The priests in question (9+3) never took a solemn vow for anything related to the SSPX. The engagements with SSPX, whether temporary or perpetual, are not vows and, canonically, not even promises on the level of an ordination promise of obedience. In fact, the SSPX could never receive a solemn vow from anyone. Those are reserved to religious orders, not even religious congregations of common life let alone a community like explicitly says that it exists without vows.

You can look it up. If they received the Order of Subdiaconate, Diaconate, or Priesthood, prior to that they made this solemn vow in their Oath of Fidelity: 

"...Lastly, I sincerely promise, according to Canon Law, to obey with docility all that my superiors or the discipline of the Church command, ready to give, in word and in act the example of virtue in order to merit to be rewarded by God for having received such an office.

I thus promise, I thus vow, I thus swear.  May God help me and these Holy Gospels that I touch."

I am dumbfounded by the lack of logic, consistency, and fundamental knowledge. You, who are an old-time traddy as am I, sound more like an opinionated church lady who clings to "Faaahther McBlahblahblah" than an informed and measured veteran of the war for Tradition.

3. What the heck are you going on about a Mr. Stark? Are you talking about Iron Man? What does that have to do with the SSPX?

What was that flash point?

It was an aggregation of different points that we mentioned in our letter to the Archbishop. For example, the John XXIII liturgy which the Archbishop had suddenly decided to impose on the entire Society of St. Pius X, when we had been using the 1955 liturgy. There was that. There was also the difficulty, specifically in the United States, of priests ordained in the New Rite. There was a Fr. Philip Stark who was saying Mass in the Southwest District of the Society. We had tried to resolve that problem in a number of different ways. You had the idea of following the party line of the Society – the Society as a substitute for the Magisterium of the Church. You had in the background the negotiations with – at that time – Ratzinger of the CDF. The Archbishop was carrying on a negotiation with him, and when you heard that, that was especially troubling. What kind of pushed things over the top was Archbishop Lefebvre’s acceptance of modern marriage annulments. There was a case out west where there was a prominent traditional Catholic who we discovered was actually involved in a second marriage. So, we did a little investigation and we found out that the first marriage had been annulled on the grounds of “psychic immaturity” by one of these modernist tribunals. We told the person that you can’t accept that – that it was baloney – and this person then wrote to the Archbishop. The Archbishop wrote back through Fr. Parrrice LaRoche who was the Secretary General of the Society and without inquiring into the reasons for the annulment, said that the presumption had to be for the validity of the annulment – that text is reproduced in our letter of March 25, 1983. That pushed things over the edge.

The first was doubtful priests, then the John XXIII [Mass], then expulsion of priests, then the idea of loyalty to the Church above loyalty to the Society, then the recognition of the Society’s subordination of authority to the authority of the Church, and the last thing was annulments.

Being that you were NO back then, how would you even begin to know? Or did you read all about it in sede articles? Except for the part about +Fellay, what you say above is pure BS that stinks to high heaven.

A promise, not a solemn vow. Have you ever studied canon law in a formal way? Solemn vow has a very specific meaning.

Since the SSPX was at the time either a suppressed institution (canonically did not exist) or was only on the level of a confraternity (no superiors who could warrant obedience), and those are the only two options (one cannot realistically pretend, though so many do, that the SSPX was a lawful congregation of common life), to whom was this PROMISE made? To the Msgr. Lefebvre as supposed Superior General of a nonexistent religious congregation? To the supposed local ordinaries of Sion or Bridgeport where the ordinations occured, who were manifest heretics and ipso facto deposed from those respective sees?

I am dumbfounded by the lack of logic, consistency, and fundamental knowledge. You, who are an old-time traddy as am I, sound more like an opinionated church lady who clings to "Faaahther McBlahblahblah" than an informed and measured veteran of the war for Tradition.