Timeline

The Josias, a website devoted to Catholic integralism, was launched in 2014. The Austrian weekly Falter credits Cistercian monk Edmund Waldstein with founding it; the site says co-editor Urban Hannon was involved from its inception.

After Benedict XVI's resignation at the end of February 2013, the conclave elected the Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio on 13 March 2013, on the fifth ballot. He was the first pope from the Americas, the first Jesuit pope and the first to take the name Francis. The Associated Press later reported that traditionalists had become some of his fiercest critics.

In his Declaratio, Benedict XVI announced that he was renouncing the ministry of Bishop of Rome, with the See to fall vacant on 28 February 2013 at 20:00. He was the first pope to resign since Gregory XII in 1415. The wording later became the basis of benevacantist claims that the resignation was invalid.

The Society of Saint Pius X expelled Richard Williamson, citing his distancing from the Society's leadership and his refusal to show due respect and obedience to his superiors. He had opposed the Society's talks with Rome.

On 13 June 2012 Cardinal William Levada gave Bishop Bernard Fellay the Holy See's evaluation of the SSPX's response to the Doctrinal Preamble first presented to him on 14 September 2011; a leaked internal SSPX letter later said Fellay found the text unacceptable and could not sign it. The Holy See treated the SSPX General Chapter's July declaration as primarily an internal document, and in late 2012 the Ecclesia Dei commission said dialogue would continue while it awaited the Society's official reply.

After the Archdiocese of Detroit said it did not regard RealCatholicTV as authorized under canon law to use the word "Catholic" in promoting its activities, the Michigan-based service changed its name to ChurchMilitant.TV in June 2012.

The Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei's instruction, approved by Benedict XVI on 8 April 2011, set out the rights of stable groups of faithful (nn. 15–19) and made diocesan bishops responsible for ensuring the extraordinary form for those who request it.

Historian Roberto de Mattei, then vice-president of Italy's National Research Council (CNR), described the March 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami as a divine punishment in a Radio Maria broadcast. An online petition called for his resignation from the CNR, as reported by Global Voices; the Catholic daily Avvenire recorded an editor's public disagreement with him.

Riposte catholique, a French Catholic news and commentary site directed by Guillaume de Thieulloy and launched with journalist Daniel Hamiche, went online on 1 January 2010, according to its own 'À propos' page.

In a letter to the bishops of the Catholic Church, Benedict XVI explained the lifting of the excommunications as a disciplinary step meant to free the four bishops from a burden of conscience, and stated that until doctrinal questions were clarified the Society had no canonical status in the Church.

Swedish television broadcast an interview in which Richard Williamson denied the existence of Nazi gas chambers. It aired as Benedict XVI lifted the excommunications of the four SSPX bishops. The Vatican said the pope had not known of his views and required him to disavow them publicly; he never did.

By a decree dated 21 January 2009 and announced on 24 January, Benedict XVI remitted the excommunications of the four bishops consecrated by Archbishop Lefebvre in 1988, in response to a renewed request from Bishop Bernard Fellay on their behalf. The Society nonetheless remained without canonical status.

Benedict XVI permitted the 1962 Missal as an extraordinary form of the Roman Rite, effective 14 September 2007. His accompanying letter said the older Missal had never been juridically abrogated and described the two Missals as two uses of one rite.

Fifteen sisters at the CMRI motherhouse in Spokane had come to accept the authority of the post-conciliar popes, and in June 2007 they left the congregation. They were later received into the Catholic Church and formed the Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Church, in the Diocese of Spokane.

Michael Voris founded St. Michael's Media in Ferndale, Michigan, in 2006. Its video service, first called RealCatholicTV and later Church Militant, grew to more than 40 full-time staff by 2023.

A group of priests formerly of the Society of St. Pius X, led by Fr. Philippe Laguérie, founded the Institute of the Good Shepherd in full communion with Rome, based at Saint-Éloi in Bordeaux. Sources differ on the exact date in autumn 2006.

In his Christmas address to the Roman Curia, Benedict XVI contrasted a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture in interpreting the Second Vatican Council with a hermeneutic of reform, warning that the former risked a split between the pre-conciliar and post-conciliar Church. He repeated the point to Rome's clergy in March 2006.

On 19 April 2005, the second day of the conclave, the cardinal electors chose Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, 78, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith since 1981, as the 265th pope; Religion News Service reported that he was elected on the fourth ballot. He later said he chose the name Benedict to link his pontificate to Benedict XV and to the cause of peace and reconciliation.

In Detroit, Robert McKenna consecrated Donald Sanborn a bishop without a papal mandate. McKenna had been consecrated by Michel-Louis Guérard des Lauriers. Sanborn, rector of Most Holy Trinity Seminary, is known for advocating sedeprivationism.

After the priests of the Priestly Union of Saint John Mary Vianney in Campos, Brazil — formed by followers of Bishop Antônio de Castro Mayer — were reconciled with the Holy See, John Paul II erected the Personal Apostolic Administration of Saint John Mary Vianney on 18 January 2002, with Bishop Licínio Rangel as administrator. It remains the only personal apostolic administration and is dedicated to the traditional Mass; Bishop Fernando Arêas Rifan has led it since Rangel's death in December 2002.

The CDF document The Message of Fatima published all three parts of the secret with a theological commentary by Cardinal Ratzinger, who wrote that no great mystery is revealed. The Fatima Center and its founder Nicholas Gruner disputed that the disclosure was complete.

LifeSiteNews began in 1997 as a news service connected to the Canadian pro-life lobbying group Campaign Life Coalition, with Steve Jalsevac and John-Henry Westen as founding staff. Westen served as editor-in-chief from the start.

Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, the Brazilian Catholic thinker and activist, died in São Paulo on 3 October 1995. In the following year the Italian historian Roberto de Mattei wrote a biography of him, later published in English as The Crusader of the 20th Century with a preface by Cardinal Alfons Maria Stickler.

At Mount Saint Michael in Spokane, Washington, Bishop Moisés Carmona consecrated Mark Pivarunas, superior general of the sedevacantist CMRI, without a papal mandate. Carmona, who had been consecrated in 1981 by Archbishop Ngô Đình Thục, died about five weeks later.

Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, founder of the Society of Saint Pius X, died in Martigny, Switzerland, on 25 March 1991, aged 85, and was buried in a crypt beneath the Society's seminary at Écône. Bishop Antônio de Castro Mayer, his co-consecrator in 1988, died the following month.

Msgr. Gilles Wach and Fr. Philippe Mora founded the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest, a community of priests using the pre-1970 liturgy, which later established its motherhouse and seminary at Gricigliano, Italy.

By its own account, the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter was founded at the Abbey of Hauterive in Switzerland by about a dozen priests and some twenty seminarians who did not follow Archbishop Lefebvre after the 30 June consecrations; John Paul II erected it canonically the same year.

Two days after Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre's unlawful episcopal ordinations of 30 June, John Paul II's motu proprio stated that excommunication had been incurred, created the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei, and asked for a "wide and generous application" of the permissions for the 1962 Missal.

Archbishop Lefebvre, with Bishop Antônio de Castro Mayer, consecrated Bernard Fellay, Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, Richard Williamson and Alfonso de Galarreta as bishops at Écône without a papal mandate, despite a formal canonical warning sent on 17 June 1988 by the prefect of the Congregation for Bishops.

John Paul II invited representatives of Christian churches and of world religions to Assisi to pray for peace, saying their different professions of faith did not lessen the meaning of the day. Benedict XVI later wrote that care had been taken so the meeting would not lend itself to syncretistic readings based on relativism.

At its 23rd general assembly, the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil (CNBB) approved a note criticising the TFP for a 'lack of communion' with the Brazilian Church, its hierarchy and the pope, and urging Catholics not to join or cooperate with it, according to the text as reproduced by the American TFP. The Brazilian TFP rejected the accusations as vague and generic.

The Congregation for Divine Worship's circular letter to episcopal conferences allowed diocesan bishops to permit Mass with the 1962 Missal for groups that did not question the legitimacy of the 1970 Missal, outside parish churches except in extraordinary cases.

Bishop John Shojiro Ito of Niigata, Japan, authorised veneration of "the Holy Mother of Akita" in his diocese while awaiting a definitive judgment from the Holy See. EWTN's editors doubt that any later formal Vatican decree on Akita exists.

A declaration signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger said that the new Code of Canon Law's silence on Freemasonry did not change the Church's judgment, and that Catholics who join Masonic associations are in a state of grave sin and may not receive Holy Communion.

The first issue of Cahiers de Cassiciacum set out the thesis of the French Dominican Michel-Louis Guérard des Lauriers: the post-conciliar popes hold the papacy only "materially," not "formally." Bishop Donald Sanborn is a present-day advocate of the thesis.

Paul VI met Archbishop Lefebvre privately at Castel Gandolfo. According to a Vatican record of the meeting published in a 2018 book and reported by Catholic News Service, the pope told Lefebvre that his position was that of an antipope.

After Archbishop Lefebvre ordained 13 priests at Écône at the end of June 1976, despite a Roman instruction forbidding him to confer ordinations, he was suspended from exercising priestly functions (a divinis) in July 1976.

In an address to a secret consistory, Paul VI criticised the stance of Archbishop Lefebvre, insisted on faithful implementation of the Second Vatican Council and rejected the claim that the Council is not binding. A contemporary press report noted that repeated instructions to close the Écône seminary had gone unheeded; the address came a year after the Society's 1975 suppression, which Lefebvre had contested in Rome.

With the agreement of Cardinal Arturo Tabera, prefect of the Congregation for Religious, Bishop Pierre Mamie of Lausanne, Geneva and Fribourg suppressed the Society of Saint Pius X with immediate effect on 6 May 1975, after Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre's declaration of 21 November 1974 rejecting the conciliar reform. Lefebvre appealed; according to the Society, Cardinal Staffa rejected the appeal on 10 June 1975. The SSPX maintains that a local bishop could not lawfully suppress the Society once approved.

Leonard Feeney was reconciled with the Church in 1972 without recanting his views on salvation. Saint Benedict Center's own history credits Cardinal Humberto Medeiros of Boston as the main figure in the negotiations. Catholicism.org maintains that the lifting of censures involved no change in Feeney's teaching.