|
Fr. Alain Lorans: Your
Excellency, you have given us the assessment from the Church’s side;
can you tell us how you see the reaction, the response that the
Society [of St. Pius X] has been offering for almost 50 years now,
since it is almost 50 years old, even though it was not yet born at
the time of the Council. Can you give us the assessment from the
perspective of the Society? (…)
Bishop Fellay: The
response given by the Society! I think that everything is summed up in
one word, and that is Archbishop Lefebvre. All that we have, all that
we do, we have received from Archbishop Lefebvre, who summed it up by
saying a quote from St. Paul: “Tradidi quod et accepi, I
handed on to you what I received.” (1 Cor. 15, 3). We perhaps lost a
few little bits over the course of the centuries, but we do have the
essentials and we received them from
His Excellency [Archbishop Lefebvre]. Archbishop Lefebvre makes
everything revolve around a point that is like the first principle
from which it all proceeds. If you have a course, all the rest will
follow; it is as if you are at the source of a river, and after that
you just have to follow it and you will arrive at the end, as far as
the sea.
The Mass lived out in the
Christian spirit is the solution to the crisis
Things start from there; now this
original element is the Mass. This is THE solution and at the same
time the great secret, which is not a secret because it belongs to the
Church and it is not supposed to be secret, although there are so few
people who know it. The good Lord arranged things this way:
everything in the life of a Christian comes from the Mass, from the
sacrifice of Our Lord on the cross. All the graces, all the merits,
all that we need to resist temptations, all that we need to be healed
of our wounds, everything flows from the sacrifice of Our Lord on the
cross, which is perpetuated, renewed and re-presented - once again
actually present, in a sacrifice that is identical to that of the
cross - in the Mass.
This is THE solution; not just as an
act, but as the assimilation of that act, what we call the Christian
spirit. In other words, it is not enough that Our Lord accomplished
all that. The fact that Our Lord suffered and died places these goods
at our disposal as though on a table, and if we want to benefit from
them, we must assimilate these goods, and in order to do that it is
necessary to receive them, we have to take them.
This is the whole mystery of pastoral
ministry - of the true pastoral care of souls, in other words, the
work of the priest which consists of leading people to the reception
of this grace and therefore bringing it to them: leading souls to Our
Lord! If a priest manages to lead a soul to Our Lord, it is
won! Everything is there.
This is put very simply, but what I
want to insist on (and this is really the great idea of Archbishop
Lefebvre), the solution to this crisis, is the restoration not just of
the sacraments, of liturgical and sacramental discipline, not just of
the faith, but also of the element that
His Excellency calls the Christian spirit. What does this mean?
This means that when God in His
goodness gives us all these graces, we must live by them. It is
necessary to assimilate them. When Our Lord comes into us he does not
come simply to spend a quarter of an hour with us. He comes to dwell
among us, forever, with His Father (see Jn 14:23). He comes to plant
there His love, a love that must radiate in order to sanctify us and
to sanctify others. And this is the point that Archbishop Lefebvre
insists on, and this is what he gives us as a remedy, as the response
to what is going on in the Church. It is a return to the Mass, but not
simply a return to the Mass as a material element, which would be the
equivalent of saying to yourself, “Look at me, now I have the old
Mass, now I’m a traditionalist.” That does not do a whole lot for
our salvation. Yes! It helps us very much, but it is necessary to live
by it. We have to live by it. It has to penetrate within us.
An essentially supernatural remedy
In the case of priests, it is
necessary for us to become another Christ. It is not enough for
someone to have a cassock, it is not enough for someone to say the
Mass in Latin, it is necessary that during the Mass one truly be
persona Christi, that one not act merely in a sacramental manner,
because it is necessary to adopt as our own the imitation of Jesus
Christ. There is a famous book that has gone down through the
centuries that said all this in a word: the imitation of Jesus Christ
is to share in His virtues. And St. Paul tells us: “I live, now not
I: but Christ liveth in me” (Gal 2:20). It is truly necessary to
make this hidden life of grace predominant in us, in such a way that
this is what informs our whole life. This seems to be a purely
spiritual response, but Monseigneur is the one who tells us:
“If you do not have that, you have missed the mark.”
There are some material elements, the
material aspect of tradition, but that is not enough in order to fight
against the evil that we find today. We want to restore the Church,
and this will only happen thanks to the spiritual aspect. It really
is therefore an essentially supernatural response. The material acts
are necessary - don’t get me wrong - and so it is necessary to return
to the traditional Mass, to its liturgy, it is necessary to recall the
whole faith without omitting any dogma, it is necessary to wage this
battle, but if we lack this element of profound, intimate union with
Our Lord, which is life lived in the theological virtues of faith,
hope and charity, then all this work is doomed to oblivion. Again St.
Paul is the one who says: if I have faith that can move mountains but
do not have charity, it is of no use; if I sell all that I have, if I
am consumed by fire for my neighbor’s sake but do not have charity, it
is worth nothing. (Cf. 1 Cor 13).
This is what our dear
Archbishop tells us, and this is
what the Society must live, if it wants to be useful at this moment in
the history of the Church. When we speak about tradition, some insist
on the external and material element, but that implies an essential,
internal and spiritual element, without which it is not even worth the
trouble to speak about tradition...
Fr. Lorans: During
the past year, you have had numerous contacts with the Roman
authorities. How do things stand today?
Bishop Fellay: (…)
(Here too) our solution is quite simple. It is the solution that was
already given by St. Vincent of Lerins. With an unlikely audacity he
posed two questions: if one part of the body of the Church is sick,
what must be done? What should a Christian do if he finds himself in a
part that is afflicted with gangrene because of heresy? You are in a
country, in a diocese where all of a sudden heresy spreads: what
should you do? And he replies: it is very simple; you cling to the
part that is still healthy. But St. Vincent goes further: what is to
be done if another illness affects the whole body? If everything is
gangrenous, what must be done? And the solution that he gives us is
that it is necessary to cling to the past, because the past cannot be
affected by today’s illness. Therefore what the saints did yesterday,
in order to be saints, remains valid today. What they believed, what
they did: all this abides, and this is what we call tradition.
Our response to the present situation
of the Church
And it can also be said that this is
our response to the situation today in the Church: it is this
attachment to what the Church has always believed, done and
taught. With this we are certain that we cannot at any moment be
outside the Church. But, of course, that puts us in an unlikely
position because we are obliged to point a finger at the one who is
judged by no one. The Holy See is judged by no one, which is also a
principle that we adopt as our own. This is an unlikely situation that
the good Lord permits. A situation that we wish we could say was
impossible, but that the facts oblige us to recognize as reality.
This makes me think of La Salette, of
those terribly violent statements: “Rome will lose the faith. There
will be an eclipse of the Church. She will become the seat of the
anti-Christ.” That is spine-chilling. “So you are saying that
Benedict XVI is the anti-Christ?” No! I did not say that, that is
wrong. It is much less precise than that. It is a worldwide
situation; you see that it is obvious that there are some people even
in Rome who have lost the faith, and you even hear this from the
mouths of cardinals. And so I heard it quite recently from a retired
cardinal, who said this at a family gathering: “You cannot know how
happy I am to have left Rome and to be here, because in Rome the devil
is in charge.” Rome is ruled by the devil. And it is a cardinal
who is saying that today!
And we ask ourselves the
question: tomorrow, then, what will become of the Society?
Fr. Lorans: That is
the question that I was going to ask you.
Bishop Fellay: Do we
just leave, do we just get off the boat? I reply: no, out of the
question! The Catholic Church is our Church. We do not have another
one. There is no other one. The good Lord permits her to be ill. Well,
then! She is ill. And we try not to catch the illness ourselves, but
we are not going to start saying that we are making another
Church. There is no other one. This is one of the most difficult
trials that God in His goodness can permit. You get to a point where
you are not very far from the trial of Abraham, in other words, you
have to hope against hope, against all the facts that one learns from
experience. You end up telling yourself: “But no, that just cannot
be; that cannot be the pope,” or else, “that cannot be the
Church.” But we have to stand our ground by saying: “The illness is
the sickness, but the illness is not the Church.” It is in the
Church, but the Church remains the Church. When you have a Mister
So-and-so who is sick, who has cancer throughout his body, this
gentleman remains Mr. So-and-so, even though he is ill. And you do not
agree with the ailment. If this gentleman is your father, he remains
your father, even if he is ill. The Church is our mother, she is ill,
but she remains our mother. We are not going to turn away our
mother. No! Of course, we must fight against the illness. But this
Church here is indeed the Church founded by Our Lord. She it is indeed
who has the promises of eternal life. She it is indeed who has the
promises that the gates of hell will not prevail against her. The
problem is that people thought that it could not go as far as this,
but plainly we have reached that point.
The Church is still our mother, even
if she is ill
In other word, we preserve it all: we
preserve the whole faith, including adherence to the principle of the
successor of Peter; there really is a successor of Peter until the end
of the world. This is one of the canons of Vatican I. There will be a
successor of Peter to the end. It doesn’t say whether he will be good
or bad, whether everything will go well or badly, but there will be a
pope, that’s all. And that is enough. The good Lord will work, will
make His grace and the faith pass through this instrument, even if it
is weakened for a moment. This is the moment in which we are living
today; it is not easy but we must not lose the faith over it. We must
ask God for faith. I realize that this is not easy.
There are many easy solutions, but we
see from the consequences that they are not viable solutions. For
instance, rejecting everything, saying that there is no longer a pope,
or even that the Church no longer exists. Well, then, are we the ones
who are going to invent our own, in the middle of the 21st
century? Not on your life! That is doomed to failure since we are the
ones taking the initiative. No, God in His goodness was the one who
founded it and who is permitting this terrible trial.
I spoke about La Salette, but I could
very well speak about Leo XIII. When this pope composed the exorcism
that bears his name, he also said that the devil would establish his
headquarters in Rome. They say that the origin of this exorcism - I
have never really been able to verify this - was an auditory
revelation in which he allegedly heard Our Lord speaking with the
Devil. The devil supposedly said: “Give me a hundred years and I
will manage to defeat your Church.” And Our Lord supposedly
said: “Yes.” It would be interesting to verify this. The fact
remains that Leo XIII composed this exorcism in which he spoke very
plainly and very clearly about this disastrous influence of the devil
on Rome.
And it is well known that there is
the question of the anti-Christ. One day he will arrive. Is that day
today? I will not get into this debate; I am not the one who will tell
you whether he is here. I know nothing about it. Will he arrive after
or before the triumph of the Blessed Virgin that was announced at
Fatima? I know nothing about it. Some say yes, some say no. We will
surely see, and what advantage would it be [to have an answer]? Not
much.
Performing the duties of our state in
life, each at his place
What we must do, and this is my
conclusion, is our duty in our state in life. We all hope that things
go better in the Church. Just think that we all can do
something. Everyone. Why? Because we all belong to this Church that we
call Militant. And the Church Militant is like an army. If you
consider the victory of an army, in any historical battle whatsoever,
what happened? How was the victory won? Very concretely, you have the
general who gives his orders, but each soldier did what he had to
do; in other words, there would have been no victory unless a certain
number of soldiers had done what they were supposed to do. Taken
individually, that may be a lot of very small things. The cook cooked
the meals, that’s all, but he participated in the victory. The
standard-bearer carried the flag and that was part of the victory. The
messenger who was supposed to transmit the orders did so. Whoever had
a rifle or a cannon shot it. And each one at his post, by doing the
duty of his state in life, contributed to the victory.
God is counting on each one of
us. Not only on Bishop Fellay or someone else, but on each one of
us. We all have our duty in our state in life. To do one’s duty
completely without omitting anything is to contribute actively to the
rebirth of the Church, to her restoration and her victory. Of course
this is done by cooperating with grace.
I’m a little afraid that if we go off
into grandiose theories, we attribute all the evil or all the good to
someone or other. No, this is not the sort of question that we will
have to answer when we arrive in the presence of our loving God at the
end of our life. He will not ask us: “Well, did you believe that
the end of the world was scheduled for December 21, 2012?” No,
that is not the sort of question that awaits us. Any more than
questions about Paul VI and the Council. Paul VI answers to the good
Lord for what he did, and we are not the ones who will answer for
him. On the contrary, what we did, what we said: that is what we will
answer for.
The consecration of the Society of St.
Pius X to St. Joseph, Protector of the Church
To conclude, here is our real
response to the present crisis: we must pray. We have to count on
grace; we have to live well by this life of grace, this life of faith,
hope and charity, a life that is as great as possible so as to extend
Our Lord’s influence; and all the rest will come in its time, when the
good Lord wills, under the protection of the Blessed Virgin.
I take the liberty of introducing
another intercessor, because I think that it is important to add him:
St. Joseph. An important intercessor, indeed, a very important one. He
is always discreet, in the Gospels, with an extraordinary discretion.
And yet he is the one who had to be the protector and who was in fact
the great protector of the Child Jesus. He is also the protector of
the Church. And it is quite beautiful that at Fatima, on that famous
day, October 13, 1917, on which the miracle of the sun occurred, the
Blessed Virgin had announced that she would come to bless the world
with the Child Jesus and St. Joseph. So it was that in Fatima, on
October 13, 1917, there was a blessing of the world with the Holy
Family. St. Joseph has a role. As soon as you speak about the Church,
as soon as you speak about the protection of the Church, he has a very
important role. He is the patron, the protector of the Church.
We have a well-established devotion
of St. Joseph, and we want to consecrate to him in a very special way
the Society of St. Pius X in these difficult hours. We will do it
this year, in 2013, on March 19. An exception will be made in France,
since the Shrine of Cotignac is located in your country, and so the
consecration of the District of France will be made one week earlier,
on March 9, in Cotignac.
I commend you to the company of these
saints who have such great influence over the Heart of Jesus. May they
protect us all!
In order to preserve the
character of this conference, the translation retains the spoken
style.
(Source: FSSPX/MG – Transcription and subtitles DICI no. 268 dated
January 18, 2013) |
