The Defense of Tradition
The Holy Mass, Heart of the Church
This is an edited transcript of a lecture given on October 16 at the SSPX’s 40th Anniversary Conference in Kansas City.
Archbishop Lefebvre did what he did for the salvation of souls and for the glory of God. It is not for purposes of self-congratulation that we are here: we do not need that. Rather, we gather here to make sure that the original flame, so fantastically ignited by Archbishop Lefebvre in response to the Revolution in the Church, is still burning for the faithful and the world to see. We are spending time here in order to remember what we are all about and to recall the unique and all-encompassing mission given to us by our founder, Marcel Lefebvre.
Allow me to unfold for you, in six sections, the role the Archbishop played as the Guardian Angel of the Catholic Sanctuary. After considering 1) the two main pillars of the Church (the priesthood and the Mass), we shall bring up the main protagonists of the recent drama in the Church: 2) the dream of the Archbishop, 3) the modernist attacks against the sanctuary. Against the evils of the New Mass, we shall have a look at 4) the instant reaction around the Ottaviani Intervention, and then at 5) the Army of the Reconquista, to finish with 6) the actual reconquest of the Sanctuary by the forces of Tradition.
The Two Pillars of the Church
When Jesus Christ came to earth, He instituted the Church to pursue His work of Redemption. The Church is defined by our catechism as “the congregation of all baptized persons who share the same faith, the same sacraments under the authority of the hierarchy, particularly the pope and the bishops.” Christ established His Church as a hierarchy to teach, govern, and sanctify. Hierarchy means a government of sacred men, of “sacerdotes,” i.e., of priests. Without priests, the Catholic Church is doomed to utter extinction. That is the way Christ set it up to remain forever and, as long as the priesthood retains its identity, we know that Our Lord’s promise will hold true, that the sacrifice will stand, which is an action essential to all religions whereby man renders all honor to God his Creator.
Bishop Tissier’s biography of our founder shows that, for him, the Mass was the essential work of the Church, indeed, the heart of the Church. The Mass is the renewal of the Sacrifice of the Cross, the source of the graces of all the other Sacraments. This is why the Church is organized around the Mass.
Yet these two elements, the priest and the Mass, are not separate entities. The two elements are so close that to speak of a “sacrificer” without a sacrifice would be to define a lumberjack without lumber, or a football player without a football. Bishop Fellay expressed this graphically when he said that “the priest without Mass, without sacrifice, is an eye without vision, an ear without hearing, feet unable to walk.”1 The Archbishop found in this relationship the mystery of priestly grandeur:
To my mind there are not two different kinds of priestly spirituality, there is only one: that of his Mass, that of the Sacrifice of Our Lord, because the priest is essentially the man of sacrifice….One cannot imagine sacrifice without a priest, and the priesthood without sacrifice.…So, we must go back to the idea of the Sacrifice. One can say that our sacrifice, the sacrifice which Our Lord has put into our hands, the sacrifice which Our Lord has left us, is a thing without limit, inexpressible, so divine and mysterious is that it surpasses everything we can imagine.2
For our founder, the priest lives out this sacrifice to build up the Mystical Body through preaching, baptism, and the other Sacraments. This sublime economy of salvation is described with the simple style but sublime pathos of a man of living faith in his jubilee sermon of 1979:
Certainly, I knew by the studies we had done what this great mystery of our Faith was, but I had not yet understood its entire value, efficacy and depth. This I learned day by day, year by year, in Africa, and particularly in Gabon, where I spent 13 years of my missionary life, first at the seminary and then in the bush among the Africans, with the natives. There I saw—yes, I saw—what the grace of the Holy Mass could do.
I was able to see these pagan villages become Christian, being transformed not only, I would say, spiritually and supernaturally, but also being transformed physically, socially, economically and politically. Because these people—pagans that they were—became cognizant of the necessity of fulfilling their duties, in spite of trials, in spite of the sacrifices of maintaining their commitments, particularly their commitment in marriage. Then the village began to be transformed little by little under the influence of grace, under the influence of the grace of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
It is necessary that we study somewhat the profound motive of this transformation: sacrifice. The notion of sacrifice is a profoundly Christian and a profoundly Catholic notion, There is the entire mystery of Christian civilization. There is that which is the root of Christian civilization: the comprehension of sacrifice in one’s life, in daily life, the understanding of Christian suffering, no longer considering suffering as an evil, as an unbearable sorrow, but sharing one’s sufferings and one’s sickness with the sufferings of Our Lord Jesus Christ, in looking upon His Cross, in assisting at the Holy Mass, which is the continuation of the Passion of Our Lord upon Calvary.
After hearing such words of faith, need we say anything more about the gifts of the priesthood and the Mass? Yet, in light of the onslaught against the Mass of all Time, it is interesting to hear how much we should cling to it when we see the hatred of the enemy of the Church towards it. Luther, who spoke even as some saints have not spoken, said: “Tolle missam, tolle Ecclesiam—Take away the Mass, take away the Church.” Here, Luther, who had ceased to believe in the Church, shows however his faith in the power of the Mass.
If you minimize the effect of the Mass, you compromise the cause. To eliminate the Mass and the priesthood, one eliminates a society. Culture comes from the cult; without a true cult, there is no true culture.
A Man with a Vision and a Mission
It is now time to turn to the people involved in the drama that surrounded the Catholic altar in the 20th century. Providence had prepared Archbishop Lefebvre for the role he played. Indeed, as a missionary, he was able to see firsthand the fruit of the spirit of sacrifice and of the Mass. His degrees in philosophy and theology allowed him to defend the Faith forcefully and authoritatively. He was made a teacher and later superior of the seminary in Gabon, before directing another house of formation in France. Yet, Divine Providence wanted him invested with the fullness of the priesthood, not to be a simple bishop in an out-of-the-way diocese, but also the overseer of over 60 bishops. This position as apostolic Delegate of French-speaking Africa allowed him to open the doors of the Roman Curia, to become familiar with the intricacies of Roman diplomacy and to confer intimately with the famous names of Rome, especially Pope Pius XII, who said of him: “He is the most efficacious and most qualified of all my apostolic delegates.” The Archbishop also attended the preparatory meetings before the Council as well as the four council sessions, during which he organized the resistance to the modernist tide, which gave him worldwide contacts of friends and support. This internationalism, unlike that of his friend Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer, was accrued when, nominated superior of the largest missionary order, he had to travel the world over and learn English. Finally, having been virtually cast out of his charge of Superior General, he was thus available when the grace of God, under the guise of bewildered seminarians, knocked at his door asking him to save their vocations and give them a traditional formation. Few bishops were more prepared for such an endeavor as this man in his sixties living in retirement in Rome.
Modernist Attacks against the Mass
This man with a mission would soon be needed to act. Already in the late 1930’s, the future Pope Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli, said this:
I am worried by the Blessed Virgin’s messages to little Lucia of Fatima. This persistence of Mary about the danger which menaces the Church is a divine warning against the suicide of altering the Faith, in its liturgy, its theology, and its soul. I hear around me reformers who want to dismantle the Holy Sanctuary, destroy the universal flame of the Church, to discard all her adornments, and smite her with remorse for her historic past. Well, my dear friend, I am convinced that the Church of Peter must assume responsibility for her past, or she will be digging her own grave.3
Pacelli’s fears were not in vain. Not ten years would pass after his grave was sealed when his fears became reality. What had been cursed by Pius XII was now blessed and what he had blessed was being cursed by the Church hierarchy.
First, the Church’s definition had been left in the cold and the ecumenical and democratic winds of the modern age left their mark on the Institution of Jesus Christ. To a new definition of the Church there had to correspond a revision of the priesthood. Oddly enough, little was said about the priesthood at Vatican II, but by 1971, the International Theological Commission could say:
Vatican II has modified this priestly image in two ways. The Council spoke of the common priesthood of the faithful prior to the ministerial priesthood.…It has put more emphasis on the position of the bishops, center of the particular church and member of the universal college of bishops. The position of the priests in the Church has become blurred.
And yet the Council’s decree Presbyterorum Ordinis defined the priest in the terms of the Council of Trent. But the context was utterly distinct, and the conciliar spirit was to stress the priest as a preacher and leader of the masses vs. the man of the Sacrifice.
After the attack on the priest, it came as no surprise that the Vaticanists would also undermine the holy Mass, the principal act of the priest. To a new priesthood should correspond a redefinition of the Mass. The New Mass was organized by Fr. Annibale Bugnini with the collaboration of six Protestant theologians. Fr. Bugnini had his own ideas on popular involvement in the liturgy, while the Protestant advisers had their own heretical ideas on the essence of the Mass. That this ambiguous rite was also promoted positively by Pope Paul VI, its official promulgator in April 1969, is evident from the confidences of his friend Jean Guitton:
The intention of Pope Paul VI was to reform the Catholic liturgy in such a way that it should almost coincide with the Protestant liturgy....There was with Pope Paul VI an ecumenical intention…to get the Catholic Mass closer to the Calvinist mass.4
Moreover, the Novus Ordo Missae defined itself this way: “The Lord’s Supper, or Mass, is a sacred synaxis, or assembly of the people of God gathered together under the presidency of the priest to celebrate the memorial of the Lord” (Pope Paul VI, Institutio Generalis, §7, 1969 version).5 The conclusion should be evident to anyone. As Fr. Gelineau, a Jesuit, put it: “The new Mass is a different liturgy. This needs to be said without ambiguity. The Roman Rite, as we knew it, no longer exists. It has been destroyed.” In his Open Letter to Confused Catholics (1986), the Archbishop quotes Luther as stating his self-acknowledged revolutionary aim:
Worship used to be address to God as a homage. Henceforth it will be addressed to man to console and enlighten him. The sacrifice used to have pride of place but the sermon will supplant it.
What we have seen over the past 40 years of the Revolution in the Church is 1) the attempted abolition of the priesthood distinct from the faithful, 2) the change of the Sacrifice to a plain meal, and 3) the systematic attempt to reduce the Eucharist to an everyday act, in commonplace surroundings, with commonplace utensils, clothing and attitudes, etc. The three doctrines that were absent or surreptitiously denied by the New Order of the Mass are absolutely essential to the reality of the sacrifice of the Mass: 1) the priest, who by his sacerdotal character is distinct from the faithful and is alone capable of consecrating the Eucharist; 2) the propitiatory sacrifice of the Mass; and 3) the real and substantial presence of the Victim—the same Victim as at Calvary—through transubstantiation. If these are the three doctrines that were especially under attack after Vatican II, what was the common principle which made these distinct attacks intelligible? It was that the Modernists dominating the Church desired to modify the relation of man to God in a blasphemous claim of equality between man and God, bringing to its culmination the Revolution that had sought to impose a natural equality on all human relations. Such is, of course, the cause of the familiarity and casualness with which the Novus Ordo treats God and the things of God.
Traditional Resistance
At the time of the promulgation of the Novus Ordo, Archbishop Lefebvre was in Rome. He had celebrated (for a few years only) the latest version of the traditional Mass of 1965, truncated of some secondary elements, like the prayers at the foot of the altar, the last Gospel, and the Confiteor before Holy Communion. The rationale for his accepting the 1965 Missal was simply that he would accept disciplinary legislation as long as there was nothing clearly wrong, giving the benefit of the doubt to legal authorities.
But in 1969, as the New Mass was being promulgated, some active members of the conservative movement had an immediate reaction. They produced what is commonly called The Ottaviani Intervention. The text was prepared mostly by Fr. Guérard des Lauriers under the diligent scrutiny of Archbishop Lefebvre. Cardinal Ottaviani agreed to revise the study and present it to Pope Paul VI. The conclusion of the work was appalling: Does the New Mass teach the Catholic Faith?
It is clear that the Novus Ordo no longer intends to present the Faith as taught by the Council of Trent.…It represents, both as a whole and in its details, a striking departure from the Catholic theology of the Mass as it was formulated in Session 22 of the Council of Trent. The “canons” of the rite definitively fixed at that time erected an insurmountable barrier against any heresy which might attack the integrity of the mystery. The recent reforms have amply demonstrated that new changes in the liturgy could not be made without leading to complete bewilderment of the faithful, who already show an indubitable lessening of their faith.6
What is at stake here is the connection between the worship and the faith. As we pray, so we believe: Lex orandi statuat legem credendi—Let the law of prayer fix the law of the faith.
The Ottaviani Intervention concludes with a veiled warning to the highest Churchman: “The subjects for whose benefit a law is made have always had the right, nay the duty, to ask the legislator to abrogate the law, should it prove harmful.”7 In other words, they are saying that the Pope, in promulgating the Novus Ordo, was trespassing his right, committing an abuse of authority, and was forcing faithful Christians to react by disobedience to man in order to obey God. The future attitude of Archbishop Lefebvre and the drama between Ecône and Rome is summed up in this warning which sounds as a threat from heaven itself.
The Army of the Reconquista
The Ottaviani Intervention was written in May 1969. A few months later, the Archbishop had bought a little house in Fribourg, Switzerland, to host a dozen seminarians under his direction. Soon, with the permission of the bishop of Fribourg, his friend Bishop Charrière, he would be writing the Statutes of the incipient religious institute, the Society of St. Pius X. Its goal is clearly fixed in these statutes, and that is the defense of “the priesthood”:
Why did our founder focus the spirituality of the Society on the priesthood and the Mass? Because, to use of the words of his spiritual son and successor Bishop Fellay:
We can sum up the diagnostic of the sickness affecting the postconciliar Church thus: The Church is in crisis since the Second Vatican Council because the priesthood is in crisis. This is one of the fundamental elements of the crisis. To a defined malady corresponds the adequate remedy: no Church restoration will take place without restoring the priesthood.9
We are priests, formed at the source of the traditional priesthood and the traditional Mass, and our mission as priests is the Mass. But what does this mean? Most fundamentally, it means that when a man receives the priestly character from a bishop at his ordination, he receives the power to renew in persona Christi the sacrifice of obedience and charity which Christ accomplished upon the Cross. He offers it in an unbloody way on the altar at each Mass that he offers. When the Archbishop said this over and over again, he was not saying anything new. This doctrine belongs to Tradition and is found in St. Thomas, the Council of Trent, and Pius XII. The priest essentially is made for the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, for the sacrifice, for sacrum facere—to do sacred things.
And inasmuch as his love for the Mass of all Time became more persistent, the Archbishop grew in the rejection—perhaps we can speak of hatred—of the Novus Ordo. This was to be very prudent, too prudent for some, and very gradual, but the direction of his mind was unmistakable: we cannot compromise on the question of the Mass. Let us look at his decisions in the ten years following the New Mass:
1) Archbishop Lefebvre gave a conference at Ecône on June 9, 1971. A historic decision had been made by him. Up to this point in time he had continued to say the Traditional Mass because it was still permitted to do so. Now he was rejecting the Novus Ordo Mass of Paul VI. He was not exercising an option, rather he was rejecting the liturgical revolution because of the doctrine of the Catholic Church as it was upheld and promulgated by the Council of Trent.
The First Step, then, was an open refusal of the New Mass.
2) In his 1974 Declaration, he does not mince his words: “It is impossible to modify profoundly the lex orandi without modifying the lex credendi. To the Novus Ordo Missae correspond a new catechism, a new priesthood, new seminaries, a charismatic Pentecostal Church—all things opposed to orthodoxy and the perennial teaching of the Church. The only attitude of fidelity to the Church and Catholic doctrine, in view of our salvation, is a categorical refusal to accept this Reformation.”
The Second Step was thus that all post-Vatican II reforms are bad in the whole and in their details.
3) The Archbishop was also connecting the priestly and sacramental crisis to the teachings of Vatican II. In the historical milestone speech of Lille (August 29, 1976), he said:
So the Third Step was to announce that the conciliar spirit is born of the Revolution and produces a monstrous priesthood and a hybrid Mass.
4) The Pope then suspended the Archbishop in July 1976 and felt personally attacked by him. In the tug of war which followed between Pope Paul VI and the Archbishop, the Pope made it very clear what it was all about, as Jean Guitton relayed: “If we allow the Mass of St. Pius V to the SSPX, everything we have gained by the Second Vatican Council will be ruined.”10
Pope Paul VI himself gave us the Fourth Step: the return to the old Mass would signify the ruin of Vatican II.
5) The Archbishop stated that it was “obvious” that there were fewer and fewer valid Masses as the faith of priests became corrupted and they no longer had the intention to do what the Church does. In 1977 the Archbishop became more demanding, “To avoid conforming to the evolution slowly taking place in the minds of priests, we must avoid–I could almost say completely–assisting at the New Mass.”
The Fifth Step was that seminarians, during the holidays when there was no availability of the old Mass, were discouraged from attending the Novus Ordo on a regular basis because it is Protestantizing.
6) In 1981, there was a dispute between two seminary professors at Ecône: Fr. Williamson and Fr. Cantoni. The latter argued that the New Mass was bad because of incidental and circumstantial things. The Archbishop solved the dispute by stating: “This Mass is not bad in a merely accidental or external way. There is something in it that is truly bad. It was based on a model of the Mass according to Cranmer and Taizé. As I said in Rome to those who interviewed me: ‘This Mass is poisoned!’”
The Sixth Step was to decide that the New Mass was essentially evil in and of itself.
The Mass of All Time Reconquers Ground in the Church
Time has demonstrated the fruits of the firm position of Archbishop Lefebvre. First and foremost, witness the blossoming of deeply Christian families. Look at our Catholic schools and colleges, the many vocations of priests, nuns, and Brothers in the ever growing tree of Tradition, which includes Franciscans and Dominicans, Benedictines and Carmelites, and other numerous friendly confraternities and congregations who wish to put themselves under the broad protection of the more organized SSPX.
In 1984, Rome produced the first Indult, which allowed the use of the Traditional Mass with incredible restrictions. Still, this brought about a change in the mind of the faithful, who realized that they still could be called Catholic and have the traditional sacraments. It allowed priests to say and faithful to attend the Mass contained in the Roman Missal edited in 1962; the same missal used by the Society of St. Pius X. Here is the reaction of Archbishop Lefebvre:
Is it a boon, or not? It would be difficult to say that it is not a good thing…I myself also during these years have not ceased asking of Rome: leave us this liberty! And so, faced with the insistence of many people, and mine also, they finally decided to do something. Unfortunately, however, they have added to it incredible conditions. It’s absolutely unimaginable to have to ask the people’s opinion: Do you reject the New Mass? If you reject the New Mass, then you don’t have the right to say the old one. That surpasses the imagination.11
This is to say that the sky had not really cleared above the Dome of St. Peter. At the same time, Pope John Paul II was promoting ecumenism at a rapid pace, escalating with the Assisi meeting in 1986. In 1988, the Archbishop laid out the reasons which had finally decided him to perform the consecration of four bishops, this act of such grave importance in the face of the whole Church and he invokes, once again, the priesthood and the Mass as the reason for his apparent disobedience.
The corruption of the Holy Mass has brought with it the corruption of the priesthood and the universal decadence of faith in the divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, accompanied by the resolute intention, clearly shown by the Roman authorities, to continue with their work of destroying the reign of Our Lord, as proved by Assisi and by Rome’s confirmation of the liberal theses of Vatican II on religious liberty.12
Yet other fruits are evident as well. We can see that Providence has tolerated the break-away from the SSPX and other sister congregations to spread to wider circles of souls afraid of the label of excommunication but still wanting the benefits of the traditional sacraments. We have only to look at the multiple societies which have been founded since 1988: the Benedictine monasteries, the Fraternity of St. Peter, the Institute of Christ the King, the parallel diocese of Campos, the Institute of the Good Shepherd, and so many unknown individual priests who take refuge under the Ecclesia Dei Commission to keep the Mass of all Time. Even if few among them will acknowledge their benefactor, they all owe their survival and existence to only one man: Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the ultimate spiritual father of most of these new foundations. Let credit be given where credit is due!
Then, at the request of the Society’s Superior General, Pope Benedict XVI took away the decree of excommunication which was weighing, albeit unduly, upon the reputation of our bishops. At his request again, and Our Lady’s intercession, the Pope also liberated the Mass of all Time with the decree Summorum Pontificum. Here are some excerpts from his letter to the bishops where he states that the old Mass was never abrogated and where he quotes explicitly our founder, who pushed Rome to restore the Traditional Mass.
As for the use of the 1962 Missal as a Forma extraordinaria of the liturgy of the Mass, I would like to draw attention to the fact that this Missal was never juridically abrogated and, consequently, in principle, was always permitted.…We all know that, in the movement led by Archbishop Lefebvre, fidelity to the old Missal became an external mark of identity; the reasons for the break which arose over this, however, were at a deeper level.…
This marks a great advance in our relations with Rome as the Mass is finally liberated and vindicated. There remains for Rome to return to the Faith of all time. In the words of our Superior General:
Lex orandi, lex credendi–the law of the liturgy is that of the faith. In the fidelity to the spirit of our founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the attachment of the Society of St. Pius X to the traditional liturgy is inseparably united to the faith which has been professed “always, everywhere and by all.”13
1 Letter to Friends and Benefactors, #69, June 2006.
2 Conference given at Stuttgart, Oct. 29, 1984.
3 Cardinal Pacelli to Count Enrico Gabazzi, in Monsignor Roche, Pie XII Devant l’Histoire, pp. 52-53, cited by LeRoux, Peter, Lovest Thou Me? (Glasysdale, Victoria, Australia: Instauratio Press, 1998), p. 1.
4 Jean Guitton, Dec. 19, 1993 in Apropos (17), p. 8ff. [also in Christian Order, Oct. 1994]. Jean Guitton was an intimate friend of Pope Paul VI. Paul VI had 116 of his books and had made marginal study notes in 17 of these.
5 “When I began work on this trilogy I was concerned at the extent to which the Catholic liturgy was being Protestantized. The more detailed my study of the Revolution, the more evident it has become that it has by-passed Protestantism and its final goal is humanism.” (Michael Davies, Pope Paul’s New Mass, p. 137; cf. p. 149.)
6 The Ottaviani Intervention (Rockford, Ill.: Tan Books, 1992). p. 3.
7 Ibid., p. 28.
8 Statutes, I, sec. 2 and 3.
9 Letter to Friends and Benefactors, #69, June 2006.
10 Jean Guitton, Paul VI secret (Ed. Declée de Brower, 1979), pp. 158-159; in The Mass of All Time, p. 263.
11 Conference, Stuttgart, Oct 29, 1984.
12 Letter written to the future SSPX bishops, 1988.
13 Press release after the Decree Summorum Pontificum of 2007.
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