May 2010 Print

PART 5

Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre

The Faith Is the Foundation of Legality in the Church

In this spiritual conference given to the seminarians of Ecône on February 27, 1976, Archbishop Lefebvre once again explains why the Society cannot be taxed with disobedience for its attitude. Obedience to laws is subordinate to the transmission of the Faith.–Fr. Gleize

 

This shall be a bit of a repeat of what I already told you on September 14, but I think that there are still some who are a bit worried. I do understand them, and I am the first to be concerned about these things: the legality of ordinations, the legality of incardinations, the legality of our situation. We ought to be ready, I think, to accept living in a state of illegality so as to live truly the life of the Church. For legality as it is being employed currently in regard to our situation, such as it is being used quite often even in the Church, no longer exists when it comes to the people who are destroying the Church. For them, legality is not applied, and they are left completely free to do as they like. At that point, there is no longer any law; there is no longer any authority for them; they are given complete freedom.

As for those who would like to keep the life of the Church, to keep the works of the Church, to keep the Church’s priesthood, the Mass and the sacraments–they have the right to have the law applied to them in a wholly unjust, illegal manner. Consequently, what matters in a situation like the one in which we find ourselves is for us to seek in earnest the purpose for which these laws have been made. What is the purpose for which canon law was made? Canon law was made for preserving the Faith and for the application of the Faith for the sake of our sanctification and the life of perfection. That’s why. But now the laws are being used, on the contrary, to hinder and, as it were, to prevent us from keeping the faith; to prevent us from observing the laws of sanctification.

For example, let us take the destruction of the liturgy: it is clear that it makes people lose their faith and that it does not help them at all in their sanctification; far from it. So must we say: “Well, well, the superiors are ordering it, and so we must submit”? Should we say, as have some progressivist priests who have written me: “As for me, in a choice between the Pope and Archbishop Lefebvre, I choose the Pope”? I told them: “Of course, choose the Pope, agreed. I also choose the Pope, but that is not what is at stake; that is not the question. The question is whether we choose 20 centuries of the Church, 20 centuries of Tradition, 20 centuries of faith, or 15 years of the Church’s self-destruction.”

That is the problem. It is not Archbishop Lefebvre and the Pope; it is 20 centuries of the Church’s Tradition and now the Church’s self-destruction–the Pope himself says so; I am not making it up. So it is a matter of knowing whether we really want to join this current and lend a hand to those who are in the process of destroying the Church, or whether we say no to those who want to oblige us to do so by force of law and the compulsion of obedience.

“You are going to obey; you must obey.” So, they say it is the Pope, the bishops, the cardinals; it’s Rome. “You have to obey; you have to join the movement demolishing the Church.”

So we say: “No, that is impossible; it goes against all the laws of the Church. All the laws of the Church exist for the Church’s edification, not its destruction. You want to make us join in the demolition–contribute to the demolition of the Church. We refuse. We want no part of it; we want to continue building up the Church as the Church has always done.”

But then, you are going to find yourselves outlaws. They may apply penalties to you–perhaps suspension, perhaps excommunication, or what have you. It is very serious; you see the kind of situation in which you are going to find yourselves. You are going to find yourselves in the situation of people who are unjustly persecuted–there’s no getting around it. While we desire to keep the faith, we do not want to become Protestants. People tell us: you must become Protestant, you must be ecumenical, you must join in this movement. Well, no; because by this movement we lose the faith and we become Protestants. We do not want to lose the faith, and we do not want to become Protestants.

We have adopted a line of conduct that is the Church’s: to uphold what the Church has done for 20 centuries. Canon law was the result of what was asked by St. Pius X, and this body of laws is the result of 20 centuries of customs, traditions, Church laws, and the faith of the Church–all of that is in canon law. So suddenly now, I do not know what is going to emerge with the new Code of Canon Law, what laws they will give us. If it is to say that all the religions have the same rights, then we are not in agreement. That is not possible.

Today, it seems that everything has changed, everything is new; the provisions concerning all the religions–Freemasons, Protestants, Muslims, Buddhists–all of that has changed; now we are all brothers. These are serious illusions, and that is why we cannot enter into this sort of indifferentism nor fail to put our Lord before all as King of society, King of individuals, and King of families. We have only one God, our Lord Jesus Christ, in whom dwell the Father and the Holy Spirit. And so there is no question of our changing. Obviously, we find ourselves at loggerheads with those currently occupying the Church and who wish, once again, to make use of these laws contrary to the reason for which the laws were made.

“But, after all, it is pride for you to resist the Church like that; you are the only ones to step outside the mainstream of the Church!”

We are not the only ones; we are with Tradition; we are with 20 centuries of Tradition. That is not pride. Is it pride to say that the Catholic religion is the only true religion? Then evidently truth is synonymous with pride. Then God is proud because God is truth. There is no truth outside of God. When our Lord said “I am the Truth, I am the Way and the Life,” He committed an act of pride! Yes, that is what they are telling us, after all is said and done.

We are saying nothing else. We are saying that we believe in the truth and in the one true Catholic Church, the only way of salvation. That is what our Lord said; that is what the Apostles taught us, and what the Church has always taught. We are not prideful. By proclaiming [these truths], on the contrary, it is we who are practicing charity, it is we who are charitable, it is we who are the true missionaries. Because it is deceiving people to tell them the opposite. It is deceiving people to make them think that one can be saved in any religion; it is deceiving them; consequently, it is to lack charity; it is to leave them in the way that leads to hell.

You shouldn’t have any qualms about this, I think. You should think it over and rely upon this constant Tradition in which one cannot be deceived. Or else the Church is wrong, and the Church is no longer infallible.

“But the pope is infallible today as he was yesterday.” I concede that the pope is infallible when the pope really declares that he is saying things in such wise as to make a definition. But the Pope, on the contrary, has been careful almost every time to say that he did not intend to define; he said it in several documents: I do not want to exercise my infallibility.

And then, what is the pope’s infallibility? Why does the infallibility of the pope exist? Why did our Lord give him this infallibility? To confirm his brethren in the faith. That is the very purpose of infallibility. Therefore it is impossible for the pope to use his infallibility in order not to confirm his brethren in the faith, in order not to confirm us in the faith, the faith of 20 centuries–to which we are attached above all else, you see.

What is the criterion of infallibility, for example, in the ordinary magisterium? If there is an act of the extraordinary magisterium, and the pope speaks ex cathedra, it is clear; he acts in a way that is absolutely infallible; he declares it: he canonizes someone, for example. It is clear. He proclaims a dogma like that of the Assumption, for example: It’s clear; it is ex cathedra. But there is also an ordinary magisterium; you must believe in the ordinary magisterium. And just what is the criterion of the pope’s infallibility for the ordinary magisterium? It is that he confirms a truth of faith that has also been proclaimed by all his predecessors. That is it. He repeats; he says, “Such a pope, such a pope, such a pope, said this, and I confirm what the popes have said and what 20 or 30 popes have said; I confirm, etc.” Then he is infallible; that is the criterion of infallibility. But if he does not confirm what has come before, what the faith of old proclaimed, the faith of all time, then he does not exercise his infallibility, what he says is not the object of infallibility.

 

(To be continued.)

Fr. Gleize is a professor of ecclesiology at the seminary of the SSPX in Ecône and now a member of the commission involved in the doctrinal discussions with the Holy See. In 2006, he compiled and organized Archbishop Lefebvre’s thinking about Vatican II. It was published by the Institute of St. Pius X, the university run by the SSPX in Paris, France. Although slightly edited, the spoken style has been preserved.

IOTA UNUM

41. Rejection of the council preparations. The breaking of the council rules.

As we have said, a distinctive feature of Vatican II is its paradoxical outcome, by which all the preparatory work that usually directs the debates, marks the outlook and foreshadows the results of a council, was nullified and rejected from the first session onward, as successive spirits and tendencies followed one upon another. This departure from the original plan did not happen as a result of a decision made by the council itself, operating within its duly established rules, but by an act breaking the council’s legal framework, which although not prominent in accounts given of these events, is now certain in its main outlines.

When the schema on the sources of revelation which the preparatory commission had drawn up came under discussion at the thirty-third session, the doctrine it propounded aroused a lively difference of opinion, although it had already been sifted by numerous meetings of bishops and experts. Those Fathers who were more attached to the Tridentine formula stating that revelation is contained in libris scriptis et sine scripto traditionibus, (“In written books and in unwritten traditions.” Session IV of the Council of Trent.) taken as two sources, found themselves at odds with those who were keen to reaffirm Catholic doctrine in terms less unpalatable to those separated brethren who reject tradition. The very lively disagreement between the two groups led to a proposal on 21 November that discussion should be discontinued and the schema entirely redrafted. (One must admit that the official account given in the O.R. has a comical flavor to it: “all the Fathers recognize the schema has been studied with the greatest care, being the fruit of the work of theologians and bishops from a great variety of nations.” How then could it be decided that it was unfit to be advanced?) When the votes had been collected, it was discovered that the move to suspend discussion did not have the two-thirds majority that the council’s rules required on all procedural questions. The secretary general therefore reported that: “The results of the voting mean that the examination of individual chapters of the schema under discussion will be continued in the coming days.” However, at the opening of the 34th session on the following day, it was announced in four languages as well as Latin that, in view of the prolonged and laborious debate which might be expected, the Holy Father had decided to have the schema recast by a new commission, in order to shorten it and to make the general principles defined by Trent and Vatican I stand out better.

This intervention, which at one blow reversed the council’s decision and departed from the regulations governing the gathering, certainly constituted a breaking of the legal framework and a move from a collegial to a monarchical method of proceeding. I do not go so far as to say this breaking of procedure marked the beginning of a new doctrine, but it did signify the beginning of a new doctrinal orientation. The behind the scenes activity which led to this sudden change in papal policy is today public knowledge, but it is considerably less important than the exercise of power superimposing itself on the due legal structure of the council. The result of the vote could have been challenged by the Pope if there had been a fault in procedure, or if a change in the rules had been introduced, as in fact happened under Paul VI, who decreed a simple majority would do. In the circumstances in which it happened, however, this intervention constituted a classic case of a Pope imposing his authority on a council, and is all the more remarkable in that the Pope was at that time portrayed as a protector of the council’s freedom. The exercise of authority was not, however, something the Pope did on his own initiative, but the result of complaints and demands by those who treated the two-thirds majority required by the council rules as a “legal fiction” and ignored it in order to get the Pope to accept the rule of a bare majority.–Romano Amerio, Iota Unum, pp.82-83. [Available from Angelus Press. Price: $23.95]