Rebel Prelate Consecrates Bishops in Catholic Schism

An archconservative French prelate consecrated four bishops in an Alpine meadow here Thursday, provoking the first major schism in the Roman Catholic Church in more than a century.

Spurning a last-minute command from Pope John Paul II to cancel the ceremony and go to Rome, 82-year-old Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre went ahead with the consecrations of the four kneeling priests at 11:44 on a sultry mountain morning. At that instant, he and they became ecclesiastical outlaws in the Vatican’s eyes, excommunicated for rejecting papal authority.

Clutching his silver bishop’s crozier in his white-gloved hand, Lefebvre told several thousand of his traditionalist supporters, crowded into a large tent, that his defiance was “an act of necessity” to assure the continuity of his movement.

“Operation Survival,” he called it in the soft, thin voice with which he has lambasted Vatican reformers for more than two decades.

“What we do is for the good of the church,” he said. “Rome will one day thank us for the action we have performed here today.”

The new bishops were still blessing the faithful at the headquarters of Lefebvre’s Fraternity of St. Pius X when the Vatican issued a statement assailing their consecration as “a formally schismatic act” for which Lefebvre and the new bishops were automatically excommunicated.

Richard Williamson, 48, a craggy, self-assured, London-born priest consecrated Thursday to direct Lefebvre’s followers in the United States, shrugged at the Vatican’s outrage.

“We are not concerned, because we are absolutely certain that we are not schismatic,” Williamson told The Times. “We are being true to the real church.”

Another of the new bishops, Alfonso Galarreta, 31, a Spanish-born, Argentine-raised priest who will head Lefebvre’s traditionalists in Latin America, said: “We do not feel we are leaving the church. We are coherent with true doctrine.”

He charged that “seven or eight” of John Paul’s bishops in South America are Communists. In conversation, a French priest who is a member of the movement described himself as a “moderate monarchist.” A booklet on sale at the movement’s bookstand here is entitled “Rock and Roll: Instrument of Revolution and Subversion.”

2 Other Bishops Consecrated

The other two bishops consecrated Thursday are Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, 43, the French secretary general of the fraternity, and Bernard Fellay, the Swiss chief administrator of the movement who, at 30, became the world’s youngest Catholic bishop, excommunicated or otherwise.

Lefebvre’s processional into the tent, behind 316 priests and seminarians, climaxed a break with the church that goes back to the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council, which he helped organize as an up-and-coming bishop and longtime missionary in West Africa.

The council modernized the church, proclaiming, among other things, the new vernacular Mass that Lefebvre has denounced as “neo-Protestant . . . a bastard rite.”

At the Vatican, where John Paul has the reputation of being a doctrinal conservative, Lefebvre is known as an incorrigible reactionary whose movement has at least informal links to the most extreme right-wing political organizations in many of the two dozen or so countries where it exists.

Lefebvre’s followers are estimated at between 100,000 and 500,000 by the Vatican and at more than a million by spokesmen at Lefebvre’s headquarters here. The U.S. wing of the Lefebvre movement has about 25 priests and 95 centers across the country for worship in the traditional Tridentine Latin Mass. Estimates on lay participants range between 5,000 and 10,000 followers.

Believers say Lefebvre symbolizes historic Catholic values abandoned by John Paul and his immediate predecessors.

“Anything we have condemned has been condoned by the post-council church,” Lefebvre said Thursday before celebrating a four-centuries-old traditional Latin Mass as part of the consecration rite that John Paul had forbidden. “They have condoned modernism, communism and Zionism.”

In another part of a long, rambling apologia before starting the Mass, he said: “Renewal since the council is not Catholic. Ecumenism is not Catholic.”

Pope Assails ‘Obstinacy’

In 1976, Pope Paul VI suspended Lefebvre “because of the scandal caused to the Christian people by your obstinacy.” Lefebvre ignored the suspension, and he has since expanded his movement steadily, in the process ordaining more than 200 priests.

On Wednesday, Lefebvre ordained 16 priests, two of them Americans, at a 4 1/2-hour ceremony here. As the faithful knelt later for blessings from the new priests, a gleaming black sedan belonging to the papal nuncio in Bern threaded its way to the headquarters of the fraternity, which is named for Pope Pius X, who reigned from 1903 to 1914. Lefebvre says he was the last truly Catholic Pope.

The car brought a courier bearing a telegram to Lefebvre from West German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, one of the Pope’s closest advisers.

Papal Message

“For the love of Christ and his church, the Holy Father asks you paternally but firmly to leave today for Rome without proceeding with the episcopal ordinations announced by you,” the telegram said. “Be inspired not to betray the bishopric with which you have been invested, or your oath of loyalty to the Pope.”

In recounting the Pope’s appeal Thursday, Lefebvre made clear he had not been strongly tempted to visit Rome, where, he said, any number of previous visits had failed to bridge the gap between his convictions and the restraints demanded by the administrators of his church. A compromise protocol in May collapsed one day after it was signed.

The 2,000 bishops who oversee the spiritual life of the world’s 850 million Catholics are the backbone of the church. Bishops have consecrated other bishops since the time of St. Peter, who was the first. But in the Vatican’s eyes, a consecration without papal approval not only violates canon law and requires excommunication, it is also an intolerable violation of trust.

Consolation for Vatican

This is particularly considered so in the Lefebvre case, where the new bishops are intended to perpetuate and encourage a movement the Vatican has denounced. There is some satisfaction for the Vatican, however, in the fact that only one other bishop, retired Brazilian Antonio Castro Mayer, 72, has embraced Lefebvre’s cause.

The Vatican regards schism with the same attitude governments hold for secession: It challenges both papal authority and institutional direction and offers an established alternative to the disaffected. With the ecumenism that is part of the modernization and democratization encouraged by the Vatican Council, the church has been attempting to repair the breaches left by past schisms.

In 1054, the original church split into two antagonistic branches, West for Rome and the Pope, and East for Constantinople and the patriarch. In the 16th Century, Catholics like Martin Luther, Ulrich Zwingli, John Calvin and King Henry VIII of England, who was eager to remarry, created Protestantism. In 1870, conservatives known as Old Catholics rebelled at the dogma of papal infallibility; they were the last major schismatic Catholics until Lefebvre.

Small in Number

Although Lefebvre’s traditionalists are numerically small, they are large on commitment and drive. In addition to around 250 priests, there are about 200 students at seminaries, including three dozen at the one Williamson has been directing at Ridgefield, Conn.

The Vatican has predicted that many traditionalists will abandon Lefebvre now that he has been excommunicated. But Williamson is dubious.

“I might lose one or two seminarians,” he said, “but I frankly doubt it.”

Jaime Tassat, a Spanish priest who administers a traditionalist parish in El Paso, Tex., said: “The Vatican’s hostility is unpleasant, but we will move forward in spite of it. We would not be here today if we had second thoughts.”

And Carl Pulvermacher, a Franciscan priest for 44 years and a traditionalist from Dickinson, Tex., said: “The Vatican can’t treat us any worse than it already has. If I were a Lutheran pastor, the bishop of Houston would be nice to me. If I wanted to be a homosexual he’d say, ‘OK, it’s your choice.’ But I’m a traditionalist, and the bishop won’t even recognize that I exist.”