Catholic sect in Cork says prayers for Pope Leo after being excommunicated by pontiff

On Sunday morning, Latin Mass went ahead as usual in Our Lady of the Rosary Church in Shanakiel, with a congregation of about 100 people praying for the pontiff. Picture: Donal O'Keeffe

Prayers were said for Pope Leo on Sunday morning at the Cork church of a breakaway Catholic group excommunicated en masse by the Vatican in recent days.

Last Thursday, the Vatican decreed that priests and lay Catholics who are part of the ultraconservative group the Society of St Pius X (SSPX) are now excommunicated.

It came the day after the rebel group defied Pope Leo XIV by ordaining bishops without his consent, thus creating a schism in the 1.4bn-member Church.

The Catholic Church considers the unauthorised ordination of bishops so serious that it causes those taking part in the ceremony to be automatically excommunicated.

The society was founded in the Swiss village of Écône in 1970 by the arch-conservative Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, and denies the teachings of the Second Vatican Council.

Vatican II, as it is widely known, introduced a range of reforms for the Catholic Church,  seeking to repair its relations with other Christian denominations and with the Jewish people.

The council also allowed for the Mass, until then said only in Latin, to be celebrated in local languages, a change the SSPX rejects, citing a preference for the Latin rite’s sense of mystery and formality.

The SSPX has approximately 1,500 priests, seminarians, and other vocational members worldwide, with a following estimated to be in the region of 200,000 people. It is thought that, in Ireland, about 500 people attend its weekly Masses.

On Sunday morning, Latin Mass went ahead as usual in Our Lady of the Rosary Church in Shanakiel, with a congregation of about 100 people praying for the pontiff.

The church has belonged to the SSPX since the 1980s, and the Mass was sung almost entirely in Latin, with incense burning throughout the ceremony.

Those attending ranged in age from small children to retired people, with many members reading from their own Bibles and missals during the Mass.

'Survival of tradition'

The congregation seemed to be evenly split between men and women, with the women wearing mantillas, the traditional Christian lace head-covering.

The parish priest, Fr Jules Doutrebente, delivered the reading and read the Gospel in English. In his sermon, he said that when Archbishop Lefebvre founded the SSPX, he had called it “the survival of tradition”, and that continued to be the society’s motivation.

In canon law, he said, no penalty could be applied in the case of necessity, and with the SSPX having a necessity for new bishops, its members could therefore not be excommunicated. Thus, he added, there was no schism, and the society's members were not excommunicated.

“At every Mass, we name the name of the Pope; in order that the Pope may help us, we pray for him,” he said.

During the sermon, Fr Doutrebente announced that he will soon be replaced by a newly ordained priest, Fr Colm Begley, who will next month make Our Lady of the Rosary his first parish.

After the Mass, Fr Doutrebente told the Irish Examiner he was not authorised to speak for the SSPX, joking that, being French, his English would not be good enough anyway.