It is often said (and it is written even in some careful places) that the Institute of Christ the King was founded by former seminarians of the Society of St. Pius X. It is worth beginning here, because the claim is false, and the truth is more interesting. That description belongs to the Fraternity of St. Peter, whose founders really did leave the SSPX in 1988. The Institute’s founders left nothing. They were never in the Society at all.

Consider the pedigree of the man at the center of it. Fr. Gilles Wach, born at Troyes in 1956, was formed not at Écône but at diocesan seminaries: a year at Paray-le-Monial, then the seminary of Genoa, where the great conservative Cardinal Giuseppe Siri shaped a generation of priests in the classical Roman mold. It was Siri who ordained Wach a deacon in 1978; and it was Pope John Paul II himself who ordained him a priest, in Rome, in June 1979. Wach went on to take a doctorate in theology at the Angelicum, the Dominican university in Rome, writing on the spirituality of St. Francis de Sales, and then to work inside the Roman Curia under Cardinal Silvio Oddi. His co-founder, Fr. Philippe Mora, whom he had met at Genoa, shared the same formation under the same cardinal, and the Institute would later make a quiet point of the fact that its two founders had been ordained by two consecutive Popes.

This is not the résumé of a man returning to the fold from outside it. It is the résumé of a Roman insider: a priest ordained by the Pope, trained in the Pope’s own city, employed in the Pope’s own Curia. When young men began to seek him out for a traditional priestly formation, and several Roman cardinals encouraged him to gather them into a community, the community that resulted was never going to be a breakaway. It was going to be exactly what it became: a new society of the Church, traditional in its liturgy and fully Roman in its obedience, built from the inside out.

The Institute’s idea had taken shape by about 1988, but its canonical birthplace was, of all places, equatorial Africa. Wach had come to know Bishop Cyriaque Siméon Obamba of Mouila, in Gabon, a bishop short of priests and glad of missionary help; and it was Obamba who gave the young community its first canonical home. On 1 September 1990, in the Diocese of Mouila (where Wach was already serving as his Vicar General) the Bishop erected the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest as a clerical society. The Institute’s first house stood not in the shadow of a French cathedral but on the mission fields of Gabon.

The choice of Gabon was not romantic; it was practical, and it is telling. In the France of 1990, a new traditional community would have been born into the tensions and suspicions of the post-conciliar Church, its every move read as a statement. In a supportive missionary diocese far from those quarrels, it could simply come into being, quietly and canonically, at the hands of a bishop who wanted it. The Institute began, in other words, the way it meant to continue: not by forcing a confrontation, but by finding a door that was open. Its founding was a diocesan act, in perfect order, witnessed by no controversy at all.

A society cannot be run from a mission diocese half a world from Europe, and the Institute soon found its true home. In the early 1990s it acquired the château of Gricigliano, in the Tuscan hills just outside Florence, and there established its motherhouse and its International Seminary of St. Philip Neri, erected within his archdiocese by Cardinal Silvio Piovanelli of Florence, with the help of the Benedictine Cardinal Augustin Mayer. Gricigliano remains the Institute’s heart to this day: the place where its seminarians are formed and from which its Prior General governs, its great ordinations celebrated in the Florentine church of San Gaetano.

The charism took a definite shape, and it is unmistakable. The Institute uses the traditional Roman rite of 1962 exclusively, for the Mass and every sacrament, and it celebrates that rite with a solemn, unabashedly Baroque splendor; the Institute’s canons are known on sight by their distinctive blue-trimmed black cassocks and their love of ceremony done beautifully. But the deeper mark is spiritual, and it is Salesian. The Institute takes as its masters St. Benedict, St. Thomas Aquinas, and above all St. Francis de Sales, the gentle bishop of Geneva whose spirit of charity pervades its life. Its motto, taken from St. Paul, is “live the truth in charity” (Veritatem facientes in caritate). The Institute cultivates a deliberate sweetness of manner, “one drop of honey,” in the Salesian phrase it likes to quote, “attracts more bees than a barrel of vinegar.” In 2008, by the decree Saeculorum Rex, Rome raised the Institute to pontifical right, so that it answers now not to a single diocese but directly to the Holy See, the natural maturing of a community that had been Roman all along.

The Institute’s answer is not to deny the risk but to reframe it. Dependence on Rome, it would say, is not a vulnerability to be minimized but the very thing a Catholic society is for. Communion with the Successor of Peter is not a price paid for the privilege of the old rite; it is a good in its own right, and the higher good — the one the old rite exists to serve. To hold the tradition inside that communion, exposed to the authority of the Church, is not a compromise of the tradition but its proper home. The Institute would rather keep the ancient liturgy as a gift received from the Church’s hand than as a possession defended against her, and it points, quietly, to the plain fact that in more than three decades it has never once had to choose between its rite and its Pope. That it has not been forced to make that choice is, to the Institute, not luck but vindication.

From a single house in a Gabonese mission diocese, the Institute has grown into an international society of some hundreds. It counts on the order of 150 priests, formed at Gricigliano and serving apostolates across Europe, the Americas, and Africa, roughly two dozen in the United States alone, still under the governance of its founder, Monsignor Gilles Wach, as Prior General. Its women’s branch, the Sister Adorers of the Royal Heart of Jesus Christ Sovereign Priest, founded in 2001, keeps a contemplative and supporting life alongside the canons; a lay association, the Society of the Sacred Heart, gathers the faithful attached to its apostolates.

Its most famous American foothold tells the Institute’s character in miniature. In 2004 the Archdiocese of Chicago entrusted it with a magnificent, half-abandoned church on the city’s South Side, the Shrine of Christ the King. In October 2015 a fire gutted the building, collapsing much of the roof; it came within a vote of demolition. The Institute did not walk away. The Archdiocese deeded it the ruin, and the canons set about the long, costly work of restoration: rebuilding, stone by stone, exactly the kind of beautiful and difficult thing the Institute exists to do. It is a fitting emblem of a society whose whole vocation is to receive what the Church has handed down, and to keep it splendid.