There are conflicts that, no matter how much they present themselves as doctrinal debates, in reality speak about the model of the Church underlying them. The prolonged confrontation between the Vatican and the Lefebvrian movement is one such case.
For more than half a century, the discussion has revolved around authority, tradition, liturgy, the Second Vatican Council, or obedience. However, a reading from an evangelical ecclesiology, one of communion, participation, and de-clericalization allows us to discover that the real problem is not solely what doctrine is being defended, but who possesses the power to define it and how the ecclesial community is structured.
Paradoxically, the conflict between Rome and the followers of Marcel Lefebvre does not truly question clericalism; it confronts two distinct ways of understanding and exercising ecclesiastical authority. They are not equivalent positions. The Vatican’s proposal, especially since the Second Vatican Council, incorporates an ecclesiological renewal of enormous scope. But the conflict continues to develop, largely within a framework where effective prominence remains concentrated in the clerical elites.
The new ordination that reopened the crisis
The recent decision by the San Pio X Priestly Fraternity to proceed with a new episcopal ordination without pontifical mandate has brought the conflict back into focus. After decades of intermittent contact with the Holy See and some gestures of rapprochement, the Fraternity has once again chosen to guarantee its own episcopal succession outside of Rome’s authorization.
From the Vatican’s perspective, the problem is evident: in Catholic ecclesiology, communion with the Bishop of Rome is also expressed in the fact that no bishop can be legitimately consecrated without a pontifical mandate. The ordination of a bishop without that authorization constitutes a serious breach of ecclesiastical discipline and questions the visible unity of the Church.
For the Fraternity, however, the situation of “state of necessity” that they claim the Church is in would justify acting without that consent to preserve the liturgical and doctrinal tradition they consider threatened.
However, both positions do not possess the same degree of ecclesiological consistency. The Holy See’s stance is based on a constitutive principle of Catholic tradition: episcopal communion articulated around the ministry of the Bishop of Rome. The Lefebvrian decision, conversely, introduces an exception whose legitimacy is decided by the group applying it itself. Paradoxically, in defending the authority of tradition, it ends up attributing to itself a superior authority to that of the Church it claims to want to preserve.
The positions are known. What is interesting is to point out what presuppositions they still share. Because the discussion once again revolves almost exclusively around who has the authority to transmit the episcopal ministry.
The center of the debate is not Christian communities, nor evangelization, nor the poor, nor the proclamation of the Kingdom, but the legitimacy of the exercise of sacramental and jurisdictional power. Once again, the visible subject of the conflict are, above all, the clerical elites.
A dispute within a still very clerical paradigm
If anything characterizes critical ecclesiological discourse, which seeks a de-clericalized Church, is the insistence on distinguishing between the Church born of the Gospel and certain historical forms adopted by the ecclesiastical institution.
The Church does not identify itself solely with its legal apparatus or its power structures. It is, above all, the People of God called by the Spirit.
From this perspective, the Vatican and Lefebvrianism still share important features of an ecclesiology where effective prominence continues to be concentrated in the hierarchy. However, they do not do so with the same intensity or in the same direction. While Vatican II opened up an understanding of the Church as People of God, communion, and synodality—although its practical reception remains incomplete—Lefebvrianism represents precisely a reaction against that conciliar development and emphasizes a much more rigidly clerical and pyramidal model.
Naturally, there are important differences between the two. Rome defends the reception of Vatican II, while the Fraternity maintains a deep critique of central aspects of the Council. But, even in the post-conciliar Church, decisive decisions continue to rest largely within the episcopal and clerical sphere. The Christian people appear too often as recipients of these decisions, rather than as true ecclesial subjects.
The debate unfolds among bishops, cardinals… The faithful barely exist as protagonists.
The absent people
One of the most original aspects of Vatican II ecclesiology consists in recovering the centrality of baptism against the hypertrophy of ordained ministry. The Church is not born from the priest. It is born from shared faith.
Ministry exists to serve the community; not the community to legitimize the ministry. When this relationship is inverted, clericalism appears: a conception according to which ecclesial life is monopolized by those who exercise sacramental or juridical power.
That precisely explains why a conflict like the current one ends up occupying the center of the ecclesial scene.
Negotiations are never framed by asking what Christian communities need to better announce the Gospel, how to favor greater participation of lay people, or how to make the Kingdom of God more visible.
The center of the problem is issues such as the canonical status of a priestly fraternity, jurisdiction to administer sacraments, doctrinal competencies, or the authority of the Pope.
Now, with the new episcopal ordination, the focus returns to apostolic succession understood as a problem of juridical legitimacy among bishops. The rest of the Church remains practically invisible.
Much of the contemporary malaise in the institution comes from maintaining an excessively hierarchical image of the Church.
Although Vatican II recovered the biblical category of People of God and opened paths such as collegiality and synodality, in many aspects subsequent practice continued to function through a vertical scheme: authority decides; the base receives.
In that context, it is perfectly understandable that a conflict like the current one may arise between Rome and the Lefebvrians. The dispute mainly consists in determining who legitimately represents authority. It is a discussion similar to what can occur within any highly centralized institution: everyone accepts the need for an authority, although they deeply disagree on who can exercise it and under what conditions.
What if the problem were the model?
What would happen if the Church were organized differently? If local communities had an authentic deliberative capacity. If discernment processes were truly synodal. If lay people participated co-responsibly in decisions. If authority were understood primarily as service and not as a concentration of competencies.
In such a model, the ordination of a bishop would not be perceived solely as an act of power transmission within a clerical elite, but as an event that truly involved the community that that ministry is called to serve.
Conflicts like the current one would lose much of their drama because they would cease to be struggles for institutional control and become processes of ecclesial discernment.
The first communities as a reference
The first Christian communities offered a much more dynamic and participatory image. There were ministries. There was leadership. But the community preceded the institution. Important decisions arose from common discernment under the action of the Spirit.
The so-called Council of Jerusalem constitutes precisely an example of communal seeking rather than unilateral imposition. The formula “We have decided the Holy Spirit and we” expresses a shared authority that can hardly be identified with the monopoly of a clerical elite.
Naturally, it would be naive to idealize those communities. But it would also be a mistake to forget that Christianity was born much closer to a brotherhood of equals than to a pyramidal organization.
Clericalism adopts different forms
Clericalism does not have a single ideological color. It can be progressive. It can be conservative. It can defend Vatican II. It can fight it.It can celebrate the reformed liturgy. It can exclusively celebrate the pre-conciliar rite.
In all cases, it appears when the Church ceases to be understood as a community of the baptized and begins to conceive itself mainly as an organization directed by specialists of the sacred, the clergy.
From this point of view, lefebvreism constitutes a particularly intense expression of traditional clericalism, since it almost completely identifies the continuity of the Church with the continuity of a certain model of clerical authority.
The position of Rome, on the contrary, incorporates decisive elements of ecclesiological renewal thanks to Vatican II. However, it risks partially reproducing that same logic when the resolution of the conflict is reduced almost exclusively to a question of legal competencies between ecclesiastical authorities, once again placing the whole People of God in the background.
It is about recovering the evangelical conviction that all baptized share the same dignity and the same responsibility in the mission.
That was, to a large extent, what Vatican II opened as a horizon for authentic ecclesiological renewal. The problem lies not so much in the Council as in the insufficient reception of some of its deepest intuitions. As long as the effective subject of the Church remains a clerical minority—even if divided between Rome and Ecône—conflicts like the current one will continue to reproduce themselves.
When the true subject becomes the People of God again, the question will cease to be only who has the right to ordain bishops and will become decisive: how to announce the Gospel of Jesus today and build communities where authority is, truly, service.
José Antonio Vázquez Mosquera
Religión Digital, Jun 29, 2026