Significant disagreements cannot be overlooked
In a previous column I explained how disturbing and difficult were the changes that Pope John XXIII wanted to establish in convening the Ecumenical Council Vatican II. Before entering the Council, many bishops and cardinals reading the agenda and the proposed innovations found them hard to accept.
But after the changes were accepted by a majority vote of the bishops, the only appeal against the Pope’s initiatives was made by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.
From the Church’s beginnings, it has been these Ecumenical Councils where the greatest heresies were repudiated. Take the Council of Nicaea, which met in 325 and condemned Arius for denying the full divinity of Jesus. Arius held that the Son of God was not eternal but created from nothing by the Father. He was, therefore, not God by nature but a creature.
It happened again in the Council of Ephesus in 431, when the bishops convened at the third Ecumenical Council to condemn Nestorius’s doctrine arguing that Mary should be called Christotokos (Christ-bearer, or mother of Christ) but not Theotokos (God-bearer, or mother of God).
During the entire Second Vatican Council, Archbishop Lefebvre opposed every change, to the point of proclaiming that Paul VI and his successors were anti-popes.
He proclaimed his aversion and repugnance thus: “All these reforms have contributed and continue to contribute to the destruction of the Church, to the ruin of the priesthood, to the abolition of the sacrifice of the Mass and the sacraments, to the disappearance of the religious life, and to a naturalistic and Teilhardian education in the universities, in the seminaries, in catechetics, an education deriving from liberalism and Protestantism which had been condemned many times by the solemn Magisterium of the Church. No authority, even the very highest in the hierarchy, can constrain us to abandon or diminish our Catholic faith such as it has been clearly expressed and professed by the Church’s Magisterium for 19 centuries.”
Who is Marcel Lefebvre (1905-1991)? Born in Tourcoing, France, he was a missionary who started his priestly ministry in Africa as a member of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit (its priests were called “Spiritans”). He was appointed as Vicar-Apostolic of Dakar, Senegal, in 1947, and a year later as Apostolic Delegate for the whole of French-speaking Africa.
In September 1955, Marcel was appointed the first Archbishop of Dakar. In 1962, he resigned to allow the appointment of a native African to the position, and he was subsequently appointed Bishop of Tulle, France. A few months later he was Superior General of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, an office he held until his resignation in 1968.
He was appointed to the Central Preparation Commission in 1959 by Pope John XXIII which was charged with drafting the schemata for consideration by the Council Fathers.
Despite this impressive resume, Marcel Lefebvre is most remembered for his persistent opposition both during and after the Council, the founding of the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X (Fraternitas Sacerdotalis Sancti Pii X), and for the events which led to his excommunication in 1988.
It was in 1970 that he created the Priestly Society of St. Pius X which from its inception has been a source of considerable controversy due in large part to his opposition to the decisions of the Second Vatican Council.
But the summit of his rebellion was in 1988 when he decided to proceed with ordaining four bishops without Pontifical mandate, thus incurring a Latae sententiae excommunication reserved to the Apostolic See.
The excommunication of the four bishops who were illicitly consecrated was remitted in 2009 when they promised to renounce their errors, but they would abdicate only under condition that the Holy See condemned their excommunication.
Once again they deceived the goodwill of the Holy Father, Benedict XVI, who expressed his sadness over the “avalanche of protest” and “open hostility” generated in some quarters. Despite the many challenges to reconciliation, the Pope encouraged the Church to overlook past faults and to make every effort to “open up broader vistas” particularly in light of the size and significance of the Society of Saint Pius X. He wrote: “Can we be totally indifferent about a community which has 491 priests, 215 seminarians, 6 seminaries, 88 schools, 2 university-level institutes, 117 brothers, 164 religious sisters and thousands of lay faithful?”
Here Benedict XVI is clearly fulfilling the important task of the Roman Pontiff to promote and safeguard the unity of the Church. Despite his best efforts, and those of his predecessors, most notably Paul VI and St. John Paul II, reconciliation with the Society has not been achieved and the possibility of such is unlikely to occur any time soon.
This matter is complex due in large part to attempts by the Society to obfuscate its actual juridical status, and in no small measure due to controversy generated by the remission of the excommunication in 2009.
