The Écône Consecrations

For seventeen years the dispute between Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and Rome had been a slow agony of letters, suspensions, and failed reconciliations. On 30 June 1988 it became irreversible. In the seminary he had founded at Écône, in the Swiss Alps, Lefebvre laid hands on four of his priests and made them bishops — without the mandate of the Roman Pontiff, in defiance of an explicit and repeated prohibition. He believed he was saving the Catholic priesthood from extinction in a time of crisis; the Holy See judged that he had committed the gravest act of disobedience a bishop can commit. Both convictions deserve to be stated plainly, and a Catholic in communion with Rome must hold the hard truth at the centre of them: a bishop may not consecrate bishops against the Pope’s express will, and the penalty for doing so is not a slander invented by enemies but a provision of the Church’s own law.

The Protocol That Almost Held

It very nearly did not happen. By the spring of 1988 Rome and Lefebvre were closer to peace than they had ever been. After long negotiations conducted on the Roman side by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a reconciliation agreement — the Protocol of 5 May 1988 — was drawn up and signed by both men. It granted the Society of St. Pius X a canonical structure, recognition of its seminaries, and — the point Lefebvre cared about most — a bishop of its own. The settlement that had eluded everyone for a generation was, for one day, on paper.

Then it collapsed. The very next day, 6 May, Lefebvre wrote to withdraw, unsatisfied above all by Rome’s refusal to name a date for the episcopal consecration and to guarantee a traditionalist majority on the commission that would oversee the Society. He had signed; within twenty-four hours he had repudiated his own signature, and resolved to consecrate bishops himself, with or without the mandate the Protocol had promised to negotiate.

The Day Itself

On 30 June 1988, before a crowd of thousands at Écône and assisted by the aged Brazilian bishop Antônio de Castro Mayer, Lefebvre consecrated four priests of the Society as bishops: Bernard Fellay, Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, Richard Williamson, and Alfonso de Galarreta. In his sermon he appealed to a state of necessity — the conviction that the post-conciliar crisis was so grave that the ordinary law of the Church yielded to the higher law of preserving the faith, and that he was therefore bound in conscience to act. He had been warned, in person and in writing, that to proceed was to incur the Church’s severest censure. He proceeded.

The censure of canon 1382 is latae sententiae — “automatic.” It is incurred by the act itself, in the very moment of the consecration, without need of any trial or sentence. Lefebvre and the four men he consecrated incurred it; so, for his part in the rite, did Bishop de Castro Mayer. On 1 July 1988 the Congregation for Bishops, by a decree signed by its Prefect, Cardinal Bernardin Gantin, formally declared what the law had already effected: that all six had incurred excommunication.

Ecclesia Dei: The Pope Responds

Two days after the consecrations, on 2 July 1988, Pope John Paul II issued the motu proprio Ecclesia Dei adflicta. Its judgement on the act was unsparing, and a Catholic must not soften it: the consecration of bishops without the papal mandate was, the Pope wrote, an act of disobedience in a matter of supreme importance for the unity of the Church, and such disobedience carries a meaning beyond itself.

The same document located the deeper trouble not in liturgy or discipline but in theology: “The root of this schismatic act,” John Paul wrote, “can be discerned in an incomplete and contradictory notion of Tradition.” And as to Lefebvre’s defence — the appeal to a state of necessity — the Holy See rejected it firmly. The necessity, Rome judged, was not real but self-created: the Pope had foreseen Lefebvre’s situation, had offered communion and conceded a bishop in the Protocol, and the only remaining obstacle was Lefebvre’s own refusal to wait upon papal authority.

Conviction and Consequence

And yet fairness cuts both ways. Lefebvre was no cynic. He was a former missionary archbishop and superior general who had given his life to the Church, who believed with his whole soul that the faith was being dismantled around him, and who acted — wrongly, but sincerely — to preserve what he thought could not otherwise survive. To deny his good faith would be as false as to endorse his act. The tragedy of Écône is precisely that a man of evident zeal placed his own judgement of the crisis above the authority of the Pope, and in doing so wounded the very communion he meant to defend.

The story did not end at the wall of excommunication. On 21 January 2009, Pope Benedict XVI — the same man who, as Cardinal Ratzinger, had signed the 5 May Protocol with Lefebvre — remitted the excommunications of the four surviving bishops, a gesture of paternal reach toward reconciliation, though the Society of St. Pius X remained without full canonical standing. The wound of 1988 is not yet healed. But the response of the Church to it — severe in justice, persistent in mercy — is the response of a Mother who will not stop calling her children home.