"We adhere with all our heart and all our soul to Catholic Rome, guardian of the Catholic faith and of the traditions necessary for the maintenance of that faith, to eternal Rome, mistress of wisdom and truth. On the other hand, we refuse and have always refused to follow the Rome of neo-modernist and neo-Protestant tendencies..." — from the Declaration of November 21, 1974
"Stubborn as a mule." — his religious superior, on Lefebvre, p. 125
"And I will say to them, what do you think of the anathemas of the Council of Trent? What do you think of the anathemas of the bull Auctorem Fidei on the Council of Pistoia? What do you think of the Syllabus? What do you think of Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Immortale Dei? What do you think of Pope St. Pius X's letter on Zion? What do you think of Pius XI's encyclical Quas Primas? Of Pius XI's "Mortalium Animos", rightly opposed to ecumenism, to false ecumenism...In light of all this, let them answer me. Let them say if they still agree with this Magisterium of the Popes, with these official documents that define our faith. These are not just any documents. They are not private speeches, private conversations of the popes; they are official documents that commit the authority of the Pope."
In the week I am writing this, Marcel Lefebvre (1905-1991) was in the news again. The Society of Saint Pius X — the priestly fraternity he founded in 1970 — consecrated four bishops at Écône without a papal mandate, in defiance of Pope Leo XIV, and drew upon itself the second, broader, and seemingly final excommunication of its history. The act was a precise re-enactment of what happened in June 1988, when over the express prohibition of John Paul II, Lefebvre himself consecrated four bishops on the same grounds in the same place, and incurred the same penalty. That his decision was repeated by the institution he founded shows the founder's frame of mind. Lefebvre is a fairly instructive LSI specimen when it comes to the paradox of "rebellious conservative" and a conflict between two strong and valued type functions.
The first two-thirds of his life is his particular version of the type in its serene, untested form. Born into a pious reactionary "1789 worst year of my life" royalist family, Lefebvre rose through the Church as the dutiful servant of a hierarchy he revered: first curate, then missionary, and then, under Pius XII, the builder-administrator of French Africa. His particular abilities were never creative or speculative; even de Mallerais' portrait from childhood characterizes him as a boy of "practical sense and remarkable judgment." As Vicar Apostolic of Dakar and then Apostolic Delegate for eighteen African countries, his chief duty was erecting dioceses and selecting bishops, extending the Catholic hierarchical order across a continent. By 1962 he was Superior General of a five-thousand-member order and an Assistant at the Papal Throne. It was the smooth bureaucratic ascent of a man whose gift was structural logic in the service of a structure he supported completely.
It seems that Lefebvre was quite a mild character personally. He does look fairly friendly in most of his photos and is extensively described as such by sources sympathetic to him, but there aren't really any contrary testimonies (unlike in the case, e.g. of Josemaria Escriva, the founder of Opus Dei, who had a notorious temper even apologists have to acknowledge and deflect). The childhood testimony says he "radiated a certain peace," was "a perfectionist, but in a more relaxed way." It seems that not only Si, but also Talanov-style Di, the "acceptance of subordination," and with it the perception of one's own ordinariness was increased in him — for most of his career he clearly saw himself as the humble servant who does not claim exceptional status and takes his assigned place in the order.
The Second Vatican Council set his two governing dispositions at war. For sixty years, the Ti structure (the received order: the doctrine as handed down, deviation as corruption) and the Di subordination (submit to legitimate authority, obey Rome) had pointed the same way. Then the authority itself became the reforming force. The Council enacted, in his eyes, the revolution from the top: religious liberty, ecumenism, the very capital-R Revolution his family had defined itself against, now promulgated by the office he was built to defer to. From that moment, every act of obedience to the living Pope became a betrayal of the received structure.
Less Di-ish types wouldn't have wavered so much as Lefebvre did, negotiating, submitting, appealing, switching between rants about evil Masonic plots and protestations of loyalty. Ti and Di grinding against each other in a man who possessed both at full strength. Eventually, he decided to derive the rebellion from within the structure of submission. The 1974 Declaration's famous distinction, quoted above, splits Rome itself in two: adherence "with all our heart and all our soul" to eternal Rome, refusal of the "neo-modernist" Rome presently administering it. The 1988 consecrations were justified by a canonical "state of necessity", a category internal to the Church's own law. The XIX-century EII modernist George Tyrrell, whose theology ran contrary to Lefebvre in the opposite direction to the church of his time, also insisted, in the same Di-ish manner, that he never abandoned the Church. But even your average LSI tends to be more Di-ish than your average EII, and in Lefevbre this function was noticeably strong to a degree Talanov's Q/D functions rarely are.
Hence, Lefebvre was left with the rebellious legitimist's logic: the monarchy's own law invoked against the reformer on the throne. A genuine nonconformist needs no such apparatus. The whole construction has struck outsiders as sophistry. But what else an ultra-conservative is to do when the seemingly legitimate authorities who can pull rank on him start deviating from the very structure he follows? Pope Paul VI is said to ask Lefebvre, "do you understand that if this were so, I would have to resign and invite you to take my place and lead the church?" Had this offer not been sarcastic, the reactionary-dissident bishop would definitely have taken it.
He always insisted he had never left the Church, who didn't agree with him on the matter. And this month, the institution he stamped, faced with the same choice, armed with the same "state of necessity," speaking of the same "eternal Rome", did exactly what its founder had done, freezing his Ti–Di conflict in concrete.
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