Prodigal Bishops and the SSPX

By Eamonn Clark, STL ( bio - articles - email ) | Jul 09, 2026

There were once two brothers living in their father’s house. One brother demanded his inheritance and went away and lived a life of debauchery. One brother stayed home, faithful. The first returned, contrite, and he was celebrated. The second complained about the mercy of the father who welcomed him back, indignant that he never had a feast for all his faithfulness.

The Prodigal Son is principally a lesson about the Gentiles and the Jews. That is not to say that there is no other legitimate application—of course, it is used to exhort individual faithful to receive God’s mercy in the confessional. I propose that another way to make this story come alive in our own day is in the ecclesio-drama playing out in the aftermath of the SSPX consecrations.

Viscerally heretical bishops who habitually tolerate or even commit shameful and bizarre liturgical abuses are treated with kid gloves. A group of priests who are scrupulously observing the letter of the law and striving with every sinew to understand the doctrinal content of the Church’s tradition and to be faithful to it are refused every concession and rebuked harshly.

The older brother sees the younger’s debauchery and disorder for what it is. He is dead to the family, a stain on its name. Yet the older brother did not understand that the outward glories of feasts and inherited property is not what the true goodness of the family consists in. The bond of the family is its own point—the father is the real inheritance, his love is the true feast. It is the invisible reality of the union with the father from which the true glory of the family springs. Aside from this, feasts and property are meaningless; one is ultimately as empty as the younger brother when he longed to feed upon the pods together with the swine.

The parable does not include an account of the psychology of the older brother during his younger brother’s absence. We are left to imagine his emptiness and misery, confused and angry at the father’s constant watchfulness and longing for the younger brother’s return.

The older brother is not unlike the workers who came earliest to the vineyard (another story about the spiritual blindness of the unbelieving Jews)—he thinks he deserves more for his prolonged faithfulness and effort in serving the father. But that’s just it—he does not see the bond with the father as constituting its own reward, service of him being a joy in itself as a result. To spend so much time with the master of the vineyard—and to know the father so closely—and not to perceive the meaning of service, is much the same as the rich man and the other unbelievers who read the scriptures sabbath after sabbath and still did not see (Isaiah 6:10).

The Apostle Phillip was rebuked for not seeing, despite his prolonged closeness to the Lord. Should not those most attentive to matters of doctrine and liturgy be rebuked, now that they have shown they are so blind as to presume that the awesome power of the episcopacy is their property, like an ecclesiastical Prometheus?

The analogy with the Prodigal Son is powerful but partial. It has its limits. Of course, Leo XIV is not God. And yet, he is Christ’s Vicar, uniquely speaking for God in administration of the Church. To be united with him is a necessary condition for being united with God. Another difference is that the father in the parable does not ever give any impression of tolerance of the younger brother’s misbehavior, which is difficult to say of Roman authority today, including the Pope.

The anger at the soft treatment of Germany, the grotesque situation in China, and general laziness, ineptitude, or lack of care concerning basic liturgical, moral, and doctrinal matters in any number of well-known cases is understandable and certainly justified to a large degree. However, while making heads roll in Germany or China sounds simple enough, the keyboard-warriors playing armchair pope ought to consider that there are extremely serious consequences for such heavy-handedness, some of it evident, some probable, some known only to a few. Justice and prudence are both virtues and must work together.

Different problems and situations call for different pastoral treatments. This is not a new idea, it is a basic truth of the cure of souls, so famously explained by Gregory the Great in his Pastoral Rule. The case of the SSPX vis-à-vis “left-wing” problematic characters is easier to explain than secret diplomatic arrangements in Beijing. The truth is that the liberals would never respond positively to the sort of direct clarity and severity which many trads would and already have attended to. Those who are focused on spiritual truths and are largely detached from the disorders of the lower soul that deaden the spiritual senses will in fact attend to the voice of correction more easily than someone who can barely raise his mind to prayer as a result of his vices.

The concupiscible appetite dominates and fleshly sins prevail among the progressives, which largely anchor and give rise to their strange doctrinal and liturgical proclivities. This is also a generally more popular disposition than the dominant irascible appetite which one perceives among the conservatives. Excessive hope, daring, fear, despair, and anger drive trads toward spiritual sins more strongly, excepting the heresies and easy liturgical abuses which conform to the spiritual sickness of the progressives. Which brother had which dominant appetite in the parable of the Prodigal Son?

There is also the problem of cognitive dissonance. It is not an infrequent occurrence to meet people mired in sins of the flesh, living worldly lives, who can simply admit the fact. Plenty will make excuses, but for those who retain even a little bit of piety, they may simply accuse themselves of sin but lack the resolve to be contrite and reform their lives. This is because the worldly and fleshly sins are much more difficult to justify than spiritual sins like schism, sacrilege, disobedience, ambition, abuse of power, pride. How common is it to find someone in the radical traditionalist world who can simply own the fact that he is in schism?

Which brother more quickly learned to own his sins—and repent of them? Which brother does not acknowledge his sin or even seem aware of it? Which brother ends up loving the father more? (Luke 7:47)

This is not to say that there is no line for the liberals beyond which there must be an ultimatum or punishment. There is, and many prudent voices are wondering when the time will come for any meaningful discipline for the more outrageously fiendish and stupid progressives among the episcopacy and priesthood. If Pope Leo wants to win back the SSPX he must attend to this, even though he must pick his battles like any administrator. The analogy strains a bit here, but if the younger brother had brought his debauchery back to the father’s house and asked for more money and a feast, wouldn’t the father have had a stern word with him?

The adherents and defenders of the SSPX will continue to argue they have done nothing wrong, that their self-incurred excommunications are invalid, that they are the most loyal sons of the Church and even of the very Pope whose authority they openly flaunt. They will complain about the debauchery as they attend to the upkeeping of the house and its lands. If they would spend more time considering that their relationship with the father is fundamentally broken, perhaps it could be repaired, and they would find that everything in the house is theirs. Meanwhile, the father is standing on his toes, hoping to have a feast soon with his long-lost wayward sons—perhaps a feast including sauerkraut and bratwurst.