The Archbishop Calls It Quits

By Richard N. Ostling

Soft-spoken but stubborn, French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre has long been a thorn in Rome's side. After founding an ultra-traditionalist seminary in the bucolic Swiss hamlet of Econe in 1970, he began proclaiming that the modernized church policies of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) were heretical abominations. Dismayed, the Holy See ordered him not to ordain any of his seminarians. When he defiantly went ahead and did so in 1976, Pope Paul VI forbade the Archbishop to administer the sacraments. He ignored that injunction as well.

It thus seemed a diplomatic miracle when, on May 5, Lefebvre signed a protocol with the Vatican specifying the terms for a reconciliation. But the Archbishop had second thoughts as he reflected upon the carefully crafted deal -- and listened to the advice of his more conservative followers. Last week the agreement fell through, threatening what to Rome is that most frightful of events: schism.

At a press conference at his headquarters in Econe, Lefebvre, 82, declared that further negotiations with the Vatican were impossible because Rome lacked "good faith." He then announced that he would consecrate four of his disciples as bishops on June 30. Since Roman Catholic canon law requires papal authorization to create new bishops, the step would automatically excommunicate Lefebvre and his newly minted prelates. By making possible the perpetuation of a sect with its own hierarchy, the consecration of illicit bishops would produce the first schism since the 1870s, when the Old Catholics rebelled against the First Vatican Council's proclamation of papal infallibility.

"Excommunicated by whom?" scoffed Lefebvre at his press conference, as his seminarians gazed on admiringly. "By modernists, by people who should themselves be publicly excommunicated. It has no value." The bishops-to-be are two administrators of Lefebvre's Priestly Society of St. Pius X, the French Bernard Tissier de Mallerais and the Swiss Bernard Fellay; Richard Williamson, the head of Lefebvre's U.S. branch and a convert from Anglicanism; and Argentina's Alfonso de Galarreta. Both Fellay and Galarreta are also under the canonical age requirement of 35 for bishops.

Pope John Paul II had long been eager to end the rebellion because, though small, it still threatened the unity of Catholicism. Weeks after becoming Pope in 1978, he granted Lefebvre's request for an audience (their only meeting) and repeatedly expressed his desire for peace. Lefebvre also seemed eager to heal the breach during his lifetime. After an extended fact-finding tour of Lefebvre's religious houses last year at the Pope's request, Canadian Edouard Cardinal Gagnon, a Vatican official highly sympathetic to traditionalists, sent John Paul a favorable report, typing it himself to keep the recommendations confidential. Lefebvre then put the pressure on, threatening for the first time to ensure his movement's future by naming schismatic bishops. The Pope directed Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the Vatican's doctrinal overseer, to do everything possible to find a solution.

The resulting May 5 protocol between Lefebvre and Ratzinger provoked protests from bishops in the U.S., France, Germany and Switzerland who opposed any concessions to the Archbishop. The pact granted Lefebvre's society official recognition and semi-independence from other bishops. Lefebvre could consecrate one follower as a bishop, subject to papal approval. In return, the Archbishop recognized the legitimacy of Vatican II, with leeway to give council decrees a traditionalist interpretation, and accepted the full authority of the Roman Pontiff. His society was permitted to continue to celebrate the Latin Tridentine Mass, all but abandoned by the church in 1969 in favor of a new rite with Masses in the vernacular (though it is now permitted in special situations). The differences over ecumenism and freedom of conscience were to be thrashed out by a panel of two Lefebvre followers and seven Vatican delegates.

The Lefebvre camp reports that Rome later rejected the Archbishop's four choices for new bishops, though the Vatican says it did promise to name one of his followers. The pact finally broke down because Lefebvre, aged and ailing, suspected that Rome would stall on a new bishop until his death. "I feel the end coming, and I need a successor so my seminarians will not be orphans," he explained. At a last-ditch meeting, Ratzinger pledged that the Pope would ram the bishop's appointment through the Vatican by Aug. 15, an unprecedented speedup. But Lefebvre insisted on creating new bishops on June 30. John Paul personally wrote to Lefebvre on June 9: "I exhort you, Venerable Brother, to renounce your project."

Lefebvre, anything but a troublemaker earlier in his career, devoted three decades to mission work in Africa and eventually became an Archbishop in Senegal and head of a diocese in France. His maverick tendencies first emerged in 1968, when he resigned his post as head of the Holy Ghost Fathers in protest against the reforms decreed by Vatican II. He then launched his society and its Swiss seminary.

The society has established other old-school seminaries in France, West Germany, Argentina, Australia and Ridgefield, Conn. The domain also includes about 100 religious houses on five continents. The Archbishop has ordained 205 priests and expects to add the 280 students now attending his seminaries. Lefebvre says that his financial backing comes from "little people" in the U.S., France, Germany and Switzerland. He has at least 10,000 lay followers.

Lefebvre's opinion of the church he leaves behind is bleak. "The seminaries are empty," he says. "There is a loss of vocations. Immorality is rampant. There is a loss of faith in general. It is a tragic situation." Officially the Vatican expressed "deep sorrow" over last week's development. In private, a senior official in the Curia observed wearily that under the failed pact, "the man and the movement would have been formally inside the church" but "mentally outside the church. It would have been a reconciliation on paper only." Now even the paper is gone.

With reporting by Cathy Booth/Rome and Adam Zagorin/Econe