ZURICH/ROME, July 2 (Reuters) - Four new bishops from a breakaway Catholic group dedicated to the old Latin mass were ordained in southwestern Switzerland on Wednesday, in defiance of an appeal against the unauthorized move by Pope Leo.
Top Vatican Cardinal Pietro Parolin said the forbidden ceremony, expected to cause the excommunication of the priests involved, had "deeply wounded" the unity of the 1.4-billion-member Church.
"This is in itself a schismatic act," Parolin told journalists in Rome, using a term to indicate a severe rupture in the Catholic community.
Thousands turned out to watch the ordination of the bishops from the ultra-traditionalist Society of St. Pius X in the tiny Alpine hamlet of Écône, two days after Leo had asked the group not to go forward with the event.
"I plead with you and ask you with all my heart: please turn back!," Leo wrote in a letter on Monday to Rev. Davide Pagliarani, the society's leader.
Only the pope may authorize the consecration of new bishops, so as to maintain the Church's ties to Jesus' 12 apostles, who are regarded as the first priests and bishops.
The Church considers unauthorized ordination of bishops as so serious 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 St. Pius X denies the central teachings of the Second Vatican Council, a landmark Vatican gathering of bishops in the 1960s that pursued a range of reforms for the global Church and sought to repair its relations with Jews and other Christian denominations.
The Council also allowed for the Mass, until then said only in Latin, to be celebrated in local languages. The society rejected that change, citing a desire for the Latin rite's sense of mystery and formality.
The Society, which says it counts 733 priests worldwide, has long had tense relations with the Vatican. Its leadership says it needed to ordain new bishops to have enough prelates to lead the group.
The Vatican had warned the society in May that the plan to ordain new bishops without papal approval would cause excommunication.
(Reporting by Joshua McElwee and Dave Graham; editing by Alistair Bell and Crispian Balmer)
