The Society of St. Pius X has published a long essay on “racism,” and the moment I read it I knew what game they were playing. This was not written for the faithful. It was not written to confront the real crisis Catholics face today. It was written to polish SSPX’s image at a delicate moment in its relationship with Rome. It is self-serving, unnecessary, and prideful — an act of virtue signaling dressed up as theology.
The piece condemns the safest, deadest villain imaginable (Nazism) while saying nothing about the living disaster of mass migration tearing apart Catholic nations. While Catholics watch their neighborhoods dissolve, SSPX polishes its press release. That is not courage. It is cowardice in cassocks.
The Enemy’s Vocabulary
The first and fatal flaw in SSPX’s essay is the uncritical acceptance of the word “racism.” Not once do they put it in quotation marks, not once do they pause to examine how slippery and weaponized the term has become. By treating “racism” as though it were a fixed category, they are already debating on enemy turf.
“Racism” is not a timeless Christian sin. It is a twentieth-century slogan, invented and expanded by revolutionaries to smear ordinary human loyalties as if they were moral failings. It now includes everything from genuine hatred to something as benign as preferring your own culture, language, or neighborhood. Yet SSPX repeats it without critique, handing the leftist catechism its greatest victory: control of the terms.
Catholics should know better. We fight over words like marriage, family, and justice because words matter. To concede “racism” is to concede the entire frame. It is to agree that natural in-group preference — the same instinct that makes a man love his children more than strangers — is morally suspect. That is not Catholic teaching. That is Marxist propaganda.
The Missing Category: In-Group Preference
Here is what SSPX never acknowledges. Much of what is condemned today as “racism” is simply in-group preference: the natural instinct to favor one’s own kin, culture, and community. This is not hatred; it is order.
Every race and nation in history has exhibited it. The Chinese distrusted outsiders, Arabs enslaved Europeans and Africans alike, Africans warred on neighboring tribes, Romans called everyone else barbarians. To pretend “racism” is a unique European invention is dishonest.
And Catholic tradition is not silent here. Aquinas says it plainly in the Summa (II-II, q.26, a.6):
“We ought out of charity to love more those who are more closely united to us.”
That single line explodes the SSPX essay. Ordered love — ordo caritatis — means we love God first, then family, then our people, then strangers. To flatten this into indiscriminate “charity” is not Thomism. It is liberalism.
When Theology Ignores Sociology
SSPX speaks as if mystical unity in Christ erases natural divisions. But in the real world, diversity corrodes trust. Harvard’s Robert Putnam showed it empirically. In diverse neighborhoods, people “hunker down” — they vote less, volunteer less, trust less.
And we see it in the pews. Mass attendance in Seine-Saint-Denis — the most immigrant-heavy department in France — fell from 23% in 1990 to under 3% in 2023. That collapse is not mystical. It is measurable. Yet SSPX says nothing about it.
By ignoring these facts, they sound less like shepherds and more like academics. Christ said, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.” SSPX pretends Caesar’s world doesn’t exist.
The Nazi Shortcut
Instead of grappling with the crisis of mass migration, SSPX takes the lazy road: Nazis.
“The racial theories that Voegelin puts to the test in Race and State repeatedly fail…”
Yes, Nazi race science was pseudo-science. But no Catholic pews today are filled with Hitler worshippers. Invoking Nazis in 2025 is a rhetorical shortcut — an attempt to smear any concern about migration and cohesion as one goose-step away from Mein Kampf.
This is the Left’s tactic, not the Church’s. If a Catholic questions open borders, he’s a racist. If he questions multiculturalism, he’s a nationalist. SSPX is now playing the same game, hoping to look respectable in Pope Leo’s eyes. But you cannot buy respectability with cowardice.
The Marxist Weaponization of “Racism”
What SSPX also ignores is obvious: “racism” is not just a neutral word. It is a political weapon deliberately sharpened by Marxists. The Soviets used it against America during the Cold War. The Frankfurt School retooled class struggle into identity struggle, making “racism” the new original sin. Today NGOs, DEI bureaucracies, and globalists wield the word like a bludgeon to silence dissent and dissolve nations.
By repeating it without critique, SSPX reloads the gun pointed at its own chest.
The Failure of Nerve
This is the heart of it. The SSPX essay is not theology; it is fear. Fear of being called racist. Fear of being lumped in with extremists. Fear of losing credibility with Rome. But in trying to please Pope Leo, they betrayed their own people. Catholics in France, Germany, Italy, and America are not haunted by Nazism. They are haunted by neighborhoods transformed, parishes emptied, and cultures collapsing under engineered migration. And their shepherds are silent.
Lefebvre Would Have Spoken
To be clear: Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre was no coward. He saw the modernist rot in Rome and named it for what it was, even when it cost him everything. He fought the battles of his time with the courage of a lion.
But his time was not ours. In the 1960s and 70s, Europe was still culturally Catholic. The danger was liturgical destruction and theological liberalism, not the flood of globalism and mass migration. He did not face what we face today.
Yet one thing is certain: if he had, he would have spoken. He would have recognized, as Hilaire Belloc did decades before, that “The Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith.” He would have warned that to lose one is to lose the other. He would not have written about Nazis while Paris turned into a mosque. He would have thundered against globalism as a new paganism, Islam as a false religion poised to conquer the continent, and immigration as the wrecking ball of Christendom.
It is the failure of his heirs that they have not done the same.
Conclusion: Scare Quotes, Not Silence
SSPX should have put “racism” in scare quotes. They should have named in-group preference as natural, not sinful. They should have acknowledged the collapse of trust under forced diversity. They should have resisted the lazy Nazi shortcut and addressed the living nightmare of mass migration.
Instead they chose respectability over truth, optics over courage, fear over faith.
Belloc warned us a century ago. To betray one is to betray the other. And even Cardinal Robert Sarah — hardly a firebrand nationalist — has lamented the crisis of Europe and the suicidal refusal of Catholics to defend their civilization: “If Europe disappears, and Islam invades it, then we will be destroyed. This is a matter of life and death.”
If Cardinal Sarah is “too extreme” for the modern SSPX, we no longer have a Society of St. Pius X—we have the Society of St. Pius XI… the one who signed the Reichskonkordat.
And yet SSPX would have us sit idly by and watch Europe become Muslim rather than risk being called racist. They prefer to look innocent in the world’s eyes while the continent that gave them Christendom bleeds out in front of them.
That is not Catholic boldness. It is cowardice in cassocks.
— Wolfshead
Strange that they find such virtue signaling still necessary under Pope Leo!
And yeah, shame on them.