jubilee gesture does not erase the irregularity of the Society’s situation. Vatican authorities have reminded the faithful in the past that attending SSPX liturgies raises questions of ecclesial unity. At the same time, canon law recognizes the validity of the sacraments celebrated with the 1962 missal, and ordinary Catholics are not asked to parse the complexities of canonists when seeking the Eucharist. The Jubilee, with its emphasis on mercy and reconciliation, seems to underscore precisely this pastoral sensitivity.
Today the Society counts more than 700 priests and half a million adherents worldwide. Its schools, retreat houses, and youth camps give it a global infrastructure, one that ensures its message resonates beyond niche circles of traditionalists. To see them walking through the Holy Door of the Lateran Basilica in a year dedicated to renewal and pardon will be, for many, an image of hope—however fragile—that past wounds need not determine the future.
The Jubilee of 2025 it seeks to gather the entire Church, in all her diversity, at the threshold of grace. That Rome would allow the Society of St. Pius X to be part of that journey, visibly and officially, may not resolve a long-standing division. But it may serve as a reminder that in the language of faith, even small steps can speak louder than decades of silence.
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