The Seminary Formation of Archbishop Lefebvre

"I Have Handed on What I Received": On the Biography of Marcel Lefebvre

They literally took me by the scruff of the neck and said: "Something must be done for these seminarians!" It was useless my saying that I was sixty-five and retired, or that it was foolish to begin something that I could not continue if I should die within the next few years...they wouldn't have it.[1]

The year was 1969. Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre was 65 and retired. He had survived the tumultuous battles of the Second Vatican Council. He had just resigned as Superior General of Holy Ghost Fathers. He had spent himself for over 40 years in the Lord's vineyard. He assumed his work was over. Providence had other plans.

A handful of seminarians at the time were dissatisfied with the priestly formation they were receiving: a formation both liberal and lax. Only four years after the close of the Council, the seminaries were already permeated by the modernist spirit of Vatican II: weekly liturgical experiments, seminarians concocting their own liturgies, seminarians going out at night, bad theology courses, no rule of life, no cassocks, no Latin, no discipline, contempt for Tradition, total collapse.

The distraught seminarians were advised to seek counsel from Archbishop Lefebvre, now living quietly in Rome. The Archbishop counseled the young men to try a House of Studies at Fribourg, but this turned out to be as unsatisfactory as anything they already encountered. The Archbishop then looked into another House of Studies in Switzerland only to find more disorder, more aggiornamento, more "spirit of Vatican II." The seminarians were orphaned. They had no place to go. They had suffered ridicule for their traditionalist stand while in the seminaries of the "new springtime." What could be done for them?

It was then on June 4, 1969, when Professor Bernard Fay, Fr. Marie-Dominque, O.P, Dom Bernard Kaul, Fr. d'Hauterive and Professor Jean-Francois Braillard met with Archbishop Lefebvre on the dilemma. They took the aging prelate "by the scruff of the neck" and insisted "something must be done for these seminarians!" The "something" they had in mind was that Archbishop Lefebvre establish a seminary.

Archbishop Lefebvre agreed to do what he could, if he received a sign that it was the Will of Providence. Two days later, on June 6, 1969, with the approval of Bishop Charriere in Fribourg, Archbishop Lefebvre's seminary was born. Originally called the St. Pius X Association for Priestly Training, it welcomed its first 11 students in October the same year.

One of these students was a young Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, who would subsequently work closely with Archbishop Lefebvre, witness first­hand the formative years of Society of St. Pius X, be ordained in 1975, hold the post of Secretary General to the Society, be chosen by the Archbishop to receive Episcopal Consecration in 1988, and write the most authoritative biography of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre to date.

The Biography of Marcel Lefebvre is divided into four sections:

Part I: The Heir (from boyhood to African Missionary);

Part II: The Missionary (Missionary, Bishop, Apostolic Delegate in Africa);

Part III: The Combatant (return to France, Vatican II, the Ottaviani Intervention);

Part IV: The Restorer (founding of Society of St. Pius X through to his death).

The reader's first temptation when picking up the book is to open to the center–the section on Vatican II–and start from there. That is when the sparks really start to fly, and it is the part of the story that seemingly pertains most to us.

The reader must resist this temptation and start at the book's beginning.

There is no way one can truly understand Archbishop Lefebvre and the fight he braved for Tradition if one does not read his early years–his remarkable life before the Second Vatican Council and the events that made him who he was. Here we learn how the man was seemingly sculpted by Divine Providence to do the exact work of resistance he shouldered after the Council. Especially, we learn of his rigorous Thomistic formation which became the foundation for every priestly action.

His earlier life also contains valuable lessons: trust and submission to the designs of Providence even when it conflicts with one's natural bent, the importance of solid theological formation, unswerving anti-liberalism, devotion to the Immaculate Heart, simplicity, hard work, and fidelity to Catholic Tradition, come what may.

Marcel Lefebvre was born in 1905, the third of nine children. His was a pious household blessed with saintly, hard-working parents. Providence arranged that he be among the first to benefit from Pope St. Pius X's 1910 regulations that lowered the age of First Communion. A six-year-old Marcel received his First Communion on Christmas, 1911.

He was a man through whom the history of the last century could be studied. In one way or another, his life intersected with the major events of the 20th century: the First World War (German armies invaded his town as a boy where he saw the young people rounded up and taken away), the rise of neo-modernism in the Church after Pope Pius X's pontificate (the Fr. Le Floch episode), the Second World War (his father died in a concentration camp in Germany), the decolonization of Africa; Communism (a number of his Holy Ghost missionaries murdered by Communists), the Second Vatican Council, the new anti-anti Modernism of the Conciliar hierarchy, and the post-Vatican II counter-revolution of which he was the central figure.

He lived through it all. He could tell personal stories from it all. Most important, he was on the side of the Angels at every intersecting point. This is because he always aligned himself, his outlook and his actions with the consistent teachings of the Popes. He always thanked his beloved Fr. Le Floch, the Rector of the French Seminary in Rome, for this clear-headed world view.


Fr. Henri Le Floch was a teacher under whom one would give his eye-teeth to be formed. Thoroughly Catholic, thoroughly committed to the scholasticism of St. Thomas, thoroughly anti-liberal and anti-Modernist, thoroughly imbued with the Roman school of theology, and with the competence to convey these truths so they be central to one's life, Fr. Le Floch trained his men. Archbishop Lefebvre readily admitted that were it not for the solid formation he received from Fr. Le Floch, he too might have succumbed to the creeping liberalism of the age.

He was the one who taught us what the popes were to the world and the Church, what they had taught for a century and a half against liberalism, modernism and Communism, the whole doctrine of the Church on these topics. He really made us understand and share in this battle of the popes to preserve the world and the Church from these scourges which plague us today. That was a revelation to me.

Archbishop Lefebvre continued:


Elsewhere Archbishop said that thanks to Fr. Le Floch, "We were mobilized against this dreadful liberalism."3


"Think With The Church"

Fr. Le Floch inculcated into the students the key principle, "Sentire cum Ecclesia" –Think with the Church. Think as the Church thinks, judge as the popes judged, in light of St. Thomas Aquinas, "leaving aside all personal ideas in order to embrace the mind of the Church."

In this environment, Marcel cut his teeth on the magnificent teaching of the Popes from the 19th and early 20th centuries, which condemned the Masonic modern world born from the French Revolution. He learned that evil principles, no matter how seductively dressed, are evil nonetheless. These principles cause the ruin of souls, the destruction of society, and rob Our Lord of His rights as King and Redeemer.

Marcel was privileged to attend the seminary's "St. Thomas Lectures." They were designed to stimulate the philosophy and theology student's tastes for studying contemporary questions ("judge as the Church judges") in the light of St. Thomas Aquinas and the popes.

At one such lecture, in the presence of Archbishop Chollet of Cambrai, Fr. George Michel put the Masonic Declaration of the Rights of Man on trial. After this brilliant presentation, Archbishop Chollet summarized: "God alone is a pure right... originally we have nothing but debts: we have rights precisely to help us pay our debts." The Biography comments, "This beautifully expressed the objective nature of rights and reaffirmed the primacy of the common good–both of which were ideas ignored by the liberal individualism of the Revolution."

The Axe Falls On Fr. Le Floch

The French Seminary produced a formidable Catholic clergy who defied the liberal spirit of the age. Many of those trained in the French Seminary in Rome would become bishops. The last thing wanted by the Masonic government of France was an army of bishops and priests tearing the mask off their liberal pretensions. It could bring down their whole world. It could ruin everything. Something had to be done.

Already, France's government was in uproar over the French Seminary where "political ideas which go against the laws of the Republic are flourishing." On March 10, 1925, France's Cardinals and Bishops issued a declaration on the injustice of the secular laws and the "steps to be taken against them." Then in France's Chamber of Deputies on March 20, the bishops' declaration was denounced as coming "directly from the French Seminary in Rome." With disgust, the French politicians quoted an extract from Fr. George Michel's St. Thomas Lecture: "The State has the duty to recognize the Catholic religion as the sole true form of divine worship...and to profess it publicly," and to protect it, "if necessary with the armed forces." This caused shrieks of horror from those present. Then a talk by Fr. Lucien Lefebvre was quoted with equal loathing: "The State has no rights over education." The politicians were furious. "That is the respect they have for the secular laws," one of them said.

Shortly after, the French government pressured Pope Pius XI to "tone down" the French Seminary's counter-revolutionary program. In one of his worst decisions–along with the suppression of Padre Pio and the decision that led to the slaughter of the Mexican Cristeros–Pius XI yielded and dismissed Fr. Le Floch: despite the fact that he was a model Rector since 1904; despite the fact that he was revered by students and former students who were now eminent Churchmen; despite the fact that an independent probe showed Fr. Le Floch to be faithful to Catholic doctrine without crease.This occurred around the same time Pius XI condemned Action Française, an anti-liberal organization admired by Pope St. Pius X that Pope Pius XII sought unsuccessfully to resurrect.

Marcel was not at the seminary for Fr. Le Floch's tribulation. Away on mandatory military service, he learned the details through heartbreaking letters from fellow students. He returned to the find the atmosphere of the French Seminary changed. Fr. Le Floch was gone. No longer were the seminarians trained for combat with the modern world, but more in a spirit of detente. It was Marcel's first taste of opposition to Catholic principle–from within the Church.