Today the Catholic Church celebrates the Feast of the Annunciation. This celebration dates back to at last the fourth century when, as told in the Gospel of Luke, the Archangel Gabriel was sent by God to Nazareth in Galilee to announce to Virgin Mary that she would ‘…conceive in [her] womb, and bring forth a son…who shall be called Jesus. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Most High’ (cf. Luke 1, 26–28).
34 years ago, on this day, was the death of a Catholic churchman who not only helped build Christendom in the then French-speaking part of Africa, but who was also an apostle against modernism and a champion for traditional Catholicism, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.
Far be it to equate the late archbishop to the Mother of God. Yet, the fact that he left this world on the feast day of the Annunciation perhaps manifests the divine Providence of a man who, as he said as per his episcopal motto: ‘Tradidi quod et accepi’—‘I have handed on what I have received’ (1 Corinthians 15, 1)—, was a bloodless martyr for the faith.
Life of Monsignor Lefebvre: A Champion of Traditional Catholicism
Monsignor Lefebvre was born in Tourcoing, France, in 1905. He was ordained a priest in 1929 having received his doctorates in philosophy and theology from the Gregorian University in Rome. He entered the Congregation of the Holy Ghost in 1932 and was sent to Gabon, Africa, where he exercised his ministry for 13 years. He was reassigned to Africa as Apostolic Vicar in 1947 by Pope Pius XII, then as first Archbishop of Dakar, in which he oversaw the Catholic Church in 18 African countries. By 1959 his territory of apostolic work had expanded to 12 archdioceses, 36 dioceses, and 13 Italian Apostolic Prefectures consisting of these modern-day countries: Morocco (southern desert region), Algeria (Saharan desert region), Mauritania, Mali, Central African Republic, Senegal, Guinea, Gambia, the Ivory Coast, Benin, Togo, Niger, Chad, Cameroon, Gabon, Congo, Madagascar, and Le Reunion.
In 1962, at the behest of Pope John XXIII, he was appointed as Bishop of the Diocese of Tulle, France (1962). Lefebvre, however, remained there only six months, since he was soon elected Superior General of the Congregation of the Holy Ghost (1962–1968), which at that time had more than 5,000 members. At the same time, the pope named him Assistant at the Papal Throne and member of the Central Preparatory Commission for Vatican Council II.
Msgr. Lefebvre participated actively in Vatican II as a Council Father (1962–1965), where he distinguished himself by organizing a group of Fathers who were determined to counteract the leaders of the liberal wing.
In 1968 he left office as superior general, preferring to submit his resignation rather than to support destructive reforms of religious life in his congregation. In 1969 he founded an international seminary, the St. Pius International Residence, in Fribourg, Switzerland. In 1970 he established a seminary at Ecône, a villa near Riddes, Switzerland, to train priests according to his traditionalist model. Shortly after the seminary’s opening, he founded the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X, which received the approval of the local bishop, and thus became a sign of contradiction.
In 1976 Pope Paul VI suspended the archbishop, prohibiting him to carry out priestly and episcopal functions. Lefebvre not only continued his apostolate, he did so by establishing regional headquarters in various countries for Catholics who were disillusioned by the left-wing infiltration of the Church, and who were also seeking to practice their faith as taught by the Church of Rome for nearly two millennia.
In 1988 in Ecône, Switzerland, without a papal mandate, he conferred the episcopal consecration onto four priests from the SSPX, for which he incurred, in application of canon 1382 of the Code of Canon Law, an automatic excommunication (latæ sententiæ).
Msgr. Lefebvre was also one who foresaw the perils of the Islamization of Christian Western society, Europe in particular.
Everyone familiar with the case of Lefebvre knows that it was not so much maintaining the public celebration of the Traditional Mass in Latin—last codified by Pope St. John XXIII in 1962—in as much as combatting the doctrinal errors which churchmen began to diffuse during and after Vatican II. The archbishop has thus been demonized to this day, even by conservative Catholics, for ‘dividing’ the Church. Yet how can the man whom Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI) reportedly considered to be ‘the most important bishop of the 20th century with regard to the universal Church’ be guilty of this?
A Contested Excommunication
Lefebvre carried out the episcopal consecrations because, as he stipulated, of the grave situation before him, which he called ‘Operation Survival’, vis-à-vis modern churchmen who were illicitly seeking to suppress the SSPX without any legitimate reason. Consequently, he stated the excommunication to be ‘null and void’.
‘Obedience’, Lefebvre once said, ‘presupposes an authority which gives an order or issues a law. Human authorities, even those instituted by God, have no authority other than to attain the end apportioned them by God and not to turn away from it. When an authority uses power in opposition to the law for which this power was given it, such an authority has no right to be obeyed and one must disobey it.’ As Pope Leo XIII stated in his Encyclical Libertas Praestantissimum (1888):
‘If, then, by any one in authority, something be sanctioned out of conformity with the principles of right reason, and consequently hurtful to the commonwealth, such an enactment can have no binding force of law.’
There are prominent canonists who altogether contest the excommunication. They cite canon 1323, 4° of the Code of Canon Law, which states: ‘The following are not subject to a penalty when they have violated a law or precept….a person who acted…due to necessity,’ unless, however, the act is ‘intrinsically evil or tends to be harmful to souls.’
‘Human authorities, even those instituted by God, have no authority other than to attain the end apportioned them by God and not to turn away from it’
Canon 1324, 8° adds another element of subjective evaluation. It is enough for someone who committed the offence to have ‘believed’ that he was in the above-mentioned circumstances, in other words, for that person to have thought he was driven by necessity. In other words, the legislator deems that, even if the act is intrinsically evil, that of consecrating bishops without a papal mandate, it diminishes the imputability of the sanction.
This means that, in the case of latæ sententiæ penalties, the sanction established by the Code is not automatically incurred, but, due to the effect of perception attenuation, there might be sufficient foundation to impose a lighter penalty. In light of these canons, taking into consideration the situation of Marcel Lefebvre, which did not begin in 1988 but in the 1960s, the juridical consensus is that the excommunication is questionable, if not altogether invalid.
This canonical exegesis does not, in any way, shape or form, contest the authority of the Roman Pontiff and the universal law he has set forth. Nevertheless, the law is applied in the spirit of the Gospels, and not in a positivist manner.
Lefebvre Vindicated
During his sermon at the episcopal consecrations in 1988, Lefebvre proclaimed that eventually the Roman authorities would thank him for his work and ‘invite’ them (SSPX) back. Just over 20 years later Pope Benedict XVI lifted the excommunications on the four bishops in 2009 in order ‘to promote ‘unity in charity’ in the universal church, and ‘to take away the scandal of division.’ And, in 2015, Pope Francis granted the priests of the SSPX the faculty to hear confessions, and in 2017 recognized the marriages celebrated by them.
St. Athanasius (c. 296/8–373), who was excommunicated by Pope Sr. Liberius and exiled on five different occasions from his Church in Alexandria, disavowed the unjust sanctions and continued to preach and ordain priests. Archbishop Lefebvre did likewise.
A year before he died, Lefebvre composed a short work that he considered his last will and testament: Spiritual Journey: According to Saint Thomas Aquinas in His Summa Theologica. ‘With this’, he said, ‘I have given everything I had to give; I do not see what more I could give.’
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