Archbishop’s Aim
Who puts the Archbishop’s work under this Rome
Betrays the Faith and him, and Catholics’ home.
In this fateful month for the Society
of St Pius X, June 2016, when we hear that some 30 Superiors will meet in order
to decide whether to accept Rome’s latest offer of official recognition, it is
surely a good moment to correct misunderstandings as to the intentions of its
Founder, Archbishop Lefebvre (1905–1991). Some claim that his course was
unsteady, that he “zig-zagged,” veering from side to side. Others pretend that
above all he sought Rome’s recognition for his Society. Without having to claim
that he was infallible one needs to remind the forgetful Society of what he was
all about: both errors are corrected by the same observation, namely that his
basic motivation was to glorify God and to save souls by serving God’s one true
Church by defending the Faith, and to defend the Faith by founding the Society
of St Pius X to form priests who would preserve the doctrine, sacraments and
Mass of Catholic Tradition.
Now the great obstacle in the
Archbishop’s way was the churchmen of Vatican II whose main priority was (and
remains) to please not God but modern man, who has moved far away from God. So,
now as then, they turned away from God (at least objectively, subjectively God
knows), and sought to change God’s Church and her Faith, doctrine, sacraments
and Mass by a humanistic “renewal.”
In disgust or despair the Archbishop
might have taken himself off into a corner with his Society, and left these
churchmen to perish with their Conciliar Revolution. But firstly, from the 1974
Roman visitation of Écône onwards, they came after him with his work because
they could not let it demonstrate their perversity. They could not afford to
leave him alone. And secondly, if he could do anything to bring Tradition to
the Romans and the Romans back to Tradition, it would benefit through them the
worldwide Church and not just his little Society. For indeed, however misguided
they were, they st ill occupied “the seat of Moses” (cf. Mt XXIII, 2), and so
from 1975 onwards the Archbishop went to and from Rome, until their
prevarication in 1988 over granting another bishop to the Society proved once
and for all that they could no longer be spoken to with words but only with
actions.
But “Stat Crux dum Volvitur Orbis,”
meaning that the Cross stands still while the whole world is in revolution.
Anchored in Tradition, the Archbishop was basically standing still, but he was
dealing with churchmen and a situation of the Church which had slipped that
anchor and was henceforth adrift. So as they drifted left, so he needed to
steer right, whereas if they seemed to veer right again (as in late 1987 and
early 1988) so he veered left (e.g. in the Protocol of May 5, 1988), but it was
always their veering or the evolving situation (e.g. the deteriorating Novus
Ordo Mass) that determined his “zig-zagging,” and not the other way round. His
own aim was steady – the defense of the Faith.
It was for this same reason that,
once the churchmen’s prevarication on that same 5th of May in 1988 was clear
beyond any reasonable doubt, then after a night’s reflection he renounced on
May 6th that Protocol which could have obtained Rome’s official recognition for
the Society, and he cut off all merely diplomatic relations with Rome, not
primarily to save his Society but to protect Catholic Tradition for the entire
Church. Doctrine had to take over from diplomacy, and from then on until his
death two and a half years later, even while behaving with respect towards the
Church officials whom he had castigated as “Antichrists,” he declared that the
Faith had to come first in the form of the pre-Conciliar Popes’ anti-liberal
and anti-modern doctrinal Encyclicals. By his fidelity to Church doctrine he
was in the driving-seat, and the Romans knew it. What a contrast with his
successors at the head of the Society, fawning on the betrayers of Church doctrine
and Tradition, and humiliated by them! Let these successors of the Archbishop
just read again what was like his farewell address to them of September 6,
1990.
Kyrie eleison.
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