Given that Bishop Tissier is rather ill, and the reports that +Fellay and +Galaretta both got the jab ... I don't know that they have the luxury of time. Imagine if all 3 passed away before they were to consecrate successors. Would they then suddenly go crawling back to Bishop Williamson and the bishops that he consecrated? If that were to happen, I think that Rome would let them wither on the vine and die out ... unless of course they wanted to plan a Modernist in there to further erode Traditional Catholicism. Of course, I'm convinced that many of the current "leadership" are in fact Modernist agents.
Faced with a whithering vine scenario, they might turn to +Huonder. Then again, he’s 80, so the clock is ticking there too.
If so, it would cause/signal a further decline of the SSPX in turning to a Novus Ordo bishop for Orders, and could spark more defections from the pews worldwide. Then again, the Swiss sspxers seem to have accepted him without much protest.
Perhaps the General Council would weigh the damage versus extinction, and decide it’s a necessary and beneficial purging (as Fr. Pfluger said with regard to Resistance losses after 2011/12)?
Then again, +Huonder is Francis’s man, and might refuse a request, if ordered to do so.
Or maybe they’ll say they don’t need their own bishops anymore, since they can turn to the likes of +Huonder for all their needs.
But much more likely, Rome will request dossiers of the most liberal candidates, and approve 1-2. The SSPX will celebrate its ralliement strategy as victorious, declaring the final realization of Lefebvre’s 1988 dream of gaining Rome-approved bishops (but of a much different spirit and formation), and say “I told you so” to +Williamson. But it will be three steps back for Tradition.
Perhaps Rome will even want to use its own bishops for the consecrations, as a test to see how much the society has softened since 1988/2012, and make it a litmus test. Or perhaps they will be happy for the moment to have a conciliar bishop co-consecrate: Getting the SSPX to consent to that much would surely be perceived as a sign of their progress (meanwhile, Menzingen could sell the deal by minimalizing the importance of co-consecrators).
But the smart move (Francis’s strategy) is to simply starve them into extinction, and it’s very questionable whether the SSPX, after 10 years of hand-wringing about its abnormal status, would possess the psychological surety it would be doing the right thing.
Turning to the Resistance bishops would simultaneously be the easiest, but least likely course: The Society leadership as a victim of its own ralliement has been softened into becoming psychologically dependent on modernist Rome’s approval, and the pride of the General Council will rather have tradition fade to black, than turn to the bishops they have been demonizing the last several years: How can they tell their faithful to shun the Resistance, if they themselves turn to them for bishops?