July 2001 Print

Letter of Archbishop Lefebvre on the subject of authority,
starting with that in the family.
Written in Rome, February 5, 1968.

 

"The Church is hierarchical, and not democratic in the sense that the community takes priority in faith and authority over those whom the Holy Spirit has placed at the head of His Church" (Our Holy Father Pope Paul VI, February 2, 968).

The biggest surprise in the current weeklies is without doubt a letter which appears in Rivarol signed by Msgr. Marcel Lefebvre, Superior General of the Holy Ghost Fathers in Rome, and addressed to a contributor to the paper who had written an article denouncing "the current situation in the Church."

That is how the editor responsible for reviewing the weekly press in Le Monde began his article in the edition of January 14-15. I must say I am surprised by his surprise. For what was said in this letter—from which he quotes the following extract—what could cause him such surprise?

You may imagine that I am as appalled as you, if not more so, by the advance of evil in the Church. The forces of Satan are powerful. Communism has cause to rejoice. Your article is perfectly accurate. If the situation has not yet in fact reached the stage you describe, the spirit of democratization is there, and you have put your finger on the problem.

These principles are demolishing the Church from within, for her divine constitution is wholly based on divine authority and the authority of divinely mandated persons. To introduce democracy into that constitution is to provoke internal dialectic, a worm that eats it away. Already we are seeing conflict everywhere, in parishes, dioceses, religious concretions—nothing is exempt. It is a galloping virus!

Has not the Holy Father time and again put us on our guard against a false interpretation of certain statements by the Council concerning the dignity of the human person, an interpretation which would lead to the rejection of authority and contempt for obedience? The most recent of these admonitions came only a few days ago. Receiving representatives of various ecclesiastical bodies whet had come to offer him blessed candles for Candlemas, the Pope exalted the virtue of obedience, and spoke the words which head this letter.

The facts which demonstrate the consequences of these false interpretations of the Council are, alas, so numerous that they amply justify, the Holy Father's fears. Are we not daily distressed by the open rebellion of certain Catholic Action groups against their bishops, of seminarians against their superiors, of priests and religious of both sexes who display an attitude of contempt towards authority, and make its exercise impossible?

Human dignity, the exaltation of the individual conscience to become the supreme rule of morality, and personal charismas are used as pretexts for reducing authority to a mere principle of unity with no real power. How can one not compare this ferment, this prelude to rebellion, with the free-thinking which has been at the root of the great calamities of recent centuries.

It seems to me more opportune than ever to re-establish the true concept of authority, and, to that end, to demonstrate its benefits, willed by Providence, for the two natural societies which exist by divine right, and which have a fundamental influence on every person on earth: the family and civil society.

The Nature of Authority

It is good to recall that authority is the formal cause of society. It therefore belongs to its nature to direct and guide all that is conducive to the end of society, that is the good common to all its members. Since the members of a society are intelligent beings, authority will guide them towards their common end with directives and laws, will see to it that these are applied, and will sanction those who oppose them.

The person holding authority may be chosen in different ways, but the power that person holds, that is to say, the power to direct other human beings, can only be a sharing in the authority of God. Societies being many, the rules concerning the exercise of authority may be very diverse, but that will never prevent the authority itself being of divine origin. "There is no power but from God" (St. Paul to the Romans, 13:1). "Thou shouldst not have any power against me, unless it were given thee from above" (Jn. 19:11). Jolivet, in his philosophical treatise (Vol. IV, 384) describes to us the first source of authority thus:

"God alone has an absolute right to command, because such a right, which consists in obliging the will can only belong to the giver of being and life. Thus we said that God is the 'Living Law,' because He is the first principle of all that is. It follows that all authority, in whatever society, can only be exercised in virtue of a delegation by God. Every leader invested with a legitimate power is the representative of God."

Authority having as its aim the common good of the members, and the members desiring this good of their own volition, there should never be any conflict between authority and the members, who seek to achieve the same goal. There should not in principle be any opposition between the leader and the subject, between authority and freedom.

It is when authority no longer seeks the true common good, or the subject puts his personal good before the true common good, that there come about clashes and dissensions. Unless there is evidence to the contrary, a legitimate and prudent authority is the judge of the common good, and the members must submit a priori to its judgments. To set personal judgment above that of legitimate authority is to destroy society. To submit to the directives of legitimate authority is to exercise the virtue of obedience, of which Our Lord gave us a moving example being obedient even to the sacrifice of His own life, obediens usque ad mortem.

In his letter Notre Charge Apostolique of August 25, 1910, St. Pius X writes:

"Does not every society made up of independent and unequal creatures need an authority to direct their activity towards the common good and to impose its law? Is it in any way reasonable to say that authority and liberty are incompatible unless one is badly mistaken on the concept of liberty? Can one teach that obedience is contrary to the dignity of the human person, and that the ideal would be to replace it by 'consented-to authority?' Did not the Apostle Paul have in mind human society in all its possible forms when he commanded the faithful to be subject to all authority? Is the religious state, founded on obedience, contrary to the ideal of human nature? Were the saints, the most obedient of men, slaves and degenerates?

The Benefits of Authority in the Society of the Family

If there is one period in a human life during which authority plays a major role, it is that which lasts from birth to the age of majority. The family is a wonderful divine institution in the bosom of which man receives his existence, but an existence so limited that he will need a long period of education, given in the first place by his parents, then by those who collaborate with them.

The child receives everything from his father and mother: physical, intellectual, and religious nourishment, and moral and social education. The parents enlist the help of teachers who, in the mind of the child, share in the parents' authority. The knowledge which the child acquires will be learned, received, and accepted much more than acquired by intelligence on the evidence of judgment and reasoning. The young student believes in his parents, in his teachers, in his books, and thus his knowledge extends and multiplies with a perfectly legitimate certainty. His knowledge properly so called, the knowledge which realizes what he knows, is very limited. It one thinks about children as a whole, about the young of humanity past and present, one notices that the transmission of knowledge depends much more on the authority doing the transmitting than on the personal evidence of acquired knowledge.

Certainly, when they come to higher studies young people acquire more personal knowledge, and strive to know the disciplines studied in the way their teachers themselves know them, but does the sheer quantity of knowledge required today permit the student to go all the way with proofs and experimentation? Besides, sciences like history, geography, archeology, and the arts must, in truth, depend on faith in teachers and books. When it comes to religious knowledge, to the practice of religion and of a morality conformable with religion, to traditions and customs, then this is even more true than for other fields of knowledge! Generally speaking people live according to the religion they have received from their parents, especially if it is a revealed religion, based on authority. The break with ancestral religion is a huge obstacle to conversion to another one. A human being remains always sensitive to the call of the religion in which he was raised.

This education, bearing the stamp of the family and of all the teachers who complete what was received in the family, has a very strong influence on a person's life. Nothing so endures in an individual as his family traditions. This is true all over the world.

This extraordinary influence of the family and of the educational milieu is providential: it is the will of God. It is normal that children should keep to the religion of their parents, just as it is normal that if the head of the family converts, then the whole family converts. The Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles give frequent examples of this.

God has willed that His benefits should be transmitted to men in the first place by the family. That is why he has granted the father of the family that great authority, which confers on him an immense power over the family group, his wife and children. The greater the goods to be transmitted, the greater the authority. A child is born so weak, so imperfect, one might say so incomplete, that the absolute necessity of the permanence and indissolubility of the home is obvious.

Seeking to exalt the personality and the personal conscience of the child to the detriment of the family's authority makes for unhappy children, and pushes them to rebellion and contempt of their parents, whereas long life is promised to those who honor father and mother. It is true that St. Paul asks fathers not to provoke their sons to anger, but, he adds, "bring them up in the discipline and correction of the Lord" (Eph. 6:4).

It is to stray from the path laid down by God to claim that only truth arrived at by a man's own strength, and according to his own lights can show him the true religion. In fact, God has envisaged the transmission of religion by parents and by witnesses worthy of the trust of their hearers. If we had to wait to understand religious truth before believing and being converted there would be precious few Christians today. We believe in religious truths because those who bear witness to them are trustworthy due to their holiness, their detachment, their charity. One believes in the true religion because it fulfils the deepest desires of an upright human soul, especially in giving it a heavenly Mother, Mary, a visible Father, the Pope, and divine nourishment, the Eucharist. Our Lord did not ask those He converted whether they understood, but whether they believed. Then, as St. Augustine says, living faith brings understanding.

It is obvious, in the case of the family unit envisaged by God's love for the first period of every human life, that the benefits of authority are immense, indispensable, and the surest way to a complete education in preparation for adult life in society and in the Church. It goes without saying that we are not forgetting the considerable assistance which the family receives from the Church, assistance which is indispensable for the Christian life and for human perfection.

The time comes, however, when the family steps aside and lets two other societies, Civil Society and the Church, take over, for it is evident that even the educated human being is incapable of pursuing his vocation without the aid of one or the other.

(To be continued)