A State of Necessity

Nothing could be more obviously schismatic than to confer the Episcopate in express defiance of the Roman Pontiff. Lefebvrism 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 a very advanced Gallicanism indeed.

For example, rule of the Society of Saint Pius X 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 been subject, and once again are. 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, 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 Blaise 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 SSPX 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 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. 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 unique and brilliant global witness to the inseparability of all of those 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.

The Dutch Remonstrant Brotherhood, the Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church of Ireland, the Socinian 'New Licht' within the early Free Church of Scotland, the rise of Unitarianism among the English Presbyterians, and the descent of New England Puritanism into "the Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Man, and the Neighborhood of Boston": all alike are stark and timely warnings of the perils of hyper-Augustinianism. Efforts at Catholicism-without-the-Pope, always of the view that they would in principle accept the Papacy if it did this or that of the schismatics' own haeresis, have similarly sorry histories of doctrinal error, political extremism, sexual deviancy, and either an obsession with, or a disregard for, ceremonial minutiae.

The Old Catholics, with their Jansenist and Gallican roots, have combined both fates. So, too, did the Petite Église of always Gallican and often Jansenist dissidents from the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and from the Napoleonic Concordat. Like the Bezpopovtsy, the Petite Église ended up with no bishops and thus no priests. So instead the local congregation chose its leading layman to administer Baptism and to lead a service of popular non-sacramental devotions. Slow but inexorable decline followed. The Old Catholics are not far from that, with the Lefebvrists only a couple of generations behind.

Or else they will apply their purported argument from necessity to the conferral of sacramental Ordination by certain abbots, including one in England, to whom Medieval Popes had granted that privilege, which the four Cistercian Proto-Abbots were exercising without hindrance in respect of the Diaconate into the seventeenth century. Of course, they would simply ignore the need for a special exercise of the Papal power for the valid exercise of this potestas ligata contained, like that to confirm, in the priestly power of consecration. If, that is, any such potestas ligata existed at all. It would exist to them if they said so.

In either event, their adoption of a presbyterian or a congregational polity alongside the advanced liberal theology of those who were once Augustinian, but who had had no Magisterial restraint on their pursuit of that system to whatever fallacious conclusion, will conform to a very easily recognisable historical pattern. As will, and as already does, their accumulation of theological, political, sexual and general oddballs who believed that there ought to be a Pope, so long as he agreed with them. In the absence of such a Pontiff, they just do as they like. The line between the most exaggerated devotees of Saint Augustine and the perennial reemergence of Donatism is always a fine one. It is an old story, and the Lefebvrists are about to become, as they are already becoming, only the latest in the long line of those who have acted it out.