Rebel Catholic Fraternity Gets 8 New Priests
ECONE, Switzerland — Rebel Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre attended the ordinations of eight new traditionalist priestsThursday, one year after he was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church.
The ceremony was conducted by Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, one of the four new bishops Lefebvre consecrated in 1988 in defiance of papal orders, creating what the Vatican said was a historic split in the church.
The ordinations raised to 222 the number of traditionalist priests in Lefebvre’s St. Pius X Fraternity, according to Bishop Franz Schmidberger, the German cleric who succeeded the archbishop.
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