Pastoral Letters: February 21, 1968

Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre

Letter of Archbishop Lefebvre dated February 21, 1968.

 

In the other articles, I have striven to bring to the fore how Divine Providence has desired that participation in His own Authority should be for all men a source of benefits not only temporal, but also eternal. The family, the city, and the Church are only truly gifts of God in the measure that the authority, which is like the keystone of each of these societies, perfectly fulfills its role within the limits traced by the particular end of each one of them. As all three are of divine origin, they can only be complementary in nature, and all three ultimately oriented towards the supreme good, that is, the glory of God and the salvation of souls.

To diminish or to restrict these authorities, or to limit their action, contrary to the divine institution, has an immediate, deleterious effect upon the life of these societies, and, sooner or later, causes their disintegration either by anarchy or by tyranny, which are the two fatal diseases of these societies. In order to form a correct judgment about the evils by which these societies have been afflicted for at least several centuries, one must locate in history the permanent tendency of man to rebel against authority. The family and civil society have only truly found the perfect realization of their end, their equilibrium, and true peace in the teachings of the Church and the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.

This fact is proved by daily experience: when spouses no longer wish to submit to the teaching of the Church, family life is corrupted. The same is true when the authority of the head of the family is no longer exercised over his spouse and the children, as happens in socialist societies. At the other extreme, tyranny leads to polygamy and all the evils that flow from it. The same principles can be applied to civil society. The so-called "social contract," the separation of Church and State, the "new jurisprudence," as Pope Leo XIII calls it in his encyclical Immortale Dei, have ruined societies, which teeter between anarchy and tyranny without ever regaining their balance.

If the Church, too, allows herself to be partially affected by these evils, that is, if men attempt to reform the divine constitution of the Church by subjecting it to human reason or human science, then the Church will undergo a grave crisis of both her teaching and her ministry.

It is therefore greatly to be desired that the teachings of the Church on authority and its exercise in the three societies founded by God Himself be honored. Pope Leo XIII has bequeathed us some fundamental texts on this topic: Immortale Dei, on the Christian Constitution of States, and Satis Cognitum, on the Unity of the Church. The latter has particular importance, for it is none other than the schema prepared by the First Vatican Council on the Church, the Pope, and the Bishops. For the society of the family, the encyclical of Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, [available from Angelus Press] gives a summary of the Church's entire teaching.

Rebellion against constituted authority is called disobedience; it leads to schism, to a state of rupture with the person invested with authority, and, ultimately, to a rupture with God. Were we to compare this rebellion leading to schism to the rebellion of human reason against faith, of human understanding against the Wisdom and Mercy of God, and thus against the authority of God revealing his Wisdom and the designs which it has pleased Him to operate in order to manifest it, we should find a proper name for it. This rebellion is nothing other than heresy.

As we are living in an era that has engendered a new heresy more serious than all the preceding ones, it is very instructive to ask ourselves how this rebellion began in the Father of Heresy and Lies. If we ask the Angelic Doctor, we find his reply: "The angel desired to obtain his final beatitude by his own strength, something which is proper to God alone" (Summa Theologica, I, Q. 63, Art. 3). St. Thomas explains the two hypotheses of this perverse will: to seek only its natural end, despising the supernatural beatitude that it could only obtain by the grace of God, or aspire to acquire this supernatural beatitude by doing without the help of God as has been established by His providential designs. In both cases, you have the rebellion of nature against faith, or, in other words, the rejection of the Word of God, the unique way of supernatural beatitude.

Instructed by this reality, we shall be led quickly to conclude that the schismatic or heretic acts exactly like the first schismatic that was Lucifer. Human will rears up against the will of God. Reason resists the authority of God that reveals the ways of salvation by which it has pleased His eternal Wisdom to have us make our way. As the Hebrews in the desert often set their will against God's and were severely punished for it, thus very many of those to whom the Good News comes either reject it totally and remain prisoners of their false ideologies and human inventions, or else they only accept it partially, refusing a humble and entire submission to the authority of God revealed by the only Church that He instituted in order to transmit to us His truth and grace. All of those who wish to attain salvation, their final happiness, by their own strength–and not by our Lord Jesus Christ given by His Catholic and Roman Church–all the heresiarchs have rejected one or another of the divine inventions of our Lord Jesus Christ to save us. Generally, they have begun by falsifying the fundamental postulates, the realities that are at the very origin of the Redemption.

Superior General of the Holy Ghost Fathers, Archbishop Lefebvre,
in Sierra Leone on the west coast of Africa, for a celebration to commemorate
the centenary of the arrival of the Holy Ghost missionaries there

One of the principle facts that underlies the entire Christian economy is original sin. If indeed one can find in the history of mankind reasons to conclude the reality of an original disorder, nonetheless it is by faith, by Revelation, that this sin is made known to us, together with its precise consequences; their gravity, but also the ineffable designs of God for its reparation: the Incarnation of the Word, Redemption by His cross, the justification of sinners by baptism and the sacraments, and their incorporation into the Mystical Body of our Lord.

This explains why most if not all of the heretics have begun by distorting the notion of original sin or by denying it entirely. "What truly is the point of departure of the enemies of religion," St. Pius X asks,

for the sowing of the great and serious errors by which the faith of so many is shaken? They begin by denying that man has fallen by sin and been cast down from his former position....All this rejected, it is easy to understand that no place is left for Christ, for the Church, for grace or for anything that is above and beyond nature; in one word, the whole edifice of faith is shaken from top to bottom... (Ad Diem Illum Laetissimum, February 2, 1904 [available from Angelus Press]).

The sin that introduces disorder into the mind and the will of man wounds the pride of reason, which cannot admit her weakness and ignorance, and finds it unworthy of herself to have to have recourse to faith in order to know the essential truths concerning her eternal salvation.

Another truth that humbles reason is the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ. What subtle solutions, each more ingenious than the others and often contradictory, have been invented over the course of the last two centuries, first by the Protestants, then by the modernists, and now by the neo-modernists, to nullify our Lord's divinity!

Fr. de Grandmaison in his work on Jesus Christ gives a striking historical commentary on the thought of the pagans, Jews, and Moslems on the person of Jesus. One finds therein substantially the doctrine of the antichrists of the Renaissance, then of the Protestant liberals, of the freethinkers and rationalists of the 19th and 20thcenturies, and finally of Teilhard de Chardin and the contemporary neo-modernists. From Porphyry (A.D. 233-304) with his work Against the Christians, dating from the third century, up to our modern-day deniers of the miracles of our Lord, or those who deny the Gospel of the infancy or who call into question the virginal maternity of Mary, is to be found the same spirit of refusal of the supernatural and of faith in the authority of God revealing the works of His eternal Wisdom. It can truly be said that, if the presentation of the error and the persons who present it change throughout history, the error remains fundamentally the same. And yet these rationalist thinkers and writers pride themselves on presenting their ideologies as something new which for some will annihilate the Catholic Church, or for others must open to her new paths for the salvation of the world.

Neither the Jews nor the Moslems believe that the Christ is God. The Jews grant that He is a distinguished moralist, the Moslems that He is an apostle or prophet, and nothing more. Luther, Voltaire, Rousseau will fashion for themselves a Christ to their liking, far removed from the real Christ. But their successors will become the true precursors of the modern heresy. The following page written by Fr. de Grandmaison 40 years ago is worth citing, for what he wrote singularly sheds light on the crisis which the Church is undergoing today.

The forms of unbelief and irreligion that we have encountered within Christianity are patterned to a certain extent on the scientific or literary movements which would seem at first to be of a different order, having participated in the general current of ideas which we have observed for humanism and for the scientific renewal which began in the 16thcentury, and which, with Liebnitz (1716) and Isaac Newton (1727), reached its maximum influence on the general public.

The intellectual license of the 16th century and the deism of the 18thare in large part in unison with these movements, as if every novelty tended to trouble minds and cause them to anxiously call into question their former beliefs. This law is proven once again in the origins and the success of liberal and modernist Christology. They are tightly linked to the career of the hypotheses that Lessing, Herder, and Goethe applied to history, considered by them as exhibiting a continuous progressive development: "the divine education of humanity." Generalized and a bit vague, these views tended to substitute the spontaneous action of collectivities for individual influences, the first supposedly an organ better suited to the nature of the great immanent, impersonal, divine Force that moves humanity towards its end.

Once one grants that the general progress of the world, of which religious progress is only one aspect, occurs by fateful advances and is constantly steered in the same direction, with no loss of the terrain gained possible, the synthesis of today exceeding all necessity while partially enveloping the synthesis of yesterday, clearly, one can only recognize in Jesus a mere link in an immense chain. One can only see in His career a step, however important, which after all is only a step, towards the final realization of the "idea," a "synthesis" which will become in its turn a "thesis" to be contradicted by an "antithesis" and finally surpassed. If the facts do not seem to agree with his philosophical causes, our pure Hegelian will blame the facts and any explanation will do to reduce the Master of Nazareth into the great pantheistic current where He will finally be levelled.

The essential points of these views are common to all the disciples of Hegel, but sometimes they are exposed in the writings of conservative Hegelians with such moderation and a tone of respect, with such a care to insist on the divine character of the total evolution and in particular on the incomparable realization of the "idea" that was Jesus of Nazareth, that they deceive many Christians. [Jesus Christ, Vol. II, Ch.3]

It is impossible not to think of Teilhard de Chardin and all the Christians who delude themselves by reading his writings imbued by the poison of rationalism and pantheism.

This page admirably illustrates the continuity of the fundamental error, which consists in seeking to submit to human reason all the truths of the Faith. The tendencies that we can observe in the writings of the theologians in fashion, clearly modernists, have their source there, after the fashion of all the heresies.

Unfortunately, alas, these tendencies now appear in the modern catechisms themselves, and this is exceptionally grave. To dare disfigure the most essential truths of the Faith or to call them into question is to place oneself outside the Catholic Faith, in the same way that those who have acted this way in the course of history have found themselves outside the true Church. How derisive it is to hear or to read something by those who believe in the necessary, ineluctable progress of humanity to the effect that the men of our times, and even more so the children, are incapable of understanding the words virginity, angels, hell, devotion, holiness... For them, today's world, then, would be unable to understand the Catholic Faith, or even the Gospel. What an admission! But it is truer to say that those who affirm such things have lost the faith, and that they no longer feel able to communicate it. Nemo dat quod non habet–No one can give what he does not have.

We must not hesitate to proclaim in season and out of season that there is only one faith and one baptism, that the faith is a whole of which one cannot deny a single article without placing himself outside the Church and the way of salvation. Whoever opposes his reason to the Revelation transmitted by the Roman Catholic Church, even if it is only on one essential point like the substantial presence of the Lord in the Eucharist, or the perpetual virginity of the Virgin Mary, or the reality of the original sin committed by our first parents which rendered us all guilty and deprived of eternal life, such a one separates himself from the Catholic Church, and must be treated as a heretic, that is to say, excommunicated.

Pope Leo XIII affirms this truth very eloquently in his encyclical Satis Cognitum:

On the one hand, therefore, it is necessary that the mission of teaching whatever Christ had taught should remain perpetual and immutable, and on the other that the duty of accepting and professing all their doctrine should likewise be perpetual and immutable. "Our Lord Jesus Christ, when in His Gospel He testifies that those who are not with Him are His enemies, does not designate any special form of heresy, but declares that all heretics who are not with Him and do not gather with Him, scatter His flock and are His adversaries: He that is not with Me is against Me, and he that gathereth not with me scattereth."

The Church, founded on these principles and mindful of her office, has done nothing with greater zeal and endeavor than she has displayed in guarding the integrity of the faith. Hence she regarded as rebels and expelled from the ranks of her children all who held beliefs on any point of doctrine different from her own. The Arians, the Montanists, the Novatians, the Quartodecimans, the Eutychians, did not certainly reject all Catholic doctrine: they abandoned only a certain portion of it. Still, who does not know that they were declared heretics and banished from the bosom of the Church? In like manner were condemned all authors of heretical tenets who followed them in subsequent ages. "There can be nothing more dangerous than those heretics who admit nearly the whole cycle of doctrine, and yet by one word, as with a drop of poison, infect the real and simple faith taught by Our Lord and handed by apostolic tradition."

The practice of the Church has always been the same, as is shown by the unanimous teaching of the Fathers, who were wont to hold as outside Catholic communion, and alien to the Church, whoever would recede in the least degree from any point of doctrine proposed by her authoritative Magisterium.

Now, it is evident that we live in an epoch where the Magisterium of the Church, confronted by manifest errors, veritable heresies, scandalous moral deviations, no longer acts with the vigor and precision that we once knew. It suffices to be acquainted with the debates of the Synod [held at Rome in 1967] on the subject of the dangers that imperil faith in order to be convinced, regretfully, that a good number of pastors no longer want to condemn error or heresy. They explicitly said so. That is one of the undoubted causes for the impudence with which error is propagated even in and by the Catholic press. It is an attitude that is inexplicable and contrary, not only to the entire tradition of the Church, but even to simple common sense: to condemn error is to proclaim the truth that the error opposes, and it is especially to prevent it from spreading and causing souls to be lost.

It is also evident that it is the most elementary duty to protect the flock from the wolves that surround it, and to chase the hirelings who abandon the flock, according to the teachings of the Good Pastor par excellence. Let us keep the integrity of our faith in the dispositions of humility and submission to the divine authority that has transmitted it immutable to us across the ages down to our day. Let us not be seduced by the artifices of the rationalists, successors of the heresiarchs of every age. Let us attach ourselves to catechisms that are of unquestionable orthodoxy, that of the Council of Trent, of St. Pius X, and of Cardinal Gaspari. Let us shun novelties contrary to the tradition of the Church. Novitates devita, even St. Paul had reason to say.

Bossuet in his Discourse on Universal History (Part II, Ch. 30) says:

The heresiarchs have been able to dazzle men by their eloquence and an appearance of piety, to stir them by their passions, to engage them by their self-interest, to attract them by novelty, and by libertinage whether of the mind or even of the senses; in a word, they were able to deceive themselves or to deceive others, for nothing is more human than to err; but besides that they could not even boast of working a public miracle, nor reduce their religion to positive facts of which their followers were witnesses, there has always been one unfortunate fact for them, which they have never been able to hide, and that is their novelty.