October 2006 Print

Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais

Archbishop Lefebvre always linked the priesthood to the social reign of our Lord Jesus Christ: the one is the source of the other, the latter flows spontaneously from the former.

At the French Seminary in Rome

At the seminary on the Via Santa Chiara, where he was trained as a priest from 1923-29, Fr. Lefebvre learned from Fr. Henri Le Floch, the rector of the house, not to separate what must be united: the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ and His kingship, the doctrine of the priest and his piety, and also the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and the social reign of our Lord Jesus Christ. This teaching is that of the Popes in their encyclicals: Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius XI, and Pius XII are the masters, together with Cardinal Pie, the journalist Louis Veuillot, etc.

"Fr. Le Floch," Archbishop Lefebvre would tell us, "made us enter and live the history of the Church and the fight against the perverse forces arrayed against our Lord. That mobilized us against this fatal liberalism, against the Revolution and the powers of evil at work to overthrow the Church, the reign of our Lord, the Catholic States, and the whole edifice of Christendom." This combat confronted each seminarian with a personal choice: "We had to choose: either leave the seminary if we did not agree, and some did leave, or else engage in the fight and march."

But to enter into the fray means to bind oneself for life: "I think that our entire sacerdotal and episcopal life has been oriented by the fight against liberalism."
But where does the priesthood fit in this essentially political combat?

At the French Seminary, readings to the seminarians made them contemplate with Belgian historian Godefroid Kurth [author of The Origins of Modern Civilization] "the Mystical Body of Christ transforming the pagan society of the Roman Empire and preparing the upward movement of recognition for the program of our Lord Jesus Christ, Priest and King." They helped them understand, with Fr. Deschamps, S.J., in his Secret Societies and Society, that "the revolutions were bringing about the elimination of the rule of Christ the King in view of ultimately eliminating the Mass and the supernatural life of Christ, the Supreme High Priest."[1]

The De Ecclesia of Fr. (later Cardinal) Billot, S.J., made them "grasp the meaning of the Kingship of Christ and see the horror of liberalism." At the school of Cardinal Pie, they learned

the understanding of the full meaning of "Thy Kingdom come" in the Our Father. Our Lord's Kingdom is meant to come, not only in individual souls and in heaven, but on earth through the submission of states and nations to His rule....The dethronement of God on earth is a crime, to which we must never become resigned. Let us never cease to protest against it.[2]

What's more (according to Fr. Fahey, who was a seminarian in Rome at the same seminary 12 years before Marcel Lefebvre, under the direction of the same Fr. Le Floch), "The Syllabus of Errors of Pope Pius IX and the encyclicals of the last four popes [Gregory XVI, Pius IX, Leo XIII, and St. Pius X] have been main subjects of my meditations on the Kingship of Christ and its relation to His priesthood."[3]

What a surprising subject of meditation for a young seminarian: allying the most elevated piety with the submission of the temporal city to Christ. For Marcel Lefebvre's masters, there was no break between individual life and political action taken in its largest sense. So-called Catholic liberalism effects the separation of what must remain united.

It was also at the French Seminary at Rome that Fr. Marc Voegtli, C.S.Sp., a professor at Santa Chiara, commented on Pope Pius XI's 1925 encyclical Quas Primas on the social kingship of Christ. For his young, enthusiastic audience, he set out the political program of the Catholic Church, which is the inverse of the liberal plan: 1) the Mass; 2) then life in the state of grace; 3) finally, the recrowning of our Lord Jesus Christ. The testimonials of Fr. Voegtli's students, like Fr. Roger Johan (a future bishop) and Fr. Victor Alain Berto, were unanimous:

His teaching was simple, he spoke only of our Lord Jesus Christ the King....He taught the integrity of the priesthood, the priesthood taken to its logical conclusion: the sacrifice of the priest [note the idea] for the reign of our Lord Jesus Christ. Everything was judged in that light. "My dear friends," the Father would say, "I beg you to love our Lord Jesus Christ," or "My dear friends, you must preach our Lord Jesus Christ with all your heart!" A collective testimony signed by twelve seminarians...declares: "Through him we learned to see our Lord Jesus Christ, the King, as the center of everything, the answer to all questions, our food, our thought, our life, everything....That is what he wanted to impress upon us: that will remain!"4

That remained! especially the indelible memory Marcel Lefebvre kept of Fr. Voegtli's conferences. By now you might be inclined to tell me: "Get on with his action at the Council and afterwards!" Yes, but it is necessary to understand the motive of his action.

The Motive of Archbishop Lefebvre's Combat for Christ the King: An Oath

Fifty years later, one of his rare faithful disciples, Marcel Lefebvre, also bore witness to the indelible impression produced by [Fr. Voegtli]'s "talks, which were very simple, taking the words of Scripture, showing who our Lord Jesus Christ was....That remained with us for life!" It even became the subject of the seminarian's meditation: "We shall never have sufficiently meditated on, or sought or understood, what Our Lord Jesus Christ is...He should rule our thinking. He makes us holy. He is also our Creator since nothing whatsoever was made without the Word, and therefore without Our Lord Jesus Christ who is the Word. So we must only think about and contemplate Our Lord Jesus Christ. And that transforms one's life!"[5]

What a remarkable statement! For Marcel Lefebvre, believing in the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ and consequently in his right to rule alone meant involving himself personally in the fight. And that is what he did, as did many of his colleagues from the seminary at Rome, at the confession of St. Peter, interiorly making an "oath of Romanitas" both doctrinal and militant. Fr. Berto's statement[6] allows the inference that such an oath was the normal thing to do and went without saying. The young clerics bound themselves to "always be on crusade."[7]

He did not know when or where, or in what troubled or tragic circumstances in the Church he might have to enter the fray and himself write a page of this Church history that had been taught to him from the angle of Christ's right to reign, but he knew that sooner or later he would have to leap into the fight. The Second Vatican Council proved to be the providential moment for Archbishop Lefebvre, the moment at which he felt impelled to intervene, remaining faithful to the Roman seminarian's oath of long ago.

Herald of Christ the King

At the Council, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre was to become, in the name of Christ the King, the head of the resistance against the false notion of religious liberty. After the presentation of the two rival schemata of Cardinals Ottaviani and Bea during the last meeting of the Central Preparatory Commission in June 1962, he said, referring to Cardinal Bea's schema:

On Religious Liberty: non placet [I vote no]...since it is based on false principles solemnly condemned by the sovereign pontiffs, for example Pius IX, who calls this error "delirium" (Denzinger 1690)....The schema on religious liberty does not preach Christ and therefore seems false.

Referring to Cardinal Ottaviani's Catholic schema, he said:

On the Church: placet. However, the exposition of the fundamental principles could be done with more reference to Christ the King as in the encyclical Quas Primas....Our Council could have as its aim to preach Christ to all men, and to state that it belongs to the Catholic Church alone to be the true preacher of Christ, who is the salvation and life of individuals, families, professional associations, and of other civil bodies.

...The Theological Commission's schema expounds the authentic doctrine but does so like a thesis; it does not sufficiently show the aim of this doctrine which is nothing other than the reign of Christ....From the point of view of Christ as source of salvation and life, all the fundamental truths could be expounded as they say "pastorally," and in this way the errors of secularism, naturalism, and materialism, etc., would be excluded.[8]

He continued to affirm the same thing after the Council, and would tell Cardinal Ratzinger on July 14, 1987:

You are working to dechristianize society and the Church, and we are working to Christianize them. For us, our Lord Jesus Christ is everything, He is our life. The Church is our Lord Jesus Christ; the priest is another Christ; the Mass is the triumph of Jesus Christ on the cross; in our seminaries everything tends towards the reign of our Lord Jesus Christ. But you! You are doing the opposite: you have just wanted to prove to me that our Lord Jesus Christ cannot, and must not, reign over society.[9]

Conclusion

For Archbishop Lefebvre, the social reign of Christ the King is the consequence of Christ's divinity. That is what Dom Columba Marmion, a spiritual author particularly appreciated by the Archbishop, wrote:

Christianity is nothing else than the acceptation in all its far-reaching, doctrinal and practical consequences of the Divinity of Christ in the Incarnation. The reign of Christ–holiness, through Him–is established in us in the measure of the purity, intensity and fulness of our faith in Jesus Christ.[10]

It is indeed the purity, the intensity, and the fullness of the Christian faith that was lacking at Rome in 1987, as it still is in 2005!

Let us read from another page of Dom Marmion:

Faith is the primary disposition of one who would follow Christ; it must be the first attitude of the soul in presence of the Incarnate Word. Christianity is nought else than the acceptation, by faith–a practical faith–of the Incarnation with all its consequences; the Christian life is but the constant putting into practice of this act of faith made to Jesus....If you accept the Divinity of Jesus Christ, you must, in consequence, accept His will, His words, His institutions, the Church, the Sacraments, the reality of His Mystical Body.[11]

And we would add: You must also accept His priesthood, His kingship, His reign over all things, even temporal, over civil societies, their institutions and States. That is what it means to have a practical faith. It is this practical faith that is lacking in Rome.

Moreover, the Catholic faith, the practical faith, necessarily leads to the fight for the social reign of Christ: not merely a battle of ideas, a Platonic fight, but a fight that requires the participants to engage themselves in order to obtain practical results:

If someone has the faith, faith in the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ, then he wants Him to reign, to repel error. He cannot accept that the same rights should be accorded to Luther, Buddha, or Mohammed as to our Lord Jesus Christ.[12]

At Rome, they have kept a purely theoretical faith in the divinity of our Lord, but in fact, they no longer have the faith. They have lost the faith, because their faith finds no application in their politics. In place of Jesus Christ's right to reign, the right of His Divine Person in which His Sacred Humanity subsists and which thus has a right to absolute and universal dominion, they have substituted the rights of the human person, the rights of an abstract and unreal person jealous of his liberty, his independence, and his conscience, whatever his mode of life might be.

As for us, we keep the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ! And we shall work for His kingship on earth.

This talk was given at a conference on "Christ the King versus the Secular Apostasy," held on December 10, 2005, in Paris. It was organized by the SSPX's St. Pius X Institute in honor of Archbishop Lefebvre's centenary. The transcript was reviewed and approved by Bishop Tissier de Mallerais.

1 Fr. Denis Fahey, C.S.Sp., Apologia pro Vita Sua, reprinted in The Angelus, January 2001, p. 5.
2 Ibid., p. 6.
3 Ibid.
4 Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, Marcel Lefebvre (Kansas City: Angelus Press, 2002), p. 44.
5 Ibid.
6 Abbé Berto, Notre-Dame de joie (NEL, 1974), p. 300.
7 Archbishop Lefebvre, La Petite histoire de ma longue histoire (1999), p. 28.
8 Marcel Lefebvre (Kansas City: Angelus Press, 2004), p. 285.
9 Ibid., p. 549.
10 Dom Marmion, Christ, the Life of the Soul (St. Louis: R. Herder Book Co., 1925), p. 141.
11 Dom Marmion, Christ, the Ideal of the Monk (1926; reprint: Roger A. McCaffrey Publishing, n.d.), p. 88.
12 Archbishop Lefebvre, Spiritual conference at Econe, c. 1973.