Another voice

More Catholic than the Pope

Auberon Waugh

Not much excitemeni has been apparent in Britain after the Pope's decision, announced on 25 July, to suspend Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre from all priestly duties under pain of excommunication. Few newspapers even bothered to mention it. The Archbishop, after all, resides in Switzerland, if of French origin, a former Archbishop of Dakar; and the internal squabbles of a foreign organisation like the Roman Catholic Church can scarcely expect much precedence. So it may be—I only say it may' be—that the early stages of what will later develop into one of the great ironies of history have passed more or less unnoticed.

Archbishop Lefebvre, whom I met a few Years ago, is an austere, obviously rather saintly man of high intelligence but simple faith. When I met him, he was approaching his seventieth birthday and even if one allows for the remarkable longevity of the Clergy, it would be optimistic to suppose he has more than ten years of active life ahead of him. After the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965 he grew alarmed by various tendencies within the Church which seemed to be finding acceptance at the Vatican, and set up a seminary at Econe, in Switzerland, to train priests in the unreformed theology and traditional rites which he, in common With every other priest in the Catholic Church, had sworn to defend at the time of his ordination. He points out that St Pius V (b. 1504, elected 1566, d. 1572), the great Counter-Reformation Pope to whom he hears so much resemblance, established the liturgy and defined the various conclusions of the Council of Trent not until such time as They became inconvenient, or until tastes Ilanged, but for all time. The present Pope nas no more right to change them than he has to declare the Papacy fallible, or the V1r8in Mary unassumed. All of which might add up to no more than two cantankerous old men squabbling away in a neglected corner of a neglected area of minority concern. It could easily 12ave remained in the corner if it had not been for the extraordinary foolishness of the decision to suspend Archbishop Lefebvre. The most remarkable aspect of the whole °I-Isiness to date—causing grave embarrass'dent to the 'progressives' who have now

iried control of every commanding position in the Vatican machine—has been the success of the Econe seminary.

Founded in 1970, it now has 120 ordinands and although it can only take thirty candidates a year, in several recent years it has had More applications for the priesthood than Aere received by all the dioceses and 1.,e1181ou5 orders throughout the whole of t' ranee. Its priests now go out into the world

independent of the diocesan authority they would have had to obey if they had been trained by the diocese. Their missions are established in nearly every country, and their itinerant or circuit priests, who say Mass according to the Tridentine Rite, minister to the spiritual needs not only of those Catholics who refuse to accept the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council on theological or canonical grounds but also to the much larger number of Catholics who despise the new liturgy, mistrust the direction on which the new orthodoxy is set and feel an ever-diminishing personal commitment to the new Butlin-style assemblies which they see masquerading—with everdiminishing success or credibitity—as the Catholic religion.

This might easily have continued quite happily under the umbrella of Rome, if only the reforms introduced by a handful of enthusiasts in every diocese had been popular or successful. Now the novelty has worn off, the new services are seen as shoddy and banal, which would be bad enough, but also lacking the historical authority which, aided by awesome incomprehension, has served Catholics so well through the ages in suspending their disbelief. The result has been a spectacular and discernible drop in Church attendances, most especially among the young people to whom these half-baked reforms were said to appeal. Perhaps they would have drifted anyway, but it becomes quite exceptionally bitter, under these circumstances, for 'loyal' or 'cooperative' priests who are prepared to accept the increasingly lunatic,directives of Rome and disregard their ordination vows, when they see their faithful middle-aged congregation disappearing to a fridentine itinerant whenever it gets the chance.

The Tridentinists are said to be particularly strong in Italy, Belgium, France and the United States. In Great Britain there are only nine priests working under the auspices of the St Pius V Society, but they manage to cover parishes as far apart as Combe Florey, in Somerset, and the further reaches of Scotland. For anyone who has attended their services, the fervour they arouse has more in common with a Revivalist meeting than the torpid apathy of ordinary Catholic churches nowadays.

That may explain some of the pressures on the Pope to suspend Archbishop Lefebvre, but it scarcely justifies the extraordinary foolishness of his decision to succumb to them. There has not been a credible Antipope in Christendom since Felix V was reconciled to Rome and awarded a Cardinal's hat in 1449. In fact, the history of the thirty-nine anti-popes listed in the Encyclo

paedia Britannica is full of such reconciliations. Needless to say, there has been no anti-pope (unless one is to jump the gun and pronounce Pope Paul VI as such) since the definition of Papal infallibility, but in many respects it makes the anti-pope's job easier : Paul VI has denied the Papal authority of his predecessor of holy memory, St Pius V, ergo he is a false Pope.

I think we can leave the details of any such Pauline indictment to the theologians and canon lawyers. The important thing is that by his hasty, foolish and intemperate action, Pope Paul has left the Archbishop with no alternative course of action. Immediately a hundred soft, plump hands will fly to their pens in a hundred Catholic presbyteries to say on the contrary, the Pope has been patient and just; he could not be expected to countenance such disobedience. My argument is not addressed on this occasion to the injustice of the act, only to its drivelling stupidity. It has long been a characteristic of 'progressives' in power that they are prepared to countenance almost any aberration on the progressive side but crack down like grand inquisitors on the slightest expression of conservative deviation. But if the Vatican Council defined a single new idea of any substance it marked the triumph of what used to be labelled 'indifferentism— the proposition that the alleged sinfulness of disunity outweighed the virtue of absolute orthodoxy. In other words, unity was everything. Yet here we have a Pope who seems determined as his contribution to the movement towards Christian Unity, to reopen the Great Western Schism of 1398-1417 within his own church.

Pope Paul has always struck me as resembling Mr Heath in his extraordinary capacity for remaining rock-like and unbadgeable on every issue where common sense and prudence require himto bow before the prevailing wind, while bowing like a Japanese lavatory attendant before puffs of breeze which others would not even have noticed.

Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong, Was everything by starts, and nothing long.

As Pope, he has been a disaster. The loyalty of Catholics to their Pope has always been conditional on his preservation of the four identifying marks of their church—its unity, its sanctity, its universality and its historical continuity. By repudiating the Council of Trent, he threatens to destroy its historical continuity. By introducing a vernacular liturgy and shuffling off authority to the diocesan bishops, he threatens its universality. Now, he moves against its unity.

My own loyalty has been betrayed far too often for me to have the slightest qualm in welcoming Archbishop Lefebvre if he should choose to denounce Paul VI as a false Pope. We shall have to wait and see who is richer:

Treason doth never prosper; what's the reason?

Why if it prosper, none dare call it treason.