Aug 12, 2026 Show with Fr. Paul Robinson on “A Society of Saint Pius X Insider Response to Pope Leo XIV’s Recent Excommunication of Their Bishops”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe, it's Iron Sharpens Iron.

The Program’s Mission and Biblical Motto

This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this 12th day of August 2026, and I'm very enthusiastic about today's show, which is extremely unusual for an Iron Sharpens Iron Radio episode.

I rarely do this, but on occasion I have a guest on my program with whom I am on an opposite end of the spectrum when it comes to disagreement over the gospel of Jesus Christ and other crucial tenets of the Christian faith.

This is not intended to be an exercise in modern ecumenism. Neither my guest nor myself are ecumenists, and we are going to be conducting this program as an educational and informative program about recent events in world history that I think have significance, and the body of Christ should be aware of what has occurred and the reasons why.

Introducing the Society of Saint Pius X Guest

And we have today on the program for the very first time a prior Paul Robinson of the Society of St. Pius X Parish, St. Isidore the Farmer in Watkins, Colorado, and today we are going to be addressing a Society of St. Pius X Insider Responds to Pope Leo XIV's Recent Excommunication of Their Bishops.

And it's my honor and privilege to have you on the program for the very first time a prior Paul Robinson. Thank you, Chris. Thank you for your invitation. Happy to be here. Well, let's start with some basic questions that should further enlighten our audience about you and also the organization that you serve, the Society of St. Pius X.

First of all, how and when did you come to believe you were called to become a Roman Catholic priest?

Chris, well, I grew up Catholic in Louisville, Kentucky. I'm from Louisville, and I am a Gen Xer. I'm 50 years old, born in 1976. And as you know well, as a former Catholic, the 70s and the 80s were cataclysmic for the church.

Everything was changing in the church. And it was at the time of great chaos and great loss for the church. So many people were leaving the church. So, you know, I think in answer to your question, I have to explain why I'm not only a survivor of that cataclysm, but also a priest.

And the answer is really due to one person, and that is my grandfather. My grandfather on my mother's side, Jobel. He's deceased now for some years. But when the changes, especially to the mass, came in after the Second Vatican Council, and I don't know how familiar your listeners are with this particular chapter of the Catholic church's history, but basically the Second Vatican Council ended in 1965.

And then five years later, there was radical changes introduced into the Catholic church, especially in the primary active worship of Catholics, which is the Catholic mass. And so a new order of mass came in.

And my grandfather, when it came in, he did not like it at all. And he did not like the changes at all. And he even pulled my mother out of Catholic high school and put her in public school. So that she would not lose the Catholic faith.

He was noticing all these people leaving the church because of the changes and because of the mass, the changes in the mass. And there was a priest in Kentucky who was saying the old mass in somebody's living room in Louisville, Kentucky.

And my grandfather took his family to this mass. And this priest eventually bought a piece of property on 3rd and Central in Louisville. And it's just down the road from Churchill Downs where they run the Kentucky Derby on the first Saturday of May every year.

You know, the famous horse race. So, yeah, I ended up, when I was growing up, I went to mass there. That's why I grew up. I actually grew up with the old mass. So this enclave of traditionalism in Louisville, Kentucky, was extremely rare, especially in the 70s and the 80s.

So I had a very exotic sort of Catholic upbringing in this situation.

The Traditional Latin Mass and the Novus Ordo

Perhaps you could at least do a little bit of explanation on what the old mass is. I know one thing about it is that it was said in the Latin language, in Latin exclusively. I can't remember right now if there was any English or native language to wherever the mass was being performed included in that Latin mass.

But perhaps you could give us some more detail on exactly how that differs from the new mass, as they call it. Orvis. Novus Ordo.

Right, right. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, a lot of times you hear people referring to the new mass as the Novus Ordo, the new order of the mass. And they were referred to the old mass as the TLM, the traditional Latin mass.

And effectively, Chris, what we believe is that our Lord Jesus Christ gave to his church seven sacraments. These are seven rituals that confer supernatural blessings, graces upon people. And the most important of them is the Holy Eucharist.

And that is a renewal of the sacrifice of Calvary, such that we believe that our Lord Jesus Christ himself is present. He's really present and that he offers himself at the mass just as he did on Calvary to the Heavenly Father.

It's not that our Lord dies again. He doesn't die. He dies no more. But that he is present among us and renews that same offering as Calvary. And while he gave that to us and he said to the apostles at the Last Supper, do this in memory of me, yet he left it to the church to sort of choreograph the ceremonies surrounding that sacrament.

And that's why in the Catholic Church, you have many different forms of the mass. For instance, there's the so-called Eastern Rite masses, many different types of ways of doing the mass. And so in what we call the West, the Western Church, the Latin Church, there has been a way of celebrating the mass basically for the last 1 ,800 years that has been in place.

And it is exclusively in Latin. It is wrapped with silence, reverence, great solemnity. And as I say, great antiquity. The prayers that are involved in this mass are of great antiquity. One of the things as a priest that's striking me is that I am saying the same words that St. Gregory the Great in the year 600 was saying when he said mass.

I'm connected to the furthest reaches of the history of the church when I celebrate mass. And so in 1970, a new order of mass was initiated, which was designed basically in order to change that mass into something that would be much more appealing to Protestants.

So what they did is they effectively tried to mute a lot of the explicit Catholic elements of the mass to make the mass sufficiently ambiguous in its expression of the Catholic faith that it could be celebrated even by a Protestant without them having any qualms of conscience.

And that's especially in three ways that this happened. One is the basically lowering of the position of the priest from being another Christ and an ordained sacramental minister to simply being a presider over an assembly of people.

That's right. That's one thing that startled a lot of folks when my dear friend Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries debated Mitch Pacwa, a Jesuit Catholic priest. And it was Mitch Pacwa that admitted during the debate that a role he possesses and title is alter Christus, which means another Christ.

And that shocked a lot of people listening. But that is a genuine title and role.

Yes, yes. We believe that Christ willed to have his priesthood perpetuated on earth through the conferral of priestly power. So he made the apostles priests, and they in turn imposed hands on others and conferred that same sacramental power on their successors.

And that succession of conferral of sacramental power has not ceased until this day. That if I am a priest, it's because a bishop imposed hands on me, who in turn had his hands of another bishop imposed upon him, going all the way back to Christ.

And so that the priest possesses a unique role. He's not simply someone who assembles a meeting, but he has a power to infect the mass. But besides that, there were two other things that were changed in the new mass.

One has to deal with the real presence of Christ. We believe that the Christ is truly present—body, blood, soul, and divinity—under the appearances of bread and wine at the mass. And therefore, we treat those sacramental species of bread and wine as God.

So there's all these acts of reverence. There's the silence. There's the genuflections. There's a very careful attention even to the particles of the hoax, that they not be lost, that they be consumed, for instance, by the priest, that they not drop on the ground.

So many things in the new mass, so many of these acts of reverence towards the real presence, expressing belief in the real presence, were stripped away.

Now, it's interesting that you say that. And let me repeat to my audience that I am a born-again, Bible-believing Christian since the mid -1980s. I am a Reformational Protestant, specifically a Reformed Baptist, confessional Reformed Baptist.

And I no longer believe in transubstantiation and many of the key dogmas and doctrines that are being addressed today by my guest. But when I was a Catholic, and I was an altar boy participating in the new mass, Novus Ordo, is that how you say it?

Ordo, yeah. Novus Ordo. Ordo, correct. No, sorry about the mispronunciation. Unlike my older brothers who were in Vatican I Catholicism, I was the first—or perhaps my brother Bob also—no, actually, I think I was the first child born, actually, after Vatican II concluded.

And I was an altar boy in English masses, unlike my oldest two brothers. But I remember some of those very things that you were addressing being included as a part of the ritual of the mass. It may have been because one of the priests was an older man, I'm not sure.

But I remember they believed and taught that the consecrated host was the body, soul, and divinity of Christ. And we did, when we entered into the sanctuary of the Catholic Church building, we would genuflect.

Although I must admit, I didn't find out until I was a Protestant why I was doing that. Do you know why you genuflected like that, that half-kneel? That's because you were being told that Jesus Christ was actually physically present on the altar.

Yes. So, I mean, one thing is that we believe that—well, after mass is celebrated, our Lord Jesus Christ remains in the tabernacle in the church, which is in the center, the back center of the church.

And so when you enter into the church, it's like you're entering into truly what's the house of God, because God is present there. And the church asks us, in order to make an initial act of palmage before we go to our pew, is that we make that genuflection.

And when you go to the movie theater, you know if someone's a Catholic if they genuflect before they get in their chair, right, in the movie theater. I didn't know that Catholics did that. Sometimes they forget where they are.

Oh, I see what you're saying. And they genuflect when they go to the movie theater. But yeah, I mean, obviously, the belief in the real presence is still on the books in the Catholic Church. What I'm saying, what happened in the New Mass is they removed, they stripped away a lot of these marks, these external marks of reverence towards the real presence, such that, you know, the Protestants who would see it would not be disturbed by seeing these marks of reverence.

But the third thing with regards to the New Mass that we find problematic is that it really dumps down the sacrificial element of the Mass, the fact that the Mass is a sacrifice. It is a renewal of the sacrifice of poverty, which Protestants have always objected to.

And so this question of the Mass being offered to propitiate our sin, that we offer infinite homage to God to pay for our sins, all mention of that or most mention of that is now gone in the New Mass.

It's not denied, the Mass is a propitiatory sacrifice, but it's not mentioned so much.

Why Latin Remains Important to Traditional Catholics

And going back to, well, before we go back to your own story, but as a child, being a part of this very rare living room, a traditional Old Mass that you were a part of as a kid, can you explain why it is in the minds of traditional Catholics, why it is so important, vitally important, that the Mass be conducted in Latin when very few people, perhaps outside of priests, even know what is being said?

Yeah, well, to be honest, the Latin is by far not the most important thing. Maybe it's like fourth, fifth, sixth on the list of things. The three most important things are the three things that I mentioned.

And the fact is that we believe that the New Mass is a danger to the Catholic faith in the sense that because it doesn't sufficiently express the Catholic faith, and this is the central act of worship, it's hard to hold on to authentic Catholic belief attending at the New Mass on a regular basis.

So, that's why we cling to the traditional Mass. But besides that, I mean, the Latin language also is helpful because for a number of reasons. One reason is that the Latin words retain their signification over time because Latin is a dead language.

So, the words are not changing in their meaning, you know, like how the word gay has changed in meaning over time, for instance. So, also, the fact that the Latin language does give a greater solemnity to the Mass because it's not in the language that I use every day, but it's in this sort of liturgical language, this ancient language.

So, the Mass is more solemn. And besides that, the people who attend the Mass are easily able to follow because they all have books that have the Latin on one side and the English on the other side. So, it's not an obstacle to them understanding the Mass as such.

And so, at some point as a young child attending this traditional Old Mass, Latin Mass, you came to, at some point, to believe that you were called to be a priest.

Yes, yes. So, I attended this church at 30th Central with the school, which I attended all the way up through 12th grade. And then I went on an Ignatian retreat when I was 17 that deeply affected me. And I started attending daily Mass while I was going to college at the University of Louisville.

And I got a master's in engineering, computer science engineering. And then I started working at Lexmark International, a printer company in Lexington, Kentucky. I worked there for two years. And during that time, I just was getting bothered.

I was getting bothered by the question of, does God want me to be a priest? And if so, yes, how would I know that he wants me to be a priest? And I effectively figured out that really, to know for sure, I have to enter a seminary.

And that's when I decided, well, I really want to have this question answered. I don't want to leave this question up in the air for the rest of my life, be bothered by it. And so, to have it answered, I need to go to the seminary.

So, I did that. I entered the seminary in Winona, Minnesota. And when I got there and started living life there, it was just like, oh, this is definitely where I'm supposed to be.

And this was a seminary of the Society of St. Pius X? Correct. Correct.

Go ahead. Continue. This church that I was attending was not associated with the Society of St. Pius X. It was just run by this priest, Fr. Mothman. But I had heard of the Society of St. Pius X, but because the so-called traditional movement in the Catholic Church was very small at that time, we certainly knew of the Society of St. Pius X.

And in that retreat that I went to in Connecticut when I was 17 was conducted by the Society of St. Pius X, and I knew some priests of the Society of St. Pius X. At the same time, there were other competitors with that.

And when you gave me sort of the outline for what we want to talk about, I was surprised because you're very knowledgeable about sort of different things going on in the traditional Catholic world. You mentioned the question of state of a contest and Phenaites, which was really surprising because the chapel I grew up in was, in fact, a Phenaite chapel.

And then, yes, believe it or not, true story. And when I was working for Lexmark, I was recruited by a state of a contest priest, Fr. Anthony Chicotta, who told me, he's like, well, you should think about becoming a priest and you should enter our seminary, our state of a contest seminary.

So it wasn't just like automatically I went to join the Society of St. Pius X, but I had these different options available, and I ended up rejecting the state of a contest because they just seemed to have a bad spirit about them.

And so I went with the SSPX.

Sedevacantism and Feeneyism After Vatican II

Why don't you, first of all, explain what a state of a contest is? In fact, the individual who was previously much more of a mainline conservative Roman Catholic apologist, Jerry Matetix, he was the very first Roman Catholic debater that I had gotten involved with a debate.

That I hosted in 1996 in Baldwin, Long Island, with Dr. James R. White of Alpha and Omega Ministries on the theme, Mary, sinner saved by grace or sinless queen of heaven was the theme. And at that time, Jerry Matetix was a, as I said, a more mainstream conservative Catholic.

And today he is a state of a contest. Please explain to our listeners who have never even heard of that term what that means.

It must be like Greek—well, I guess it's more like Latin. But effectively, Chris, in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, because there was so much confusion introduced by the Council, there were various reactions on the part of Catholics.

Unfortunately, a lot of Catholics left the Church, including a lot of priests and nuns. Other Catholics were saying, we're going to stay, but we have to make sense of what's happening in the Church. And among those people trying to make sense of what's happening in the Church are the so-called state of a contest.

These are people who say, well, what happened at Vatican II was you had an ecumenical council of the Church, 21st Ecumenical Council of the Church. And by ecumenical there, it just means that you have all the bishops from the world.

That's all that it means in that context. And it fell into error. It taught heresy. How is this possible for an ecumenical council to teach heresy and for that to be promoted by the Church? Because Catholics believe that the Pope and the Church are infallible when speaking solemnly on matters of faith and moralism.

That means that it cannot fall into error. And yet, there are some things in Vatican II that are in contradiction with the constant teaching of the Catholic Church. So they're saying to themselves, how is this possible?

And the state of a contest answers to that question is, well, the Pope was not the Pope. He wasn't a real Pope. And their position is called the empty seat position. That's what state of a contest means.

It means empty seat in Latin. And so it's the empty seat position. He wasn't really promulgating this doctrine, this heresy, because he wasn't really Pope. Whereas with the Society of St. Pius X, what we say is that this council did not have the charism of infallibility because it explicitly said, we are not proclaiming dogmas in this council.

And that you have to want to bind Catholics on dogma for this infallibility to be present. So that's how we address that issue. Whereas others say, well, Vatican II is not heretical. There's no problem with Vatican II.

And going on to the Phenaites, tell us about why they are at odds even with those in the St. Pius X Society. I know the only thing that I can recall about Phenaites is that they believe there are zero exceptions to water baptism being absolutely essential for salvation.

I don't know much more about them than that.

That's correct. You've got it. You've got it. So there was a priest, a Jesuit priest, Fr. Leonard Feeney, who was preaching in Boston in the 1940s, 1950s. And he believed—and it was true—that the dogma of Catholicism, that there is no salvation outside the Church, was being betrayed in the Church.

And he kind of overreacted to that. And he said, as a result, that it's impossible for anyone who has not been baptized with water to attain salvation. And that the Constitution of the Church on the so-called baptism of blood and baptism of desire, that those things actually do not confer salvation.

So that's another whole discussion as to what is meant by that. But effectively, he took a very hard line on salvation, saying that if you did not have water baptism, there is no way to attain salvation.

Do they require water baptism by a Roman Catholic priest, or are Trinitarian Protestants who convert to Catholicism accepted, and are their baptisms considered valid?

Yes. I mean, we consider some Protestant baptisms valid. It's the same rules as for Catholic sacraments, which is proper matter, form, and intention. In fact, one of the priests here in my priory—today we were watching a video about Lutheran baptism, trying to figure out if this is valid, you know, according to the Church's rules.

But do Feniites welcome those baptisms?

I would assume so. You know, obviously, I'm not a Feniite anymore. I was raised that way. But I later learned it does stop the authentic teaching of the Church, and in fact, Fr. Fenii was condemned under the pre-Vatican II Church, under Pius XII.

So, yeah, I'm not exactly sure. I think they would definitely accept that some Protestant baptisms are valid.

Okay, we're going to go to our first commercial break, and when we come back, we're going to find out more of the serious issues that separate the Society of St. Pius X from Vatican II Catholicism. And if anyone has a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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The SSPX’s Founding and Catholic Dogma

Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron radio. If you just tuned us in, we are in the process of conducting, I think, a fascinating interview that is very different than your typical Iron Sharpens Iron radio program in which I am most of the time, 99 of the time at least, interviewing someone with whom I have theological agreement about the gospel of Jesus Christ and other crucial tenets of the Christian faith.

My guest today and I are on polar opposite ends on many of these issues. Of course, we're not on the opposite ends of all issues, such as the deity of Christ and the trinity and the burial of Jesus Christ and the bodily resurrection of Christ and so on.

But there are many crucial salvific issues that separate us. We do not consider each other brothers in Christ, but I must say he is a very nice individual who is the kind of person I would love to have dinner with and I am having an enjoyable conversation with him today, even though we consider each other a mission field and today's program is likely going to upset both ecumenists on one end and also those on the other end, perhaps even mainly from my own group of Reformed Protestant Christians who think that I'm compromising my faith by having someone who disagrees with the gospel on my program, but this is being conducted purely for educational reasons.

In fact, an ecumenist Catholic who is a veteran journalist told me before the program that I don't particularly like the fact that you're going to have someone on your program that's going to be saying horrible things about the Catholic Church.

And I said, well, keep in mind, he professes to be a Catholic, and his response was, well, that's like a 350-pound linebacker claiming to be a woman. I'm glad you find that funny. I certainly did. But going back to the reason for the existence of the Society of St. Pius X and what exactly it is and what it is not, I know that it was founded in 1970 by the French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, and I probably mispronounced his name.

But can you tell us about this man, more about this man, and exactly why this organization or this society was founded by him, what it stands for, what it stands against, and what its main concern was with Vatican II Catholicism?

Yes, absolutely, Chris. Thank you for your kind words. So, I mean, if you don't mind, I'd just like to zoom out a little bit just to give context for the founding of what we call the SSPX, or the Society of St. Pius X, and what everything ultimately boils down to is the question of the dogmas of the faith.

And this is something we can talk about because at least we're on the same page on this, that you have to believe what God has revealed in order to be saved. So dogma, the belief of articles of faith, is very much tied to our salvation and our union with God.

So we believe that God became incarnate on this earth, that he founded a church, that he entrusted the supernatural truths that we need to believe to the apostles in what we call, what Catholics call, the deposit of the faith.

It's like, you know, the truths of the faith. And that the role of the church, the Catholic Church, is to transmit those truths of the faith from generation to generation until the end of time, and so lead people to salvation.

And this idea that what you believe about God may cause, or not believe about him, may cause your salvation, or make you lose your soul, is often very foreign to people today. But let's just think about it.

I mean, if God tells you something about himself, if he tells you that he became incarnate, if he tells you that he is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and you say, I refuse that, then effectively that refusal amounts to a refusal of God.

And that's why there's all these Catholic figures throughout the history of the church who have rather died than change their faith, or renounce those truths of the faith. A famous example is St. Peter of Verona in the 1200s.

He was an inquisitor, you know, and he was fighting against these heretics called the Cathars. They were like a medieval reincarnation of the Manichean heretics who basically said the material world was evil and was brought into being by an evil god.

And he was assassinated by these heretics, and he took his own blood and wrote Fredo on the graph with his own blood. So the bottom line is that the Catholic Church has always been very sensitive to heresy, to denials of the faith, because of the fact that denying any article of the faith was always seen as being the cause of a loss of one's eternal salvation.

And we were chatting a little bit before the show about the phrase anathema seat that's found in the Council of Trent, you know, and this is typical of the decrees of the Catholic Church, where the Church is trying to clarify for her children what is necessary to be believed.

And she says, if anyone says that so-and-so, you know, then let him be anathema. Basically, he is denying the faith and his salvation is in peril. He's going to be dead.

And this is a very important aspect of how you are different from modern Vatican II mainstream Catholicism. Even the conservative apologists, like from Catholic Answers and other places, are softening the blow of Trent's anathemas.

Just to clarify to my audience, my guest today believes I am under the anathemas of Trent because of my denials of crucial things affirmed by the Catholic Church in dogma. I believe my guest is under the anathema of the Apostle Paul.

But anathema is a serious concept, and a very well-known Catholic apologist, obviously outside of the SSPX, Jimmy Akins, was recently assuring everyone in a church building during a debate that they had nothing to fear about the anathemas of Trent because they are not the ones being anathematized.

He was assuring that to everybody, people that he doesn't even know, which was odd. But this is a modern invention, I'm assuming, in your mind, in your opinion, I should say. Absolutely.