Spirituality of Marcel Lefebvre: Master of the Priesthood

With the eloquent title of Master of the Priesthood, this is the second biographical book that award-winning Italian author Cristina Siccardi has written on Archbishop Lefebvre, just one year after her first one: Archbishop Lefebvre: In the Name of Truth (Mons. Marcel Lefebvre nel Nome della Verita; published in 2010 by Sugaro Edizioni). While both excellent and objectively compiled books on Archbishop Lefebvre are currently available only in Italian, hopefully they can one day be accessible in the English language.

A video still of author Cristina Siccardi giving a conference to the SSPX at Albano in August 2010

What is important to note here, is that publication of a second book by the same author on the same person supplies further proof of the increasing interest in Archbishop Lefebvre throughout Italy. This is particularly poignant when we are made aware that the author was not affiliated with the Society of St. Pius X prior to writing her works.

In this new book, Spirituality of Marcel Lefebvre: Master of the Priesthood (Maestro in Sacerdozio: La spiritualita di Monsignor Marcel Lefebvre), the author shows through Archbishop Lefebvre’s spiritual doctrine, his deep attachment to the Church and his commitment to her tradition of two millennia.

From Archbishop Lefebvre: In the Name of Truth

Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre (1905-1991), a name that almost always elicits a jerk, and is often unpronounceable, except in certain restricted areas, where it is very much loved and revered. To much of the public and Catholics, he has been portrayed as a “heretic”, as a “schismatic,” one who wished to found a church of his own... How many errors, how many fabrications have been built around people who think that reason, uncomfortable truths that advance their own and thus become uncomfortable. Uncomfortable as Lefebvre.

Archbishop Lefebvre: In the Name of Truth

Known mostly as the rebellious bishop, Archbishop Lefebvre was, until now, under a beam of defamatory light—not for his conduct of life, however highly virtuous and impeccable, verifiable by all—but for his strong stance against a pastoral Council, Vatican II, in which he saw and denounced the anti-Christian dictates and relativistic effects that would arise.

Today, after almost twenty years after his death and forty-five by the close of the Council itself, we can historically approach him with greater confidence and without acrimony, considering this man, rather, this priest, not as the enemy of someone, but as a brave and forward-looking soldier of Christ, defender of the integrity of the Faith and of the Holy Roman Church, the Petrine Primacy and the Eucharist.

Archbishop Lefebvre—thanks to the children he left, the priests of the Society of St. Pius X—demonstrated that the traditional Catholic doctrine still remains, and that in the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass of All Time, in priestly holiness, can be found the answers to the problems of a world that is lost in vainglory and conceit, thus dethroning Christ the King.