Pope Leo Faces the First Crisis of His Pontificate
nytimes.com/…0/opinion/pope-leo-latin-mass-cathol…
June 30, 2026
By David Gibson
Mr. Gibson is the director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University.
When terms like “schism” and “excommunication” crop up in news stories about the Catholic Church, you start looking around for a momentous event that will change the course of history, like the Protestant Reformation in 1517 or the Great Schism in 1054 dividing the Western and Eastern churches. The Vatican’s likely censure of a tiny anti-modernist Catholic sect is none of those things. But the attendant furor is sparking a lot of schismatic-sounding declarations and eye-glazing arguments about the arcane details of Catholic liturgy.
The focus of the uproar is a breakaway faction based in Ecône, Switzerland, the Society of St. Pius X, which is devoted to the celebration of an outdated version of the Mass in Latin. Why is the group, named after Pope Pius X, a fiercely …More