Soft-spoken but stubborn, French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre has long been a thorn in Rome's side. After founding an ultra-traditionalist seminary in the bucolic Swiss hamlet of Econe in 1970, he began proclaiming that the modernized church policies of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) were heretical abominations. Dismayed, the Holy See ordered him not to ordain any of his seminarians. When he defiantly went ahead and did so in 1976, Pope Paul VI forbade the Archbishop to administer the sacraments. He ignored that injunction as well.
It thus seemed a diplomatic miracle when, on May 5, Lefebvre signed a protocol with the Vatican specifying the terms for a reconciliation. But the Archbishop had second thoughts as he reflected upon the carefully crafted deal -- and listened to the advice of his more conservative followers. Last week the agreement fell through, threatening what to Rome is that most frightful of events: schism.
At a press conference at his headquarters in Econe, Lefebvre, 82, declared that further negotiations with the Vatican were impossible because Rome lacked "good faith." He then announced that he would consecrate four of his disciples as bishops on June 30. Since Roman Catholic canon law requires papal authorization to create new bishops, the step would automatically excommunicate Lefebvre and his newly minted prelates. By making possible the perpetuation of a sect with its own hierarchy, the consecration of illicit bishops would produce the first schism since the 1870s, when the Old Catholics rebelled against the First Vatican Council's proclamation of papal infallibility.
"Excommunicated by whom?" scoffed Lefebvre at his press conference, as his seminarians gazed on admiringly. "By modernists, by people who should themselves be publicly excommunicated. It has no value." The bishops-to-be are two administrators of Lefebvre's Priestly Society of St. Pius X, the French Bernard Tissier de Mallerais and the Swiss Bernard Fellay; Richard Williamson, the head of Lefebvre's U.S. branch and a convert from Anglicanism; and Argentina's Alfonso de Galarreta. Both Fellay and Galarreta are also under the canonical age requirement of 35 for bishops.
Pope John Paul II had long been eager to end the rebellion because, though small, it still threatened the unity of Catholicism. Weeks after becoming Pope in 1978, he granted Lefebvre's request for an audience (their only meeting) and repeatedly expressed his desire for peace. Lefebvre also seemed eager to heal the breach during his lifetime. After an extended fact-finding tour of Lefebvre's religious houses last year at the Pope's request, Canadian Edouard Cardinal Gagnon, a Vatican official highly sympathetic to traditionalists, sent John Paul a favorable report, typing it himself to keep the recommendations confidential. Lefebvre then put the pressure on, threatening for the first time to ensure his movement's future by naming schismatic bishops. The Pope directed Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the Vatican's doctrinal overseer, to do everything possible to find a solution.