Ultramontane, Indeed

The beating of some of its priests at a Paris rally in support of traditional marriage raises the question of exactly what Lefebvrism is, and is not.

It is certainly not "just traditional Catholicism", or even just Catholicism as widely practised during the Pianische Monolothismus. Rather, it makes sense only in certain very specific terms peculiar to France. Terms that, for very French reasons, it assumes to be universal when they are not.

Lefevbrist devotional and disciplinary practice is an obvious expression of, if not direct Jansenist influence, though probably so, then at least the strain in the French character that made it receptive to Jansenism. Likewise, Lefebvrist theory and organisational practice are no less obviously expressions of Gallicanism, and sometimes of very advanced Gallicanism indeed.

For example, rule of the SSPX is by a General Chapter in which not only do bishops and simple presbyters have equal status, but it is considered an aberration that the Superior-General is at present a bishop, rather than being a simple presbyter to whom the Society's bishops would be, and in the past have been, subject. Shades of the extreme Gallican attempts to prove a Dominical institution of the office of parish priest.

And shades of the structural arrangements of Anglo-Catholic traditionalism over the last two decades and before, echoing the extent to which that movement has always tapped into the same English and Welsh organisational traits that made Congregationalism so popular (and many of the same English and Welsh devotional traits that made Methodism so popular) just as Lefebvrism has tapped into the same French traits that had previously manifested themselves as Gallicanism (and Jansenism).

Lefebvrism gives perhaps the first ever formal institutional shape to the situation created by the seventeenth century, which began with three competing parties in the French Church, but which ended with two, the Gallicans and the Jansenists having effectively merged against the Ultramontanes due to the deployment of Gallican ecclesiological arguments against the Papal condemnations of Jansenist soteriological ones.

By the wayside had fallen such features as Jansenist belief, with the sole if notable exception of Pascal, in the infallibility of Papal definitions ex cathedra, and Gallican use of belief in Our Lady's Immaculate Conception as a mark of party identity due to its having been defined by the Council of Basel.

The popular attraction of the Lefebvrist clergy in terms of the old Latin Mass and traditional or "traditional" devotions echoes that of the Gallican clergy in terms of the old diocesan Missals and Breviaries and a sympathy for the entrenched local devotional practices reviled, like those entrenched local liturgical forms, by the Ultramontanes.

The French Church, or an idea of the French Church, is assumed to be fundamentally autonomous, so that the incompatibility of Dignitatis Humanae with a very specifically French Counter-Revolutionary theory of the relationship between Church and State means that it is the Conciliar Declaration that must yield. This is simply taken to be self-evident.

In reality, such a position is as schismatic and as heretical as John Courtney Murray's attempt to conform Dignitatis Humanae to the American republican tradition's reading of the First Amendment as taught to high school students, an approach comprehensible only within Manifest Destiny and all that.

It has therefore ended up, for now, in George Weigel's signature to the Project for the New American Century, and in the public support for the Iraq War on the part of the late Richard John Neuhaus, known to George W Bush as "Father Richard".

American "conservative" Catholicism sees the American Church as autonomous as surely as does American "liberal" Catholicism, and freely disregards Catholic Teaching on social justice and on peace as surely as the other side freely disregards Catholic Teaching on bioethical and sexual issues.

As a result, both alike are blind to the Magisterium's brilliant and unique global witness to the inseparability of all of these concerns. In both the French and the American cases, there is a strange inability to recognise that what one was taught at 13 or 14 might not always be the last word on any given subject.

One of Lefebvre's consecrees is a Legitimist, another is a Carlist, and a third is Richard Williamson. The fourth consecree, however, is Bernard Fellay. He is the most sympathetic to reunion with Rome, Williamson, unsurprising, being the least. And he, Fellay, is Swiss.

In Switzerland alone, so far as I am aware, there survives at cantonal level the Catholic republican tradition of the pre-Revolutionary kind. The Catholic cantons of Switzerland are the only remaining Catholic republics as such, rather than republics with Catholic populations but which in themselves are nevertheless products of the Revolution.

Even the church taxes in Germany and Austria, for example, are the products of compromises between the antagonistic forces of, on one side, the Church and, on the other side, the Republic that had been conceived in the will to destroy Her, or at the very least to banish Her from any sort of public life. But the Swiss cantons are not like that.

The Protestant cantons are also the only pre-Revolutionary Protestant republics still in existence, so far as I am aware. The American Republic is in an odd position, in that 1776 came before 1789, so that that Republic is not a product of the Revolution, but nevertheless sits under a radically orthodox theological critique.

That critique is most obviously by reference to pre-Revolutionary traditions of Catholic and Protestant republican thought, on the Catholic side perhaps Venetian, on the Protestant side perhaps Dutch, and on both sides perhaps at cantonal level in Switzerland, where it is possible that such thought might hold sway even now.

It certainly ought to hold sway there even now, historically speaking no less than philosophically speaking. Insofar as it does, that begins, and rather more than begins, to account for the very, very different approach of the one Swiss among the Lefebvrist bishops, compared with that of his titled French and Spanish confrères.

And compared especially with that of his confrère who belongs to a small but clearly identifiable tribe of English eccentric whose embrace of Continental reaction while seeking to apply it to the very different history of these Islands has left him not wanting to be British and not really wanting to be English.

Including when she was the Dowry of Mary, one of the most extravagantly Catholic countries that there has ever been, England never had an absolute monarch, still less an absolute monarch who was really just a temporal servant of the Pope.

Where has ever had such a thing? Certainly not France, either. And most certainly not anywhere in Bernard Fellay's Helvetic Confederation.