The Prestigious Destiny of a Founding Text (3)

A “Sign of Contradiction”

At the heart of the condemnations against Archbishop Lefebvre in 1975, his Declaration was the subject of debate among the teaching staff at the Écône seminary. Some wanted to correct it, and drafted a “moderate declaration”: “Your Grace, withdraw your first text and sign this one.” But Archbishop Lefebvre could not give in. He had told the cardinals: “I could put it differently, but I could not write anything different.”

So four or five professors withdrew: the text of November 21 became a sign of contradiction. Archbishop Lefebvre recalled two years later: “Some professors would have wanted me to accept the Council! I would have had to express my total acceptance of the Council and only oppose the Council's unfortunate interpretations.

“I could not accept such a formula. Because, in conscience and in truth, I do not think that we can accept it. To say that there is nothing in the Council, that the Council is perfect, that it is a Council like any other that we have to accept like any other, and that there are only the interpretations and abuses of the Council...”.

This challenging of Vatican II seems unavoidable to him: “Why, in the famous Declaration, do I allude to the Council? The Council is dangerous. There are liberal tendencies, modernist tendencies, which are very dangerous because they then inspired the reforms which followed and which are bringing the Church down. You judge the tree by its fruit, you only have to look at it.”

The facts themselves prove him right. In September 1975, he explained to the seminarians: “The Holy Father, the cardinals, are ultimately condemning our seminary because of its tradition! By keeping our traditions, we find ourselves, for them, in opposition to the Council and therefore in disobedience to the Church! [...]

“Logically, then, the Council is breaking with Tradition! It is impossible to understand it any other way...! Because we keep the traditional orientations, we are condemnable in the name of the Council: it is therefore that something new has emerged from the Council, something that is opposed to Tradition...”

A Dividing Line

However, while the Declaration appears strikingly anti-conciliar, it is not limited to this objection. It rises higher, to a peak of altitude from which it transcends all dialectic, in a climate of authentically Catholic freshness.

“So you are against the Pope, you are against the Church,” we are told. We are not against the Pope at all! We are the Pope's best defenders! [...] We hold as very precious what the Pope holds most dear: defending the Deposit of Faith, transmitting the Deposit of Faith, the revelations of the Apostles, which were given to the Apostles by Our Lord.

“So we are not at all against the Pope—quite the contrary!” And in a letter to the Holy Father on September 24, 1975, he “reaffirmed what he had stated in the first part of his Declaration”: his “unreserved attachment to the Holy See and to the Vicar of Christ,” saying he was devoted “wholeheartedly to the Successor of Peter, ‘master of the truth.’”

But the same Declaration that protects him from separation from the Pope also protects him from servile submission to him. It was this text, too, that Cardinal Giovanni Benelli, Substitute of the Secretary of State, quoted to him at a meeting on March 19, 1976: “No authority, not even the highest in the hierarchy, can force us to abandon or diminish our Catholic Faith, so clearly expressed and professed by the Church’s Magisterium for nineteen centuries.”

And he commented: “‘No authority, not even the highest’: so the Pope, even the Pope?” Archbishop Lefebvre did not quite see how one could argue with a sentence like that, it seems obvious to him...”’But,’ Cardinal Benelli insisted, ‘it is the Pope who is the judge of truth, it is the Pope who is the criterion of truth, it is the Pope who decides the truth.’

“‘I think the Pope must transmit the truth, but he is not the one who makes the truth. He is not the truth; he must transmit the truth.’
‘In any case, it isn’t you who makes the truth!’
‘I don't. But a child who knows his catechism knows the truth, and the Pope cannot oppose the truth that is in his catechism and that the Popes have taught for twenty centuries.’”

A Magnificent Response 

Cardinal Benelli began to implore: “You must, Your Grace, make an act of submission. You must make an act of submission! You are going to say that you were mistaken; secondly, that you accept the Council, you accept the postconciliar reforms, you accept the postconciliar orientations given by Rome.

“You accept the Mass of Paul VI in your house and in all the houses that depend on you; and you accept ensuring that all those who have followed you until now, follow you also in the change you must make and in the discipline you must impose on them to enter into the discipline of the Church! [...] I assure you: if you sign this act, there are no more problems for your seminary, there are no more problems, not even material ones!”

But Archbishop Lefebvre, unshakeably faithful to his clear-cut position of principle, remained indifferent to these intimidations. He wanted to be subject only to the truth of the Church's Tradition, even if it meant facing the most painful opposition.

No pressure would separate him from eternal Rome; no contradiction would weaken the vigor of his attachment to Peter; no fear would divert him from his fundamental opposition to all the liberal orientations that were demolishing the Church, however much they may have emanated from a council or from the Pope himself.