Letters to Friends and Benefactors - March 1977

[Stone]

Archbishop Lefebvre

Letters to Friends and Benefactors

19 March 1977

Dear Friends and Benefactors,

We are going on with our work and with God’s blessing we will continue to go on, for Tradition cannot cease to transmit Revelation until the end of time. God has revealed Himself to us in Our Lord Jesus Christ. This Revelation is today what it was in the past and what it will always be. We must receive it such as it has been given to us.

The Revelation was brought to an end with the last of the Apostles in order that we might fix our gaze on Jesus Who is “the author and finisher of faith” (Heb. 12: 2).

Saint Paul summarises this Revelation which he himself also received in these words: “I judged not myself to know anything among you but Jesus Christ and Him crucified” (I Cor. 2:2).

The Cross of Jesus summarises the whole of our faith and therefore the whole of our conduct, all of our attitudes, our interior and exterior life. It not only teaches us the truths necessary for our salvation, but also the way to salvation and the combat, which must be waged to achieve it. It shows the way to wage this combat against all that is opposed to our salvation, whether it be within or around us. The Cross is therefore the leaven and the law of Christian civilisation which is that of the salvation of souls by Jesus crucified.

To attempt to diminish in one way or another the teachings revealed by the Cross under the pretext of the historical development of society, of historical conscience, evolution, etc. is to close the way of salvation and deliver men up to other men, with no divine hope, light or life. It is to make this world the antechamber of hell.

This is what is being prepared for us by the elimination of any idea of combat against error due to religious liberty, or against atheism, laicism, and communism. Likewise by an ecumenism which delivers the Church into the hands of her enemies, and lack of opposition to sin by wiping out law in favor of conscience.

This new attitude of the Church authorities is a negation of the Cross of Our Lord. To ask us to follow this attitude, which lay under the surface during the Council, and which is clearly expressed in the reforms and practice of the Conciliar Church, is as much as to ask us to deny Christ crucified. We cannot do so .

By the grace of God our seminarians and young priests understand these things well and do not wish to abandon the crucified Jesus either. They demonstrate this by their dress, their daily lives and their preaching: but essentially and above all by the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

Once again this year we have numerous candidates for the seminary and our novitiates to the Brotherhood and Sisterhood. The number of our houses continues to multiply as we now have one in the province of Quebec in Canada and another in Geneva. To satisfy all the requests for priests which we receive it would be necessary to ordain a hundred a year! This year, God willing, fourteen priests and twenty sub-deacons will be ordained. Five brothers as well as five nuns will receive the habit. Three of the sisters will make their profession.

We hope that we will soon be able to announce that the foundations of the seminary chapel at Ecône have been laid! This will be a very important enterprise. We know that we can count on you to help the seminary with a chapel worthy of the honour and adoration that we must give to Our Lord.

Above all we must pray and do penance to ask Our Lord, by the intercession of the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph, to deliver Holy Church from those who wish at all costs to ruin her and arrive at the great apostasy.

In gratitude for all that you are doing in favour or our work for a true renovation of the Church, may God bless you!

+Marcel Lefebvre
Feast of St. Joseph.

Source

[Emphasis - The Catacombs]