Marcel-François Lefebvre ( 29 November 1905 — 25 March 1991) was a French Roman Catholic archbishop. Following a career as an Apostolic Delegate for West Africa and Superior General of the Holy Ghost Fathers, he took the lead in opposing the changes within the Church associated with the Second Vatican Council.
In 1970, Lefebvre founded the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), which is still the world's largest Traditionalist Catholic priestly society. In 1988, against the orders of Pope John Paul II, he consecrated four bishops to continue his work with the SSPX. The Holy See immediately declared that he and the other bishops who had participated in the ceremony had incurred automatic excommunication under Catholic canon law. Lefebvre's supporters disputed the excommunication. In 2009, the Holy See lifted it for the four surviving bishops.
the second son and third child of factory-owner [[René Lefebvre]], who died in 1944 in the [[Nazi Germany|Nazi]] [[concentration camp]] at [[Sonnenburg]] (in [[East Brandenburg]], [[Nazi Germany|Germany]]), where he had been imprisoned by the [[Gestapo]] because of his work for the [[French Resistance]] and [[British Intelligence]]. Marcel's mother and René sr.'s wife was Gabrielle Wattin, who died in 1938.
His parents were devout Catholics who brought their children to daily Mass. His father was an outspoken monarchist who ran a spy-ring for British Intelligence when Tourcoing was occupied by the Germans during World War I.
In 1923 Lefebvre began studies for the priesthood; at the insistence of his father he went to the French Seminary in Rome. He would later credit his conservative views to the rector, a Breton priest named Father Henri Le Floch. His studies were interrupted in 1926 and 1927 when he did his military service. On 25 May 1929 he was ordained deacon by Cardinal Basilio Pompilj in the Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome. On 21 September 1929 he was ordained to the priesthood by Bishop (soon to be Cardinal) Achille Liénart in Lille, the diocese in which he was incardinated. After ordination, he continued his studies in Rome, completing a doctorate in theology in July 1930.
In August 1930 Cardinal Liénart assigned Lefebvre to be assistant curate in a parish in Lomme, a suburb of Lille. Even before this, Lefebvre had already asked to be released for missionary duties as a member of the Holy Ghost Fathers. But the cardinal insisted that he consider this for a year while he engaged in parish work in the diocese of Lille. In July 1931 Liénart released Lefebvre from the diocese. In September Lefebvre entered the novitiate of the Holy Ghost Fathers at Orly. A year later on 8 September 1932 he took simple vows for a period of three years.
Lefebvre's first assignment as a Holy Ghost Father was as a professor at St. John's Seminary in Libreville, Gabon. In 1934 he was made rector of the seminary. On 28 September 1935 he made his perpetual vows. He served as superior of a number of missions of the Holy Ghost Fathers in Gabon. In October 1945 Lefebvre was ordered by the superior general to return to France and take up new duties as rector of the Holy Ghost Fathers seminary in Mortain.
Lefebvre's return to France was not to last long. On 12 June 1947, Pope Pius XII appointed him Vicar Apostolic of Dakar in Senegal; he received the titular episcopal see of Anthedon (El Blakiyeh near Gaza in Palestine). On 18 September 1947 he was consecrated a bishop in his family's parish church in Tourcoing by Achille Liénart (who had previously ordained him a priest); as co-consecrators acted the Bishop Jean-Baptiste Fauret, C.S.Sp. and Bishop Alfred-Jean-Félix Ancel. Cardinal Lienart has been identified as a 30 degree Freemason, according to Issue No. 51 of Chiesa Viva, March 1976.
In his new position Lefebvre was responsible for an area with a population of three and a half million people, of whom only 50,000 were Catholics.
On 22 September 1948, Lefebvre, while continuing as Vicar Apostolic of Dakar, received additional responsibilities: Pope Pius XII appointed him Apostolic Delegate to French Africa. In this capacity he was the papal representative to the Church authorities in 46 dioceses "in continental and insular Africa subject to the French Government, with the addition of the Diocese of Reunion, the whole of the island of Madagascar and the other neighbouring islands under French rule, but excluding the dioceses of North Africa, namely those of Carthage, Constantine, Algiers and Oran." With this new responsibiity he was appointed Archbishop of the titular see of Arcadiopolis in Europa.
As Apostolic Delegate, Lefebvre's chief duty was the building up of the ecclesiastical structure in French Africa. Pope Pius XII wanted to move quickly towards a proper hierarchy (with bishops instead of vicariates and apostolic prefectures). Lefebvre was responsible for selecting these new bishops, increasing the number of priests and religious sisters, as well as the number of churches in the various dioceses.
On 14 September 1955, the Apostolic Vicariate of Dakar became an archdiocese, and Lefebvre thus became the first Metropolitan Archbishop of Dakar. Archbishop Lefebvre was the first and foremost advisor to Pius XII during the writing of the encyclical Fidei Donum (1957), which instructed the clergy and laity on the missions in the Third World countries and called for more missionaries.
In 1958 Pope Pius XII died and was succeeded by Pope John XXIII, who, in 1959, after giving Lefebvre the choice between remaining either as Apostolic Delegate or as Archbishop of Dakar, appointed another to the post of Apostolic Delegate for French Africa. Lefebvre continued as Archbishop of Dakar until 23 January 1962, when he was transferred to the diocese of Tulle in France, retaining his personal title of archbishop. In 1960, Pope John XXIII appointed Lefebvre to the Central Preparatory Commission for the Second Vatican Council.
Superior General of the Holy Ghost Fathersmoreless
On 26 July 1962 the Chapter General of the Holy Ghost Fathers elected Lefebvre Superior General. Lefebvre was widely respected for his experience in the mission field. On the other hand, certain progressive members of his congregation, particularly in France, considered his administrative style authoritarian and desired radical reforms. On 7 August 1962 Lefebvre was given the titular archiepiscopal see of Synnada in Phrygia.
Lefebvre was increasingly criticized by influential members of his large religious congregation who considered him to be out-of-step with modern Church leaders and the demand of the bishops' conferences, particularly in France, for modernization and reforms. A general chapter of the Holy Ghost Fathers was convened in Rome in September 1968 to debate the direction of the congregation after the changes of the Second Vatican Council. The first action of the chapter was to name several moderators to lead the chapter's sessions instead of Lefebvre. Lefebvre then handed in his resignation as Superior General to Pope Paul VI. He would later say that it had become impossible for him to remain Superior of an Order which no longer wanted or listened to him.
Appointed by Pope John XXIII a member of the Central Preparatory Commission for the Second Vatican Council, Lefebvre took part in the discussions about the draft documents to be submitted to the bishops for consideration at the Council. During the first session of the Council (October to December 1962), he became concerned about the direction the Council's deliberations were taking. Lefebvre took a leading part in a study group of bishops at the Council which became known as the Coetus Internationalis Patrum (International Group of Fathers).
A major area of concern at the Council was the debate about the principle of religious liberty. During the Council's third session (September to November 1964) Archbishop Pericle Felici announced that Lefebvre, with two other like-minded bishops, was appointed to a special four-member commission charged with rewriting the draft document on the topic, but it was soon discovered that this measure did not have papal approval, and major responsibility for preparing the draft document was given to the Secretariat for Promoting Christian Unity. Instead of the draft entitled "On Religious Liberty", Lefebvre and Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani had supported instead a text dealing with "Relations between the Church and State, and religious tolerance." The Coetus Internationalis Patrum did, however, manage to get the preliminary vote (with suggestions for modifications) on the document put off until the fourth session of the Council, but were unable to prevent the adoption, on 7 December 1965, of the final text of the declaration Dignitatis humanae by the overwhelming majority of the Council. The expressed view of some that this overwhelming majority was only due to intense lobbying by the reformist wing of Council Fathers among those prelates who initially had reservations or even objections, however, is not accepted by all observers. Lefebvre was one of those who voted against the declaration, but he was one of those who added their signature to the document, after that of the Pope, though not all present did sign. Lefebvre later declared that the sheet of paper that he signed and that was "passed from hand to hand among the Fathers of the Council and upon which everyone placed his signature, had no meaning of a vote for or against, but signified simply our presence at the meeting to vote for four documents." However, the paper on which his signature appears, and which was not "the relatively unimportant attendance sheet which Lefebvre recalled in his interview", bears "the title Declaratio de Libertate Religiosa (along with the titles of three other documents) at the top," and "(t)he fathers were informed that if they wished to sign one or more documents, but not all of them, they could make a marginal annotation beside their name, specifying which documents they did or did not wish to sign. No such annotation is found beside the names of either Lefebvre or de Castro Mayer, which proves that they were prepared to share in the official promulgation of that Declaration on Religious Liberty which they later publicly rejected."
Lefebvre belonged to an identifiable strand of right-wing political and religious opinion in French society that originated among the defeated royalists after the 1789 French Revolution. Lefebvre's political and theological outlook mirrored that of a significant number of conservative members of French society under the French Third Republic (1870—1940). The Third Republic was riven by conflicts between the secular Left and the Catholic Right, with many individuals on both sides espousing distinctly radical positions (see, for example, the article on the famous Dreyfus affair). Thus it has been said that "Lefebvre was... a man formed by the bitter hatreds that defined the battle lines in French society and culture from the French Revolution to the Vichy regime".
Lefebvre's first biographer, the English traditionalist writer Michael Davies, wrote in the first volume of his Apologia Pro Marcel Lefebvre:
In France political feeling tends to be more polarized, more extreme, and far more deeply felt than in England. It can only be understood in the light of the French Revolution and subsequent history.... At the risk of a serious over-simplification, it is reasonable to state that up to the Second World War Catholicism in France tended to be identified with right-wing politics and anti-Catholicism with the left.... [Lefebvre's] own alleged right-wing political philosophy is nothing more than straight-forward Catholic social teaching as expounded by the Popes for a century or more....
In similar vein, the pro-SSPX English priest Fr. Michael Crowdy wrote, in his preface to his translation of Lefebvre's Open Letter to Confused Catholics:
We must remember that [Lefebvre] is writing against the background of France, where ideas are generally more clear?cut than they are in Great Britain.... Take the word "socialism," for example; that means to some of us, first and foremost, a social ideal of brotherhood and justice. We have had our Christian socialists. On the Continent, however, Socialism is uncompromisingly anti?religious, or almost a substitute for religion, and Communism is seen as the natural development from it. This is the Socialism the Archbishop is writing about. And when he rejects Liberalism, he is not thinking of the [British] Liberal Party... but of that religious liberalism that exalts human liberty above the claims of God or of His Church....
Theological positions
Lefebvre was associated with the following positions:
The rejection of ecumenism;
The espousal of pragmatic religious tolerance instead of the principle of religious liberty;
The rejection of collegiality within the Church;
Opposition to the replacement of the Tridentine Mass with the Mass of Paul VI.
Political positions
Political positions espoused by Archbishop Lefebvre included the following:
Condemnation of the 1789 French Revolution, and what he called its "Masonic and anti-Catholic principles".
Support for the "Catholic order" of the authoritarian French Vichy régime (1940—1944), which collaborated with Nazi Germany and whose leader, Philippe Pétain, was later sentenced to death as a collaborator.
Support for authoritarian governments. In 1976, Lefebvre praised the regimes of Jorge Videla in Argentina and Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and in 1985 he spoke approvingly of the governments of Francisco Franco of Spain and Antonio Salazar of Portugal, noting that their neutrality in World War II had spared their peoples, including their Jewish populations, the suffering of the War.
Support for the French far-right leader Jean-Marie le Pen. In 1985, the French periodical Présent quoted Lefebvre as endorsing Le Pen, on the grounds that he was the only leading French politician who was clearly opposed to abortion.
Opposition to Muslim immigration into Europe. In 1990, Lefebvre was convicted in a French court and sentenced to pay a fine of 5,000 francs when he stated in this connection that "it is your wives, your daughters, your children who will be kidnapped and dragged off to a certain kind of places as they exist in Casablanca".
After retiring from the post of Superior General of the Holy Ghost Fathers, Lefebvre was approached by traditionalists from the French Seminary in Rome who had been refused tonsure, the rite by which, until 1973, a seminarian became a cleric. They asked for a conservative seminary to complete their studies. After directing them to the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, Lefebvre was urged to teach these seminarians personally. In 1969, he received permission from the local bishop to establish a seminary in Fribourg which opened with nine students, moving to Ecône, Switzerland in 1971.
Lefebvre proposed to his seminarians the establishment of a society of priests without vows. In November 1970, Bishop François Charrière of Fribourg established, on a provisional (ad experimentum) basis for six years, the International Priestly Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) as a "pious union".
The French bishops, whose theological outlook was quite different from Lefebvre's, treated the Ecône seminary with suspicion and referred to it as "the Wildcat Seminary". They indicated that they would incardinate none of the seminarians.
In November 1974, two Belgian priests carried out a rigorous inspection on the instructions of a commission of cardinals, producing, it was said, a favourable report. However, while at Ecône, they expressed a number of theological opinions, such as that ordination of married men will soon be a normal thing, that truth changed with the times, and the traditional conception of the Resurrection of Our Lord were open to discussion, to which the seminarians and staff objected to as scandalous. In what he later described as a mood of "doubtlessly excessive indignation", the Archbishop wrote a "Declaration" in which he strongly attacked the modernist and liberal trends that he saw as apparent in the reforms being undertaken within the Church at that time.
In January 1975 the new Bishop of Fribourg stated his wish to withdraw the SSPX's pious union status. Though Lefebvre then had two meetings with the commission of Cardinals, the Bishop put his intention into effect on 6 May 1975, thereby officially dissolving the Society. This action was subsequently upheld by Pope Paul VI, who wrote to Archbishop Lefebvre in June 1975. Lefebvre continued his work regardless. In the consistory of 24 May 1976, Pope Paul VI criticized Archbishop Lefebvre by name and appealed to him and his followers to change their minds.
On 29 June 1976, Lefebvre went ahead with planned priestly ordinations without the approval of the local Bishop and despite receiving letters from Rome forbidding them. As a result Lefebvre was suspended a collatione ordinum, i.e., forbidden to ordain any priests. A week later, the Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops informed him that, to have his situation regularized, he needed to ask the Pope's pardon. Lefebvre responded with a letter claiming that the modernisation of the Church was a "compromise with the ideas of modern man" originating in a secret agreement between high dignitaries in the Church and senior Freemasons prior to the Council. Lefebvre was then notified that, since he had not apologised to the Pope, he was suspended a divinis, i.e., he could no longer legally administer any of the sacraments. Lefebvre remarked that he had been forbidden from celebrating the new rite of Mass. Pope Paul VI apparently took this seriously and stated that Lefebvre "thought he dodged the penalty by administering the sacraments using the previous formulas.") In spite of his suspension, Lefebvre continued to pray Mass and to administer the other Sacraments, including the conferral of Holy Orders to the students of his seminary.
Pope Paul VI received Lefebvre in audience on 11 September 1976, and one month later wrote to him admonishing him and, repeating the appeal he had made at the audience. Pope John Paul II received Lefebvre in audience sixty days after his 1978 election, again without reaching agreement.
David Allen White's biography of Lefebvre, The Horn of the Unicorn, reports that Lefebvre allegedly received a small number of votes (variously reported as three or "several") in the August 1978 conclave that elected Pope John Paul I. This was said to have caused some consternation among the cardinals as Lefebvre was not a cardinal, and casting a vote for a non-cardinal in a papal election is unusual, although permitted by Church law.
In a 1987 sermon Lefebvre, at age 81, announced his intention to consecrate a bishop to carry on his work after his death. This was controversial because, under Catholic canon law, the consecration of a bishop requires the permission of the Pope.
On 5 May 1988, Lefebvre signed an agreement with Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) to regularise the situation of the Society of St Pius X. The cardinal agreed that one bishop would be consecrated for the society. However, Lefebvre came to the view that he was obliged both to reject the arrangement he had agreed to and to ordain a successor, if necessary without papal approval. The Pope appealed to him not to proceed in "a schismatic act", warning of "theological and canonical consequences".
On 30 June 1988, Archbishop Lefebvre, with Bishop Emeritus Antônio de Castro Mayer of Campos, Brazil, as co-consecrator, consecrated four SSPX priests as bishops: Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, Richard Williamson, Alfonso de Galarreta and Bernard Fellay. The next day, 1 July, the Congregation for Bishops issued a decree stating that this was a schismatic act and that all six people directly involved had thereby incurred automatic excommunication.
On 2 July, Pope John Paul II condemned the consecration in his apostolic letter Ecclesia Dei, in which he stated that the consecration constituted a schismatic act and that by virtue of canon 1382 of the Code of Canon Law, the bishops and priests involved were automatically excommunicated.
Lefebvre declared that he and the other clerics involved had not "separated themselves from Rome" and were therefore not schismatic and that they "found themselves in a case of necessity", not having succeeded, as they said, in making "Rome" understand that "this change which has occurred in the Church" since the Second Vatican Council was "not Catholic". In a letter addressed to the four priests he was about to consecrate as bishops, Lefebvre wrote: "I do not think one can say that Rome has not lost the Faith."
Archbishop Lefebvre died in 1991 at the age of 85 from cancer in Martigny, Switzerland and, eight days later, was buried in the crypt at the society's international seminary in Ecône, Switzerland. Archbishop Edoardo Rovida, Apostolic Nuncio to Switzerland, and Bishop Henri Schwery of Sion, the local diocese, came and prayed at the body of the dead prelate. Later that year, on 18 September 1991, Cardinal Silvio Oddi, who had been Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy from 1979 to 1986, visited Lefebvre's tomb, knelt down at it, prayed, afterwards saying aloud: "Merci, Monseigneur". Thereafter Cardinal Oddi said he held Archbishop Lefebvre to have been "a holy man" and suggested that the Society of St Pius X could be granted a personal prelature by the Holy See like that of Opus Dei. In January 1992, the then-superior general of the Society, Fr. Franz Schmidberger, rejected this hypothetical offer by an unpublished private letter to the Holy See. The letter's content was described by bishop Richard Williamson as basically saying that, "as long as Rome remains Conciliar, a fruitful and open collaboration between the two [the SSPX and the Holy See] does not seem possible."
"I well suspected that our refusal to use the New Mass would sooner or later be a stumbling block, but I would have preferred to die rather than confront Rome and the Pope!"
"Perhaps one day, in thirty or forty years, a meeting of cardinals gathered together by a future Pope will study and judge the reign of Paul VI; perhaps they will say that there were things that ought to be clearly obvious to people at the time, statements of the Pope that were totally against Tradition. At the moment, I prefer to consider the man on the chair of Peter as the Pope; and if one day we discover for certain that the Pope was not the Pope, at least I will have done my duty. When he is not using his charism of infallibity, the Pope can err. So why should we be scandalized and say, 'So there is no Pope,' like Arius, who was scandalized by Our Lord being humiliated and saying in this Passion, 'My God why have you abandoned me?' Arius reasoned, 'Therefore he is not God!'"While preaching against the doctrine of Sedevacantism.
"There are the facts upon which, I think, we can lean. We place ourselves in God's providence. We are convinced that God knows what He is doing. Cardinal Gagnon visited us twelve years after the suspension: after twelve years of being spoken of as outside of the communion of Rome, as rebels and dissenters against the Pope, his visit took place. He himself recognized that what we have been doing is just what is necessary for the reconstruction of the Church. The Cardinal even assisted pontifically at the Mass which I celebrated on December 8, 1987, for the renewal of the promises of our seminarians. I was supposedly suspended and, yet, after twelve years, I was practically given a clean slate. They said we have done well. Thus we did well to resist! I am convinced that we are in the same circumstances today. We are performing an act which apparently... and unfortunately the media will not assist us in the good sense. The headlines will, of course, be "Schism", "Excommunication!" as much as they want to - and, yet, we are convinced that all these accusations of which we are the object, all penalties of which we are the object, are null, absolutely null and void, and of which we will take no account. Just as I took no account of the suspension, and ended up by being congratulated by the Church and by Progressive Churchmen, so likewise in several years - I do not know how many, only the Good Lord knows how many years it will take for Tradition to find - its rights in Rome - we will be embraced by the Roman authorities, who will thank us for having maintained the Faith in our seminaries, in our families, in civil societies, in our countries, and in our monasteries and our religious houses, for the greater glory of God and the salvation of souls." SSPXAsia.com:On the Occasion of the Episcopal ConsecrationsAt the Ecône Consecrations, 30 June 1988.
Monsenor Lefebvre[vida y pensamiento de un obispo catolico - Coleccion de biografias - Spanish Edition](Hardcover) ISBN-13: 9788473350365 ISBN-10: 8473350367 Genre:Nonfiction
