Brian Burgess@Burgess7281975
I hear you but let me share some things about the good Archbishop and the Society he created that I believe are worth consideration.
Also - I urge us all to receive the Eucharist and Penance as often as possible. I should receive both daily but am not there yet.
So pray for me please.
And I don’t want to make this a referendum on the Canonical Status of SSPX (Irregular Communion; not Schismatic) but let me give you some fuel for thought.
(1) Can you think of any Saints who were Excommunicated only later to become Saints several generations later? How about specifically in France?How about who were French who PSPX helped rehabilitate?
(2) The 1988 Excommunications were remitted back in 2009 by, of all people, our beloved Pope Benedict XVI who, in younger days as Prefect for the Inquisition, had been somewhat of a foil for Archbishop Lefebvre. Indeed, I suspect His Eminence Cardinal Ratzinger had more than just a passing role in the drafting of Can. 1387 which was the specific basis for Archbishop Lefebvre’s Excommunication.
(3) I have never heard anyone who knew Archbishop Lefebvre who did not LOVE him and this includes people on all points along the Traditionalist and, ahem, Modernist Continuum. Father Anthony Cekada (prominent Separatist Sedevacantist of the SSPV who died in 2020) was expelled by Lefebvre and subsequently sued thereby but, to hear him talk of Lefebvre it was very obvious that he held him in great regard.
The brilliant Father Michel des-Lauriers, was a Sedeprivationist who taught at Econe and was expelled by Lefebvre in the late 1970s when Father (des-Lauriers) told incoming seminarians that post-1965 Popes were only “Pope Materialiter” and not “Pope Formaliter” and therefore were owed the same submission that one would afford a corpse (“sicut cadaveri”).
Yes, Archbishop Lefebvre defended Popes whom he thought were wrong against harder-line Traditionalists for years.
Indeed, I don’t just suspect that PSJPII would give Archbishop Lefebvre a bear hug if they were here today but he DID this many times throughout the 1980s when the squawking was loudest.
(4) When Lefebvre was six-years-old he wrote Pope Saint Pius X a thank you note on Christmas Day for the Encyclical Quam Singulari (1910), which had lowered the age of reason and permitted children to receive Holy Communion at age seven rather than twelve.
And if His Holiness Pope Leo XIV were to ask me my opinion (and he hasn’t 😉) I would respectfully urge him to consider the issues surrounding the SSPX and Archbishop Lefebvre in utmost Charity and Reason.
