HomeThere
has been a revolution in the Society of St. Pius X.
Every revolution fuels continual change. Accordingly, the “new” SSPX declares that “we must continually reposition ourselves”.
In every revolution, the revolutionaries work hard to brainwash the people. Accordingly, the “new” SSPX systematically strives “to bring the faithful to realize this new face in the history of the Church, this new reality”, as Bishop Fellay admitted.
The N-SSPX leaders treat Archbishop Lefebvre sentimentally, like their mascot, not as their guide.
The N-SSPX distorts his teaching to justify whatever direction it now wishes to take. Bishop Fellay cynically remarked that “one can make Archbishop Lefebvre say whatever one wants”.
Quoted from the April 11, 2014, DICI #294, p.10.
One of the ways that the N-SSPX leaders are teaching the opposite of Archbishop Lefebvre, is by contradicting his position that the conciliar church is a different church. Here is an example of Bishop Fellay teaching that the conciliar church (which he calls the “official” church
is the same as the Catholic Church:
The problem of jurisdiction shows the importance of being recognized canonically. ... The
official church is the visible church; it
is the Catholic Church, period.
Bishop Fellay’s December 20, 2014 ordination sermon at the seminary of La Reja, Buenos Aires, Argentina (emphasis added).
Contradicting Bishop Fellay’s false claim, Archbishop Lefebvre declared that the “official church” is not the true Catholic Church:
[T]hey have put us out of an
official Church which is not the real Church, [but] an official Church which has been infested with modernism; and so we believed in the duty of disobedience, if indeed it was disobedience! To obey, but to obey the immemorial Church, to obey all the popes, to obey the whole Catholic Church.
Archbishop Lefebvre ordination sermon, June 27, 1980 (emphasis added).
The “new” SSPX conflates the conciliar “official church” with the Catholic Church to justify bargaining for recognition from modernist Rome.
Bishop Fellay falsely claims that the “visible church”—meaning the conciliar church—is the Catholic Church. Here are Bishop Fellay’s words (already quoted above):
[T]he visible church ... is the Catholic Church, period.
Bishop Fellay’s December 20, 2014 ordination sermon at the seminary of La Reja (Buenos Aires, Argentina).
When Dom Gerard became a compromiser and obtained his indult agreement from modernist Rome in 1988, he used the same tactic has the N-SSPX now uses, viz., seeking recognition from modernist Rome because he falsely claimed that it is the “visible church”.
In his words below, Archbishop Lefebvre explains that the conciliar church (i.e., modernist Rome
is not the visible church. Instead, Traditional Catholics are already in the true “visible church” because we have the Four Marks of the True Church. Archbishop Lefebvre called Dom Gerard’s false claim “childish” and this applies to the N-SSPX too, which now makes the same false claim. Here are Archbishop Lefebvre’s words:
To stay inside the Church, or to put oneself inside the Church—what does that mean? Firstly, what Church are we talking about? If you mean the Conciliar Church, then we who have struggled against the Council for twenty years because we want the Catholic Church, we would have to re-enter this Conciliar Church in order, supposedly, to make it Catholic. That is a complete illusion. ...
Obviously, we are against the Conciliar Church which is virtually schismatic, even if they deny it. In practice, it is a Church virtually excommunicated because it is a Modernist Church. ... That is no longer the Catholic Church: that is the Conciliar Church with all its unpleasant consequences. ...
This talk about the
“visible Church” on the part of Dom Gerard and Mr. Madiran is
childish. It is incredible that anyone can talk of the “visible Church”, meaning the Conciliar Church as opposed to the Catholic Church which we are trying to represent and continue. I am not saying that we are the Catholic Church. I have never said so. No one can reproach me with ever having wished to set myself up as pope. But,
we truly represent the Catholic Church such as it was before, because we are continuing what it always did.
It is we who have the notes of the visible Church: One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic. That is what makes the visible Church.
Because we Traditional Catholics have the Four Marks of the Church and the modernists don’t, Archbishop Lefebvre declared that this new conciliar church is in schism from the Catholic Church of which we are members. He declared:
It is not we who are in
schism but the
Conciliar Church.
Archbishop Lefebvre sermon in Lille, August 29, 1976 (emphasis added)
Archbishop Lefebvre sometimes called this same conciliar church a “counterfeit church” and also a “counter-church”, because it opposes the true Catholic Church:
Which Church are we talking about? Are we talking about the Catholic Church, or another church, a Counter church, a counterfeit of the Church? Now, I think sincerely, that
we are talking about a counterfeit version of the Church, and not the Catholic Church. It does not teach any longer the Catholic faith. It teaches something else, it leads the Church to something else other than the Catholic Church.
It is no longer the Catholic Church. They are sitting in the chairs of their predecessors, ... but they are not continuing in the line of their predecessors. They no longer have the same faith, nor the same doctrine, nor the same morality as their predecessors. So it is no longer possible. And principally, their great error is ecumenism. They teach an ecumenism which is contrary to the Catholic faith. ...
The Church is occupied by this counter-church which we know well and that the Popes knew perfectly, and that the Popes have condemned throughout the centuries; for what will be soon four centuries, the Church did not stop condemning this counter-church which was born especially with protestantism, and which was developed with protestantism, and which is at the origin of all modern errors, which has destroyed all philosophy, and which has led us to all the errors we have known, that the Popes have condemned; liberalism, socialism, communism, modernism, sillonism. We are dying from them. The Popes did everything to condemn that, and now behold those who are in the chairs of those who condemned these errors are in agreement with this liberalism and ecumenism. Now we cannot accept that. And the more things become clear, the more we perceive that this program ... all these errors, were elaborated in the masonic lodges.
Spiritual conference, Econe, 21st of June 1978, published in Sel de la Terre #50, p. 244 (emphasis added).
Archbishop Lefebvre remarked that even the modernists agreed with him that this conciliar church is a new church:
This Council represents, in our view and in the view of the Roman authorities,
a new Church which they call the Conciliar Church.
Archbishop Lefebvre interview in the French newspaper, Le Figaro, August 4, 1976 (emphasis added).
Again, Archbishop Lefebvre emphasized that even the modernists agree that the conciliar church is not the Catholic Church:
It is easy to think that whoever opposes the Council and its new Gospel would be considered as excommunicated, as outside communion with the Church.
But one may well ask them, communion with what Church? They would answer, no doubt, with the Conciliar Church.
I Accuse the Council, Archbishop Lefebvre, p. xiii (emphasis added).
Archbishop Lefebvre exhorts all to follow only the true Catholic Church and stay far from the non-Catholic new conciliar church:
How could it be clearer?!
From now on it is the conciliar church one must obey and be faithful to, and not to the Catholic Church. This is precisely our problem. We are suspended
a divinis by the conciliar church, of which we do not want to be a part.
This conciliar church is a schismatic church, because it breaks with the Catholic Church of all time. It has its new dogmas, its new priesthood, its new institutions, its new liturgy, already condemned by the Church in many official and definitive documents. This is why the founders of the conciliar church insist on obedience to the church of today, making abstraction of the Church of yesterday, as if it didn’t exist anymore. ... The church which affirms such errors is at one and the same time heretical and schismatic.
This conciliar church is therefore not Catholic.
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, handwritten and photocopied, of July 29th 1976, to his friends; reproduced in the Sel de la Terre #36, p. 10 (emphasis added).
Again, Archbishop Lefebvre explained that, to remain Catholic, we must stay separate from this conciliar church:
It is, therefore, a
strict duty for every priest wanting to remain Catholic to
separate himself
from this Conciliar Church for as long as it does not rediscover the Tradition of the Church and of the Catholic Faith.
Spiritual Journey, by Archbishop Lefebvre, ch. 3 (emphasis added).
Archbishop Lefebvre (talking in the third person) explained that the true Catholic Church and the new conciliar church can never agree:
Let there be no mistake, it is not a matter of a difference between Mgr. Lefebvre and Pope Paul VI. It is a matter of the
radical incompatibility between the Catholic Church and the conciliar church, the mass of Paul VI representing the symbol and the program of the conciliar church.
Archbishop Lefebvre (speaking about himself in the third person), in Agence France Presse Communiqué, 12th July 1976; Cardinal Seper also quoted these words of Archbishop Lefebvre back to him in a January 11, 1979 interrogation of Archbishop Lefebvre published in the May 1979 issue of Itineraires, number 233, p. 144-145, under the title Archbishop Lefebvre and the Holy Office (emphasis added).
Archbishop Lefebvre further explained that the greatest service we can render to the Catholic Church is to stay away from the new conciliar church:
Rome has lost the Faith, my dear friends. Rome is in apostasy. These are not words in the air. It is the truth. Rome is in apostasy. They have left the Church. This is sure, sure, sure. It is a schismatic council.
The Church which affirms such errors is both schismatic and heretical. This Conciliar Church is therefore not Catholic. To whatever extent pope, bishops, priests or faithful adhere to this new Church, they separate themselves from the Catholic Church. The Novus Ordo Mass is a bastard rite. The Novus Ordo sacraments are bastard sacraments. The Novus Ordo priests emerging from the Novus Ordo seminaries are bastard priests. So we are excommunicated by Modernists, by people who have been condemned by previous popes. We are condemned by men who are themselves condemned.
It is a Church that I do not recognize. I belong to the Catholic Church. Let us add this, that
the greatest service we can render to the Church and to the successor of Peter is
to reject the “reformed” and liberal church. I am not of that religion, I do not accept that new religion. It is a liberal, modernist religion. We are not of this new religion! We do not accept this new religion! We are of the religion of all time; we are of the Catholic religion. We are not of this “universal religion” as they call it today—this is not the Catholic religion any more. We are not of this liberal, modernist religion which has its own worship, its own priests, its own faith, its own catechisms, its own “ecumenical” Bible. We cannot accept these things. They are contrary to our Faith. We choose not to abandon our faith, for in that we cannot go wrong. We are convinced of this,
it is they who are wrong, who have changed course, who have broken with the Tradition of the Church, who have rushed into novelties, we are convinced of this. That is why we do not rejoin them and why we cannot work with them; we cannot collaborate with the people who depart from the spirit of the Church, from the Tradition of the Church.
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, July 29, 1976 Reflections on the Suspension a divinis, interview published July 30, 1976 in the periodical called Minute, no. 747 (emphasis added).
Archbishop Lefebvre explained that the conciliar church is a different church which embraces error as if it were truth:
You need this Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ to go to heaven. This Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ is disappearing everywhere in the Conciliar Church. They are following roads which are not Catholic roads: they simply lead to apostasy. ... All the errors which [the pre-Vatican II popes] have condemned are now professed, adopted and supported by the authorities of the Church. ... What is this “truth” for [the post-Vatican II hierarchy] if not the “truth” of Vatican II, the “truth” of the Conciliar Church? Consequently, it is clear that the only “truth” that exists today for the Vatican is the conciliar “truth”, the spirit of the Council, the spirit of Assisi.
Sermon at the consecration of the four bishops on June 30, 1988.
Archbishop Lefebvre reasoned from the conciliar church’s bad effects that it must be a false, non-Catholic church:
How can one avoid the conclusion: there where the faith of the Church is, there also is her sanctity, and there where the sanctity of the Church is, there is the Catholic Church?
A Church which no longer brings forth good fruits, a Church which is sterile, is not the Catholic Church.
Archbishop Lefebvre, Letter to Friends and Benefactors, September 8, 1978 (emphasis added)
Archbishop Lefebvre declared that he did not care if this revolutionary, conciliar church excommunicated him:
But the Church against her past and her Tradition
is not the Catholic Church;
this is why being excommunicated by a liberal, ecumenical, and revolutionary Church is a matter of indifference to us.
Biography of Marcel Lefebvre, by Bishop Tissier de Mallerais, quoting Archbishop Lefebvre, p.547 (emphasis added).
Archbishop Lefebvre realized that he had been tricked by the modernists who sought to “convert” him to the conciliar church through dialog:
Upon reflection, it appears clear that the goal of these dialogs is to reabsorb us within the Conciliar Church, the only Church to which you [
i.e., Cardinal Ratzinger] allude during these meetings.
Archbishop Lefebvre’s letter of May 24, 1988, to Cardinal Ratzinger, quoted in Archbishop Lefebvre and the Vatican, by Fr. François Laisney, p. 99.
Archbishop Lefebvre concluded that we must stay out of the conciliar church and stay in the Catholic Church to save our souls:
The faithful ... will understand that salvation is in the Catholic Church and not in the Conciliar Church that becomes more and more schismatic.
Words of Archbishop Lefebvre quoted in a November 1, 1995 conference in Kansas City, given by Fr. Ramon Anglés.
Conclusion
Beware when N-SSPX lies that the conciliar “official” church is the Catholic Church! Let us shun the N-SSPX and the conciliar church to remain Catholic and save our souls!