https://archive.fo/06EBv
>The Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) is a fervently traditionalist Catholic sect: a Vatican breakaway with no official Church status, and the cause of much malcontent in Rome. Born in reaction to the Church’s modernizing reforms of the ’60s, the Society soon emerged as a stronghold of the way Catholicism used to be. In the towns and cities where SSPX communities popped up (SSPX claims almost half a million members, hundreds of priests, and a presence on every continent, though the numbers cannot be verified), the group is best known for its practice of the old Tridentine Mass: conducted in Latin, the priest’s back to his congregation, and heavy on the Gregorian chant.
>Elsewhere, SSPX is known for other things: like its Holocaust-denying bishop; its anti-Semitic conspiracy mongering (an SSPX leader recently dubbed Jews and Modernists “enemies of the Church”); its rejection of interfaith dialogue; and its insistence that, since the 1960s, the Vatican has taken a turn for the worse. The Anti-Defamation League describes SSPX as “mired in anti-Semitism.” The Southern Poverty Law Center ups the ante, calling “radical traditionalist Catholics” (including, prominently, SSPX members) “the single largest group of hard-core anti-Semites in America.”
>As Murphy learned more about SSPX, she found more to like: the “order and dignity;” the “happy families, united parents;” the commitment to charity; the fired-up adherents. She began to attend seminars, retreats, a pilgrimage through Paris. “I’ll remember it on my deathbed, walking by the Arc de Triomphe and all of Paris comes to a standstill because there are 8,000 people walking by with rosaries… singing these incredible hymns that they were singing in 1789 when they hated what was going on in the Revolution.”
>he Society has a long history of Vichy nostalgia; it was revealed in the 1990s that the group had harbored Nazi collaborator and war criminal Paul Touvier. But the situation climaxed in 2009, when SSPX bishop Richard Williamson gave a television interview in which he denied the existence of Nazi gas chambers.