“There is no possibility to get to Heaven without being united to the Pope,” said Fr. Andrzej Komorowski, the recently-elected Superior General of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter (FSSP), a Society of Apostolic Life of Pontifical right that celebrates the Traditional Latin Mass.
Bisig said the unjust suppression of the flourishing seminary, which had 120 seminarians by 1977, and Pope Paul VI’s subsequent suspension led to a change in Lefebvre’s attitude towards Rome, and his language became increasingly “polemical.” Lefebvre began to entertain sedevacantism, the idea that Paul VI was not the real pope, and thus the Chair of Peter was vacant, Bisig said. But the archbishop kept this opinion largely out of the public realm because most priests in the SSPX would have been scandalized.
“Until then it was forbidden for us to be critical of the Holy Father or Rome,” Bisig said.
The founding members of the FSSP only split with Lefebvre after Lefebvre ordained four bishops in 1988 against the will of Pope St. John Paul II, leading to Lefebvre’s excommunication. The SSPX, then numbering some 60,000 followers, was deemed schismatic.
“It was clear we had to leave the Society because of this rupture with Rome,” said Bisig, one of 12 priests, one deacon and 20 seminarians who left.
“We did not want to leave the SSPX,” he said. “We were forced to do so. Our superior became schismatic. We felt like orphans abandoned by our father.”
Bisig, who became the first Superior General of the FSSP, is now rector of Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary in Denton, Nebraska.
Over the past 30 years, the FSSP has succeeded in forming a Society that is in unity with the Pope as it continues to offer traditional liturgy and formation. Bisig says this demonstrates that “it is possible to be in the Church with traditional liturgy and traditional priestly formation.”