The Lefebvre Fever

It could have been, scarcely a decade ago, a pious Roman Catholic Mass, just the sort of loyal demonstration to gladden the heart of a Pope distressed by the faithlessness of the modern world. The worshipers had come early to the auditorium in the northern French city of Lille; while a choir chanted medieval Latin hymns, the congregation quickly filled 5,700 seats and spilled out into the aisles. Then the celebrant of the Mass entered, a pink-cheeked, white-haired priest who moved solemnly up the aisle behind a quartet of acolytes bearing lighted candles.

But the words from the altar were anything but pious or loyal. Instead, the priest, Roman Catholic Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, 70, coolly denounced the Vatican for having entered an "adulterous marriage" with "revolution and subversion." As a result, charged the prelate, "The rite of Mass today is a bastard rite. The sacraments today are bastard sacraments. We want to have prayers like our ancestors. We want to keep the Catholic faith." After an hour of such remonstrations, Lefebvre began the Mass in Latin, according to the four-century-old Tridentine rite, now superseded and banned by Rome.*

Despised Reforms. For Lefebvre and his followers, the new Mass promulgated by Pope Paul in 1969 is a symbol of the changes embodied in the reforms of the Second Vatican Council--reforms that they despise. Among other objections, Lefebvre contends that the use of vernacular languages instead of Latin has broken down Catholic unity. In addition to the Mass, Lefebvre demands a return to the "true Bible," the Latin Vulgate of St. Jerome, instead of dangerous "ecumenical" versions. He excoriates progressive interpretations of church doctrine. "If I had done earlier what they teach priests in seminaries to do now, I would have been excommunicated," he lamented in his sermon last week. "If I had taught then the catechisms they teach now, they would have called me a heretic."

Ironically, until recently the Vatican had long considered Lefebvre an exemplary missionary and a pastoral pillar of the church. Born into a family of industrialists near Lille, he was ordained in 1929 and spent 30 years in Africa, where he became Archbishop of Dakar. But he had difficulty adjusting to the changes that swept Africa in the 1960s, when many colonies won independence, and he was transferred back to France. After a brief stint as bishop of Tulle, he was appointed head of a missionary order, the Fathers of the Holy Spirit. When the order's general assembly voted a series of reforms, Lefebvre resigned, charging that "democratization" of the church was the work of Satan. Six years ago he founded a seminary at Econe, Switzerland, dedicated to the training of traditionalist priests who would function as though Vatican II had never taken place.

Despite the Vatican's disapproval and finally its order last year to dissolve the seminary, Lefebvre continued to operate it. His defiance came to a head this past June when Lefebvre, once again disregarding Vatican orders, ordained 13 priests and 13 sub-deacons. In July the Vatican announced that he was suspended a divinis, a sanction that bars him from saying Mass, administering the sacraments and preaching. Disregarding the suspension, Lefebvre went ahead with the Lille Mass last week.

As a bishop, Lefebvre possesses his authority in what Roman Catholics believe to be apostolic succession from the original apostles; thus, his partisans might argue, he has the power to set up a church structure of his own. While some extreme traditionalists in Europe might welcome such a move, its appeal in the U.S. is doubtful. A number of priests in the U.S. still defiantly say the forbidden Tridentine Mass, but their bishops generally ignore them, content to remind Catholics that the Mass is illicit. Some of these priestly recalcitrants might conceivably join a Lefebvre schism; at least one was at the Lille Mass. But the conservative Catholic press in the U.S. has warned readers that Lefebvre's actions are wrong, and loyally backed Pope Paul.

Apart from the suspension, the Pope has treated Lefebvre with considerable restraint, even tenderness. In a poignant note in French, handwritten in Rome two weeks before the Lille Mass, the Pontiff addressed the erring bishop as "our venerated brother," urged him to reconsider "the insupportable irregularity of your present position" and "break the illogical bonds which make you alien and hostile to the church." The letter apparently affected the intransigent archbishop very little. Last week in Lille he told reporters that he did not feel at all isolated. "I am with 20 centuries of the church," he declared confidently, "I am with 20 centuries of heaven."

*The rite takes its name from the Latin Tridentum, for Trent, Italy, site of the 16th century counterreformation church council that authorized a newly uniform Mass ritual. It is the Tridentine rite that is forbidden, not Latin. The original version of the new rite, from which all vernacular versions are translated, is, in fact, in Latin.

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