+
JMJ
Firstly, because of the insights provided by Bishop Tissier are useful in understanding the motivations of Archbishop Lefebvre.
Secondly, because it provides some insight to the Archbishop's 'sine qua non' conditions for a regularization (near the end of the article).
P^3
Courtesy of SSPX.ca
Bishop Tissier: Interview for La Porte Latine
March 25, 2016
We publish here a translation of Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais' interview for La Porte Latine (the SSPX's website in France) on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the death of Archbishop Lefebvre.
For the 25th anniversary of the Dies natalis of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, founder of the SSPX, Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, auxiliary bishop of the Society of St. Pius X, was kind enough to give an exclusive interview to La Porte Latine. We have kept the conversational style of Bp. Tissier, painting for us the personality of Archbishop Lefebvre and bringing him alive again. He recalls the main events and phases of this exceptional period of Church history. He also analyzes the relations of the SSPX with Rome according to the principles of the late Archbishop.
LPL: Bishop Tissier de Mallerais, you are among the first of us to have known and followed Archbishop Lefebvre. What is more, you are hisbiographer. What does Archbishop Lefebvre evoke for you 25 years after his death? What was his great “motto”?
Bishop Tissier de Mallerais: The name of Archbishop Lefebvre recalls to my mind a man meek and humble of heart and at the same time a strong and violent prelate, violent with that violence Our Lord spoke of when He said that the violent bear away the Kingdom of Heaven. His motto was without a doubt his episcopal motto, “Credidimus caritati: We have believed in charity.” He wished to say with St. John: “We have known, and have believed the charity, which God hath to us” (I John 4:16), or with the Adeste fideles of Christmas: “Sic nos amantem, quis non redamaret!” which means: “He Who so loved us, who would not love Him in return?”
His entire life was a matter of rendering to God love for love: from his priestly vocation at the age of 17 until his death as an "excommunicated" bishop. Cardinal Oddi, who knew him, said of him: “He loved the Church too much!” In other words, he carried his love for the Church and Our Lord to an extreme, exposing himself to the most serious ecclesiastical censures, suspension and excommunication, in order to save the priesthood and the permanence of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass in the Church. He followed His divine Master: “Propter nimiam caritatem qua dilexit nos Deus…”: “On account of the excessive charity with which He has loved us, God…” (Antiphon of Vespers, January 1).
Can you recall for us the heritage he received as a young seminarian in Rome?
It is very simple: a love for the pope and the Church. The popes seen in the remarkable continuity of their teachings in political and social matters, from Gregory XVI, Pius IX, to St. Pius X and Pius XI. What they taught for a century and a half against the errors of liberalism and modernism. At the College of Tourcoing, he had not grasped the malice of these errors and the capital role of these popes in preserving the Church from their plague and maintaining the faith in the social kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
At Via Santa Chiara, under the direction of Fr. Henri Le Floch, director of the French Seminary of Rome, Marcel Lefebvre had an intellectual conversion:
For me it was a complete revelation. I understood that I was mistaken. For example, I thought that it was very good for the State to be separate from the Church. I was a liberal! At the seminary, I understood that I had to change my ideas, in the light of these magnificent encyclicals of the popes. They showed us how to judge history. And so it stayed with us! Slowly, the desire to conform our way of thinking and our judgment of events to the Church’s way of thinking was born in us. But it got us started. Fr. Le Floch used to tell us: ‘In entering the Seminary, here at Santa Chiara, you are entering into the history of the Church.’ It was really that: he made us live and enter into the history of the Church, into that combat against the perverse forces that fight against Our Lord Jesus Christ. It mobilized us, yes, mobilized us against this deadly liberalism, against the Revolution and the powers of evil at work to overturn the Church, the reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Catholic States and all of Christianity.”
St. Pius X’s inaugural encyclical E supreme apostolatus especially, and the holy pope’s pontifical motto: “Omnia instaurare in Christo” or “To restore all things in Christ” filled him with enthusiasm. Like many of his fellow students, he felt himself, I would say, harpooned, not so much by Thomism and the theology he received at the Gregorian University that delighted the more speculative minds like that of Victor Alain Berto, but for the fight for Christ, King and Priest. For His reign, individual in souls and social in Christianity, is the fruit of His cross. “Regnavit a lingo Deus”, we sing in the Vexilla Regis during Passiontide: “God reigns through the wood, the wood of His Cross”; and therefore through the Mass, which is the sacramental re-actualization of the sacrifice of Calvary and which distributes the treasury of merits of the Redeemer. That is the heritage received by Marcel Lefebvre at Santa Chiara, a heritage that he was resolved to transmit, cost what it might, by enlisting himself in the fight of the popes when God so willed. He was a prepared priest.
How must we understand the future fight of Archbishop Lefebvre against two popes?
It was not a fight against the popes, but against their errors. Paul VI accused him: “You are against the pope!” An absurd reproach! “It is you, Most Holy Father,” he answered, “who oblige us to distance ourselves from you in order to remain faithful to your predecessors!” And he would never have fought this fight if he had been a seminarian in France. He said it himself:
If I had entered the seminary in Lille, my life would have been very different. It is thanks to Fr. Collin, my brother Rene’s professor in Versailles from 1917-1918, that I was sent and formed at the French Seminary of Rome.”
It was the only seminary of the sort where pious and doctrinal priests were formed just as the founder of the Spiritans, Claude Poullart des Places, wished—this was already magnificent in itself—but also combative priests, which was extremely rare in the Church.
So the love for the popes and their teachings that he received was to cause him terrible suffering forty years later, at the Second Vatican Council, which wished to sell off everything Marcel had received, understood, assimilated and loved at Santa Chiara! He would then be brought to contradict the popes, it is true, to refuse to obey the post-conciliar reforms, he, the great obedient bishop, who had taught his African seminarians: “The pope is the Successor of Peter, Christ on earth, the unshakable Rock, the light of the world!” He was forced to admit, as Pius XII had said:
And if at times there appears in the Church something that manifests the weakness of our human nature, it should not be attributed to her juridical constitution, but rather to that regrettable inclination to evil found in each individual, which its Divine Founder permits even at times in the most exalted members of His Mystical Body, for the purpose of testing the virtue of the Shepherds no less than of the flocks, and that all may increase the merit of their Christian faith....This is no reason why we should lessen our love for the Church, but rather why we should increase our devotion to her members. “ (Encyclical Mystici Corporis, June 29, 1943, §66).
It was this devotion, this respect for the popes, not for their person, but because of their function, that always kept Marcel Lefebvre from any offensive reaction or words against the conciliar popes. And it was the consideration of the permanence of the supreme pontifical function under the errors of these equivocal popes that kept him from falling into sedevacantism, that error of those who, rightly scandalized by the errors of these pontiffs, wrongly conclude that they have lost their function of pope. He continued to go to Rome, to visit the liberal or modernist prelates, “to try to convert them,” he would say, or at least to get them “to tolerate us at least” and again to recognize canonically the Priestly Society of St. Pius X (after its supposed suppression on May 6, 1975), and to “recognize us as we are”, he used to say. Those were his politics with Rome for fifteen years: from the supposed "suppression" of the Society in 1975 until his death in 1991.
Would you be so kind as to sketch a portrait now of Marcel Lefebvre the missionary?
Nominated assistant vicar of a parish in the workers’ suburbs in Lille in August 1930, Marcel Lefebvre devoted himself zealously to his pastoral charge and the apostolate among the Communist families, whose children he strove to catechize. He was fully satisfied with his work, but uneasy with the clergy of his diocese, where he did not find the fighting spirit he had experienced at Santa Chiara. At the insistence of his brother Rene, a missionary in Gabon, Marcel began to lean towards the missionary life, which seemed to him more useful, harder, more meritorious, and he entered the Spiritan novitiate in Orly in 1931. After his religious profession, he was sent to Black Africa, in Gabon, south of the equator.
First nominated as professor, then rector of the seminary of Libreville, he is remembered as a man of order, an excellent organizer, and a “very flexible, very agreeable, smiling man, firm in his ideas, much loved by his students and appreciated by the Fathers, manifesting from the very start of his missionary life a particular competency and taste for the formation of priests.” (Testimony of his confrere, Fr. Fauret, a future bishop)
Exhausted after six years, he was sent to the bush, to different posts one after another, where he continued the work of his predecessors: plantations (industrial or food producing); the industries of the missionary stations: management of the forests, lakes (fisheries) and quarries (stone, cement, plaster and brick), printing presses, boat building, construction of a wharf in Donghila for the boats to dock; at the Fathers’ house, installing offices to receive the faithful, etc.
But the spiritual aspect is the most important, for, according to his principle, a good material order is at the service of the good order of souls. He left to his confrere, a black priest, the care of the place’s schools: a primary and secondary school for boys and a girls’ school (directed by the Sisters), and he himself made his rounds in the bush. In a canoe or a flatboat, he visited the villages dispersed along the rivers, he checked the work of his army of catechists that he increased and formed, he sat for endless sessions of sacramental confessions, he celebrated Mass and rejoiced to hear everyone singing the Kyriale and even the entire Mass of the Dead by heart in Gregorian Chant. He blessed marriages and he chose the best students of each village’s two schools and brought them to the station schools, where their talents would be perfected or their religious or priestly vocations would blossom. To those who reached the end of their studies or apprenticeships, he would say, “Return to the village, remain poor, work.” And the best would go on to higher studies in the State schools or universities; they would be tomorrow’s elite.
And what mark did he leave on Dakar and Senegal?
As Apostolic Vicar, then archbishop of Dakar (1947-1962), he built the seminary in a more suitable place and brought in young professors, Fathers he had sent to complete their studies in Rome: he wanted a "Roman" board of professors. He gave life to the dying congregation of indigenous sisters; he built churches. That of Fatick stands as an emblem of the missionary "breakthrough" he achieved among the still pagan people of Serer, thanks to the zeal and intelligence of Fr. Henri Gravrand. This young priest had scarcely arrived when he told him up front: “Your Excellency, I’ve been sent to you, but I want missionary work, real missionary work!” This sort of talk pleased Bishop Marcel, who answered, “Good, come with me, I will show you a place that did not get off to a good start; you’ll see.” And a few weeks later, the young Father told him: “Here is where I am with learning the language, but I have to tell you, Your Excellency, I can see that your mission is dying!” The bishop smiled: “What do you suggest?” He listened to the neophyte’s revolutionary propositions: “Your Excellency, why don’t we make an ‘Old Testament’ for these polygamous pagans, since we cannot baptize them?” The Archbishop raised his voice a little: “What! No baptism! Do you want them all to become Muslims?” “No, Your Excellency, that is exactly what I don’t want! Hear my idea out!”
And the Apostolic Vicar heard, understood and accepted the explanation given to him:
These pagans will receive certain teachings of the Gospel, they will promise to give their children to the Father for catechism; they will promise to be baptized before their death and keep only one of their wives; and they will immediately receive a 'Friends of the Christians' identity card (that will also be useful to them in their civil lives). They will thus be sociologically tied to Christianity and protected against the pressures of Islam that are beginning to threaten the ‘Animist belt’ of Senegal.”
So in a pastoral letter, Archbishop Lefebvre praised the undertaking, despite the high risks, without naming the Father in question:
It takes an inventive and ingenious zeal that is not satisfied with one’s parishioners nor with the methods inherited from one’s predecessors, but that goes ahead, using the means, enemies and methods of today’s Senegal, without being tinged with a spirit of novelty ‘qui sapit hæresim’” – I see no need to translate.
In addition, the bishop brought the Carmelites from Cholet and built a Carmel for them, so that their prayers and sacrifices might draw down divine blessings on his missions. Then he discovered Jean Ousset’s Cité Catholique(Catholic City) and sponsored it, to the detriment of the director of his Action Catholique Ouvrière (Catholic Action of the Working Class)! He brought in the Parish Cooperator Fathers of Christ the King (CPCR): Frs. Augustin Rivière and Noël Barbara, who preached retreats to his priests. They spoke of the goal of life, the last ends, hell, the call of Christ the King, how to order one’s life without letting oneself be led by disordered attachments: all of which made certain liberal missionaries shudder…the Archbishop did not care. Moreover, he brought in all sorts of religious, teaching congregations and other, male and female, so much so that at the episcopal reunions in Dakar, his colleagues were in rapture at the extraordinary animation that reigned in his diocese and decided to imitate him in their own.
And Archbishop Lefebvre’s role as Pius XII’s Apostolic Delegate?
I was just coming to that. You see, the popes can sometimes be idealistic; they see Africa like China:
There needs to be a native clergy, native bishops; that way the Church will no longer be a foreign figure and when the young countries achieve their independence and the missionaries are banished as in China, the Church will be able to continue.”
Yes, of course,” answered Archbishop Lefebvre, “that is true, but wait! The Church of Africa is not yet on the level of China. We have to develop the Catholic institutions and the zeal of Catholics as much and as quickly as possible, before developing their independence.”
And Marcel explained all that to Pope Pius XII when he went to render an annual account of his activity as Delegate.
Most Holy Father, I am just returning from Canada. In two weeks’ time, I visited sixty religious houses and seminaries; I have promises from twenty congregations, some of them new, to come and found new houses in Africa. Look where I am going to put them: here is the map of the Delegation…”
And Pius XII contemplated this proliferation seriously. Now "all that" went against the most deeply rooted preconceived ideas of the Roman Curia. Well, you know, the pope followed his Delegate. On April 21, 1957, his encyclicalFidei Donum (The Gift of the Faith) exhorted the bishops of developed countries, “inspired by a burning charity to share that solicitude for all the churches, which lies heavy upon the shoulders of the pope,” to let many of their priests leave for the missions in Africa. This displeased certain members of the Curia: “No,” said Cardinal Celso Constantini, secretary of theCongregation for the Propagation of the Faith, to Archbishop Lefebvre,
it is a mistake! Soon the Africans are going to be coming to catechize us! Stop this immigration of missionaries, of foreign priests, Your Excellency!”
But,” added Archbishop Lefebvre, “Pope Pius XII supported me!”
Things became heated sometimes in the Curia. Especially when Delegate Lefebvre begged for money…One day, at the office of the Propaganda Fide, tired of the Delegate’s insistence, the official threw him a packet of dollars over the desk, and the Archbishop, bending to pick them up from the ground, said: “Leave it, I’ll take care of them!” There is an impromptu glance at the ideologically "incorrect" activities of the Apostolic Delegate in French Africa.
Can one say that his years in Africa were his "great years"?
Yes, he said so: for him, his African years were his most thrilling years since his priestly ordination. He overcame his natural reserve, threw himself forward, utilized his natural gifts of organization, initiative, original decisions, and over and above all this, he developed his episcopal grace. Fr. Bussard, his Vicar General in Dakar, told me much later in Vevey, Switzerland, near the palace of Nestle, when speaking of Archbishop Lefebvre:
He could have been a timid, peaceful man, who did nothing; but no, that man never had five free minutes! I used to say to myself: How does he do it? He speeds! He could have been CEO of Nestle, no problem!”
And concretely, in his actions, his African years were the years of an extraordinary development of the Church in Africa. If the men were silent, the stones themselves cried out: everywhere there were seminaries, cathedrals, schools! The Catholic school was his greatest preoccupation and his great work. He saw in it the future of the Church of Africa. He had a Catholic middle school for boys built at the gates of Dakar, in Hann, with the intention of welcoming 700 students as a start; today there are 3000. He used to tell us they accepted up to ten percent of Muslims, and that for the rest of their lives these latter had a great esteem for the Church. He told the pope, and Pius XII wrote it in black and white in 1951 in his encyclical on the missions Evangelii Præcones. But this was not the true goal of the Catholic schools, in these Muslim countries like Senegal: Archbishop Lefebvre saw higher, farther: for him, it was to form a Catholic elite that would take the country in hand tomorrow. And that is what happened.
Did Archbishop Lefebvre speak of his work and his African success?
Well, in Écône, he never told us what he had done. He told us stories of things that had happened to him, stories that had us doubled over in laughter: the pious donkey of Lambaréné, the truck of palm wine in Ndjolé, the chase of the thief in Chinchoua, the kidnapping of the Christian wife of a polygamist by the students of the school of Lambaréné, Dr. Schweitzer who would not even kill a mosquito. He did tell us about his tangles with the devil in the hut of a witch, where he destroyed a doll with a machete without touching the frightened witch. But I only discovered the great missionary that he had been after his death, when I went there with a confrere to question the surviving witnesses.
Can you tell us about his combats at the Council and afterwards?
We often see in Archbishop Lefebvre the fierce opponent of the conciliar errors, which is not at all the essential of Marcel Lefebvre. But he was involved in this fight and was prepared for it. It started with the Council and his combat was truly the fruit of his faith in Christ the King.
I will give a list, since you ask, of his principal fights, a conciliar trilogy that is identical to the Masonic trilogy of the French Revolution: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Archbishop Lefebvre himself was the one who discovered this parallel and exploited it fruitfully, I must say!
- Liberty: religious liberty, with the declaration Dignitatis Humanae.
- Equality: episcopal collegiality, in Lumen Gentium.
- Fraternity: ecumenism and interreligious dialogue, with Unitatis Redintegratio and Nostra Aetate.
He refuted these errors for us in detail and very often. But careful! With these conciliar errors, you are leading me far away from the portrait of Archbishop Lefebvre… Too bad for you! Allow me to list the different points of "divergence" (a euphemism), which, by the way, are those that oppose us to conciliar Rome today. It is the same today.
Religious freedom, says the Council, is the natural right of immunity from any constraint of the followers of any religion, without distinction between the true and the false.
1.) This, says Archbishop Lefebvre, is a false conception of freedom. Freedom is made for the true and the good.
You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” proclaimed Jesus (Jn. 8:32).
Granting the same freedom to truth and to falsehood is the error of political indifferentism that leads people to believe in the heresy that all religions are equal and that leads society to chaos, the Church to ruin, and souls to hell. I add, since these are current events, that Islam itself theoretically does not tolerate this conciliar freedom, although it takes advantage of it on a practical level in formerly Christian countries; it is crazy.
2.) What is more, Archbishop Lefebvre recalled that civil society and the State are creatures of God, Author of the social nature of man. The State therefore owes a religious homage to God, not through just any religion but through that which was instituted by God Himself. So one can reason thus: the followers of other religions have only an abstract, apparent, supposed right, a "jus existimatum" to the exercise of their "religious cult" considered in the abstract, and they can claim this abstract right against deniers and persecutors of all religious cults. Do you get what an "abstract right" is? I will continue the reasoning. But God Himself made known precisely by which worship He wishes to be honored. The divine positive law gives precision to the natural law. Only the worship of the Catholic Church is approved by Him. So only the Catholics and the Church have an absolute, true, concrete and certain right to the exercise of the divine worship (which is the true worship of the true God), a right to which the apparent right of non-Catholics must yield: “præsumptio cedat veritati”, as the expression goes. Archbishop Lefebvre implicitly made this juridical argument, when he proclaimed the true and absolute right of Catholics alone and of the Church (see the last written presentation of the members of the Coetus at the Council in December 1965).
3.) Finally, Archbishop Lefebvre said, the State has a duty towards Our Lord Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church to recognize and protect the law of God. It must conform its laws to the commandments of God and to the Gospel. That is what is called the social reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Religious liberty is the denial and ruin of the reign of the God-Man, of His divinity, of His primacy over all creatures, of His kingship over human societies.
4.) The traditional doctrine is that the State must repress public scandals. And exterior manifestations of false cults are a scandal, so the State has the right to suppress them; or, in certain circumstances, to practice tolerance towards them if the preservation of public peace suggests it. But this tolerance is not a natural right of those tolerated. It is a disposition of civil law in view, not of the proper and apparent good of the dissidents, but of the real common good of the civil society and of the Church. Such is the unanimous doctrine of the pre-conciliar popes, and Archbishop Lefebvre based himself on this teaching that he received in the seminary, as we also still do to refuse the religious liberty of the Council.
5.) Moreover, although Archbishop Lefebvre did not explore this question, this conciliar religious liberty recognizes that it is “limited by the common good and its requirements” (see the Catechism of the Catholic Church). This could be the traditional doctrine if the common good was conceived, as Pius XI says in Quas Primas, as including in the first place the social kingship of Jesus Christ:
who is the unique author, for civil society as for every citizen, of prosperity and true happiness” (EPS, PIN no. 543).
But the conciliar declaration and the CCC explicitly say that the common good consists “above all in the respect of the rights of the person”, which is precisely the dissolution of the common good and pure individualism! And the curious result is the proclamation of religious freedom within the limits of religious freedom…To be more clear: each man’s religious freedom is limited by the religious freedom of his neighbor. That is the maxim of pure liberalism. John Paul II called it “the free competition of ideologies” (Speech in Strasburg) and thought it a perfectly good thing Dignitatis Humanae places itself from the start in the model of a multi-religious society, which is concretely the fruit of the dissolution of the Catholic states by the revolution. That is enough to condemn conciliar religious liberty from the start.
Tell us also about Archbishop Lefebvre’s fight on collegiality and ecumenism!
Very well. First, collegiality. At the Council, Archbishop Lefebvre rejected it at first, but then he ended up remaining silent because of the Preliminary Note of Explanation that Paul VI had added to Lumen Gentium. After the Council, he told us two things, one doctrinal, the other practical.
Doctrinally: “At the ecumenical council,” he said, “the pope communicates his infallibility to the bishops.” It is a little bit the unfortunate confusion between the supreme power of the pope and his infallibility: a confusion that does much harm due to the excessive weight that has been placed on the pope’s privilege of infallibility ever since 1870. The pope uses this privilege very rarely! But we understand what Archbishop Lefebvre meant: “At the ecumenical council, the pope communicates to the episcopal body a participation in his supreme and universal power over the Church.” End of story! I think that is what we will profess in the profession of faith we will make for the new canonical recognition of the Society by Rome. And it will thoroughly irritate them, believe me.
The practical side of collegiality: it tends to destroy the pope’s personal power, assisted by the Holy Ghost, over the entire Church
because the bishops can always claim to exercise with the pope their supposed supreme and universal power, or to oppose the pope’s decisions with a: 'We were not consulted.'”
And collegiality also ruins the personal authority, assisted by the Holy Ghost, of the bishops over their dioceses that they will no longer dare to govern without consulting their episcopal counsel and their parish councils. Archbishop Lefebvre sensed, without being able to explain it, the spirit of revolution behind collegiality: in a word, it was parliamentary democracy in the Church. It is the reign of the "leading nucleus" (the lobbies or pressure groups) or of parallel authorities, and at the same time it is the institutionalization of the system of a "reductive group", in which in a group, one seeks, be it calculated or for the sake of convenience, to find solutions of compromise for the differences. It is truly the revolutionary technique applied to the government of the Church. Adrien Bonnet de Viller explained this, and it is his greatest merit.
Finally, ecumenism. It is the "return to full communion with the Church" of separated Christians, and not their pure and simple return to the unity of the Church from which their fathers separated themselves. But this idea of "full or not full" communion is pernicious. Just as the Church of Jesus Christ is visible, in the same way ecclesial communion is something external and visible, made up of three very recognizable elements: the same faith, the reception of the same sacraments, and submission to the same supreme authority of the Roman Pontiff. These three elements either are or are not. There is no middle ground. This is the very simple doctrine of St. Peter Canisius, accepted ever since by all the catechisms (up until the eve of the Council) and therefore the doctrine of the ordinary magisterium of the Church.
The Council abandoned this truth and this magisterium. It is very serious. On the pretext that the dissidents retain certain truths or rites of the Catholic Church, they are supposedly in "imperfect" communion with the Church. They even go so far as to say that the "separated communities",
although deficient in some respects, have been by no means deprived of significance and importance in the mystery of salvation” (Unitatis Redintegratio, no. 3, para. 4),
which is a blasphemy against the Catholic Church, the only "sacrament of salvation" so to speak; and they add, listen carefully, that “the Spirit of Christ has not refrained from using them as means of salvation”, which is impossible. The Holy Ghost can only use means that contain no trace of division, but these communities, insofar as they are separated from the Church, are division itself!
Doubtless they can have people who adhere to them in good faith, who are in "invincible error", as we say; but good faith does not save, only the truth saves. It is when they begin to be dissatisfied with their doctrines or rites that, under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, certain dissidents can be brought to convert and to return to the Church. And that is what Archbishop Lefebvre said with his realism and his missionary experience.
And are you not forgetting Archbishop Lefebvre’s fight for the Mass?
No, not at all. I remember that on the eve of the first Sunday of Advent in 1969, two months after my entry into Archbishop Lefebvre’s seminary in Fribourg, Switzerland, our founder called us together for a special spiritual conference, we his nine first seminarians, and told us gravely:
Tomorrow the 'Novus Ordo Missae' becomes effective, the new mass instituted by Pope Paul VI, in all the parishes of Fribourg, Switzerland, France, and everywhere. What are we going to do?”
After a moment of silence, with his small, almost timid voice, he added:
We are going to keep the Old Mass, aren’t we?”
Those are the historic words with which Archbishop Lefebvre saved the sacrifice of the Mass.
Of course, we were all of his opinion, and he did not need to ask us. We had all lived through the stages of the liturgical revolution since the year 1960: the altars turned around to say the Mass "facing the people", the suppression of the psalm Judica me and the last Gospel, parts of the Mass said out loud in the vernacular, the canon read out loud and in the vernacular, the words of the consecration changed, what was left to change? Paul VI created three new Eucharistic prayers and codified all the reforms and imposed them, but without imposing them as he should, canonically.
And the contents of this "New Order of the Mass" were made known to us by the Ottaviani Intervention that been approved by Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci, writing to Paul VI that this new Mass "abandons in detail and overall the Catholic theology of the Mass as it figures in the decree of the Council of Trent, which gave a definitive response to the Protestant reformers.” I quote from memory and not precisely, but that is what they said.
And it was only in June 1972 that Archbishop Lefebvre summarized for his seminarians the extrinsic and intrinsic reasons that made him deny the goodness of the new rite, the legitimacy of its promulgation, and its so-called obligation by Pope Paul VI. It was a two-page, typed text, short, concise, complete, luminous, definitive, a stance from which there was no going back, that required our adherence. We gave it with full satisfaction, with relief. On November 28, 1969, it was simply a private "Yes" to the Mass of all time; in June 1972, it was a public and argued "No" to the New Mass.
Let us now consider the restorer: What does the Church owe to Archbishop Lefebvre?
Why, simply the salvation of the Catholic priesthood! Prepared a long time in advance by his formation at the seminary, his combative disposition, and his perfect understanding of liberalism and modernism that had not been eradicated by the condemnations of Pius X, rich in his missionary experience in which the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass stood out as the source of all graces of conversion and sanctification, he found himself, around 1960, faced with the identity crisis of the priest and the degradation of the priestly ideal, which is “the sacrifice of the priest for the reign of Jesus Christ” (Fr. Marc Voegtli, Santa Chiara). It was being transformed into social action for the underprivileged and the cooperation of the Church with Communism. Archbishop Lefebvre was on the alert: should he not intervene? One day while assisting at office in his cathedral of Dakar, he was seized suddenly by a sort of dream. Was it a dream or a divine inspiration? He could not say, but it left him with a goal and a conviction:
Faced with the crisis of the priesthood, to transmit in all its doctrinal purity and its missionary charity the Catholic priesthood as the Church received it from Jesus and has transmitted it over the centuries, not so much materially and validly, but above all formally: the immutable spirit of the priesthood.”
This spirit had been described by Fr. Voegtli at Santa Chiara, as we have mentioned.
How did Archbishop Lefebvre go about this salvation of the priesthood?
Listen well! He simply let himself be led by the circumstances. He heard the calls of distress from seminarians in their perditious seminaries and, urged by families and active friends, he founded an embryo of a seminary, an "International Association of St. Pius X" in Fribourg, Switzerland. Then this seminary was providentially transferred to Écône, in Valais.
At first I did not want to move forward, I resisted,” he used to say, “I dragged my feet, I leaned back, but the candidates urged me to found something.”
This was typical of his way of thinking. He used to say:
In action, one must follow Providence and never get ahead of it.”
But for him, as for Fr. Calmel, “leaving things to the grace of God did not mean doing nothing! It meant doing everything in one’s power, while remaining in love.” Holy abandon lies “not in abdication and laziness, but at the heart of action and undertaking” (Fr. Calmel, Itineraires, no. 64, "Du veritable abandon – On True Abandon"). I have spoken enough about the preliminaries; let us not forget the essential!
What, then, is the essential of Archbishop Lefebvre’s action?
Why! The Society! The crowning point of his life, and the work of a genius: yes, the synthesis of several great ideas. Do you not see? Allow me to list them to make myself clearer.
1.) First, a priestly society without vows. He presented us with this project just one month after opening in Fribourg, on November 15, 1969, so from the beginning. He had been thinking about it for a long time. It burned his lips and he could not refrain from speaking to us about it; it seemed so important to him, capital for the future and for the Church: just that! Our priestly society would be a brotherhood; every priest would be the loving son of the same father (the Superior General or the superior of the local community) and would have for his confreres the attitude of a brother. Our priests would not take the three vows of religious, but would be bound to the Society by public engagements.
2.) But above all, a priestly society with a shared common life. And that is what he did: our priests are not isolated, each in his far-off corner; in the priories, they lead a common life of prayer and meals under same roof, with a rule. So they are not left to themselves, nor are they isolated in a Church that has been handed over to the whims and scandals of a secularized clergy. The apostolate, too, is in common, under the local direction of the "prior" and then direction of the district superior and the superior general. The apostolate thus gains in organization and efficacy. And it is perfectly adapted to the diaspora of today’s Catholic faithful: from the priory, the priests go out to their surrounding "missions": secondary places of worship, catechism rooms, small schools here and there. The priory is thus an operational base; it is the centerpiece of the Society. Other communities more or less "Ecclesia Dei" have followed our example, and despite their defects in the combat, that is the cause of their influence.
3.) Then, of course, for us, there is the patronage of St. Pius X, the last canonized pope, the great enemy of modernism, whose motto "to restore all things in Christ" is that of the Society; but above all, the supreme Pastor, who paid special attention to the interior life and the sanctification of priests in his apostolic exhortation Haerent Animo of August 4, 1908, that he wrote in Latin himself and a page of which he used to read every morning to Cardinal Merry del Val, his Secretary of State. This text is priestly sanctity in bits and in good order!
4.) Then his second brilliant idea: the year of spirituality. These priests needed “a sort of novitiate”, with retreats and developed catechism classes that the founder called “the course of spirituality”: God, the Blessed Trinity, the Holy Ghost, the creation of the angels and men, original justice, original sin, the "justification of the impious", grace. Then the virtues and the gifts of the Holy Ghost and the beatitudes. Then Our Lord Jesus Christ. His divinity, His person, His humanity, His wisdom, His "capital grace", His priesthood, His sacrifice on the cross, His universal primacy, His social reign. Then the sacraments, and at the summit the sacrifice of the Mass, center and source of the life and apostolate of the priest. Then the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, her Immaculate Conception and fullness of grace, her co-redemption, her mediation of all grace, the dependence of the priest on her omnipresent influence. Then the last ends, hell included.
5.) And yet another brilliant, or rather providential idea, for he did not come up with it himself: the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, that apply this overall picture to reforming the soul, putting it back in order, placing it in fundamental dependence on God. It was the arrival of Fr. Ludovic-Marie Barielle in Écône in 1972 that allowed Archbishop Lefebvre to complete the spiritual and apostolic preparation of his priests. Think of it: our priests can preach retreats! Such was never seen among the diocesan clergy. Even Ignatian retreats, which were the "private hunting grounds" of the Jesuit Fathers!
6.) And again, another great idea: studies according to St. Thomas Aquinas and his Summa Theologica! That no longer existed since the Council, and that in itself is enough to condemn this council, by the way. So, the text of the angelic doctor’s Summa as a manual of theology, in Latin, please. Hence Latin classes are given at the seminary, so our priests can understand their breviary and have access to St. Thomas in the original text, and to the Fathers of the Church. And St. Thomas, master of the most beautiful synthesis of philosophy, dogmatic, moral and spiritual theology all at once! Where else can this be found, if not in the Summa? And the ability of this Summa to refute all errors, past, present and to come! It is marvelous. I remember the pleasure with which, as a young seminarian, I used to open my Summa in Latin in theology class with Fr. Thomas Mehrle in Écône; each of us had the text in front of the Master and in our ears the commentaries of a faithful Thomist, the worthy Dominican Father who came once a week to help us taste the marrow of St. Thomas. What a legacy! What a pure source of the spiritual life! What a resource for our preaching! Simply ponder "the life of Jesus" or "the mystery of the Redemption" or "the sacrament of the Eucharist" in the Summa and you make wonderful discoveries, you penetrate into the heart of the mystery, without resolving it, of course, but you are enriched forever.
7.) But that is not all. The second-to-last (and I am not even sure of that) brilliant idea of our founder was the "Course on the Acts of the Magisterium" given during the year of spirituality. It was the Roman legacy of Fr. Le Floch: the constant teaching of the popes in the face of the modern political and social errors. So something very practical and current. It is not a didactical class on modern errors, but a knowledge and assimilation of how the popes judged these errors, in the light of principles of reason and faith.
8.) And his last brilliant idea: for our priests to help in Catholic boys’ schools, and in the end to direct them. Destined, as he used to say, “to imbue the youth with religion”, while making them men, they will be better than the pre-seminaries of the past, arousing priestly and religious vocations and preparing fathers of families capable of working for Christ in society.
So he is a genius! But what about the virtues of Archbishop Lefebvre?
In everyday common life, some thought his capital virtue was humility. His humility, they say, could be seen in the hallways of the seminary of Écône, when an “early bird” seminarian on his way to pray in the chapel a little before Lauds, saw him at dawn on Sunday discreetly carrying his own sack of dirty laundry to the laundry room. Or during the school hours, while the seminarians were in class, when Br. Gabriel caught Archbishop Lefebvre broom in hand sweeping the unwelcome dust-bunnies from the halls of the cloister. Or again, when he rose with open arms to greet a newly arrived seminarian who boldly knocked on his office door. But I think that all of that had nothing to do with humility: it was, I would say, his virtue of order, to put people and things in order, you can call it what you wish.
First of all, he was always neatly dressed, with a black cassock with invisible buttons and his modest Spiritan sash, his shoes always clean and polished. Then his desk: his table was perfectly empty and everything was systematically put away in the drawers or on the shelves. It was the absolute rule of a man of order, the order of a doctor or lawyer: nothing lies around on the table. His archives, too, carefully organized in his cabinet, his books wisely arranged on the bookshelves, thematically, but also practically: the Bible on hand, of course; a Larousse dictionary, doubtless, you will say, to avoid spelling mistakes; a manual entitled L’anglais Sans Peine ("English with No Trouble"), to review his English before going to Great Britain or to the United States; and a world atlas to prepare his travels. You see the practical man. Then, above all, there was the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas, in Latin and French with commentaries from Cajetan; then the pontifical documents: the chronological collection of the Bonne Presse and the thematic collection of the monks of Solesmes. With that he had the essentials for his spiritual reading and preparations for his conferences to the seminarians and the faithful. But he also attentively read L'Osservatore Romano, Le Figaro and La Documentation catholique, to keep up with events in the Church and the world and give a judgment on them that was always appreciated by his collaborators and seminarians, for example, during the Gulf War in Iraq in the 80’s and 90’s.
Then he put order in his day, in his agenda, and above all in his priests, their spiritual life and apostolate. It was as if he said: “The grace of God does not dispense one from organization.” I would even say, pardon the expression, that that is the spitting image of Archbishop Lefebvre.
His care for order and efficacy in his Pastoral Letters and circulars from Dakar is admirable. His Letters to the members of the Society as well. I use them to preach priestly retreats.
I remember his comment after a public conference: “Did you take a collection to pay for the hall… and the speaker’s trip?” As the confrere, embarrassed, answered: “No, Your Excellency”, he said: “It is good to want to be supernatural, but we end up forgetting what makes the world go round!”
His care for order and efficacy in his Pastoral Letters and circulars from Dakar is admirable. His Letters to the members of the Society as well. I use them to preach priestly retreats.
I remember his comment after a public conference: “Did you take a collection to pay for the hall… and the speaker’s trip?” As the confrere, embarrassed, answered: “No, Your Excellency”, he said: “It is good to want to be supernatural, but we end up forgetting what makes the world go round!”
Tell us about his spiritual conferences.
He would be there waiting for us patiently, standing on the platform of the big classroom. He sat in his chair without leaning on the back, his feet together, his hands tightly together, his wrists resting on the table, a table on which he lay a booklet of the Summa or the works of St. Pius X. And with his little monotonous voice, he spoke to us of the "four sciences of Christ" or the "elements of the virtue of prudence" or the "acts of the virtue of religion" or the "ends of the Sacrifice of the Mass": his favorite subjects. The tone was sleep-inducing, and the subject not very exciting compared to the stories Fr. Barielle used to tell us in his conferences. But we listened, and in the end, it was so much more fundamental, so much more indispensable!
But he came alive when he demolished for us the conciliar errors with many examples from Roman or episcopal blunders of La Documentation catholique! Or when he told us the story of his meeting with Paul VI or later his meetings with Cardinal Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI). We found ourselves there with him in the palace of the Holy Office or at Castel Gandolfo, in the fire of vehement discussions, dramatic and extraordinary. Paul VI reproached him: “You want to take my place!” And the cardinal told him when speaking of religion: “But, Your Excellency, the State does not know; by itself it does not know!” It was stunning. And we were amused at the iron-clad answers of our dear founder to the attacks of these secularized men.
Going back to his sense of organization: what kind of virtue is this?
Order and organization go together. Archbishop Lefebvre certainly had a natural taste for order, he took pleasure in organizing things: ceremonies, house visits (which he visited from the cellar to the attic), the construction of his seminary, meetings with the architect and contractors, always preceded by a prayer. “What struck me,” Fr. Berclaz, a Spiritan and a practical man, once told me, “was the supernatural spirit Archbishop Lefebvre put into a simple construction meeting.” He also liked to fix up the houses he bought, to draw up statutes, those of the Knights of the Rouvre in Belgium, those of the Society Sisters, Oblates, and Brothers. Careful! His power to put order in things and men, in activities and souls, came from a gift of the Holy Ghost: the gift of wisdom, of which the philosopher says, “it belongs to the wise man to judge and ordain.” But beyond this inspired wisdom, I think that the principal virtue of our founder was the virtue of prudence.
Prudence…Do you mean caution, distrust?
No, not at all. His prudence, in the sense of the cardinal virtue of prudence: to take counsel, then decide and finally execute! He manifested this virtue to the highest degree in the consideration, and then the decision and preparation of the consecration of the bishops. He began with consulting different theologians (including the simple professors of his seminaries in particular), the "high priests" of the Catholic resistance against modernism at the time: Fr. Coache, Fr. André, etc., the superiors of the friendly communities; and even asked advice from his most intimate friends and his volunteer chauffeurs: “What should I do?” “Whom would you nominate?” He meant those to be consecrated as bishops and he wanted names!
What came as a surprise was that after his first decision to go ahead with the consecration without the approval of Rome, in 1986-87 after the "Congress of Religions in Assisi", he stepped back: after an invitation from Cardinal Ratzinger on July 14 and on the advice of his collaborators in Fatima on August 22, 1987, he accepted to postpone his decision and seek Pope John Paul II’s approval for the episcopal consecration. He accepted the canonical visit of Cardinal Gagnon in November 1987, proposed a status of a personal ordinariate for the Society, and it was only at the outcome of difficult negotiations in March and April 1988, and after signing an insufficient protocol of agreement on May 5, that he resolved on June 2, 1988, to go ahead with the consecration against the pope’s will.
But for that, he tried to obtain a general consensus of the entire family of Tradition. He explained several times, orally and in writing, the motives that urged him to consecrate auxiliary bishops, without jurisdiction, which would create no parallel episcopal hierarchy, as these bishops were exclusively destined to confer Holy Orders and the sacrament of Confirmation. He received this consensus at the meeting on May 30, 1988, at the priory of Notre-Dame du Pointet. Dom Gerard Calvet, prior of Le Barroux, who was against the consecration, declared he would "go along with whatever Archbishop Lefebvre decided". That was what he hoped to obtain.
Speaking of the consecration, what was your reaction when Archbishop Lefebvre proposed to you the episcopate?
It was around April 1987. He summoned me from Rickenbach to Écône. In his office, he told me his wish. I answered him: “Your Excellency, I have made many mistakes, I do not feel capable of being a bishop.” And he responded: “I, too, have made mistakes!” That reassured me, very simply. And I told myself: "He has thought this through, he knows what he must do, better than I, he has made his choice, I have only to accept." Of course, I thought of the excommunication that I would incur, not that I thought it valid, but sociologically it was a disgrace I would have to bear. I accepted it, with the grace of God. As one of my brother priests once said, I also said to myself: “His Excellency has the grace to decide, I have the grace to follow.”
Now, twenty-five years after the death of Archbishop Lefebvre, where is the future of the Society?
Things are becoming clearer. During our pilgrimage to Rome in the year 2000, we were charmed by Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos, who urged John Paul II to recognize the Society unilaterally. Then Benedict XVI granted us two "preliminary requirements": the recognition of the freedom of the traditional Mass and the lifting (more or less fortunate, for us and for him) of the 1988 excommunications. In 2010-2011, we had planned doctrinal discussions: in total disagreement! Our Superior General Bishop Fellay pursued the negotiations and caused some worry, until it became clear, in May and June 2012, that Benedict XVI still required as a condition, as he had said plainly at the start, that we accept the Council and the legitimacy of the reforms. It was a failure. But now there is very clearly a disposition on Pope Francis’ side to recognize us without these conditions. We say "Prudence!" For things are moving and progress is still needed.
Archbishop Lefebvre never laid down as a condition for us to be recognized by Rome that Rome abandon the errors and the conciliar reforms. Even if he did say something like that to André Cagnon in 1990, he would never have done so, because that was never his line of conduct, his strategy with modernist Rome. He was strong in the Faith, he did not yield on his doctrinal position, but he knew how to be flexible, patient, and prudent in practice. To achieve his ends, his prudence told him to push the adversary, to harass him, make him step back, persuade him, but without blocking him with conditions that he still finds unacceptable. He did not refuse dialogue and was disposed to take advantage of every door opened by his interlocutor. It is in this sense that a certain opportunism, a certain "pragmatism" has been seen in him, and it is true: it is a small virtue annexed to the cardinal virtue of prudence. Sagacity, practical wisdom, is the neighbor of solertia, mentioned by Aristotle, St. Thomas (2-2, q. 48) and the Gaffiot, which is a skill in finding means to obtain one’s ends.
Archbishop Lefebvre requested with acumen “that we at least be tolerated”: “this would be a major advance,” he said. And “that we be recognized as we are,” that is, with our practice that follows from our doctrinal positions. Well, today we see in Rome a disposition to bear our existence and our theoretical and practical positions. I say "bear" because one tolerates evil!
Already, doctrinally, they no longer force us to admit "the whole Council" or religious liberty; some of the errors we denounce are on the point of being considered by our interlocutors as open for free discussion, or continued debate. This is progress. We discuss, but they have to admit that we are not changing and it is unlikely that we will change. And in practice, we ask these Romans: “Recognize our right to reconfirm the faithful conditionally,” and “Recognize the validity of our marriages!” You see, these are serious bones of contention. They will have to grant us these things. Otherwise, how could our recognition be livable?
It may take some time, but there is a God!
And an all-powerful Mediatrix!
Thank you, Your Excellency, for taking the time to answer clearly and precisely the many questions of the readers of La Porte Latine.
Sources: La Porte Latine, March 22, 2016
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