This is an interesting "take" on Archbishop Lefebvre from the sedevacantist priest Fr Anthony Cekada, an Econe graduate who is regarded as one of the brighter sede intellectuals. Cekada is giving his version of the break which led to him and several other American SSPX priests setting up in the late 80s as the Society of St Pius V (Cekada later left this and went with an independent group).
I must say that Fr Cekada and Archbishop Lefebvre both come out of this account very badly. Cekada because of the arrogance and smugness with which he relates how he and his associates outsmarted the SSPX and the way in which he takes it for granted that he and he alone is entitled to decide what is true Catholicism, that he is not bound to any sort of obedience to the prelate who ordained him and the society he joined, that he can call himself a true Catholic while setting himself up as a Church of Me accountable to no-one and nothing else, etc.
Archbishop Lefebvre comes off badly because Cekada notes his varying statements about the authority of the Pope, some verging on sedevacantism and others pulling back from it, the ambiguous nature of the SSPX and the fact that the Archbishop felt himself entitled to dismiss priests from the SSPX at his own sweet will and without any sort of judicial process (as we have seen from some SSPX statements quoted on this forum, the SSPX have a very rigorous concept of obedience and it is deliberately structured so as to make it pretty much impossible for a Superior to be made accountable to the members or to be deposed against his will). Even allowing for the fact that Cekada is by his own account a sedevacantist and joined the SSPX as a sede, that his suggestions about the Archbishop's motives (e.g. that he was partly motivated by personal animosity against Paul VI, which Cekada suggests explains why he was willing to negotiate with JP II - which as a sede Cekada believes should never even have been considered) reflect assumptions that his views are self-evident, and that some of those dismissed from the SSPX were dismissed for being sedes, which Cekada naturally disapproves of - it still raises serious questions about the Archbishop's position. I have noted some significant points in bold.
Warning - the full text should be avoided by people with high blood pressure and limited tolerance for self-righteous sedevacantist sophistry
www.traditionalmass.org/images/articles/NineVLefebvre.pdfEXTRACTS
The overwhelming majority of
lay members in each place supported our stand against
Abp. Lefebvre and his organization.
In 2007 Bishop Richard N. Williamson published a collection of newsletters he wrote during this period, when he was the rector of the SSPX seminary in Ridgefield, Connecticut.
Naturally, his is the Society’s “official history” of the legal struggle. It is the one that, in bits and pieces, has been passed on to several generations of SSPX priests, seminarians and laymen.
The Nine, this version goes, were sedevacantists (or at least secret sedevacantists) who rebelled against the authority of SSPX and its saintly archbishop-founder. They
then used the U.S. court system to defraud the Society of several of its church properties in the Northeast and Midwest — all very, very wicked.
Those who repeat this account, though, never seem to notice that it reflects, if not hypocrisy, at least a double standard — one according to which the rightness or wrongness of a deed is judged by its conformity to the will of Abp. Lefebvre.
For instance, when Abp. Lefebvre says in effect to Paul VI or John Paul II, “We resist you to your face,” he is echoing St. Paul’s reproach to St. Peter, and he is the 20th
-century St. Athanasius. But when a priest says the same thing to Lefebvre, he is a rebel and an ingrate.
Or, when French traditionalist priests and laymen
seize a church in 1978 that they did not pay for (St. Nicholas du Chardonnet) and turn it over to Abp. Lefebvre and SSPX, they are the heroes of the traditionalist resistance.
But when American traditionalist priests and laymen hold
onto the churches in 1983 that they did pay for and refuse
to turn them over to Lefebvre and SSPX, they are conspirators, swindlers and thieves.
....
In my opinion, the principal factor that paved the way
for the court battle was the “mentality” of the Nine, particularly that of its five older members: Fathers Kelly (ordained in 1973), Sanborn (1975), Dolan (1976), Jenkins
(1978) and myself (1977).
Our personal histories were remarkably similar. We
had been raised in the pre-Vatican II Church and then entered seminaries in different parts of the country, where
we witnessed up close the disastrous effects of the Vatican
II changes. We were all fighters who repeatedly battled
with the modernists within our respective seminaries and
orders before finally ending up with Abp. Lefebvre at his
seminary in Ecône, Switzerland.
In my own case, this journey took ten years. Had Vatican II not occurred, I would have had no interest whatsoever in joining Abp. Lefebvre or his organization. I did not
go to Ecône because I was attracted there by the “saintly
archbishop” and the “spirit“ of his society. I went only because I hated modernism, and I wanted to be a Catholic
priest to fight this plague in all its many guises.
At one conference, in fact, Abp. Lefebvre admitted that
this was probably the case for most of us; in normal times,
he said, the majority of us would have chosen to be Jesuits,
Benedictines, Dominicans or diocesan priests, rather than
members of SSPX.
Before Ecône, moreover, I had seen many other holy
priests and prelates, together with institutions far more
impressive and venerable than SSPX, surrender, sell out or
enthusiastically go over to the enemy camp. If the “Iron
Bishop” of Ecône would one day do so, well, it would not
be a complete surprise, but I would not go along with him.
So, when we older priests were ordained and started
organizing groups of faithful Catholics into traditional
chapels throughout the United States in the 1970s, we did
not look upon our apostolate as one of extending the work
of Abp. Lefebvre and SSPX, or even of preserving “the
Latin Mass.” For us, it was a work of combating heretics
and providing valid sacraments.
From the beginning, we were up front about this with
the faithful in any mission we founded...
Father (now-Bishop) Dolan (who founded about 30 missions when he was in SSPX) would give an initial lecture to
the Catholics who had invited him to come to a particular
city. He would explain that the Conciliar Church was a
false religion which taught heresy, that Paul VI was not a
real pope, and that the sacraments conferred by the Conciliar Church were invalid in most cases. These were topics
we repeatedly addressed from the pulpit.
For me and for other members of the Nine, Abp. Lefebvre and his association were like anything else in the
Church: a means to an end — the defense of Catholic doctrine and the salvation of souls — not an end in themselves.
So, if the archbishop and his organization sold out to
the enemy (as we had seen so many others do) they had no
right to any loyalty from us.
B. New Weather in Rome
The second significant factor that would set the stage
for our legal battle with the archbishop was the notable
shift in his “line” after his old enemy Montini (Paul VI)
died and was eventually succeeded in 1978 by John Paul II,
who received the archbishop warmly.
Although there is no question that Abp. Lefebvre was
a convinced anti-liberal and anti-modernist, Mgr Montini
had been a personal enemy when the archbishop served in
the Vatican diplomatic corps before Vatican II. Montini had
also later taken the side of liberals in the French hierarchy
against the archbishop.
This element, I think, added fuel to the fire once the
controversy over the Ecône seminary started to heat up in
1974, and it led Abp. Lefebvre to take a much harder line in
many of his pronouncements against “Rome” and Vatican
II.
For us Americans, naturally, the archbishop’s fiery
words were music to our ears when, during the Society’s
early years (1974–1979), we either entered Ecône or began
our apostolates as young priests. As a result, when various
crises occurred that led to departures of liberals or softliners from the Society (the archbishop’s Declaration in
1974, the suppression in 1975, Paul VI’s consistory allocution and the archbishop’s suspension in 1976, the faculty
revolt in 1977), the internal politics of the Society placed
the American hard-liners solidly among those in the organization who were bien vus — in favor.
During these years too, the opinions expressed by Fr.
Dolan that we mentioned in the previous section were not
all that far from sentiments Abp. Lefebvre himself had expressed, or were merely a logical conclusion therefrom.
In 1974, for instance, the archbishop told the seminarians at Ecône that the problem with Vatican II was not just
an erroneous interpretation of its teaching — rather, the
Council itself taught errors. Now, Abp. Lefebvre, who held
a Roman doctorate in theology and was a distinguished
member of the hierarchy, knew the Catholic teaching that a
true council convoked by a true pope could not teach error,
so from his statement to the seminarians one would naturally conclude that Vatican II was a false council and Paul
VI was a false pope.
2
Other statements that Abp. Lefebvre
made during this period favored the same conclusion —
the position that in the 1980s would come to be known as
“sedevacantism.”
3
That such statements were in part bound up with the
archbishop’s personal animus against Paul VI, of course,
was not really apparent to us at the time. But it would become so, once Paul VI died in August 1978.
After the election of John Paul II in October 1978, Abp.
Lefebvre declared himself ready to “accept Vatican II read
in the light of tradition.” On November 18, 1978, John Paul
II warmly received the archbishop with a bear hug, and
assured him that he himself would see to the resolution of
the archbishop’s case.
In early 1979 this program was temporarily derailed
when the matter was turned over instead to the Vatican
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The archbishop
had to submit to a rather insulting meeting at which the
bishop who had suppressed the Society, Mgr Mamie, was
present, and during which one of the participants accused
Abp. Lefebvre of “dividing the Church.”
Perhaps as a result of this, our stock had gone up
slightly by August 1979 when a group of us American
priests had dinner with the archbishop at Oyster Bay Cove
NY. I was bold enough to ask him whether religious liberty
was heretical and then hint about the effect that would
have on the post-Vatican II popes. Abp. Lefebvre chuckled
and said: “I do not say that the pope is not the pope, but I
do not say either that one cannot say that the pope is not
the pope.”
4
Naturally, this gave us hard-liners hope.
This was dashed three months later, when the archbishop did another flip-flop. On November 8, 1979 he issued “The New Mass and the Pope: The Official Position of
the Society of St. Pius X.” The archbishop repudiated the
notion that Paul VI had been a heretic and therefore not a
true pope (the term “sedevacantism” was not used yet),
said the Society “absolutely refuses to enter into such reasonings” and added that the Society “cannot tolerate
among its members those who refuse to pray for the
Pope.”
In May 1980, therefore, the archbishop visited the Oyster Bay Cove priory and kicked three of us out of the Society (Frs. Kelly, Dolan and myself). The next morning, for
reasons unknown, the archbishop changed his mind: No,
we didn’t have to put John Paul II’s name in the Canon
after all, he said; and, if people asked what his position was
on the pope, we had to tell them what it was, but we didn’t
have to accept it ourselves.
Though for a time we entertained a slim hope that the
archbishop might one day come around to our position
(especially if some Vatican official insulted him suffi-ciently), it became clear during the ensuing years (1981–
1983) that he was pursuing the path of compromise and
negotiation with the modernist heretics.
JP2’s bear hug had worked its magic on the archbishop
and changed the “weather” in Rome. But we wanted no
part of it, or any union with modernists.
....
At a certain point in its history, the Society of St. Pius X
started to promote the notion that it enjoyed the canonical
status of a “society of the common life without vows” —
an entity in canon law akin to a religious order. Familiar
examples of such societies include the Maryknoll Fathers,
the Paulist Fathers, and the Oratorians.
But this claim is, put charitably, more than somewhat
fanciful. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, SSPX at its
foundation was nothing more than a “pious association,”
an entity in canon law that ranks lower than a lay Rosary
Confraternity or the St. Vincent de Paul Society, and
slightly above the Sacred Heart Auto League.
5
I was never given a copy of the rules for this organization when I was a seminarian. Indeed, I was not even
aware when I was at Ecône that such a document existed. I
only came across a copy of the SSPX Statutes by accident
when I moved to New York in 1979, two years after my
ordination.
As a seminarian, I signed an “engagement” in the Society, a document which said only that “I give my name to
the Society.” What obligations this entailed for the signer,
beyond striving to be a holy priest, were not stated.
It was obvious to me that signing this document gave
me no rights as a member of SSPX. It was even more obvious that
Abp. Lefebvre and the other higher-ups did not
believe that my act of signing up imposed any obligations
at all on them towards me. Priest, seminarian or brother —
any member of SSPX, I noticed, would be bounced out on a
moment’s notice with no appeal.There were two versions of the SSPX Statues:
• The 1970 Statutes
6
had received temporary approval
from the Bishop of Fribourg for a period of six years, and
therefore were the only version that one could argue had
been canonically binding — for six years.
• The 1976 Statues
7
(the ones I discovered by chance)
were supposedly put together by a “General Chapter” held
at Ecône in September 1976. These had no canonical force,
because they had not been approved by anyone with even
a remote claim to canonical authority....
This I contrasted with my experience in a real religious
order, the Cistercians. There, the obligations I assumed
with my vows were absolutely clear — set forth in detail
over hundreds of pages in the Rule of St. Benedict, the
General Constitution of the Order, the Constitutions of the
Congregation of Zirc, and other lesser statutes. So, too,
were my rights as a member of the Order and the obligations of my superiors to respect those rights. As a Cistercian, I had two years of weekly classes on these topics.
The only conclusion possible for me was that SSPX was
nothing more than a loose association of priests, seminarians and brothers with certain shared ideals. Because of the
general disarray among Catholics after Vatican II, SSPX
was organized and operated on an improvised and ad hoc
basis.
I
f you disagreed with whatever Abp. Lefebvre’s position happened to be on any topic on any given day, you
were free to leave, and he was equally free to bounce you
out. When it came right down to it, you had no obligations
to him and he sure acted as if he had no obligations to you.
...
looming vulture-like in the wings was the grimfaced Fr. Richard Williamson. The archbishop had appointed him as Vice Rector of the Ridgefield seminary and
as a sort of theological commissar for America, charged — 5 —
with ferreting out any deviations from the archbishop’s
new party line.
Fr. Williamson was perfect for this role. As an adult
convert after Vatican II, his only knowledge and experience of Catholicism came from Abp. Lefebvre and SSPX.
Consequently, he was a total party line man; his principal
point of reference for resolving any issue was what Abp.
Lefebvre thought about it. This can be seen in the newsletters and articles he produced during the dispute that
would follow.
[THIS IS AN INTERESTING POINT - I WONDER HOW FAR BISHOP WILLIAMSON'S LOONEYISM DERIVES FROM NO LONGER HAVING ARCHBISHOP LEFEBVRE TO TELL HIM WHAT TO THINK? - HIB]
...
Fr. Williamson’s method at the seminary was that of
the classic agent provocateur — outrageous statements intended to elicit strong opposing reactions from seminarians who might show loyalty to any principle beyond the
ever-changing “positions of the archbishop.” [THIS BTW IS EXACTLY WHAT THE SSPX COMPLAINED OF ABOUT THE EPISCOPAL VISITORS TO ECONE WHOSE REPORT LED TO ITS SUPPRESSION]
...
Fr. Stark, we
discovered, had been ordained with the post-Vatican II
ordination rite.
Now, Abp. Lefebvre himself had told us years before
that the 1968 priestly ordination rite was of doubtful validity, and he had conditionally ordained at least two Novus
Ordo priests who came to work with SSPX in the United
States, Fathers Sullivan and Ringrose. When the facts of the
Stark case initially came to light, we assumed that Abp.
Lefebvre would follow this same course of action with Fr.
Stark.
11
When this did not happen, in 1981 we published a
study of the new ordination rite in our magazine, The Roman Catholic. The article, written by Fr. Jenkins and entitled
“Purging the Priesthood in the Conciliar Church,” did not
mention the Stark case directly, but his conclusion was
clear: the new ordination rite was of doubtful validity,
therefore the sacraments conferred by a priest so ordained
were of doubtful validity, and therefore such a priest
should seek conditional ordination.
This did not go down well with Fr. Bolduc. For his
part, Fr. Stark made it very clear that he would refuse to
submit to conditional ordination.
Abp. Lefebvre indicated that he wanted us to publish
another article on the subject by Michael Davies — and
Davies, of course, maintained that the new rite was valid.
We published Davies’ article together with a critique of it
by Fr. Jenkins. This in turn led to another written exchange
in The Roman Catholic.
The matter dragged on into 1982, by which time Abp.
Lefebvre (we would later learn) was engaged in one of his
periodic bouts of behind-the-scenes negotiations with
“Rome.” Had our objections to the validity of the new ordination rites become known to the modernists from
whom he was seeking recognition, it would have been an
embarrassing obstacle to “reconciliation.”
So, instead of treating the issue of Fr. Stark’s ordination
as a serious threat to the validity of sacraments his organization was conferring, Abp. Lefebvre treated it merely as
an annoyance and an internal political problem. In best
diplomatic corps fashion, he sought to placate both sides,
equivocate, delay, and avoid public disputes
...
The evolution of liturgical practices in the Society of St.
Pius X will one day make a fascinating topic for someone’s
doctoral dissertation. In the early days of Ecône, the “traditional Mass” celebrated there was a mish-mash of the 1962
John XXIII rite and the interim Paul VI modifications
(1964–67), combined with things “the archbishop liked,”
“what one did in France,” and an occasional dash of the
pre-1955 practice.
How deceived we Americans felt we were, when we
arrived at Ecône only to find a “modernized” Tridentine
Mass! Psalm 42 dropped from the Prayers at the Foot of the
Altar, the priest sitting at the side (as in the Novus Ordo),
the Epistle and Gospel read at Low Mass from lecterns facing the people, and other innovations.
During this same period of time, some of the Englishspeakers in SSPX, notably the seminarian Daniel Dolan,
took an interest in the history of the post-1955 liturgical
changes. These were in large part, it turned out, the work
of Fr. Annibale Bugnini, the creator of the 1969 Novus Ordo
Mass. Bugnini was quite clear in stating that the slew of
liturgical changes that began in the 1950s were “a bridge to
the future” and part of the same process that would produce the New Mass.
When in the 1970s SSPX priests were ordained and
returned to their respective countries, they followed the
local practices there. In English-speaking countries and
Germany, the pre-1955 Missal, Rubrics and Breviary were
used. France, in principle, used the John XXIII books.
The liturgical issue came up at the SSPX “General
Chapter” in 1976. There it was decided that Society priests
should continue to follow the existing practice in their
countries — a sensible enough rule. So, in our U.S. chapels
and seminary, we followed the pre-1955 liturgical books
and practices.
In the early 1980s, however, Abp. Lefebvre decided to
impose the 1962 Missal and Breviary of John XXIII on everyone in SSPX. This again, we would later learn, was connected with the archbishop’s “negotiations” with Ratzinger
and John Paul II. He was asking them for the right to use
the 1962 Missal — the one whose use would later be prescribed for the Indult Mass, the Fraternity of St. Peter and
for the Motu Mass authorized by Ratzinger (Benedict XVI)
in July 2007.
In autumn of 1982, therefore, over the protests of Fr.
Sanborn, the U.S. seminary Rector, Abp. Lefebvre imposed
the use of the John XXIII Missal and Breviary on St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary, then located in Ridgefield CT. This
did not go down well at all, with either the faculty or most
of the seminarians.
The introduction of the 1962 liturgical changes at the
seminary made it obvious that the rest of the priests in the
Northeast would be the archbishop’s next targets for “liturgical reform.”
Now not even the head of a real religious order like the
Cistercians has the power to impose new liturgical practices on members — and Abp. Lefebvre was nothing more
than a retired bishop heading a priests’ association that had no canonical existence. He had no right to dictate liturgical practices to anyone.
Apart from the legal issue, there was the principle itself. These liturgical reforms were the work of the Mason
Bugnini. They were one stage in his program to destroy the
Mass and replace it with the Novus Ordo assembly-supper.
Knowing that, there was no way I and my fellow priests
would use his Missal. [CEKADA OF COURSE OVERLOOKS THE MINOR DETAIL THAT THEY WERE SANCTIONED BY PIUS XII, WHOM HE SUPPOSEDLY ACKNOWLEDGES AS A LEGITIMATE POPE]
In early 1983 Abp. Lefebvre threatened to expel Fr.
Zapp from SSPX because he refused to follow the John
XXIII reforms.
The archbishop’s threat contradicted canon law and
the tradition of the Church, which required that any bishop
who ordained a priest had to insure that the priest had a
“canonical title,” that is, a permanent means of temporal
sustenance. Even when a bishop ordained a priest without a
true canonical title (as Abp. Lefebvre did), canon law
obliged the bishop and his successors to support the priest
as long as he lived.
Abp. Lefebvre made a regular practice of threatening
priests with expulsion or actually expelling them from the
Society, and then making no provision whatsoever for
their support. By 1983, this was part of the archbishop’s
standard operating procedure — cross him and you were
out in the street with no appeal.D. Usurpation of Magisterial Authority
Here the problem was that Abp. Lefebvre and SSPX
acted as if they possessed magisterial authority. When it
came to matters such as the validity of the New Mass or
vacancy of the Holy See, the archbishop began to insist on
imposing on members adherence to his positions du jour.
This, again, was done with a view to cutting a deal with
Ratzinger and John Paul II.
But merely external compliance was not enough. To
this was added a requirement for internal submission to the
SSPX party line. This was evident from a November 8, 1982
letter that Abp. Lefebvre’s hand-picked successor, Fr.
Franz Schmidberger, wrote to a young priest:
“If you remain with our Society, you have to gradually
clarify your inner viewpoint and have to return to the attitude of the Priestly Society, which seems to us to be the
only right one, under the given circumstances, as a talk
with theologians this past weekend has shown me again.
Think about it seriously, because with this decision your
temporal and so much more your eternal welfare is at
stake to the highest degree. I will continue to pray for
you for divine enlightenment and humble submission.”
Return to the attitude of the Society? Your eternal welfare is at stake? Humble submission? For us, this was nuts.
Only the Church has the right to require internal submission at the price of one’s “eternal welfare” — not the canonical counterpart of the Sacred Heart Auto League.
We joined up to fight modernism, not submit to an
alternate magisterium. [OF COURSE WHAT THIS MEANS IN PRACTICE IS THAT FR CEKADA ACKNOWLEDGES NO MAGISTERIUM AT ALL - EXCEPT HIMSELF]
In practice
Abp. Lefebvre and SSPX had begun to equate loyalty to themselves and their “positions” with loyalty to the
Church.
Neither we nor the people we served had signed up
for this either.
Thus,
when people say sedevacantism was the cause of
our dispute with SSPX, I respond that the real conflict was
not over failing to recognize John Paul II as pope — it was
failing to recognize Abp. Lefebvre as pope...
The main claim the archbishop and SSPX made was
that we were their agents and trustees. As such, we were
responsible for acquiring and holding property in trust for
them. We had now defrauded them of their property and
were illegally occupying it.
“Real estate agent” was not, as I recall, one of the duties in the prescribed instruction the archbishop read to us
during the ordination rite.
But in any event, as far as we were concerned, whether
or not the civil law considered us agents or trustees, the
archbishop now countenanced doubtful sacraments, and
was imposing a crypto-modernist Missal in view of “corporate reunion” with the arch-heretic Wojtyla’s ecumenical, One-World Church.
17
For that reason Abp. Lefebvre
forfeited any moral right whatsoever to the church properties he claimed, just as the diocesan bishops did in the ‘60s.
A traditionalist priest in the ‘60s was in no position to
fight for his flock by doing legal battle with his bishop. But
in 1983, thank God, we were — and we would...
SSPX countersued, making claims similar to
those it made in the New York suit. To this, they added the
claim that their organization was a hierarchy, and that the
legal precedents in Pennsylvania required courts to defer
to decisions made by a church hierarchy with respect to
properties held by local churches that were subordinate to
it.
Well again, this was news to me, because the Church I
thought I belonged to had only one hierarchy, of which
only the pope could be the head. [FR CEKADA OF COURSE SEEMS QUITE HAPPY TO DO WITHOUT A POPE AT ALL]A retired archbishop did
not qualify as part of that hierarchy in my book — especially since my book was the Code of Canon Law, which
placed his supposed “hierarchy” on a lower level than a
lay Rosary Confraternity.
END