Archbishop Lefebvre: The Priestly Vocation
The “Great War”
(1914-1918) Marcel Lefebvre did not eat his fill: the black bread was sticky on the inside and disgusting; the American chickens were rotten when they arrived. Fortunately, there was the soup kitchen. Jeanne, his older sister came home:
“Here is the milk can, I filled it at the soup kitchen, but there isn’t enough; there are so many people waiting in line…”
The soup was gone in no time, and once the table was cleared, the children did their homework.
“Time for prayers,” said Madame Lefebvre. “We will pray for Oncle Louis who is in a concentration camp in Pomerania, and for Papa in Holland.” And with their mother, the five children recited the rosary with their arms outstretched in the form of a cross.
The next morning, Marcel was on his feet at 5:45 to go serve Mass for his favorite priest in a private home, for the school was occupied by the German army. He went out into the street and over on the corner of the rue de l’Abattoir, he saw two soldiers standing there in their grey-green uniforms; they seemed to be waiting for him. Marcel turned and ran back home.
Fr. Desmarcheliers came to the house at noon: “Why didn’t you come this morning to serve Mass?”
“There were soldiers in the street, and if they had caught me, they would have beaten me with the butts of their guns; it’s the same risk every morning, going out before the curfew ends at 6.”
“Then you should have taken the rue de Réservoir!”
Was it a safer street? By no means. But Marcel was resolute: “Very well, Father, I shall continue to serve your Mass. I’ll see you tomorrow!”
The constant worries, their mother imprisoned for a week in the cellars of the town hall where she would catch tuberculosis of the bones: these were great trials for the five children.
“It changed us,” Archbishop Lefebvre would say later. “Even if you’re only nine, ten, or eleven years old, you can’t help it...War is really a terrible thing.... Obviously, it affected us, the older children. We five, we were scarred by those events, and I think that in part, at least, we owe our vocation to them. We saw that human life was insignificant and that one has to know how to suffer.”
Then came the Armistice, the end of the war, and on November 11, 1918. Marcel’s older brother René, who was at the minor seminary in Versailles, received the cassock then left for Rome; he would be Marcel’s forerunner.
An Apostolic Teenager
(1917-1923) Marcel entered the Congregation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, where the members learned the feasts of Our Lady. Then at the age of 13, he joined the Eucharistic Crusade, whose badge he proudly wore and whose motto he loved: “Pray, receive communion, make sacrifices, be an apostle”—it expressed the dearest desire of his heart. To be an apostle, to give of himself: that was his ideal.
At the age of 16 he entered his school’s “Conference of St. Vincent de Paul.” As a member, he visited the poor of the city with a comrade.
“Maman, put me in charge of the chicken coop and the rabbit hutch. You can pay me a little bit, right?”
“Of course, son, but what will you do with the money?”
“Buy a bicycle.”
“Why?”
“To visit my poor with Robert Lepoutre.”
“Very well, my son. You shall have your bike.”
One day in 1923, he entered a hovel on a street corner and found a cripple in a wheelchair inside: it was a paralyzed watchmaker.
“Sir, I’m going to clean up all this mess for the love of God and repaint your shop.”
And when he’d finished: “Now, since your fingers are still as skillful as ever, I am going to find you some clients!” And he did as promised. Two days later:
“Marcel,” asked Bernadette, his younger sister, “My watch stopped working, do you know any watchmakers?”
“Yes, go to this address!”
At 25 rue de l’Observatoire, Bernadette did not see any watchmaker, but she knocked anyway.
“Come in.”
“Oh,” she said when she’d opened the door, “I must be mistaken; I’m looking for a watchmaker!”
“That’s me! What can I do for you?”
“It’s my watch…”
“I’ll fix it for you; come back in a week.”
A week later, Bernadette returned: “Here is your watch, Mademoiselle; but tell me, how did you get my address? There is no store front here!”
“My brother gave it to me.”
“Ah. And what is your brother’s name?”
“Marcel Lefebvre.”
“Ah! You are Marcel Lefebvre’s sister! Your brother is a saint! When he saw the mess there was here, he tidied everything up, repainted my poor apartment, and even found me some clients! I have been living a new life!”
Marcel never talked about what he did for his poor: “Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doth,” says Our Lord.
But apostolate was in his blood! Was not his vocation already present without him realizing it?
The Decision
Before Easter vacation in 1923, their main teacher, Fr. Belle, told the students of his graduating class: “During these holidays, you will have to make a decision about your future: either to work, earn your living, and found a Christian family to carry on your family; or, God willing, to enter into the novitiate or the seminary.”
Marcel was touched, but hesitant: “A priest, a priest, I would like that, but it is so lofty, so great! How can one think one could become a priest?”
Christiane, his little 14-year-old sister, gave her advice: “Marcel, if you are that hesitant, go to Wisques for a retreat! Fr. Guestmaster gives advice to retreatants!”
He could have said: “Mind your own business, little sister. I’m old enough to decide for myself!” But Marcel was humble, he discerned the voice of God in the words of one younger than himself. He rode his bicycle to the Benedictine abbey of Wisques. Above the gate, he read: “Ora et labora” and immediately translated: “Pray and work.”
After three days, Fr. Guestmaster knocked on the door of his cell: “So, young man, do you like our life?”
“Yes, Father, your office sung in Gregorian by two alternating choirs, your liturgy, the refectory where I shared your meal in silence, while listening to the life of an edifying saint. I like it all…but…I want the apostolate…”
“Ah, if that is the case, my dear friend, your place is not with us! We Benedictines, our apostolate is prayer; we are cloistered!”
And Marcel returned home: “Well, what did Fr. Guestmaster say?” asked 20-year-old Jeanne, who was soon to enter the Sisters of Mary Reparatrix.
“He said that I do not have a Benedictine vocation!”
“So not a religious?” exclaimed Jeanne.
“Listen, sometimes I wonder if I should be a simple Trappist brother: they are so edifying, united to God and working hard in the fields. I feel like going to Poperinghe to speak to Fr. Alphonse. They say he reads hearts…”
And off Marcel went on his bike across the Belgian border. At Saint-Sixte, he asked the Brother Porter: “Could I speak to Fr. Alphonse?”
“Yes, I’ll call him; have a seat!”
Marcel heard his heavy step coming down the stairs; the inner door opened, Fr. Alphonse appeared, and without asking a single question, he looked Marcel in the eye and said: “You, you will be a priest! You must be a priest!”
Marcel was dumbfounded, but he had his answer from heaven! He would be a priest. On his way back to Tourcoing on his bicycle, he thought: “I have always thought of being an apostle, to give of myself for others; that is my life, I have never wanted to do anything else.”
Bursting with joy, he went to find his father, the head of the family; he needed to speak with him.
“Papa, I am going to be a priest!”
“Good, my son, that is what I thought you would do. But I never wanted to influence you. Now, if that is what you have made up your mind to do, you will go to Rome!”
“Oh, Papa, do my studies in Latin, in a foreign country? Why bother? I will enter in Hellemes, here in the diocese!”
“No, I fear the liberal penetration that I sense in Lille. You will go to Rome, where your brother René is. You will be under the direction of Fr. Le Floch, a Roman, there; you will hear healthy doctrine, under the eyes of the pope. You have only to go see our bishop now.”
Bishop Quilliet, who was trying hard to keep the Roman and anti-liberal traditions alive in his diocese of Cambrai, received the candidate and his father: “Go to Rome, dear friend, drink in the marrow of the Eternal City, become truly Roman.”
What Is the Priestly Vocation?
When Christiane was asked in 1986 as a very old Carmelite behind the grille in the parlor of Quievram, in Belgium, “When do you think your brother Marcel received his vocation?”
“Well, one receives the priestly vocation on the day of one’s subdiaconate! At least according to the doctrine received and confirmed by St. Pius X.”
“But what?”
“Marcel always had it, for as long as I have known him! He always wanted to give of himself for others, in the family, at school, with his poor. He had a very balanced temperament: calm, thoughtful, full of ideas, resourceful, an organizer, a doer. Everything he needed!”
“And that makes for, shall we say, an apostolic priestly vocation?”
“With the seal of the Church, yes. You see, it is like in philosophy: you provide the matter (favorable dispositions, no unfavorable dispositions), and upon this matter falls what we call the form, that gives a form and consistency to these dispositions; this form is the call of the Church received on the day of your ordination to the subdiaconate, through the voice of the bishop.”
I spoke with a fellow priest, a professor of moral theology: “Father, what do you think of the definition Archbishop Lefebvre gave of the priestly vocation? He does not even mention the divine call! But ‘vocation’ means ‘call.’ ‘One must be called by God,’ says St. Paul in his epistle to the Hebrews!”
“What was his definition?”
“Here it is: ‘A vocation is not the result of a miraculous or extraordinary call, but rather the blossoming of a Christian soul that is attached to its Creator and Savior Jesus Christ by an exclusive love and shares His thirst to save souls.’”
“I’m surprised; what about the call of the Church?”
“It is implied; it confirms all the good dispositions as the form that unites them all, gives them their overall confirmation and marks them with the stamp, the seal of the Church through the reception of the order of the subdiaconate.”
The Sacred Heart School and Marcel’s Vocation
What was the Sacred Heart School? It undeniably played a capital role in Marcel Lefebvre’s vocation.
This Catholic high school was run and directed by 32 teaching priests. Each class (there were several classes for each grade) had its “main teacher” who could be the students’ confessor or spiritual director. Marcel chose Fr. Desmarcheliers, a 40-year-old priest, modest, simple, cordial and full of energy; he served his Mass often, as we mentioned above, and took him for a model.
More than half of the graduating class each year “chose” the seminary or the novitiate (Capuchins, Jesuits, Dominicans).
This Catholic school was thus somewhat of a “minor seminary” without the name and bore the same fruits.
The advantage was that it did not seem to direct the young men necessarily towards the priesthood. Minor seminaries were more directive; the young men in them were expected to desire the priesthood. But from the 1950’s on, this type of “clerical school,” so to speak, became unpopular with families and was increasingly ill-suited to a society that was less penetrated with Catholicism. Priestly or religious vocations were not supposed to be born in childhood or early adolescence.
Archbishop Lefebvre, Superior General of the Holy Ghost Fathers from 1962 to 1968, confirmed the decline of the minor seminaries; he did not close them, but his successor did in the congregation.
And when he founded the Priestly Society of St. Pius X in 1970, Archbishop Lefebvre foresaw that his priests could become directors of Catholic schools for boys that would bear the same fruit of vocations as his old Sacred Heart School in Tourcoing, so well suited to the mentality of the late 20th century.
Conclusion
Marcel Lefebvre’s vocation enables us clearly to distinguish the main factors (favorable causes) of priestly vocations among the youth:
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