On the evening of 29 June, the solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, Pope Leo XIV sat down to write a letter in French. It was addressed to the superior of the Society of St Pius X, Davide Pagliarani, and its words were those of a father pleading with a wayward child. “I plead with you and ask you with all my heart: please turn back!” the pope wrote, two days before the traditionalist group planned to consecrate four new bishops without papal mandate at its seminary in Écône, Switzerland. The act, he warned, would be a “sin of extreme gravity”, a schism that would render sacraments illicit and, in some cases, invalid for the faithful.

The following morning, the Vatican announced a very different kind of decision. Sister Alessandra Smerilli, a 51-year-old Salesian economist, was named prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, making her the third woman ever to lead a Vatican dicastery. She replaces Cardinal Michael Czerny, who is retiring at 80. Simultaneously, Cardinal Fabio Baggio was appointed pro-prefect of the same office, a dual structure that acknowledges the canonical reality that some functions of a department head require priestly ordination. The move, Vatican observers note, mirrors the model used by Pope Francis when he named Sister Simona Brambilla as prefect of another dicastery in early 2025.

The twin gestures sketch the contours of Leo XIV’s early governance. On one side, the elevation of a woman to a senior curial post extends the trajectory set by his predecessor, who made the promotion of women a pillar of his response to decades of complaints that they were excluded from decision-making. Smerilli, already the dicastery’s secretary, is a known quantity: an academic economist who has advised on post-pandemic recovery and environmental ethics. On the other side, the anguished letter to the SSPX signals that the pope will not countenance a parallel church. The society, founded in opposition to the modernising reforms of the Second Vatican Council, has existed in a canonical limbo since its founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, consecrated four bishops illicitly in 1988, incurring automatic excommunication. Today it claims over 750 priests and a global network of schools and chapels, a shadow institution that Rome has long tried to reconcile.

The letter’s tone was striking for its raw pastoral urgency. “I urge you to consider carefully the spiritual good of the faithful,” Leo wrote, “because the schismatic act you are about to undertake would deprive them of the licit, and in some cases, even valid reception of the sacraments.” He closed by entrusting his intentions to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. In Rome, the image of a pope begging a breakaway group to reconsider, even as he quietly reshapes the curia with female leadership, captures a papacy that is at once tender and resolute. As Sister Smerilli prepares to take up her post on 1 September, the letter remains unanswered, its plea hanging over the Swiss Alps like a prayer.