Archbishop Lefebvre was right to oppose the ‘living tradition’ of Vatican II

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Archbishop Lefebvre was right to oppose the ‘living tradition’ of Vatican II
Although Archbishop Lefebvre’s understanding of Catholic tradition matched that of St. Paul, many proponents of change after Vatican II argued that he was mistaken in his determination to faithfully transmit the Faith that he had received.



Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre with Pope Pius XII
YouTube

Robert T. Morrison
Dec 17, 2024
(LifeSiteNews) — In his sermon during the 1988 consecrations of the four bishops of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre spoke of his understanding of Catholic tradition, and the role of a bishop in transmitting it:

Far be it from me to set myself up as pope! I am simply a bishop of the Catholic Church who is continuing to transmit Catholic doctrine. I think, and this will certainly not be too far off, that you will be able to engrave on my tombstone these words of St. Paul: ‘Tradidi quod et accepi—I have transmitted to you what I have received,’ nothing else. I am just the postman bringing you a letter. I did not write the letter, the message, this Word of God. God Himself wrote it; Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself gave it to us. As for us, we just handed it down, through these dear priests here present and through all those who have chosen to resist this wave of apostasy in the Church, by keeping the Eternal Faith and giving it to the faithful. We are just carriers of this Good News, of this Gospel which Our Lord Jesus Christ gave to us, as well as of the means of sanctification: the Holy Mass, the true Holy Mass, the true Sacraments which truly give the spiritual life.

His idea was very simple: Our Lord entrusted His Church with the task of faithfully transmitting the Catholic Faith, so that is precisely what a bishop should try to do. As Archbishop Lefebvre said, he viewed his task as similar to that of a postman bringing a letter: Jesus gave us the “letter” through His Apostles, and the Church is responsible for passing it along through the generations.

St. Paul expressed the same basic idea in his letter to the Galatians:

But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach a gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema. As we said before, so now I say again: If any one preach to you a gospel, besides that which you have received, let him be anathema. (Galatians 1:8-9)

Obviously St. Paul did not mean that the truths of the Faith needed to be expressed with the exact same phrases to every audience regardless of context — indeed, even the four Gospels themselves express the same teachings of Our Lord in different ways. Instead, the common sense meaning of his words is that the truths of the Faith do not change in substance even if they can legitimately be expressed in different ways.

Although Archbishop Lefebvre’s understanding of Catholic tradition matched that of St. Paul, many proponents of change after Vatican II argued that he was mistaken in his determination to faithfully transmit the Faith that he had received. In his Open Letter to Confused Catholics, he rebutted the common criticism of his position:

But, one will object, the dogma that makes Mary the Mother of God only dates back to the year 431, transubstantiation to 1215, papal infallibility to 1870 and so on. Has there not been an evolution? No, not at all. The dogmas which have been defined in the course of the ages were contained in Revelation; the Church has just made them explicit. When Pope Pius XII defined in 1950 the dogma of the Assumption, he said specifically that this truth of the assumption into Heaven of the Virgin Mary, body and soul, was included in the deposit of Revelation and already existed in the texts revealed to us before the death of the last Apostle. We cannot bring anything new into this field, we cannot add a single dogma, but only express those that exist ever more clearly, more beautifully and more loftily.

His last sentence sets forth the manner in which Catholic tradition can develop. This was Archbishop Lefebvre’s view of the way in which tradition is “living” despite the fact that Revelation ended with the death of the last Apostle.


What has the Church taught?

Of course it was not merely Archbishop Lefebvre’s personal view of the matter. Beyond the clear words of St. Paul to the Galatians, we can add the following authoritative statements corresponding to Archbishop Lefebvre’s understanding of the reality that Catholic tradition cannot evolve to become something other than what Our Lord entrusted to His Apostles:

• First Vatican Council: “For the doctrine of the faith which God has revealed is put forward not as some philosophical discovery capable of being perfected by human intelligence, but as a divine deposit committed to the spouse of Christ to be faithfully protected and infallibly promulgated. Hence, too, that meaning of the sacred dogmas is ever to be maintained which has once been declared by holy mother church, and there must never be any abandonment of this sense under the pretext or in the name of a more profound understanding. ‘May understanding, knowledge and wisdom increase as ages and centuries roll along, and greatly and vigorously flourish, in each and all, in the individual and the whole church: but this only in its own proper kind, that is to say, in the same doctrine, the same sense, and the same understanding.’ St. Vincent of Lerins, Commonitorium (Notebook), 28 (PL 50, 668)”
  
  
• Blessed Pius IX’s Qui Pluribus: “It is with no less deceit, venerable brothers, that other enemies of divine revelation, with reckless and sacrilegious effrontery, want to import the doctrine of human progress into the Catholic religion. They extol it with the highest praise, as if religion itself were not of God but the work of men, or a philosophical discovery which can be perfected by human means. The charge which Tertullian justly made against the philosophers of his own time ‘who brought forward a Stoic and a Platonic and a Dialectical Christianity’ can very aptly apply to those men who rave so pitiably. Our holy religion was not invented by human reason, but was most mercifully revealed by God; therefore, one can quite easily understand that religion itself acquires all its power from the authority of God who made the revelation, and that it can never be arrived at or perfected by human reason.”
  
  
• St. Pius X’s Oath Against Modernism: “I sincerely hold that the doctrine of faith was handed down to us from the apostles through the orthodox Fathers in exactly the same meaning and always in the same purport. Therefore, I entirely reject the heretical misrepresentation that dogmas evolve and change from one meaning to another different from the one which the Church held previously.”
  

As we know, these statements were not made needlessly — the Church had to insist on this matter to oppose the enemies of orthodoxy who were trying to introduce errors by arguing that Catholic truth should evolve to keep up with changing times.


The problem of living tradition

In ordinary practice, the problem with “living tradition” manifests itself primarily when there is some idea proposed that differs from what the Church has always taught. Two examples can help illustrate this.

As we know, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre vehemently opposed John Paul II’s 1986 interreligious prayer meeting at Assisi. He and Bishop Antonio de Castro Mayer responded to the event in their joint declaration dated December 2, 1986:

Rome has asked us if we have the intention of proclaiming our rupture with the Vatican on the occasion of the Congress of Assisi. We think that the question should rather be the following: Do you believe and do you have the intention of proclaiming that the Congress of Assisi consummates the rupture of the Roman authorities with the Catholic Church? For this is the question which preoccupies those who still remain Catholic. Indeed, it is clear that since the Second Vatican Council, the Pope and the Bishops are making more and more of a clear departure from their predecessors. Everything that had been put into place by the Church in past centuries to defend the Faith, and everything that was done by the missionaries to spread it, even to the point of martyrdom, henceforth is considered to be a fault which the Church must confess and ask pardon for… We might recall here our Declaration of November 21, 1974, which remains more relevant than ever. For us, remaining indefectibly attached to the Catholic and Roman Church of all times, we are obliged to take note that this Modernist and liberal religion of modern and conciliar Rome is still distancing itself more and more from us, who profess the Catholic Faith of the eleven Popes who condemned this false religion…

If other bishops had joined them at the time, perhaps the scourge of false ecumenism might have been ended before more damage was done. Instead, Archbishop Lefebvre and Bishop de Castro Mayer stood alone. Two years later, they were the subject of John Paul II’s apostolic letter announcing their excommunication for consecrating the four SSPX bishops without Rome’s approval. Rather than simply criticizing the consecrations, John Paul II condemned Archbishop Lefebvre’s view of “living tradition”:

The root of this schismatic act can be discerned in an incomplete and contradictory notion of Tradition. Incomplete, because it does not take sufficiently into account the living character of Tradition, which, as the Second Vatican Council clearly taught, ‘comes from the apostles and progresses in the Church with the help of the Holy Spirit. There is a growth in insight into the realities and words that are being passed on. . . .’

With irony that was surely unintended, but tremendously revealing, John Paul II continued by asking theologians to renew their commitment to deeper study to “reveal” how Vatican II’s teachings fit with tradition:

Moreover, I should like to remind theologians and other experts in the ecclesiastical sciences that they should feel themselves called upon to answer in the present circumstances. Indeed, the extent and depth of the teaching of the Second Vatican Council call for a renewed commitment to deeper study in order to reveal clearly the Council’s continuity with Tradition, especially in points of doctrine which, perhaps because they are new, have not yet been well understood by some sections of the Church.

It is fair to ask why such an inquiry needed to be carried out over twenty years after the Council had closed — perhaps it might have been better for the Council Fathers to explore the question prior to promulgating the teachings? In any case, Archbishop Lefebvre was unjustly rebuked for steadfastly insisting that Catholic tradition could not change to permit the false ecumenism so evident at Assisi.

The second example to consider relates to Francis’s 2023 response to the Dubia of the five Cardinals “concerning the interpretation of Divine Revelation, the blessing of same-sex unions, synodality as a constitutive dimension of the Church, the priestly ordination of women, and repentance as a necessary condition for sacramental absolution.” Here is the first question from the Cardinals, and Francis’s response:

Question: ‘Following the statements of some bishops, which have neither been corrected nor retracted, we ask whether the Divine Revelation should be reinterpreted in the Church according to the cultural changes of our time,  and the new anthropological vision promoted by these changes. Or if, on the contrary, the Divine Revelation is binding forever, immutable, and therefore not to be contradicted, in accordance with the dictum of the Second Vatican Council, which states that ‘the obedience of faith’ must be given to God who reveals, (Dei Verbum 5); that what is revealed for the salvation of all nations must remain ‘forever whole and alive,’ and be ‘handed on to all generations’, and that progress in understanding does not imply any change in the truth of things and words because faith is ‘handed on once and for all,’ and the Church’s Magisterium is not above the Word of God, but only teaches what has been handed on.’

Response: ‘a) The answer depends on the meaning you give to the word ‘reinterpret.’ If it is understood as ‘interpret better,’ the expression is valid. In this sense, the Second Vatican Council affirmed that it is necessary that with the work of exegetes – and I would add of theologians – ‘the judgment of the Church may mature’ (Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum, 12). b) Therefore, while it is true that the Divine Revelation is immutable and always binding, the Church must be humble and recognize that she never exhausts its unfathomable richness and needs to grow in her understanding. c) Consequently, she also matures in her understanding of what she has herself affirmed in her Magisterium.’

The response is shameless sophistry: Francis and his collaborators understood perfectly well that the Cardinals were correct in believing that Divine Revelation is “binding forever, immutable, and therefore not to be contradicted.” But they also recognized that the Cardinals’ position has been undermined by the experience of the Vatican II revolution, which erroneously suggests that truth can “mature” to contradict what the Church had previously taught. If the truth could actually “mature” to allow for false ecumenism (which contradicts Divine Revelation), on what grounds could anyone persuasively argue that the truth could not “mature” to allow reinterpretation of Divine Revelation?

This is the problem of “living tradition” as the term is understood by the proponents of the Vatican II revolution. Once one abandons the views expressed by Archbishop Lefebvre — and St. Pius X, Blessed Pius IX, Vatican I, St. Vincent of Lerins, and St. Paul, etc. — what is the limiting principle for how much doctrine can change? Or to put it mathematically, once you let people say that 2+2 is 5, 6, and 7, on what grounds can you persuasively argue that it cannot also be 8?

The only real answer is to insist on what the Church has always taught on the matter. Truth is truth and cannot change. As St. Paul told us, those who disagree are anathema.

Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us!