POPE PAUL VI'S LETTER TO ARCHBISHOP MARCEL LEFEBVRE
(This
letter was sent to Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre one month after he visited the
Pope on
When We received you in audience on last
September 11 at Castelgandolfo, We
let you freely express your position and your desires, even though the various aspects of your case were
already well known to Us
personally. The memory that We
still have of your zeal for the faith and the apostolate, as well as of the good
you have accomplished in the past at the service of the church, made Us and
still makes Us hope that you will
once again become an edifying
subject in full ecclesial communion. After the particularly serious actions that
you have performed, We have once
more asked you to reflect before God concerning your
duty.
We have waited a month. The
attitude to which your words and acts publicly testify does not seem to have
changed. It is true that We have
before Us your letter of September 16, in which you affirm: "A common point unites us; the ardent desire
to see the cessation of all the abuses that disfigure the church. How I wish to
collaborate in this salutary work, with Your Holiness and under Your authority,
so that the church may recover her true countenance."
How must these few words to which your
response is limited —and which in
themselves are positive—be interpreted? You speak as if you have forgotten your scandalous words and gestures against ecclesial
communion—words and gestures that you have never retracted!
You do not manifest repentance, even for the cause of your suspension a divinis.
You do not explicitly express your acceptance if the authority of the Second Vatican
Council and of the Holy
See—and this constitutes the
basis of the problem—and you continue in those personal works of yours which the
legitimate authority pas expressly ordered you to suspend. Ambiguity results from the 'duplicity of your
language. On Our part, as We promised you, We are herewith sending you the
conclusion of Our reflections.
1.
In practice
you put yourself forward as the defender and spokesman of the
faithful and of priests "torn apart by what is happening in the church," thus giving the sad impression
that the Catholic faith and the essential values of tradition are not
sufficiently respected and lived in a portion of the people of God, at least in
certain countries.
But in your interpretations of the facts and in the
particular role that you assign yourself, as well as in the way in which
you accomplish
this role, there is something that misleads the people of God and deceives souls
of good will who are justly desirous of fidelity and of spiritual and apostolic
progress
[emphasis
added].
Deviations in the faith or in sacramental practice are certainly very
grave, wherever they occur. For a long period of time they have been the object of Our full doctrinal and
pastoral attention. Certainly one must not forget the positive signs of
spiritual renewal or of increased
responsibility in a good number of Catholics, or the complexity of the cause of the crisis: the immense change in today's world affects
believers at the edge of their being, and renders ever more necessary apostolic
concern for those "who are far away."
But it remains true that some priests and members of the faithful mask
with the name "Conciliar" those
personal interpretations and .erroneous practices that are injurious, even
scandalous, and at times sacrilegious. But these abuses_cannot be attributed
either to the Council itself or to the reform that have legitimately issued
therefrom, but rather to a lack of authentic fidelity in their regard. You want
to convince the faithful that the proximate cause of the crisis is more than a wrong interpretation of
the Council and that it flows from the Council
itself [emphasis added].
Moreover, you act as if you
had a particular role in this regard. But the mission of discerning and
remedying the abuses is first of all Ours; it is the mission of all the
bishops who work together with Us. Indeed We do not cease to raise Our voice against
these excesses: Our discourse
to the consistory of last May 21 repeated this in clear terms. More than anyone else We hear the suffering of distressed
Christians, and We
respond to the cry of the faithful
longing for faith and the spiritual
life. This is not the place to remind you, brother, of all the acts of Our
pontificate that testify to Our constant concern to ensure for the church
fidelity to the true tradition, and to enable her with God's grace to face the
present and future.
Finally, your behavior is contradictory. You want, so you say, to
remedy the abuses that disfigure
the church; you regret that authority in the church is not sufficiently
respected; you wish to safeguard authentic faith, esteem for the ministerial
priesthood and fervor for the Eucharist in its sacrificial and sacramental
fullness. Such zeal would, in itself, merit our encouragement, since it is a
question of exigencies which, together with evangelization and the unity of
Christians, remain at the heart of Our preoccupations and of Our
mission.
But how can you at the same
time, in order to fulfill this role, claim that you are obliged to act contrary
to the recent Council in opposition to your brethren in the episcopate, to
distrust the Holy See itself—which you
call the "Rome of the neo-modernist and neo-Protestant tendency"—and to
set yourself up in open disobedience to Us? If you truly want to work "under Our authority," as you affirm in your last
private letter, it is immediately necessary to put an end to these ambiguities
and contradictions.
2. Let us come now to the more precise requests which you
formulated during the audience of September 11. You would like to see recognized the right to
celebrate Mass in various places of worship according to the Tridentine rite.
You wish also to continue to train candidates for the priesthood according to
your criteria, "as before the Council," in seminaries apart, as at Econe. But
behind these questions and other similar ones, which We shall examine later
on in detail, it is truly necessary
to see the intricacy of the problem: and the problem is theological. For these
questions have become concrete ways
of expressing an ecclesiology that is warped in essential
points.
What is indeed at issue is the question
—which must truly be called fundamental—of your clearly proclaimed refusal to
recognize in its whole, the authority of the Second Vatican Council and that of
the Pope. This refusal is accompanied by an action that is oriented towards propagating and organizing what
must indeed, unfortunately, be called a rebellion. This is the essential issue,
and it is truly un tenable.
Is it necessary to remind you that you are Our brother in the
episcopate and moreover—a
fact that obliges you to remain even more closely united to the See of Peter—that
you have been named an assistant at
the papal throne? Christ has given the supreme authority in his church to Peter
and to the apostolic college, that is, to the Pope and to the college of bishops una
cum Capite.
In regard to the Pope, every Catholic admits that the words of Jesus to
Peter determine also the charge of Peter's legitimate successors: ". . .whatever
you bind on earth will be bound in heaven" (Mt.
Concerning bishops united with the sovereign
pontiff, their power with regard to
the universal church is solemnly exercised in the ecumenical councils, according
to the words of Jesus to the body of the apostles: ". . .whatever you bind on
earth shall be bound in heaven" (Mt. 18:18). And now in your conduct you refuse
to recognize, as must be done, these two ways in which supreme authority is
exercised.
Each bishop is indeed an
authentic teacher for preaching to the people entrusted to him that faith which
must guide their thoughts and
conduct and dispel the errors that menace the flock. But, by their
nature, "the charges of teaching and governing. . .cannot be exercised except in
hierarchical communion with the head of the college and with its members"
(Constitution Lumen Gentium, 21; cf. also 25). A fortiori, a single
bishop without a canonical mission does not have in actu expedite ad agendum,
the faculty of deciding in general what the rule of faith is or of determining
what tradition is. In practice you are claiming that you alone are the judge of
what tradition embraces.
You say that you are subject to the church
and faithful to tradition by the sole fact that you obey certain norms of the
past that were decreed by the
predecessor of him to whom
God has
today conferred the powers given to Peter. That is to say, on this point also,
the concept of "tradition" that you invoke is distorted
[emphasis added].
Tradition is not a rigid and
dead notion, a fact of a certain static sort which at a given moment of history
blocks the life of this active organism which is the church, that is, the
mystical body of Christ. It is up to the Pope and to councils to exercise
judgment in order to discern in the traditions of the church that which cannot
be renounced without infidelity to the Lord and to the Holy Spirit—the deposit
of faith—and that which, on the contrary, can and must be adapted to facilitate the prayer and the mission of the church throughout a
variety of times and places, in order better to translate the divine message
into the language of today and better to communicate it, without an unwarranted
surrender of principles.
Hence tradition is inseparable from the living magisterium of the church,
just as it is inseparable from sacred scripture. "Sacred tradition, sacred
scripture and the magisterium of the church. . .are so linked and joined
together that one of these realities cannot exist without the others, and that
all of them together, each in its own way, effectively contribute under the
action of the Holy Spirit to the salvation of souls" (Constitution Da Verbum,
10).
With the special assistance of the Holy Spirit, the popes and the
ecumenical councils have acted in this common way. And it is precisely this that the Second
Vatican Council did. Nothing that was decreed in this Council, or in the reforms
that we enacted in order to put the Council into effect, is opposed to what the
2,000-year-old tradition of the church considers as fundamental and immutable.
We are the guarantor of this, not in virtue of Our personal qualities but in
virtue of the charge which the Lord has conferred upon Us as legitimate
successor of Peter, and in virtue of the special assistance that He has promised
to Us as well as to Peter: "I have
prayed for you that your faith may not fail" (Lk. 22:32). The universal
episcopate is guarantor with us of this.
Again, you cannot appeal to the distinction between what is dogmatic
and what is pastoral to accept certain texts of this Council and to refuse
others
[empahsis added]. Indeed, not everything in
the Council requires an assent of the same nature: only what is affirmed by
definitive acts as an object of faith or as a truth related to faith requires an
assent of faith. But the rest also forms part of the solemn magisterium of the
church to which each member of the faithful owes a confident
acceptance and a sincere application.
You say moreover that you do not always see how to reconcile certain
texts of the Council, or certain dispositions which We have enacted in order to
put the Council into practice, with the wholesome tradition of the church and in
particular with the Council of Trent of the affirmations of Our predecessors.
These are for example: the responsibility of the college of bishops united with
the sovereign pontiff, the new Ordo Missae, ecumenism, religious freedom, the
attitude of dialogue, evangelization in the modem world. . . . It is not the
place, in this letter, to deal with each of these problems. The precise tenor of the documents, with the
totality of it nuances and its
context, the authorized explanations, the detailed and objective commentaries
which have been made, are of such a
nature to enable you to overcome these personal difficulties. Absolutely
secure counsellors, theologians and spiritual directors would be able to help
you even more, with God's
enlightenment, and We are ready to facilitate this fraternal assistance for
you.
But how can an interior personal difficulty—a
spiritual drama which We
respect—permit you to set
yourself up publicly as a judge of what has been legitimately adopted, practically
with unanimity, and knowingly to
lead a portion of the faithful into your refusal? If justifications are useful
in order to facilitate intellectual acceptance — and We hope that the troubled or reticent
faithful will have the wisdom,
honesty and humanity to accept those justifications that are
widely placed at their disposal —they are not in themselves necessary for the
assent of obedience that is due to the Ecumenical Council and to the decisions of the Pope. It is the
ecclesial sense that is at
issue.
In effect you and those who
are following you are endeavoring to come
to a standstill at a given moment in the life of the church. By the same
token you refuse to accept the
living church, which is the church that has always been: you break with the
church's legitimate pastors and scorn the legitimate exercise of their charge.
And so you claim not even to be
affected by the orders of the Pope, or by the suspension a divinis, as you lament
"subversion" in the church.
Is it not in this state of mind
that you have ordained priests without dimissorial letters and against
Our explicit command, thus creating
a group of priests who are in an irregular situation in the Church and who are under grave ecclesiastical
penalties? Moreover, you hold that
the suspension that you have incurred applies only to the celebration of the sacraments
according to the new rite, as if they were something improperly introduced
into the church, which you go so
far as to call schismatic, and you think that you evade this sanction when you administer the sacraments according to the formulas of the past and against the
established norms (cf. I Cor. 14:40).
From the same erroneous conception springs your abuse of
celebrating the Mass called that of St. Pius V. You know full well that this
rite had itself been the result of
successive changes, and that the Roman Canon remains the first of the
eucharistic prayers authorized today.
The present reform derived its raison d'Stre
and its guidelines from the Council
and from the historical sources of
the liturgy. It enables the laity to draw greater nourishment from the word of God. Their more active participation leaves intact the
unique role of the priest acting in the person of Christ. We have sanctioned
this reform by Our authority,
requiring that it be adopted by all Cath olics.
If, in general, We have not judged
it good to permit any further delays or exceptions to this adoption, it is with
a view to the spiritual good and the unity of the entire ecclesial community,
because, for Catholics of the Roman rite, the Ordo Missae is a privileged sign
of their unity. It is also because, in your case, the old rite is in fact the
expression of a warped ecclesiology, and a ground for dispute with the Council
and its reforms under the pretext that in the old rite alone are preserved,
without their meaning being obscured, the
true sacrifice of the Mass and the
ministerial priesthood.
We cannot accept this erroneous judgment, this
unjustified accusation, nor can We tolerate that the Lord's Eucharist, the
sacrament of unity, should be the
object of such divisions (cf. I Cor.
Of course there is room in the church for
a certain pluralism, but in licit matters and in obedience. This is not
understood by those who refuse the
sum total of the liturgical reform; nor indeed on the other hand by those who
imperil the holiness of the real presence of the Lord and of his sacrifice. In
the same way there can be no question of a priestly formation which ignores the
Council.
We cannot therefore take your requests
into consideration, because it is a question of acts which have already been
committed in rebellion against the one true
—
3. Specifically, what do We ask of
you?
A.—First and foremost, a declaration that will rectify matters for
Ourself and also for the people of God who have a right to clarity and who can
no longer bear without damage such equivocations.
This declaration will therefore have to affirm that you sincerely adhere
to the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council and to all its documents—sensu
obvio —which were
adopted by the Council fathers and approved and
promulgated by Our authority. For such an adherence has always been the rule, in
the church, since the beginning, in the matter of ecumenical
councils.
It must be clear that you equally
accept the decisions that We have made
since the Council in order to put it into effect, with the help of the
departments of the Holy See; among other things, you must explicitly recognize
the legitimacy of the reformed liturgy, notably of the Ordo Missae, and our
right to require its adoption by the entirety of the Christian
people.
You must also admit the binding character of the
rules of canon law now in force which, for the greater part, still correspond
with the content of the Code of Canon Law of Benedict XV, without excepting the
part which deals with canonical penalties.
As far as concerns Our person, you will
make a point of desisting from and
retracting the grave accusations or insinuations which you have publicly
levelled against Us, against the orthodoxy of Our faith and Our fidelity to Our
charge as the successor of Peter, and against Our immediate
collaborators.
With regard to the bishops,
you must recognize their authority in their respective dioceses by
abstaining from preaching in those dioceses and
administering the sacraments there: the eucharist, confirmation, holy orders,
etc., when these bishops expressly object to your doing
so.
Finally, you must undertake
to abstain from all activities (such as conferences, publications, etc.)
contrary to this declaration, and formally to reprove all those initiatives
which may make use of your name in the face of this
declaration.
It is a question here of the
minimum to which every Catholic bishop must subscribe: this adherence can tolerate
no compromise. As soon as you
show Us that you accept its
principle. We will propose the practical manner of presenting this declaration.
This is the first condition in order that the suspension a divinis be
lifted.
B.—It will then remain to solve the problem of your activity, of
your works, and notably of
your seminaries. You will
appreciate, brother, that in view of the past and present irregularities and
ambiguities affecting these works, We cannot go back on the juridical
suppression of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Pius X. This has inculcated a
spirit of opposition to the Council and to its implementation such as the Vicar
of Christ was endeavoring to promote.
Your declaration of
This is why, as supreme guarantor of the faith and of the formation of
the clergy, We require you first of all to hand over to Us the responsibility of
your work, and particularly for
your seminaries. This is
undoubtedly a heavy sacrifice for you, but it is also a test of your trust, of your obedience and it is a
necessary condition in order that
these seminaries, which have no canonical existence in the church, may in the
future take their place therein.
It is only after you have accepted the principle that We shall be able to
provide in the best possible way for the good of all the persons involved, with
the concern for promoting authentic
priestly vocations and with respect for the doctrinal, disciplinary and pastoral
requirements of the church. At that stage. We shall be in a position to listen
with benevolence to your requests and your wishes and, together with Our
departments, to take in conscience the right and
opportune
measures.
As for the illicitly
ordained seminarians, the sanctions which they have incurred in conformity
with Canon 985,7 and 2374 can be lifted, if they give proof of a
return to a better frame of mind, notably by accepting to subscribe to the
declaration which We have asked of you. We count upon your sense of the church in order
to make this step easy for them.
As regards the foundations,
houses of formation, "priories" and various other institutions set up on your
initiative or with your encouragement, We
likewise ask you to hand them
over to the Holy See, which will study their position, in its various
aspects, with the local episcopate. Their survival, organization and apostolate
will be subordinated, as is normal throughout the Catholic Church, to an
agreement which will have to be reached, in each case, with the
local
bishop —nihil sine Episcopo —and in a spirit which respects
the
declaration mentioned
above.
All the points which figure in this letter and to which We have given
mature consideration, in consultation with the heads of the departments
concerned, have been adopted by Us only out of regard for the greater good of
the church. You said to Us during our conversation of September 11: "I am ready
for anything, for the good of the church." The response now lies in your
hands.
If you refuse— quod Deus avertat—to make the declaration which is asked of you,
you will remain suspended a divinis. On the other hand, Our pardon and the lifting of the suspension
will be assured you to the extent
to which you sincerely and without ambiguity undertake to fulfill the conditions of this letter
and to repair the scandal caused. The obedience and the trust of which you will
give proof will also make it possible for Us to study serenely with
you
your personal
problems.
May the Holy Spirit
enlighten you and guide you towards the only solution that would enable you on
the one hand to rediscover the
peace of your momentarily misguided
conscience but also to ensure the good of souls, to contribute to the unity of the
church which the Lord has entrusted to Our charge and to avoid the danger of a
schism.
In the psychological state in which you find yourself, We realize that it
is difficult for you to see clearly and very hard for you humbly to change your
line of conduct: is it not therefore urgent, as in all such cases, for you to
arrange a time and a place of recollection which will enable you to consider the matter
with the necessary objectivity?
Fraternally, We put you on
your guard against the pressures to which you could be exposed from those who wish to keep you in an untenable
position, while We Ourself, all your brothers in the episcopate and the vast majority of the faithful await
finally from you that ecclesial attitude which would be to your
honor.
In order to root out the abuses which we all deplore and to guarantee a
true spiritual renewal, as well as the courageous evangelization to which the
Holy Spirit bids us, there is needed more than ever the help and commitment of the entire ecclesial community around
the Pope and the bishops. Now the
revolt of one side finally reaches and risks accentuating the insubordination of
what you have called the "subversion" of the other side; while, without your own
insubordination, you would
have been able, brother, as
you expressed the wish in your last letter, to help Us, in fidelity and under
Our authority, to work for the advancement of the
church.
Therefore, dear brother, do
not delay any longer in considering before God, with the keenest religious
attention, this solemn adjuration of the
humble but legitimate
successor of Peter. May you measure
the gravity of the Hour and
take the only decision that befits a son of the church. This is Our hope, this
is Our prayer.
From the
PAULUS PP.
VI