No Pragmatic Sanction

The question of the status of Lefebvrism is doing the rounds again. Of course the Society of Saint Pius X thinks that this Pope is a Modernist. It has thought the same thing about the last four, the only others under whom it has ever existed. We must be clear 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 was considered an aberration that the last Superior-General was a bishop, rather than being a simple presbyter to whom the Society's bishops would have be, and once again now are, 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.