Pope Excommunicates Ultra Conservatives Catholics for Ordaining Bishops

You just have the Vatican going nuclear on a bunch of ultra -conservative Catholics.They just dropped a mass excommunication that risks breaking off a large chunk of the church.Because you see, they were tired of this breakaway group called the Society of St. Pius X, or SSPX, because they kept refusing to listen to the Pope and follow decades of reforms.And you have this including what seems like mundane things inside of the church, such as still giving mass in Latin, requiring churchgoers to be given communion bread straight from a priest's hand, and having them face the altar rather than the congregation when giving mass.

But easily one of the biggest differences is that the SSPX does not like that the Vatican has tried to build bridges with other Christian denominations.So seemingly none of that was enough to get them kicked out of the Catholic church.Instead, what broke the camel's back was their decision to ordain their own bishops in Switzerland this week.And according to strict Catholic law, only the Pope.has the authority to do so, and he explicitly pleaded for the SSPX not to do this because it would lead to excommunications.And so not only were the four new bishops for the SSPX excommunicated, but so were the two that ordained them.

And then on top of that, the Vatican warned that the group's 750 priests, they can't give sacraments.And so that means if they do stuff like weddings, it doesn't count.And they're also looking at automatic excommunication if they stick with the movement.Though easily the biggest fallout could be among the movement's 600 ,000 followers who were warned that they would also be automatically excommunicated if they continued to follow the SSPX.And you have a lot of those here in the United States and an excommunication that large, I mean, it would be among the largest in well over a century.

And so what you might be seeing is the formation of a new church that is really just the old church that refused to change.And so genuinely, huge news for 1 .4 billion Catholics worldwide, but also it kind of highlights how much things have changed.Because in the past, excommunications and schisms this large, it risked wide scale war and bloodshed.This time, it kind of just makes for a quick, interesting short form video.