Vatican stresses only pope may approve bishop consecrations to safeguard apostolic ties to Jesus’s original disciples.

The Vatican says priests and lay Catholics who are part of a breakaway right-wing Catholic group that ordained bishops without Pope Leo XIV’s approval are in schism with the wider church and are now excommunicated.

In a decree on Thursday, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the top watchdog authority for the 1.4-billion-member Roman Catholic Church, also warned Catholics globally that the Swiss-based Society of St Pius X is now celebrating the sacraments illicitly.

The ultraconservative group, which denies key church teachings, cannot officiate marriages or hear confessions validly, the decree said.

The Vatican decree was issued a day after the group consecrated four new bishops, defying a plea from Pope Leo not to do so.

It is a strict policy of the Catholic Church that only the pope may authorise the consecration of new ⁠bishops to maintain the church’s ties to Jesus’s 12 disciples, who are considered the first priests and bishops.

Thursday’s decree said the two bishops leading the unauthorised ordinations held in Switzerland on Wednesday have been excommunicated along with the four priests involved in the ceremony.

However, the Vatican went further than expected and said that all priests of the Society of St Pius X and all Catholics who “adhere formally” to the group were now in schism and excommunicated. A schism is a term to indicate a severe, formal rupture inside the Catholic community.

The Society of St Pius X did not immediately respond to the excommunications on Thursday. On Wednesday, it said it had to go forward with the ordinations without papal approval “owing to exceptional circumstances”.

In a letter to the society Monday, Pope Leo warned that “to tear the seamless garment of Christ is a sin of extreme gravity”.

“I plead with you and ask you with all my heart: please turn back!” he wrote.

The Vatican Secretary of State Pietro Parolin, told journalists on Wednesday that the Church felt “deep sorrow” over the ordinations.

“An act of this kind deeply wounds the unity of the Church,” he said.

The Church considers unauthorised ordination of bishops such a serious matter that it causes those taking part in the ceremony to be automatically excommunicated, or “out of communion” with the wider Church, and unable to receive sacraments until they repent and ask for forgiveness.

The Society of Saint Pius X, which has around 600,000 followers around the world, comprises fundamentalist Catholics who strongly oppose the liberal reforms imposed by the Vatican II Council in the 1960s.