Dialogue between the Society of St. Pius X and the Holy See

For a number of years after the 1988 consecrations, there was little if any dialogue between the Society of St. Pius X and the Holy See. This state of affairs ended when the Society led a large pilgrimage to Rome for the Jubilee in the year 2000.

A sympathetic Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos, President of the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei, approached the SSPX bishops during the pilgrimage and, according to Bishop Fellay, told them that the Pope was prepared to grant them either a personal prelature (a new juridical structure introduced by Vatican II; presently Opus Dei is the only personal prelature) or an apostolic administration (the status given to the traditionalist priests of Campos, Brazil). The SSPX leadership responded with distrust, saying that Castrillón was vague on how the new structure would be implemented and sustained, and criticising the Holy See's allegedly heavy-handed treatment of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter. They requested two preliminary "signs" before continuing negotiations: that the Holy See grant permission for all priests to celebrate the Tridentine Mass; and that its statement that the 1988 consecrations had resulted in excommunication for the clerics involved be declared void.

Cardinal Castrillón refused to grant interviews on the subject, in order "to maintain the privacy of the details of our dialogue", though this silence was broken when his letter of 5 April 2002 to Bishop Bernard Fellay was later published. This contained the text of a protocol summarizing the meeting between the two men held on 29 December 2000. This envisaged a reconciliation on the basis of the Lefebvre-Ratzinger protocol of 5 May 1988; the 1988 excommunications would be lifted rather than declared null. From 2003 onwards, the annual reports of the Ecclesia Dei Commission began to report on dialogue between the Vatican authorities and the SSPX, beginning with "some high-level meetings and... an exchange of correspondence" in 2003, continuing with "dialogue at various levels... [and] meetings, some at a high level" in 2004, and leading to "somewhat improved" dialogue with "more concrete proposals" in 2005.

...
Wikipedia