SSPX Profession of Faith misses the victories of orthodox theology

By Jacob Phillips ( bio - articles ) | Jun 30, 2026

I wish to write here as an academic theologian, and as a lecturer who teaches some young people who find their heads turned by the appeal of the SSPX’s steadfastness. I therefore read the Society’s recent Profession of Catholic Faith with great interest, and indeed more than a little sympathy.

Let me be crystal clear. There are many paragraphs therein which I liked. I mean, really liked. There were moments I almost felt the sort of goosebumps one has felt reading some of the finest Magisterial documents of our tradition, which, to be brutally honest, I haven’t always felt in recent years.

Yet the honest truth is that I regularly feel those same goosebumps reading much of today’s academic theology, which, at least in the English-speaking world with which I’m most familiar, is inestimably more faithful and grounded on an understanding of the Tradition in continuity with the past than it was when I was an undergraduate some decades ago.

I appreciate the SSPX are more concerned about the hierarchy than academics. Some young people might find the option of straying outside the barque of Peter appealing on that same basis. I wish to suggest that things within the fold are moving in the right direction and that there’s good reason to expect that future generations of clergy will bear the fruit of this reorientation.

The Profession regularly articulates brilliantly some of the most profound and compelling truths known to man, those known exclusively by the Divine Revelation of the Triune God entrusted to our Holy Mother, the Church. These truths are offset and contrasted with a compendium of falsities, or partial truths, which have floated around the theological firmament since at least the 19th century.

My problem is, however, that huge amounts of work have gone into significantly changing that same theological firmament in recent decades, such that the adversaries of the document are no longer taken as theologically authoritative nor particularly significant in a great number of Catholic universities and seminaries any longer. The document thus argues mostly against views which have long since had their day, and to which few academic theologians today subscribe.

Take, for example, the statement that “Revelation is not the progressive expression of a religious consciousness, nor the fruit of a collective experience of the believing community.” I would be hard pressed to find an example of anyone holding to that in today’s academic world. I could, with some effort, perhaps link it to the work of a couple of people, but I’d probably have to dig out the work of someone whose name has almost entirely disappeared from university and seminary curricula.

The same goes for “the error of modernism” which “reduces faith to an interior experience.” Two decades ago I was enrolled at a relatively liberal Jesuit school where I often disagreed with many of my teachers. Yet, even there, such ideas as faith being essentially subjective, or solely about expressing some aspect of humanity as homo religiosus, were already woefully dated timepieces from an outgone era.

The same again goes for the presentation of historical-criticism of the Bible as “rationalist exegesis,” in which the Sacred Scriptures are treated as “having only man for their author,” excluding “a priori the possibility of the supernatural.” Huge amounts of work have gone into the flourishing of Biblical theology typified by people like Scott Hahn, John Bergsma, and Brant Pitre, which enables exegesis to function in a faithful manner, without any of these rationalist errors.

Then we have the rejection of “modern agnosticism, philosophical skepticism, idealist subjectivism, and all doctrines which limit the scope of human knowledge to sensible phenomena or to the constructions of consciousness.” Praise God, I’m hard pressed to think of many academic theologians who’d not wholeheartedly agree. In recent years there’s been a marked turn towards metaphysical realism, particularly in theologians of the Thomistic Ressourcement, most obviously Thomas Joseph White.

Regarding “the diminished professions of trinitarian faith which, under pretext of religious unity or ecumenical prudence, deliberately pass over in silence what God has revealed about Himself” in a “false irenicism.” OK, yes, I will admit that those who feel called to interreligious dialogue are sometimes more inclined to a diplomatic silence than I’d personally wish—but the teachings of the same postconciliar church that promulgated Dominus Iesus are clear enough: that “followers of other religions” are “objectively speaking” in “a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the Church, have the fullness of the means of salvation.” (§22)

I could continue in this vein for many pages, but hopefully you get the point. The Profession is challenging for the most part not because it is straightforwardly wrong, but because it contrasts right teaching with positions with very little provenance in today’s Catholic academy.

In other words, the document misses the mark. The real issues are barely even touched upon. The keeping of people’s hearts and minds within the Church may depend on tackling these real issues, enabling those attracted by the SSPX to appreciate how the entire history of the Church can be understood as continuous without surrendering to modernism.

Issues such as, that is, how, a construal of Revelation as neither subjective nor anthropocentric must still (to quote the Profession) be articulated historically in “an ever clearer and more explicit manner” such that historical context and eternal truth are intrinsically and profoundly intertwined.

Or, if after the rebuke of modernism, faith is properly adhered to as a graced response to the exterior word of God, we still firmly profess the truth of doctrine within the only context it can be heard—which the Profession describes as “the fluctuations of history.”

Or, again, what happens when we take as an irremovable presupposition for biblical interpretation the depositum fidei of the Church, how faithful, critical exegesis further cultivates the depth of encounter with God’s Word for so many of the faithful.

Or, finally, how the emergent forms of a more honest interreligious dialogue promise to enable the capacious love of the Triune God to invite followers of other religions into the fullness of truth disclosed by the Church.

Pope Benedict XVI wrote, in a letter accompanying his decision to initiate a remission of the excommunication of SSPX bishops some years ago, that “the Church’s teaching authority cannot be frozen in the year 1962.” This authority lives and breathes through the unbroken history of the Church, and a great many theologians have been attending to the work of healing the wounds caused by the overbearing theological liberalism of that same decade’s aftermath out of loyalty to precisely that authority.

Much good, sincere, and honest work is taking place along exactly these lines in the theological academy today—so, if we share the same adversaries, I would urge my brothers in Christ to stay within the fold so we can together continue the work that is already well underway.