The rain began falling early, soaking the long procession of priests as they filed into a vast tent pitched on a field in the Swiss village of Écône. Organ music and plainsong framed a liturgy that stretched over four hours, the ancient Latin rites unfolding beneath the grey Alpine sky. Thousands of worshippers had travelled from across Europe, North America, and Africa, many clutching rosaries and smartphones, as the Society of Saint Pius X prepared to do what it had done exactly thirty-eight years earlier: consecrate bishops without the consent of the pope.

By the time Monsignor Alfonso de Galarreta laid his hands on the heads of four priests — two Frenchmen, a Swiss, and an American — the breach with Rome was complete. Pope Leo XIV had issued a last-ditch letter only a day before, pleading with the traditionalist group to “turn back” and warning that the act would constitute a “sin of extreme gravity”. The society’s superior general, Davide Pagliarani, responded from the altar, insisting that the consecrations were not rebellion but a “duty sacred before God” to preserve the faith. Under canon law, the gesture incurred automatic excommunication for all six bishops involved, a penalty the Vatican is expected to formalise in the coming days.

The Society of Saint Pius X was born in 1970, when the French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre founded it in explicit opposition to the modernising reforms of the Second Vatican Council. The council’s embrace of religious liberty, ecumenism, and the vernacular liturgy was, in his view, a betrayal of Catholic tradition. The 1988 consecrations at the same Écône site led to a formal declaration of schism by John Paul II, a wound that later pontiffs tried to heal. Benedict XVI lifted the excommunications in 2009 and liberalised the old Latin Mass; Francis granted the society’s priests faculties to hear confessions and witness marriages. Yet the core doctrinal divide remained, and the group continued to grow, now claiming some 600,000 faithful, over 700 priests, and five seminaries worldwide.

What distinguished this ceremony from its 1988 predecessor was not the theology but the technology. The entire event was live-streamed on the society’s YouTube channel, with simultaneous translation into multiple languages. At the offertory, a QR code appeared on screen, inviting viewers to make remote donations. Participants could purchase a commemorative “Cuvée des Sacres” wine set, each bottle bearing an image of a bishop’s mitre, ring, or crozier. Baseball caps stamped with the “Econe2026” seal were distributed among the crowd. For a movement that defines itself by its rejection of modernity, the digital fluency was striking, a paradox noted by observers in Rome and beyond.

As the last chants faded and the new bishops processed out into the damp afternoon, the society’s website still displayed a countdown clock that had been ticking for days. It had reached zero, but the clock remained, a small, stubborn emblem of a community that sees itself as operating in a permanent state of emergency. The rain had stopped, and the faithful dispersed across the wet grass, many still holding their phones, scrolling through images of a ceremony that had, once again, placed a small Swiss field at the centre of a global Catholic drama.