Econe
– 31 August 1985
DURING
THE FIFTEEN DAYS preceding the Feast of the Immaculate Conception,
Your Holiness has decided to gather together an Extraordinary Synod
in Rome, with the purpose of making the Second Vatican Council,
which closed twenty years ago, "an ever more living reality.”
On
the occasion of this event, allow us, who took an active part in
the Council, to make known to you with all due respect our apprehensions
and our desires, for the good of the Church, and for the salvation
of the souls entrusted to us.
These
twenty years, as the Prefect of the Congregation for the Faith himself
says, have provided sufficient illustration of a situation resulting
in a real self-destruction of the Church, except in those areas
where the millennial Tradition of the Church has been maintained.
The
change wrought within the Church in the nineteen-sixties was given
concrete form and expression in the Council by the Declaration
on Religious Liberty, which granted man the natural right to
be exempt from any restraint imposed on him by divine law to adhere
to the Catholic Faith in order to be saved, a restraint necessarily
embodied in ecclesiastical and civil laws in subordination to the
legislative authority of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
This
freedom from any restraint by divine law or human laws in the matter
of religion is inscribed among the freedoms proclaimed in the Declaration
of the Rights of Man, an impious and sacrilegious declaration condemned
by the Popes and in particular by Pope Pius VI in his Encyclical
Adeo nota of April 23, 1791, and in his Consistory Allocution
of June 17,1793.
From
this Declaration on Religious Liberty the following consequences
flow, as from a poisoned spring:
1.
Religious indifferentism of states, even Catholic states, carried
out over twenty years, at the instigation of the Holy See.
2.
The ecumenism pursued unceasingly by yourself and by the Vatican,
an ecumenism condemned by the Church's Magisterium, and in particular
by the Encyclical Mortalium Animos of Pius XI.
3.
All the reforms carried out over twenty years within the Church
to please heretics, schismatics, false religions and declared enemies
of the Church, such as the Jews, the Communists and the Freemasons.
4.
This freedom from the restraint of divine law in the matter of religion
obviously encourages freedom from restraint in all divine and human
laws, and destroys all authority in all areas, especially in the
area of morals.
We
have never ceased protesting, both during the Council and after
the Council, at the incredible scandal of this false religious liberty.
We have protested in speech and in writing, in private and in public,
resting our protest upon the most solemn documents of the Magisterium:
among others, the Athanasian Creed, the Fourth Lateran Council,
the Syllabus (No.15), the First Vatican Council (DS 2008), and the
teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas concerning the Catholic Faith (IIa
IIae Questions 8 to 16), a doctrine which has been that of the Church
for almost twenty centuries, confirmed by Canon Law and its applications.
That
is why, if the coming Synod does not return to the traditional Magisterium
of the Church, in the question of religious liberty, but instead
confirms this serious error from which heresies flow, we shall be
forced to think that the members of the Synod no longer profess
the Catholic Faith.
For
their actions are contrary to the immutable principles of the First
Vatican Council, which stated in the fourth Chapter of the Fourth
Session:
"For
the Holy Ghost was not promised to the successors of Peter that
by His revelation they might disclose new doctrine, but that by
His help they might guard the revelation transmitted through the
Apostles, or the Deposit of Faith, and might faithfully expound
it."
This
being so, we can only persevere in the Church's holy Tradition and
take whatever decisions are necessary for the Church to keep a clergy
faithful to the Catholic religion capable of repeating with St.
Paul, "For I received of the Lord what I also delivered unto
you."
Holy
Father, your responsibility is heavily engaged in this new and false
conception of the Church, which is drawing clergy and faithful into
heresy and schism. If the Synod under your authority perseveres
in this direction, you will no longer be the Good Shepherd.
We
turn to our Mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary, rosary in hand, begging
her to impart to you her Spirit of Wisdom, as to all members of
the Synod, in order to put an end to the invasion of Modernism within
the Church.
Holy
Father, be so good as to forgive the frankness of our approach to
you, which has no other purpose than to render unto our one and
only Savior, Our Lord Jesus Christ, the honor which is due to Him,
as also to His one and only Church, and deign to accept our homage
as devoted sons in Jesus and Mary.
Marcel
Lefebvre,
Archbishop-Bishop
Emeritus of Tulle
Antonio
de Castro Mayer,
Bishop
Emeritus of Campos
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