Timeline: Marcel Lefebvre

At Écône, Bishop Alfonso de Galarreta, assisted by Bishop Bernard Fellay, consecrated Pascal Schreiber, Michael Goldade, Michel Poinsinet de Sivry and Marc Hanappier as bishops for the Society of Saint Pius X, in defiance of the Holy See's warnings. The ceremony, which the Society streamed live, came 38 years after Archbishop Lefebvre's consecrations at the same seminary. Superior general Davide Pagliarani preached the homily.

Richard Williamson, one of the four bishops consecrated by Archbishop Lefebvre in 1988, died on 29 January 2025 aged 84. Expelled from the SSPX in 2012, he had incurred excommunication again in 2015 by consecrating a bishop in Brazil without papal mandate; his televised Holocaust denial in 2009 had led to a conviction for incitement in Germany.

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.

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.

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.

At Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre's request, Bishop François Charrière of Lausanne, Geneva and Fribourg erected the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X as a pious union in his diocese, approving its statutes on a trial basis for six years. According to the Society's published founding documents, the Congregation for the Clergy sent it a letter of praise on 18 February 1971.