Letter of Mgr. Lefebvre to the Sovereign Pontiff
25 April 1979
Most Holy Father,
At the request of His Eminence Cardinal Seper, I send you together with this letter the questionnaire and corrected answers, a summing up of my conversations of 11-12 January with the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
In these few lines I should like to draw Your Holiness's attention to the extreme gravity of the situation affecting the faithful, and above all of young people, in the so-called Catholic countries of the free world.
The majority of Catholics find themselves either without priests or directed by priests who no longer have the Catholic faith. Indeed, where priests are less than forty years old, and there are few of these, they have been badly trained in groups of formation that have a Modernist, Protestant, even Marxist spirit. If priests are older, they are using catechisms replete with errors, even heresies, and they use ecumenical Bibles to instruct their parishioners.
The extent of the disaster is enormous. We rejoice at your insistence that the priest must be holy. But who will give him holiness if the seminaries have bad teachers? If the Church is to be renewed the priesthood must be renewed at all costs, and so, accordingly, must the seminaries. But true seminaries cannot be established without restoring the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass according to the spirit defined by the Council of Trent, and at the same time restoring the Sacraments and the entire Liturgy in this same spirit.
Our own experience proves this conclusively, and would do so even more had we been encouraged rather than persecuted.
Today our five seminaries could be ten or twenty, our 170 seminarians 1,000, if we had been granted even provisional approval. We could render a great service to the bishops by preparing true priests for them, as did St. John Eudes, St. Vincent de Paul and the Blessed Olier.
In order to achieve this result it would only be necessary to declare a general approval, granted to our priests who are in demand everywhere, in all Catholic countries. Many are the members of the clergy who encourage us.
Would it not be possible to grant us the statute which is already in force in prelatures nullius, such as the Canons of St. Maurice in Switzerland who have a bishop, Mgr. Salina, at their head, a statute which is also that of the Mission de France, of which the superior is also a bishop?
My successor, elected according to the statutes of the Society, would receive consecration as a bishop. It is a very ancient custom in the Church, which as given proof of its value.
I wish so much that you would ask His Eminence Cardinal Palazzini to be the Visitor to our houses, and to give you a report on them. Cardinal Siri and Cardinal Seper are very busy and could not take on this burden.
Please believe, most Holy Father, that we have but one goal, to serve the Church, the Pope, and souls by forming holy priests for them, priests to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world.
I beg Your Holiness to accept my respectful homage and my filial sentiments in Christo et Maria.
I beg Your Holiness to accept my respectful homage and my filial sentiments in Christo et Maria.
Marcel Lefebvre
