Looking Back: Archbishop Lefebvre

 Looking Back: Archbishop Lefebvre

Once the negotiations failed, Cardinal Ratzinger spoke on Italian television of a "traumatic" distrust on the part of Archbishop Lefebvre. No: it is a lucid and logical distrust. Unity of communion in the Church is based on unity of Faith (cf. Leo XIII Satis Cognitum). Whenever there is no unity in the Faith, either in whole or in part, there can be no unity of communion.
 

"We cannot," said Archbishop Lefebvre in the following September to the Econe seminarians, "lend a hand to the demolishers of the Church who in their other hand grasp a hammer to do the demolishing! We must get clear what we are after: either we truly wish to build up the Church or we wish to demolish it. If we side with the demolishers, if we rest ourselves on their authority, then by that very fact we also approve, indirectly if not explicitly, of their destruction of the Church. We cannot say that everything is resolved between us. That would be deplorable." And, alluding to those who have thrown in the towel, contenting themselves with profit-taking from Archbishop Lefebvre's umpteenth sacrifice, he goes on to say, "We suffer from being abandoned by all those who have grown tired of finding themselves for so long in a situation delicate, difficult, hard and painful. But we must not grow tired, because what is at stake is not our selves, it is the Faith, Tradition, the continuity and growth of the Church. Therefore we do not have the right to say, 'I am tired of struggling, now I wish to submit to authority,' when that authority is not defending the Faith" (and is working to demolish it).

In Defense of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and the Society of St. Pius X