A Letter to Our Holy Father from an SSPX Catholic

Mr Hall has written a letter to Pope Leo as an SSPX Catholic. He makes a case for the SSPX that needs to be made more often: Salus animarum suprema lex.

From Crisis

By Kennedy Hall

I will not rehearse the theological disputes here. You are an intelligent man, and you can do your reading. I will only ask you to consider the charity of your patron, St. Augustine.

Your Holiness,

I must confess that I have never written a letter to the pope before, and I ask your forgiveness if I fail to observe the proper forms of address. I assure you it is innocent ignorance, not malice.

First, I want to thank you for accepting the call to be pope. It is not a role I would want for myself. It is the most important office in the world—humanly speaking, the most consequential position of authority in all of human history. There is no higher office, no greater dignity, no position a man can hold which more powerfully demonstrates the authority of Christ our King on earth.

I also want to say something that some of my fellow traditional Catholics may find a little soft, but I mean it sincerely: I love you. I love you deeply. My wife and children love you. We pray for you every single day, multiple times a day. You are our Holy Father, and it is natural to love your father, biological or spiritual.

I have a son who was born and died last year. He was baptized in the hospital—I baptized him myself in the operating room. Our priest came and confirmed him, and he passed away about an hour and a half later. I will speak more about him shortly, but I want you to know that—perhaps this is how it works, perhaps not—I have taken to telling him, with some humor though also some earnestness, that since he is not yet 18, he still has to do what I say. And so I have asked him, repeatedly, to pray for you.

I also want to acknowledge that you have inherited an impossible job, at least in human terms. In this Year of Our Lord 2026, the world and the Church are in a state of disarray. I need not rehash the reasons here, as you are an intelligent man and surely understand them well. But to put it plainly: things are in decline. In the realm of faith, morals, and liturgy, the situation is grave. The morals of our societies are in the sewer—not merely on grave matters like unjust war or abortion but on the most fundamental aspects of the human condition that just decades ago would have been understood by common sense.

You have inherited a Church that has had to reckon with massive corruption, both doctrinal and moral, in recent decades. You have been thrust into an office that has become politicized in ways that, I believe, are deeply unfair to the dignity of the papacy and that diminish the true place of the pope as the preeminent world leader. In that spirit, I want to say that I am grateful for your recent comments on the conflicts in the Middle East. You expressed Catholic teaching with great charity, and I am thankful for that.

Now, among the controversies you have inherited is the controversy surrounding the Society of St. Pius X. I do not know how familiar you were with this matter before your elevation to the papacy—whether you had personal experience with the priests, bishops, or faithful of the SSPX. I myself am an attendee of an SSPX chapel. I have been for years. I have also written in defense of the Society, and I stand by what I have said.

I know the SSPX is not perfect. No human institution is. But I know that without them, I am not sure what I would do for the formation of my family.

What I take most seriously—and what I believe the priests of the SSPX take most seriously—is the salvation of souls. Perhaps it is old-fashioned in the minds of some, but I still believe that the Catholic Faith is the one true religion. I believe there is no salvation outside the Church. I believe that God must be worshiped in as dignified a manner as human beings are capable of offering. 

I believe the Church was not wrong for nineteen and a half centuries; and that it somehow found a new path in the 1960s is something I simply cannot accept. I believe that Pope St. Pius X was correct when he solemnly condemned Modernism 120 years ago. I believe the teachings of your namesake, Pope Leo, still stand on matters such as religious liberty, Sacred Scripture, and so on. I believe that Sacred Scripture is the inerrant Word of God—that there can be no errors in it, even historical ones—because any such error would be an offense against the Holy Ghost, who guided the minds and hands of all its authors.

Because of these convictions, I have faced no small amount of persecution and difficulty in my life as a Catholic—not from non-Catholics but by those who carry the name Catholic.

I was not raised in a practicing Catholic family. My mother is an Italian immigrant; my father comes from a line of English Catholics. I am Canadian. I was raised in a culturally Catholic home, but we did not practice much. I attended Catholic school, and while I was a good student—good enough that I later became a teacher because of my love of learning—I have to be honest: I learned nothing about the Catholic Faith that I can recall from those years. 

I did not know what the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist was. I did not know who the Holy Spirit was. I did not know that mortal sin existed. And I am far from alone in that. That was my upbringing. Sadly, such lack of formation remains prevalent in so many Catholic institutions today.

Eventually, in my twenties, I found the fullness of the Faith—and I am convinced it was through the intercession of Our Lady of Guadalupe, though that is a story for another time. From that moment, my life changed entirely. I fell deeply in love with the tradition, the history, and the teachings of Our Lord and His Church.

As I began to try to share this fullness of faith with my colleagues—I was teaching at a Catholic school at the time—I quickly discovered that what I would call the perennial Catholic Faith had become anathema. Insisting on traditional morals, traditional liturgical posture, or traditional theological outlook was treated as something like the proverbial sin against the Holy Ghost. When I looked for support from my diocese, there was none to be found. In fact, the most resistance came from the priests and the employees of the chancery office, which was as shocking as it was disheartening.

Eventually, I had to leave my Catholic school board. It had become impossible to remain in good conscience. Continuing would have required compromising fundamental principles—namely, the truth of the Catholic Faith as lived in practice. I could not do that. I knew that, when I die, I will have to face Our Lord, and I did not want to give in to human respect.

Along that path, I found Catholic Tradition. And I found the Society of St. Pius X.

Quite frankly, it was a breath of fresh air. I did not have to fight anymore. I did not have to fight heretical priests. I did not have to stomach sacrilege and liturgical abuse. It was liberating. It was like finding a home I had longed for my whole life without knowing it existed—and realizing that all those years away from the Faith there had been this aching feeling in the pit of my stomach that I had never been able to name.

More than that, there had been a particular kind of loneliness. And when I found the fullness of the Faith in a chapel served by the priests of the SSPX, it was like a remedy for homesickness. I realized that all those years of spiritual discomfort had been akin to a feeling of abandonment. Finding these priests was like finding true fathers—I do not mean that I doubted the sacramental validity of the other priests, but in the deepest intangible sense, men willing to do anything for their children. I have seven children, including our little saint in Heaven, and I would crawl over broken glass if one of my children needed me to. I expect this of priests because their paternity must be, in a sense, even deeper than mine because it comes from Our Lord, who is one with the Father.

When Covid arrived, our diocese not only closed before the government required it, supposedly out of an abundance of caution, but actually forbade baptism—and that policy lasted for a long time. When I brought the news to my wife, I remember her weeping at the thought of all the babies who would be born and not receive the saving waters of baptism because of a misguided directive from misguided prelates. 

I reached out at that time to a diocesan priest I knew, a conservative man with a social media following, and I asked him: “Father, could you please post a video teaching parents how to baptize their children in case they have a baby during the closures?” 

His response was that he did not want to be disobedient. He would not do it. I had not asked him to violate any episcopal directive. I had only asked him to teach—which is what a priest is supposed to do. But even the idea of simply teaching Catholics how to protect their children’s souls was untenable for him because it might be perceived as disobedience.

There are many such stories. But the point is the same: the Faith has lost its savor. As Our Lord says of salt that has lost its flavor, it is good for nothing. There is no urgency to save souls anymore, at least in most corners of the Church. There are still good theologians, still good men in the priesthood and the episcopacy—I do not doubt it. But the situation is radically dire.

And in my experience, the priests of the Society of St. Pius X represent a true alternative to the status quo.

Allow me to return, for a moment, to my son.

His name is Gabriel Augustine. He was born and died on October 24, 2025, which is the traditional feast of St. Raphael.

Your Holiness, you would have loved to have been there in that hospital room. It was so full of faith.

We knew he was going to die. His diagnosis had made that certain. And we knew we would have only hours with him. My children were there; our family members were there. We sang him happy birthday. Father gave him the traditional rite of Confirmation. I baptized him moments after he was born with water that friends had brought back from Lourdes. I thought it was so providential, for I knew he was going to die physically, but the association of that water, from that sacred font of healing, made it clear that what was being healed was his soul.

It was as if the angels were present in that hospital room. Even the nurses—women who were not religious—told us there was a light in the room they could not explain. And when I look back at photographs taken that day, there is a mysterious light. It was as if St. Raphael himself had come to bring St. Gabriel Augustine, named for the Archangel, to Heaven.

My son passed away at 3:15 in the afternoon—a powerful hour, being the hour of the crucifixion of Our Lord, and also calling to mind Genesis 3:15, the Protoevangelium, where we learn that Our Lady with Our Lord will crush the head of the serpent. There was so much symbolism, so much providence in all of it.

I would have loved for you to be there, Your Holiness, because I know you are an Augustinian and you would have loved to hold Gabriel Augustine and to sing Happy Birthday to him with his siblings. I will add this: I am a member of the Third Order of the Society of St. Pius X, and the religious name I took was Augustine because St. Augustine is the principal patron of my life, alongside St. Joseph, which is my middle name. 

St. Augustine was a man of immense charity. He loved souls above all things, and because of that, he loved the truth above all things. He was a man who could reconcile differences. He knew that the most fundamental thing we can do is save our souls. He knew that charity covers a multitude of sins and that, with God’s grace and divine charity, all things are possible.

I will not rehearse the theological disputes here—about the power of order, the power of jurisdiction, and so forth. You are an intelligent man, and you can do your reading. I will only ask you to consider the charity of your patron, St. Augustine, and the charity of these priests of the Society of St. Pius X. If you had been in that hospital room, you would have seen Fr. Stannus and his deep love for souls. And where there is love for souls, there is charity. And where there is true charity, there can be no schism—for schism is a sin against charity.

These men who have answered the call to be traditional priests do not do so for love of money, power, or influence. By joining the Society of St. Pius X, they embrace a life of ridicule, persecution, and scorn from many Catholics who do not understand them. They do what they do because they love the truth, because they love God, because they love the Church, and because they love the pope. 

They believe that the best way to serve the papacy is to hold fast to Tradition—to hand on what they have received. For the papacy is not simply about the man in the chair at any given moment. What of the nearly three hundred men who have come before you, so many of whom gave their lives as martyrs?

Some people have wondered why I wouldn’t just call a diocesan priest instead of a priest of the Society to bring the sacraments to my dying sweet baby boy; well, Your Holiness, among other reasons, I don’t think our diocese believes in the necessity of infant baptism, as demonstrated by its hellish policy of denying little ones that sacred privilege during the Covid period. 

In addition, Fr. Stannus celebrated the Mass of the Angels in the Traditional Rite for our son, and I am not sure this rite, in the fullest sense, even exists in the Novus Ordo. It is such a shame, because I can tell you—this is not the first Mass of the Angels I have been to—it is a sublime occasion. It is as if the Glorious, Joyful, and Sorrowful mysteries of the Rosary play out before your very eyes. There is such sadness, yet so much hope, and so much triumph. My four living sons carried Gabriel’s casket with me (I had to hold little Charles in my arms while my other hand held the casket because he is only two years old), and my sons helped me lower Gabriel into the grave, which we dug as a family. 

Through all of this, Fr. Stannus of the SSPX was there praying, leading, singing, and comforting us. And Father will know what I mean when I say this, but he isn’t special—meaning, he is like so many other priests in the Society. He is a man of God, a man of the Church, an alter Christus who would lay down his life for his sheep. If he is a schismatic, then I am a woman.

I do not know what you will decide regarding the SSPX. But if I may be so bold, I ask that you seek the intercession of my son, Gabriel Augustine. I know he is praying for you—because I have asked him to. And perhaps his two namesakes, the Archangel Gabriel and St. Augustine, will come to your aid as well.

That being said, if you choose not to recognize us, so many of your spiritual children, I understand. Those of us associated with the SSPX are accustomed to being rejected by so many spiritual fathers. But we will still pray for you.

May God’s will be done in all things.

I promise you that I will pray for you every day, so long as you are alive—and after you die, I will pray for the repose of your soul. So long as I have life in me, I will fulfill that commitment.

May God bless you abundantly. And if I never see you in this life, I hope to see you in eternity.

In Christ,

Kennedy