This website contains quite a few posts on the SSPX. Naturally this would be the case because we’ve spent many years attending Masses celebrated by its priests and have often defended the SSPX against the attacks of those in the conciliar church. When the SSPX abandoned the principles of its founder in July 2012, we were heartbroken. Sentiment, however, cannot be the driver of our decisions. Those who adhere to truth know that they must make the right decision and that is to speak out against the new direction and not go along with it. This is what the writers on this website have done. We now consider the SSPX to be in the same class as the other pseudo-Traditional communities such as the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter (FSSP). This being the case, I thought it would now be opportune to speak about the FSSP itself.
The Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter was founded by a group of priests who separated from the Society of St. Pius X after Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre consecrated four priests to the episcopacy on June 30, 1988. It was erected as a clerical society of Apostolic Life with Pontifical Right on October 18, 1988. Article 8 of its Constitutions states the following:
The particular aim of the Fraternity of Saint Peter is to achieve this objective (i.e., sanctification of its priests) through the faithful observance of the “liturgical and spiritual traditions” according to the dispositions of the Motu Propio Ecclesia Dei of July 2, 1988, which is at the origin of its foundation.
The Motu Proprio “Ecclesia Dei” was the document of Pope John Paul II that confirmed the “excommunications” of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, Bishop Antonio de Castro Meyer, and the four consecrated bishops. Note that the article above states that this Motu Proprio for the FSSP “is at the origin of its foundation”. Since the FSSP doesn’t state otherwise in any of its official documents, we must conclude that the FSSP agrees with the validity of the “excommunications” and orthodoxy of the doctrinal declarations in the Motu Proprio. Fr. Gregory Hesse (+2006), Doctor of Sacred Theology and Canon Law, gave a conference at St. Michael’s Church (run by Fr. Hector Bolduc until his death in 2012) in Wisconsin in 1998. In this conference, Fr. Hesse tears the Motu Proprio to bits by pointing out its doctrinal, moral, and canonical errors, thereby demonstrating that the FSSP is truly a house built on sand. Please take the time to listen below to an extract of the conference.
You can directly listen to the audio by left clicking on the “Play” button. If you prefer to download the audio file to your computer, right click the “Play” button and then left click the “Save audio as” option.