It is not gracious to speak ill of the dead. "De mortuis nil nisi bonum," said the Latins. But where the Faith is at stake, and where a man, apparently until his death, took a stand on the Faith which can gravely mislead the faithful, it is not exactly speaking ill of him to remind the faithful of his mistake. If his soul is now in Purgatory or Heaven, he cannot mind the faithful being told the truth on the occasion of his death. Certainly I will not mind if over my grave a wiser man than I re-directs souls towards the Truth. Therefore Dom Gérard's peace should hardly be disturbed if, in a Society of St. Pius X publication like The Angelus, we go back on why he and Archbishop Lefebvre parted company in 1988 on the occasion of the episcopal consecrations. With those consecrations Dom Gérard frankly disagreed, and a few weeks later he came to a separate agreement of his own with Rome. On at least one occasion soon afterwards the Archbishop was observed to be weeping over Dom Gérard's decision.

They were not sentimental tears. Up till that point Dom Gérard's monastery had been a power-house of Traditional resistance to the Conciliar Revolution. How much stronger that resistance would have been if Dom Gérard had not defected! But from that point on his monastery slowly turned into a defender of that Revolution. One thinks, for instance, of the huge several-volume defence of Vatican II's deadly doctrine on Religious Liberty, published several years ago by a monk of Le Barroux.

In fact Dom Gérard had already in 1984 sought to come to an agreement with Conciliar Rome, but he was persuaded to back off, perhaps, amongst other things, by words written to him at that time by the Archbishop: "Beware of Roman snakes!" However Dom Gérard believed that Cardinal (then) Ratzinger was a man one could deal with, so he cut his own deal, and most of his monks slid into the embrace of Conciliar Rome, where they have remained ever since...

How had it happened? A priest friend of the SSPX and former monk of Dom Gérard, who knew him well, has an interesting and convincing explanation. Here is the heart of it:

As Archbishop Lefebvre pointed out, when Dom Gérard quit his monastery in Tournay, which was turning Conciliar, in order to found the Traditional monastery of St. Mary Magdalene, his motivation was mainly to maintain monastic and liturgical tradition. He did not sufficiently grasp the most important theological aspects of the crisis of the Church.

In addition, his intuitive rather than scholastic way of thinking was liable to make him change position suddenly in a way that betrayed his lack of a thorough doctrinal formation. In fact Dom Gérard had never received, or else never assimilated, a formation of the kind called for by Pius X in his encyclical Pascendi. St. Thomas Aquinas and scholastic thinking were far from occupying their due place in Dom Gérard's formation. (End of our friend's quote)

As a French priest used to say who collaborated closely with the Archbishop at the time of the Council, "One may not care for the rigors of Catholic doctrine, but in the Catholic Church very little can be achieved without it." Many a seminarian will testify to how arduous the study of St. Thomas can be, but the ruins of the Catholic Church all around us testify to the wisdom of St. Pius X's insistence in Pascendi on the study of St. Thomas Aquinas as the very first remedy to the mental sickness of modernism.

Soon after Dom Gérard decided to go over to Conciliar Rome, Archbishop Lefebvre wrote:

The consequences are from now on unavoidable. The SSPX will have no further relations with Le Barroux, and we will be warning all our faithful to give no more support to a Congregation which is henceforth in the hands of our enemies, the enemies of Our Lord and His Universal Kingship.

Strong clear words. May Dom Gérard have understood their truth before he died, so that now his soul may be resting in peace.