“Between Rome and Rebellion”: Learning Our History as Traditionalists (Part 1)

Priestly ordinations on June 29, 1976, in Econe

I would say that I have been a traditionalist, in thought and feeling, for a lot longer than I have used that specific term to characterize the movement to which I belong. Now, there are some who object to the term in principle, but I think we can use it in a pragmatic way; after all, language is meant to be useful, and having a term that refers to people who strive to adhere to Catholic tradition in theology, morality, and liturgy is useful. (I wrote about this matter here.)

But one thing I’ve noticed is that very few traditionalists know their own history well.

This, I think, is a problem—especially for people who are involved in conversations, whether online or in person, and all the more if they are going to produce podcasts or in any other way set themselves up as public spokesmen for the cause of tradition.

Why is it a problem?

Well, think about what it would be like for someone to be a spokesman on the USA without knowing American history extremely well, or on World War II without knowing the battles and negotiations backwards and forwards. Just being a Catholic, while it gets you very far in regard to the basics of salvation, does not automatically qualify you to set up as a Catholic apologist; and just attending the traditional Latin Mass does not suddenly qualify you to defend it or to interpret the many complex issues that arise in its ambit.

Over the years I have seen some very embarrassing “TLM apologetics” in which the arguments were so severely flawed that anyone who knew their liturgical history well would instantly walk away, more convinced of his anti-trad views than ever. Similarly, social media encourages people to feel confident about sharing every thought that pops into their heads on the SSPX or the Ecclesia Dei period or Bugnini or whatever, but in 9 out of 10 cases they are ill-prepared to address these topics.

I say these things not to discourage anyone from being involved in the melee, but rather, to encourage readers to remember that opinions and arguments will be taken all the more seriously when they proceed from a certain breadth and depth of knowledge — and, therefore, that we owe it to ourselves and to our fellow Catholics to take pains to acquire this knowledge by means of at least some study every day.

All that by way of an introduction to this week’s and next week’s Professor’s Bookshelf. We will look at excerpts from Yves Chiron’s marvelous book Between Rome and Rebellion: A History of Catholic Traditionalism with Special Attention to France (Angelico Press, 2024), which is a must-read for those who want a close-up study of where and how the traditionalist movement started, and what are the major traits it has shown over the decades.

Chiron effectively conveys the immense drama of the period immediately after the Council, which was, in a lot of ways, far more rumbustious and scandalous than most of what we’ve had to experience in recent decades. Even during the Francis pontificate, as awful as it was, there was always a pretty substantial conservative and traditional counterforce, whereas reading about the late 1960s and 1970s one has the impression that just about everybody in the Church had lost their minds or their bearings.

Breathlessly moving from one upheaval to the next, Chiron sheds light on how things became as bad as they did, inspiring the reader with stories of the notable lay and clerical heroes who entered the fray and fought the good fight, in spite of being constantly harassed and accused of “disobedience” (not much has changed in that playbook). Chiron documents the vitality of the traditional groups at a time when everything seemed to be falling apart—and documents the violent rage of the Establishment against them.

Between Rome and Rebellion covers a vast amount of information that every traditionalist activist, writer, or speaker should know. In particular, if you want to understand why Lefebvre did what he did, and why the SSPX exists, there is no better resource.

I shall split these excerpts in two parts. Enjoy! As usual, the page number is given in parentheses. Any editorial remarks by me are placed in italics.

[All plain text is from Chiron; italics are my comments. PAK]

Ultramontanist origins

In establishing the intellectual genealogy of twentieth-century traditionalism, one finds that it is the direct descendant of intransigent Catholicism. It was born in opposition to the French Revolution. This is what Émile Poulat calls the “Catholic Counter-Revolution.” (1)

Initially, it was over-the-top ultramontanist:

“We are integral Roman Catholics,” reads the statement of purpose of La Vigie [a weekly that began in 1912],

that is to say, we place above everything and everyone not only the traditional teaching of the Church in the order of absolute truths, but also the directions of the pope in the order of practical contingencies. The Church and the Pope are one and the same. Ubi Petrus ibi ecclesia [Where Peter is, there is the Church].

Benedict XV defined the modernist “spirit” as a search for “novelties” at all costs “in the way in which they carry out religious functions, in the ruling of Catholic institutions, and even in private exercises of piety.” (7)

Quoting Veuillot:

I believe that since the world cannot live without authority, it will come to seek authority at its source here below, which is the Holy See. . . . [t]o establish order, it will be necessary to begin with a solemn affirmation of the rights of the Papacy, which are the rights of God. (17)

So ironic!

In his June 19, 1913 Declaration mentioned above, Archbishop Benigni established the equivalence between “integral Catholicism” and “Romanity.” He affirmed that “integral Catholics” are “Catholics who want to be entirely, integrally Roman, faithful to the Holy See and to its directions in individual and social life.” He specified: “In the face of the minimization of Roman Catholicism attempted by liberal Catholics, modernizers, etc., they affirm the integrity of their Romanism. That is all.” When the appellation “integral Catholics” was prohibited by Benedict XV, “Romanity” remained more than ever a characteristic claimed by anti-liberals and anti-modernists. In doing so, they were in full agreement with the popes. (18)

The rise of progressivism

The crisis in the Church did not begin with the Second Vatican Council. In France, it began at the Liberation [from German occupation], in an unprecedented historical context in which the end of the war marked in all areas (political, international, economic, cultural, including religious) the end of one world and the advent of another. “A transitional age,” Cardinal Suhard, Archbishop of Paris, would soon say, in Essor ou déclin de l’Église. … There is, he wrote, a “Church divided” between a “progressive mysticism” that pleads for “adaptation” and an “intransigence” that refuses “accommodations” and “compromises” and wants “an integral return to traditional forms.” (27)

As soon as the country was liberated, French Catholicism entered into “effervescence.” It was Cardinal Gerlier, Archbishop of Lyon, who used the word a few years later, describing “a kind of intellectual effervescence” which, “for some time now, has been troubling some souls” and “certain audacities of thought [that] were flying thick and fast.” (33)

Early liturgical experiments

This was happening in the 1930s!:

The effervescence was not limited to theology; it was also liturgical. The Liturgical Movement, born in 1909 in Belgian and German Benedictine abbeys, had spread to France in the 1920s and 1930s. At the same time, certain liturgical innovations began to spread. The practice of the “dialogue Mass” was approved under specific circumstances by the Congregation for Rites in 1935: when the priest celebrated a low Mass, the faithful might say the servers’ responses as well as the Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei. Other innovations spread at the end of the 1930s and during the war. At the Cité des Jeunes, a large sponsorship center he had founded in Jouy-en-Morin for children and adolescents from Parisian parishes, the Marist Father Fillère instituted “living” Masses: the priest celebrated facing the congregation arranged in a semicircle, the hymns were in French, and the kiss of peace was exchanged among the participants. (34)

A Mass versus populum in 1930 at Maria Laach, a German Benedictine monastery that would become a hotbed of liturgical progressivism

In addition to these innovations and experiments in France, there were those of the four thousand or so priests, religious, and seminarians who were prisoners or deportees to Germany. In the camps, where religious celebrations were never forbidden, various “pastoral liturgical experiments,” as one stalag chaplain put it, were put into practice and lived. They transgressed certain liturgical norms in force at the time, and introduced new practices. When they returned from the camps, these thousands of priests, religious, and seminarians did not forget what they had experienced and practiced, and some of them wanted to introduce these new practices in their parishes or convents. (35)

The CPL [Centre de pastorale liturgique], through its sessions, conferences, and publications, carried out “activities of research, information, experience, and liturgical propaganda,” to use the formula of Father Dubarle, then director of Éditions du Cerf. It was a “great laboratory of new ideas.” The CPL encouraged, guided, and inspired the liturgical innovations and experiments that multiplied in certain parishes and communities up until the Council, all the while trying to temper the impatience and imprudence of the most daring. (35)

New alliances against “intransigents”

Georges Hourdin [editor of La Vie catholique illustrée, which began in 1945] said: “This trimmed-down faith, this insertion of Christians into the modern world as it was, prefigured the decisions of the Second Vatican Council; we were laying the groundwork for it in a completely disinterested way, since we did not even imagine that it could ever take place.” (39)

They [various new postwar publications] all shared “the same conviction that to give in to anti-communism would be to cut oneself off from the working class, the masses, in a word the people.” (40)

This earned the movement the approval of Emmanuel Mounier in Esprit: “It cannot be said that being Christian necessarily excludes any defined, lucid collaboration with the communists.” (41)

Card. Suhard in a 1947 pastoral letter used the terms “integrism” and “progressivism” for the first time in an official church document. He described the integrists as follows: “Against aggressively militant atheism they oppose a defensive dogmatism. . . .The Church [in this view] is not behind the times. It is man who is sinning and losing his reason.” He rejected this view as a “rupture” with the modern world. (48)

It can be said that in the 1940s and until the early 1960s there was a kind of tacit triple alliance between the Holy Office, certain professors of the pontifical universities, and various French Catholic publications with a view to denounce what appeared to them as theological deviations, and to defend the faith against threats. (55)

A few months later, in September 1952, Pierre Lemaire devoted a special issue of Paternité to the infiltration of Catholic circles by communist ideas. It contained an alarming account of how communist ideology was being imposed in the seminaries that remained open in China, and an article devoted to the “Marxist impregnation in France.” (67)

In September [1953], Father Congar published an article on the future of priest-workers in which he used a formula that was to become famous: “You can condemn a solution if it is faulty; you cannot condemn a problem.” (69)

Father Fessard, who was always a lucid and profound analyst, noted its persistence and explained it [in 1960]: “Poverty, justice, and the direction of history: so many ambiguous words through which the Marxist poison has crept in.” (70)

In the cases of both Pierre Lemaire and Jean Ousset, these first episcopal warnings or prohibitions occurred while other bishops, in private and in public, had given them support and encouragement. This support continued, which shows a division in the episcopate or, at least, attests to the freedom of the bishops at a time when Episcopal Conferences and their unwieldy structures did not yet exist. (70)

Jean Madiran in 1954. The same could be said of liturgical propaganda:

The worker-priests are “morally prisoners of the diabolical communist phantasmagoria. Therein lies the essence of this horrible drama: they are in the state of men who have gone through a long hallucination and who are unable to shake it off.” (77)

New lay apostles enter the fray

Bishop Lusseau complaining about a new “progressive catechism” circulating in France: He did not question the good intentions of the propagators of the new catechetical methods, but he pointed out a number of silences or insufficiencies on original sin, the mystery of the Trinity, the Incarnation of God, the Real Presence in the Eucharist, etc. […]

Indeed, it is not possible for intelligences whose initiation from a young age to the truths of the revealed Faith is incomplete not to find themselves forever deprived of the deep convictions that make up the Christian life. (85)

Archbishop Marmottin of Reims was much warmer, and encouraged Pierre Lemaire to continue his fight [1957]: “I admire your courage and your ever ardent zeal, as well as your holy wrath against so many errors and deviations. You know that I share your ideas; but I cannot go to war as you do.” (86)

Pierre Lemaire considered leaving Angers at that time, where he was now persona non grata with the bishop. He did not leave the city until two years later, when he had found a suitable place to continue his activities: it was Saint-Céneré, in Mayenne, where he set up a printing house and published books, brochures, and reviews. For the time being, he did not decide to retire from all lay apostolate— he was not yet fifty-five years old— and he did not give up publishing, distributing, and fighting. (89)

In 1958, Lemaire launched a new periodical called Défense du foyer. In his first editorial he wrote of it:

It appears at a serious moment: because we have denied the Author of all good, all authority is disappearing. The evil is so great that our overseas empire is collapsing. . . .Our sons are fighting in Algeria, but it is in France that the real problems arise. The impotent State no longer defends essential values. It is sinking into anarchy and corruption. We, fathers, have the obligation— it is a matter of life and death— to restore order, first at home, and then in the city. (89)

Multiplying quotations from the teachings of Leo XIII and St. Pius X, the text concluded that in a political constitution “abstract notions, enchanting and flattering as they may be, are more prone to equivocation and error than are concrete realities such as God, family, country, and work on which any balanced society rests.” (91)

Sixties-ism

Mentalities, too, were undergoing significant changes, especially in the West. The Western world was embarking on what Canadian sociologist Louis Rade has called “Sixties-ism.” He defines it as “an ideology of modernity that reached its peak in the 1960s and continued until the mid-1970s. It is characterized by individualism, a more or less radical rejection of authority, the refusal of duty, the demand for rights, youthism, consumerism and, at the same time, the contestation of this consumerism.” This “1960s” state of mind had become widespread before the Council met, and the bishops gathered in Council could not ignore it. It can be said that many of them, without approving it, did not want to contradict it head-on.

From a strictly religious point of view, in the still predominantly Catholic countries of Europe and in North America, secularization of society and education, as well as other factors, had led to an ever-decreasing number of regular Massgoers. In 1962, the year the Council opened, in Austria only one-third of Catholics attended Mass regularly; in France, the proportion was between 27 and 28%.5 The de-Christianization of the Church goes back before the Council. John XXIII and a majority of the Council Fathers wanted to confront it with a new method and a new language. (110)

One can sympathize, in a way: they thought they might reverse this. But everything done by Vatican II and afterwards only accelerated the decline, adding fuel to the fire of secularization.

Thus, on October 23, 1964, in his intervention in the aula, the exiled Archbishop Yu-Pin of Nanking was indignant:

The schema on the Church and the modern world has an inexplicable omission: it says nothing about communism. But even if one wants to ignore the political-economic aspects of the system, it is not possible to ignore its ideology, which has the most serious consequences for the whole of life in the world. Communism dominates almost half of humanity and threatens the other half. It is the gravest danger in the modern world. (125)

Ignored then, ignored now. (Think of Cardinal Zen.)

L’abbé Louis Coache (1920–1994)

Tough times call for tough men

On June 4, 1964, Promotion du laïcat sent an open letter to all the bishops of France, in which it gave the following warning:

Our action will continue to grow; it is not for us to reveal our plans; we will act —when necessary —where necessary —for as long as necessary. Such is the price of protecting our homes. Promotion of the Laity will not disarm until the progressives and crypto-communists who are ensconced at the head of Catholic organizations and media outlets have been kicked out by our Higher Clergy. (131)

Now THAT’s the spirit!

Father Coache, a simple country priest who until then had been unknown, began to make his voice heard and soon attracted the media’s attention. Ordained a priest in 1943 and pastor of various rural parishes in the Oise region, he had been concerned since the beginning of the 1950s about a growing independence among certain priests and religious “with regard to discipline, morality, and liturgy.” He noted at that time a “degradation of the Faith” which, he said, “always happened under the pretext of clarification or better expression, of adaptation or charity.”…

After the end of the third session of the Council he was concerned about what he was observing in many churches and what the press was reporting, and at Christmas 1964 he published at his own expense the Lettre d’un curé de campagne à ses confrères (“Letter from a country priest to his confreres,” 32 pages). He wanted to alert them to the

real tidal wave that is breaking on the various beaches of our Roman Church. In a great number of religious and ecclesiastical circles, there is a desire to shake the authority of the Church, to make a world religion for a world that must be pleased at all costs. . . .The authority and principles of the Church are being undermined under the silly pretext of abolishing triumphalism or clericalism . . . disobedience is taking hold, evil is no longer denounced; attitudes, virtues, and prayers that correspond to the most authentic Christian principles are condemned as rigorism, pharisaism or narrowness. (132)

You see how little has changed? The last sentence perfectly sums up what the anti-trads are still saying today.

Lefebvre begins to make waves

Without going into the details of all the debates, it should be noted that Archbishop Lefebvre, who had already intervened several times on religious liberty during the previous sessions, spoke twice on this theme during the fourth session: on September 9 and 15, 1965. According to him, and to many of the Fathers of the CIP or allied to them, the schema on religious liberty was based on an erroneous definition of liberty as immunity; in reality, “liberty is good and true insofar as it is regulated by the truth.” Without the will to do good, there is no dignity of the person, and under the pretext of respecting consciences, one must not give rights to error. At most, error can be tolerated if its repression would cause a greater evil. (136-37)

[Father Coache] protested against the “abomination of the catechetical sheets” in use before the expected publication of a new catechism, and the arbitrary liturgical innovations by which “an entire clergy is causing us to slide into heresy and abomination.”

And, predictably, this protest met with a chilly reception among bishops:

Coadjutor Archbishop Pierre Veuillot of Paris wrote to Archbishop Marty of Rheims (at the time): “Once again I ask myself the same question: can we remain mute in the face of a generalized and passionate attack on all the efforts at renewal in the Church?”

Soon thereafter, the episcopate issued this statement:

“The duty of Catholics is clear. They must filially receive and implement these teachings and decisions [of Vatican II]. However, a minority, with ever more assertive boldness, is challenging, in the name of fidelity to the past, the principles of the renewal now under way.” (139-140)

In 1965, Fr. Georges de Nante already predicted exactly what would come to pass with Pope Francis:

The Council and the Pope were aiming at making the Catholic Church abandon “its former title” and “replace it with the far more evocative acronym: MASDU (Movement of Spiritual Animation of Universal Democracy). A decatholicized Christianity, the friend of men!” (142)

One sees revving up the whole “enforced optimism” machine that has been such a feature of postconciliar life. The French bishops wrote to the Vatican in 1966 that “shadows must not make us forget the light projected by the Council on the life of our dioceses. The symptoms of vitality are many and comforting, both among the clergy and among the laity.” (146)

Catechism crisis flares up

A new catechism was to be released in 1966. Le Monde noted “significant changes”:

The Precepts of the Church have purely and simply vanished. Mortal sin too, which so traumatized young children, has vanished. . . . Venial sin goes unmentioned. There is no definition of Original Sin. The very names of the devil, or demon, and evil spirits are not even mentioned. The famous “guardian angels” of so many generations’ lullabies no longer figure in this “obligatory fund.” All mention of hell has vanished, as well as its definition as a place of torment, of suffering, and of fire. All that is specified is that “those who refuse to love God to the end would not be able to live with God.” (150)

Madiran, in response, republished the catechism of Pius X and the catechism of Trent, and observed:

“Lay people must, today, vicariously provide the faithful with the Roman catechism that no one provides any more…. What is immediately striking in the new catechism is its revolutionary character,” particularly “the number of omissions”: “The new catechism makes no mention of angels, nor of the Ascension, nor of the Assumption, nor of the sacraments of order, marriage, and extreme unction, etc.” He also noted, and deplored, the fact that: The new catechism, referring as it does mainly to the Bible and Vatican II, completely ignores the great dogmatic formulations of the early Councils. (151)

He concluded:

“All in all, if one refers to the meaning of modernism as defined by Pius X, we can say that the climate of the new catechism is typically modernist.”

Pierre Lemaire reprinted the Grand catéchisme en images [a large-format illustrated catechism for children] that Father Bailly, founder of the Maison de la Bonne Presse, had published in 1909, and which had been reprinted many times until the 1950s. He also reprinted 10,000 copies of the catechism that was in use in the diocese of Paris in 1930, under the title Catechisme de nos enfants (“Our Children’s Catechism”). (158)

Maurice Clavel: “You have not gone out to the world, you have gone over to the world. The spirit of the age has taken hold of you, intimidated you . . . it got you.” (161)

English edition of Fr. Raymond Dulac’s critique of the New Mass

First rumblings about the New Mass

Father Dulac, in Le Courrier de Rome—which was increasingly read by priests and faithful attached to tradition—was kept well-informed by his Roman friends and marshalled his theological verve against this “normative Mass” [of 1967] which

is allegedly destined to replace the one that Gregory the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Philip Neri, Bossuet, the Curé of Ars celebrated without ever suspecting that they were celebrating a passive, unconscious, individualistic, and complicated Mass. The normativa suppresses Kyrie, Gloria, and Offertory; it pulverizes the Confiteor; it glosses over the intercession of the saints, over the commemoration of the souls in purgatory, over anything that expresses the personal offering of the human priest; it proposes two spare Canons; it corrects the words of the consecration; and, of course, it replaces Latin with the national idiom. (177)

In France, the first full critique of the new Mass was that published by Father Dulac, who, as we have seen, had reacted against the liturgical reforms in the very first issues of Le Courrier de Rome, in 1967.

On June 27, 1969, in a long article that was to set the tone for a good many other commentators after him, he attacked an “ecumenical Mass” that could well suit Protestants, a “polyvalent Mass,” since some of its “rites [were] left to the celebrant’s choice” and it contained “equivocal” words; it “annihilated the Offertory”; it was a “Mass that hides its face.” The article ended with a clear and definite rejection: “We refuse to follow the Novus Ordo Missae.” (182)

Rather sad: because of neoscholastic reductionism, wherein only doctrine matters and not ritual, Journet simply accepts the pope’s word that doctrine hasn’t changed and accepts the new rite. But his words damn with faint praise:

Cardinal Journet, on the eve of celebrating the new Mass for the first time, said that he would do so “with great obedience,” and that Paul VI’s address had reassured him. “Of course,” he agreed, “we are losing great riches...[t]here is no doubt about it,” but he hoped that the monasteries would remain “islets” that would know how to “preserve the Latin tradition, as a witness to the catholicity of the Church through time.” (188)

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Jean Madiran observed that the text of the Mass remained “uncertain, variable, ever-changing, because the options offered to the celebrant and the liberties he may take mean that there is no longer the new Mass, but new Masses.” (190-91)

Card. Siri expressing the most irrational hyperpapalism imaginable:

The Council did not ask for such a revolution. The liturgical reform was done, the Pope approved it, and that’s enough: I adopt a position of obedience that one must always have with regard to the Pope. If he had asked me, I think I would have made some observations, several. But once a law is approved, there is only one thing to do: obey. (191)

In the event, it was grassroots “resistance” that allowed the traditional Mass to continue despite the prohibitions from Rome, from the Episcopal Conferences, and from the chanceries. (195)

A not inconsiderable number of parish priests were able to remain faithful to the traditional Mass. (196)

Stalwart priests resist the New Mass

Chiron then goes on to tell the fascinating stories of several priests who simply refused to stop saying the old Mass, and carried on in varying degrees of trouble with their superiors. But they would never back down, and this seems to have earned them grudging respect. But when these various priests died, in many cases it was only due to the SSPX that the Masses, which by then had been going for many years after the introduction of the Novus Ordo, could be continued for the benefit of the stable congregations. This kind of history puts meat on the bones when it comes to understanding the real-world situations to which Lefevbre was responding.

A journalist reported on one such priest in the diocese of Montpellier:

He [Father Caucanas] is reputed to be a formidable integrist. He says Mass in Latin. For years he has been in constant opposition to Cyprien Tourel, bishop of Montpellier, an old seminary chum. The bishop reproaches him for not applying the liturgical reforms of Vatican II? Each time, he retorts: “Get lost.” (199)

The association was registered at the prefecture under the name Association sacerdotale Noël Pinot (ANP), named after the priest from Anjou who was executed during the Revolution and who went to the scaffold wearing priestly vestments while saying the first words of the Mass: Introïbo ad altare Dei (“I will go to the altar of God”). (202)

At this point in the story, it is worth pondering the reasons for which Paul VI was so determined and inflexible in imposing a new rite of Mass. He himself, by temperament, was inclined to beautiful liturgies in Latin and Gregorian chant, as he had discovered them in his childhood among the Benedictines of Chiari, near Brescia. But since at least the 1950s he was convinced that the faithful wanted greater participation in the liturgy and/or were incapable of relating to a more intellectual worship (as he saw it). He soon felt that it was legitimate to sacrifice Latin, Gregorian chant, ad orientem celebration, and certain other practices, in order to make the Mass more accessible to the greatest number.

There was also a more subjective reason: Paul VI had entrusted the preparation of the liturgical reform to a new organism, the Consilium, which answered directly to him, and had left a great deal of freedom to the person actually in charge of it, Father Bugnini, whom he made a prelate and then an archbishop. Paul VI, an intellectual pope, put all his trust, for several years, in the army of liturgical specialists who had been at work in this Consilium.

The clergy and faithful attached to the traditional Mass, however, were not defending it solely on grounds of sentiment (for being the Mass of their youth or ordination) or aesthetics, but for primarily doctrinal reasons: the Mass as “propitiatory sacrifice” and “pure oblation” (to quote the Council of Trent), offered through the ministry of the priest whose primary function this is. Within this attachment to the traditional Mass, there is also a traditional notion of the priesthood. (202)

Fr. Paul Aulagnier

The need for traditional priests becomes urgent

Father Aulagnier reports [in a 2000 interview]:

Our way of life, too, was changing considerably. After four years, the rules of the seminary had practically disappeared. There was no more silence since everyone had a radio in his cell, no more liturgy since every morning saw a new improvisation. The Council had celebrated “openness to the world,” and the world had entered into minds and hearts. (204)

To the mystic Claire Ferchaud, he [Lefebvre] wrote on May 13, 1969:

I believe that at this moment in time, my most urgent duty is to train priests. This is my constant concern and it fills all my time. . . . I am also convinced that it is the holiness of the priesthood that will save us. This is why I’m devoting all my energy and prayers to that end. (205)

On June 9, 1971, in a clear and definitive manner, he [Lefebvre] affirmed his firm and irrevocable choice to preserve the traditional Mass and to refuse the new Ordo Missae. … The Mass, Archbishop Lefebvre explained, rests on “three truths of defined Catholic faith— de fide divina catholica”: the priest, “alone capable of consecrating the Eucharist”; “the sacrificial nature of the Mass and its propitiatory role”; and “the real and substantial presence” of Christ. Now, the liturgical reform, Archbishop Lefebvre affirmed, “directly or indirectly undermines these three essential truths.”

Archbishop Lefebvre, on the other hand, felt that “one cannot affirm in a general way that the new Mass is invalid and heretical” but “it leads slowly to heresy” and “the number of invalid Masses is on the rise.”17 Gradually, however, he would proscribe all participation in the Mass according to the new rite. The doctrine of the SSPX, to this day, is that it is better— during vacations, for example— to break the Sunday precept than to attend an “equivocal” or “questionable” Mass. (208)

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The envy kicks in…

In the early 1970s, the bishops of France could not help but notice the growing number of entries to the seminary of Écône, whereas their own seminaries were receiving fewer and fewer candidates. (210)

An attempt at a pre-seminary was started at Paray-le-Monial:

“There are young men who wish to serve God and the Church,” wrote Father Ladame.

But they ask, in order to commit themselves, to be offered something both serious and stable: not a Christianity reduced to social action tinged with politics, nor a priesthood in perpetual search of its identity and usefulness! The day, on the contrary, when these young people discover that the priesthood is first and foremost a loving response to a loving call from Jesus, Son of God—“Come and follow me!”—they decide to walk in the footsteps of the Master, in joyful renunciation of all that is not Christ, in complete availability to the tasks that the Church will one day entrust to them in the name of the Lord. (211)

It was therefore in a context of acute crisis among French seminaries that Écône was first condemned and Archbishop Lefebvre was first ostracized in the autumn of 1972. (212)

Here was the excuse for refusing to accept Lefebvre’s seminarians into dioceses:

“Who today can venture into this calling without being actually ‘taken from among men,’ that is, marked by the common demands of contemporary life?” (212)

This double rebuff against Archbishop Lefebvre—the refusal to allow him to come to Lourdes and the refusal to recognize his seminary—had no immediate effect on his work, which still had the approval of the Bishop of Sion and the Holy See. The number of entries to the seminary continued to increase. (214)

Father Louis Bouyer, an Oratorian and eminent theologian, noted in 1975 that the “crisis of Catholicism affected first of all the religious” and he denounced “the headlong rush to which religious superiors and prelates tried to give their blessing even as the fruits of their Council were massive defrockings and a generalized confusion of apostolate with apostasy.”

We will only call to mind the reactions and resistances of those who wanted to remain faithful to the Rule and traditions of their order or congregation, even to the point of leaving it in order to remain faithful to the spirit and letter of their order or congregation. (216)

Cardinal Jean Daniélou

A two-track proposal never implemented

Cardinal Daniélou (!) even proposed a sort of Benedict XVI solution, well in advance of Ratzinger—let there be two tracks in the Church for seminaries and religious orders — one that is “updated” and one that is “traditional” — and see which one works better!

But of course this was unacceptable to the progressives. They would never allow the slightest bit of “competition” either because their hatred for the old was so inextricably a part of their ideological commitment to the new, or because they were quite frankly aware that the revolution could never win in an open competition with the old (actually, these positions are compatible: a communist would say that people are wedded to habit and thus need to be broken from it, for their own good—or at least for the good of subsequent generations).

I think that the only and urgent solution is to stop the false orientations taken in a number of institutes. To do this, we have to stop all experiments and decisions contrary to Council directives; warn against books, magazines, sessions where these erroneous conceptions are spread; restore in their integrity the practice of the constitutions with the adaptations requested by the Council. Where this seems impossible, it seems to me that religious who want to be faithful to the constitutions of their order and to the directives of Vatican II cannot be refused the right to form distinct communities. Religious superiors are bound to respect this desire.

These communities must be allowed to have houses of formation. Experience will show whether vocations are more numerous in houses of strict observance or in houses of mixed observance. In the event that superiors oppose these legitimate requests, recourse to the Supreme Pontiff is certainly allowable. (216)

Next week, we’ll complete our tour through highlights from Chiron’s Between Rome and Rebellion.