“Following in the footsteps of its founder, Archbishop Lefebvre, the Society of St. Pius X is making its third Jubilee pilgrimage to the Eternal City,” James Vogel, the society’s director of communications, told the Washington Examiner.

He continued, “As Catholics, it is equal parts penance, to obtain the indulgence, to proclaim our attachment to the Holy Father, and in a special way, for the Church to ‘regain Her splendor’ for the salvation of souls.”

However, approval to participate in the pilgrimage does not signify endorsement or sponsorship from the Vatican. Church leaders previously clarified this stance regarding a pro-LGBT Catholic group that received approval for a prayer vigil in 2024.

While the presence of a new pope has drawn speculation about whether the pilgrimage will open doors for dialogue, SSPX has been preparing for the trip since before Pope Francis’s death in April.

“We are going to Rome to purify ourselves of our sins, to obtain indulgences for our sins and to sanctify our souls in this city of grace,” the SSPX said of the pilgrimage in a letter published in February. “We will go to Rome to proclaim and manifest our unwavering attachment to the Apostolic See, to the Pope, successor of Peter and Vicar of Christ, to the bishops, successors of the Apostles, to the priests, their collaborators, and to the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church.”

“We will go to Rome, simply because we are Catholics, children of the Church, and because we want to remain Catholics no matter what happens,” it added.

The priestly fraternity, named in honor of the anti-modernist Pope St. Pius X, was founded in 1970 by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre as a response to liturgical reforms made in the Second Vatican Council (also known as Vatican II).

SSPX priests only celebrate the “Traditional Latin Mass,” an all-Latin liturgy codified in 1570, and claim the “New Mass” as formalized in Vatican II is inferior and insufficiently reverent.

“In the new rite, man has become more of the focus, not so much God,” the fraternity asserts on its website about the standard form of mass propagated after Vatican II. “The traditional Mass, on the contrary, focuses on the worship of God and the true sacrificial nature of the Mass.

The group also laments a perceived drift within the Church toward the error of “modernism.”

“Truth, according to the modernist, depends upon each individual’s subjective perceptions and beliefs, not upon any objective, universal order descending from God,” the SSPX website explains. “Truth thus changes from person to person, from age to age, from place to place, and modernism insists that human reason alone can determine what is right and wrong, good and bad, true and false.”

The zenith of the SSPX’s feud with the Vatican followed Lefebvre’s decision in 1988 to illicitly consecrate four bishops without Rome’s approval and in explicit disregard of warnings from then-Pope John Paul II. The pontiff ruled this was a “schismatic act.”

Both consecrators and those consecrated were punished with automatic excommunication, a penalty Lefebvre disputed until he died in 1991.

The struggle between the group and the Vatican continued for decades as restrictions were tightened on the Traditional Latin Mass.

Not until Pope Benedict XVI was elected in 2005 did church leadership approach the irregular community with a mind toward reconciliation.

Benedict lifted the excommunications on the four bishops consecrated by Lefebvre in 2009, hoping the gesture would be “followed by the prompt attainment of full communion with the Church on the part of the whole Society of St Pius X.”

Full communion did not manifest. Dialogue on liturgical and theological disagreements stalled and eventually sputtered out before Benedict resigned from the papacy in 2013.

Subsequently, Pope Francis granted SSPX priests a slow trickle of faculties, such as the ability to officiate marriages or perform the sacrament of absolution in limited circumstances.

At the same time, Francis launched a campaign of suppression against the Traditional Latin Mass, expressing concern that faith communities which refused to accept alternative liturgies were suffering from a “nostalgic disease.”

Pope Leo XIV, elected in May to head the Catholic Church, remains mysterious regarding his positions on the Latin Mass and the SSPX. His emphasis on unity and small movements toward accommodating the Latin Mass has raised some hope for a breakthrough.

Fr. John Fullerton, the District Superior of SSPX in the United States, called the first American pope’s election a “momentous occasion.” Following the pope’s ascension, Fullerton called on clergy and laity to “pour out our prayers for the Pope with all the fervor we can muster.”

He added, “May Pope Leo XIV faithfully fill the shoes of St. Peter and strengthen the faithful, spread the Gospel, and never waver in telling the world that what it needs above all else is Our Lord Jesus Christ, whose death and resurrection gives all men and women hope of eternal life.”

SSPX’s pilgrimage will culminate with a procession at the Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran, the seat of the Bishop of Rome and the mother church for the entire faith, on Aug. 20, the day of Pope St. Pius X’s death.

POPE THRILLS HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF YOUNG CATHOLICS AT HOLY YEAR YOUTH FESTIVAL

This will not be SSPX’s first jubilee in Rome. Their first pilgrimage was in 1975 when the society was canonically regular. The second trip was in 2000, when the society was still relatively small, as a gesture of fidelity to Rome despite then-standing excommunications against their bishops.

SSPX now self-reports 780 clergy members and approximately 600,000 laity attending its mass centers. It operates six seminaries and is present in over 60 countries across six continents.

The 2025 pilgrimage is seen as an opportunity for them to display their growing numbers and reaffirm their allegiance to the pope amid ongoing confusion about the future of their canonical status.