Monseigneur Marcel Lefebvre and I

Mons. Lefebvre
1981

No, I was never privileged to meet him, tho' I have friends who were blessed to have been confirmed by him. What I did have was a very brief correspondence with him.

I had read Canon 1382 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law,

A bishop who consecrates someone a bishop without a pontifical mandate and the person who receives the consecration from him incur a latae sententiae excommunication reserved to the Apostolic See.

So when, on 30 June 1988, he and His Lordship Antônio de Castro Mayer consecrated the four Bishops at Écône, I wrote him a letter telling him that he was a hellbound excommunicate, accusing him of heresy and schism as well as sundry other uncharitable things.

Needless to say, His Grace did not deign to answer me.

Not long before he died, I wrote him again. I had been quite familiar with the Protocol signed by then Joseph, Cardinal Ratzinger and Monseigneur on 5 May 1988, which had promised the Society of St Pius X a Bishop. I was also familiar with the motu proprio Ecclesia Dei, which said in Section 6, Paragraph a),

a) a Commission is instituted whose task it will be to collaborate with the bishops, with the Departments of the Roman Curia and with the circles concerned, for the purpose of facilitating full ecclesial communion of priests, seminarians, religious communities or individuals until now linked in various ways to the Fraternity founded by Mons. Lefebvre, who may wish to remain united to the Successor Peter in the Catholic Church, while preserving their spiritual and liturgical traditions, in the light of the Protocol signed on 5 May last by Cardinal Ratzinger and Mons. Lefebvre;

which I, and many other Catholics, interpreted as the Vatican promising the new Institute, the Priestly Fraternity of St Peter (FSSP) the same things that had been promised to Monseigneur and the Society of St Pius X, including a Bishop.

Now, almost two years later, I noted that the FSSP still had no Bishop. Also, I was reading Canon Law at the time, and in Book VI, the 'Penal Code' of the Church, entitled 'SANCTIONS IN THE CHURCH', I ran across Canon 1323, 

The following are not subject to a penalty when they have violated a law or precept:

4/ a person who acted coerced by grave fear, even if only relatively grave, or due to necessity or grave inconvenience unless the act is intrinsically evil or tends to the harm of souls;

After learning this, and reading analyses by learned Canonists about Monseigneur's situation and this Canon, I became convinced that the Vatican had been hoist on their own petard. There was no doubt in my mind that he had acted out of grave fear for the future of Holy Church and the Priesthood and that he felt that his action was absolutely necessary.

And no one, not even a man totally opposed to him, to the SSPX, and to Tradition in general could argue that his act was 'intrinsically evil or tend(ed) to the harm of souls'!

Ergo, by the Church's own Code of Canon Law, just a few years old, the 'latae sententiae excommunication' putatively incurred by Archbishop Lefebvre was null and void ab initio!

After all this reading and spending some time in serious thought on the matter, I sat down and wrote His Grace again, this time abjectly apologising for my letter of July, 1988. I explained how my opinions had changed and why. I told him that I had become convinced that he had acted only out of concern for the good of our Holy Church and of the Holy Catholic Faith. I told him that I had come to compare him to St Athanasius, the great defender of Trinitarian orthodoxy during the Arian Crisis.

I didn't really expect an answer. However, a few weeks later I received a letter from him. He thanked me for my letter, gave me his Episcopal Blessing and included a few holy cards in honour of the 40th anniversary of his consecration to the Episcopate.

Not only was he a holy Bishop, I am convinced by my very short correspondence with him that he was also a fine exemplar of a Catholic gentleman! 

So, despite the fact that I have never heard Holy Mass celebrated by a Priest of the SSPX, I am convinced that when the Church returns to sanity, as She will per the promises of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour, Monseigneur Lefebvre will be raised to the honours of the Altar as a Second Athanasius. To that end, here is a prayer for his beatification.

O Jesus, Eternal High Priest, who deigned to elevate Thy faithful servant Marcel Lefebvre to the episcopal dignity and to grant him the grace of being a fearless defender of the Holy Mass, of the Catholic Priesthood, of Thy Holy Church, and of the Holy See, of being a courageous apostle of Thy Kingdom on earth, of being a devoted servant of Thy Holy Mother, and of being a shining example of charity, of humility and of all virtues; bestow upon us now, by his merits, the grace we beseech of Thee, so that, assured of his powerful intercession to Thee, we may one day see him elevated to the glory of the altar. Amen.

I received this from a friend of mine who is a Priest of the Society of St Pius X. He is stationed in New Zealand, and he told me,

Here in NZ, we've just started a group effort to pray this for the cure of a man by the name of Luke Nyssen, a 50-year-old father of 9 children (eldest 19, youngest 1) who was recently diagnosed with extremely advanced Stage 4 Pancreatic Cancer no one suspected until he felt about nauseous and felt an odd lump in his stomach a week ago.

Perhaps in all the confusion in the Church such a miraculous cure through the good Monsignor's intercession of a disease which no doctor here thinks is anything but terminal and within perhaps weeks, would be a great help to the Church in recovering Her senses and having such a champion to pray to and imitate.

I shall be offering the prayer for Monseigneur's intercession for the intention of Mr Nyssen's healing, and of your charity, I ask all who read this to join me.

Here is one form of the prayer card,

And here is a link to a .pdf file if any of my readers would like to print a beautiful prayer card, with his image, wearing a mitre on the obverse and the prayer on the reverse.