Archbishop Lefebvre and Conciliar Sacraments – Did he doubt them?

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Archbishop Lefebvre and Conciliar Sacraments – Did he doubt them?
The Church cannot approve rites which are harmful or out of harmony with the faith.
This is precisely what Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre said of the conciliar rites. So how did he resolve the question?



Image: The Tomb of Pope Leo XIII (Fr Lawrence Lew OP) with superimposed image of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre (Wiki Commons) both under CC 2.0.

WM Review | Aug 27, 2024


Introduction

Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre stated on several occasions that both the Novus Ordo and the accompanying reforms to the other sacramental rites are essentially harmful in themselves, incentives to impiety, and fail to serve as a profession of the Catholic faith. In one classic text, he said:

“All these reforms, indeed, have contributed and are still contributing to the destruction of the Church, to the ruin of the priesthood, to the abolition of the Sacrifice of the Mass and of the sacraments…

“It is impossible to modify profoundly the lex orandi without modifying the lex credendi. To the Novus Ordo Missae correspond a new catechism, a new priesthood, new seminaries, a charismatic Pentecostal Church—all things opposed to orthodoxy and the perennial teaching of the Church.

“This Reformation, born of Liberalism and Modernism, is poisoned through and through; it derives from heresy and ends in heresy, even if all its acts are not formally heretical. It is therefore impossible for any conscientious and faithful Catholic to espouse this Reformation or to submit to it in any way whatsoever.

“The only attitude of faithfulness to the Church and Catholic doctrine, in view of our salvation, is a categorical refusal to accept this Reformation.”1

However, Catholic teaching and theology tells us that this is impossible for the Church’s approved sacramental rites, which are examples of universal disciplinary laws and thus fall under “the secondary object of infallibility.”

The only route out of this dilemma is to exonerate the Church of responsibility for these reforms. We must, in other words, say that these reforms do not come to us from the Church or with her approval or sanction.

This conclusion – that the reformed rites do not come from the Church and not enjoy her approval or sanction – was expressed and implied by the Archbishop and other SSPX figures on several occasions.

However, this solution comes at a price.

Once we have acknowledged that, because of their harmful, evil or non-Catholic nature, these reformed rites cannot have come to us from the Church or with her approval or sanction, we must also recognise that these rites do not come with the Church’s guarantees of validity either.

In this piece, we will see what Archbishop Lefebvre had to say about the validity of the reformed sacramental rites, and how he more or less recognised the practical effects of the conclusion mentioned above.


The harmfulness of the reformed rites and prima facie guarantees of validity

As noted elsewhere – and as is obvious – only rites which come to us from the Church enjoy her guarantees of validity. There is no theological principle which allows us to say that the Church’s liturgical rites are infallibly valid but not infallibly safe and Catholic.

Therefore, as mentioned, if we do hold these rites to be unsafe and uncatholic, then we must also acknowledge that by that fact, they also lack the Church’s sanction – and therefore we have no prima facie grounds for asserting that they are valid.

This is the same thing as saying that they are subject to prima facie doubt.

In his 1956 book on a related topic, Anglican Orders and Defect of Intention, Fr Francis Clark writes:

“The only formulae that infallibly and necessarily contain the essential significance of a sacrament are those which have been canonised by being instituted by Christ and His Church for that purpose.”2

In his bull on Anglican orders and liturgical changes, Pope Leo XIII himself wrote:

“… f the rite be changed, with the manifest intention of introducing another rite not approved by the Church and of rejecting what the Church does, and what, by the institution of Christ, belongs to the nature of the Sacrament, then it is clear that not only is the necessary intention wanting to the Sacrament, but that the intention is adverse to and destructive of the Sacrament.”3

The English bishops explained this further in 1898, in defence of the same bull:

“… in adhering rigidly to the rite handed down to us we can always feel secure; whereas, if we omit or change anything, we may perhaps be abandoning just that element which is essential.”4

What would these nineteenth century bishops have made of our situation, in which [i]all the sacramental rites were radically reformed, and in which four were changed in their essentials?

Regarding changes of sacramental form, Clark writes:

“Where, however, a new liturgical form is introduced and no such canonised formula [“instituted by Christ and His Church”] is employed, there cannot be certainty of its validity until its credentials have been established, and it has been acknowledged, expressly or implicitly, by the universal Church.”5

In a footnote appended to this text, Clark continues:

“Only the Church as a whole, the Mystical Body of Christ and the guardian of His sacraments, has the power to decide that with final certainty.”6

We cannot evade the force of this point by claiming that the Church has already decided the matter by her promulgation and customary usage of these rites: this evasion is cut off to us, if we are also claiming that these rites are harmful, non-Catholic, and to be rejected.

In any case, this would give rise to another problem, as the promulgation of a sacramental rite by the Roman Pontiff is itself a definitive judgment of the goodness, safety and validity of the rites.

If they had been promulgated or sanctioned by the Roman Pontiff, then they would have had the approval of the Church – and it would therefore be impossible to say that they are harmful or fail to express the Catholic faith.

Nonetheless, without presuming to solve this problem, the negative qualities of the reformed rites require us to hold back from having recourse to a resolution based around authoritative promulgation of these rites.


Archbishop Lefebvre’s own concerns about validity

As discussed previously, doubts about the validity of these reformed sacramental rites are apparent in Archbishop Lefebvre’s words and actions.

Even if he himself did not always personally embrace such doubt, his pastoral practice demonstrated that he clearly understood the situation, and wished to accommodate the faithful by providing them with certainty and peace.

Speaking of Confirmation, he said:

“It is at the request of the faithful, attached to Tradition, that I use the old sacramental formula, and also for safety's sake, keeping to formulas which have communicated grace for centuries with certainty.”7 (Emphasis added)

[ ... The remainder of this article is behind a paywall.]