Text about Écône

From the perspective of integral Catholicism, this is not, however, an act of pride, but an act of self-defense. The entire logic of the Priestly Society of St. Pius X since 1970 is based precisely on this recognition: the crisis in the Church is not a marginal, administrative, or purely pastoral matter. It is a crisis affecting the core doctrine of the faith, and consequently the liturgy and morality. Therefore, Archbishop Lefebvre did not speak of rebellion against the Church, but of the necessity of saving what the Church has always professed, celebrated, and commanded.

This position runs through all the classic literature of the movement: "Open Letter to Confused Catholics", "I Accuse the Council!", "They Have Dethroned Him", as well as later studies by the Society's milieu on the crisis after Vatican II and on the consecrations of 1988. Their common core is simple. The essence of Christianity is not the spirit of novelty but the faithful transmission of the deposit of faith. Therefore, if post-conciliar Rome tolerates or promotes solutions that in practice weaken such key issues as: - the dogma of the unique salvific nature of Christ, - the missionary nature of the Church, - the sacrificial character of the Mass - or the objective moral norm, then the duty of preserving Tradition becomes for traditionalists the primary duty. In this view, bishops are needed not to establish a new Church, but to preserve the priesthood, confirmation, seminaries, and the ordinary continuity of Catholic life.

For the movement of Archbishop Lefebvre, the symbol of the collapse of Roman Christocentrism was already Assisi on October 27, 1986. The interreligious meeting with John Paul II was perceived as a sign of a new era in which the practice of dialogue began to overshadow the public confession that Jesus Christ is the only Savior, and the Catholic Church the only ark of salvation fully established by Him. For traditionalists, this was not a minor image error, but a visible sign of a shift: from the logic of converting nations to the logic of religious coexistence.

The pontificate of Francis only deepened this process. The document from Abu Dhabi in 2019 contains the statement that the pluralism and diversity of religions are willed by God. Regardless of later attempts at explanation, to the ears of a Catholic formed in traditional doctrine, this sounds like a formula dangerously bordering on the denial of Christ's missionary mandate and the relativization, if not negation, of the first commandment.

Similarly read was the document of the Vatican Commission for Religious Relations with Judaism of December 10, 2015, "The Gifts and the Calling of God are Irrevocable". Strictly speaking, the document does not proclaim two parallel paths of salvation and does not abolish faith in the universal mediation of Christ. However, it states that the Church does not conduct a particular institutional mission directed at Jews. In this document, issued under the auspices of Francis and not rejected by his successor, the Church abandons the conversion of a specific category of people to faith in Christ, claiming that they can attain salvation without Him. That document thus indirectly undermines the very meaning of the existence of the Church and Christianity as such. Worse, the documents adopted during Francis's time have not been condemned or rejected, so they must be treated as binding.

For the Society's milieu, these are key examples of doctrinal blurring: formally, much traditional vocabulary is preserved, but practically the missionary imperative is weakened. A discrepancy arises between theory and pastoral practice, and this discrepancy over time becomes a new doctrine. This is also visible in other fields. Amoris laetitia of 2016 became a symbol of interpretive disaster for traditionalists. In some countries and dioceses it was read in continuity with previous teaching, in others it served to admit to communion persons living in permanent unsacramental unions without requiring a full change of life.

If in Buenos Aires more is allowed than in Warsaw, in Malta more than in Africa, and a papal text can lead to contradictory practices in the matter of sacraments, it means that chaos is not an abuse on the margins, but has become a method of governance. It is precisely this state that the Society considers particularly dangerous: not an open heresy proclaimed by a single decree, but a systematic doctrinal loosening in which everything can be nuanced, postponed, dispersed in footnotes and local guidelines.

The liturgy looks the same today. The traditional Catholic sees on the one hand the unchanging Latin Mass with chant and full of the sacred, expressing sacrifice, hierarchy, and adoration, and on the other hand the Western mainstream full of flashy improvisation, experiments, banalization, and local variants. Doctrine says one thing, catechesis another, practice a third. Some clergy bless what others do not even want to name. Some speak of the necessity of conversion, others of encounter without claims to truth. Some maintain the traditional understanding of mortal sin, others reduce morality to situational discernment. The traditionalist calls such a state simply chaos; liturgical and above all doctrinal.

It is worth adding one more element to this puzzle: a significant part of the traditionalist world consists of those Catholics who remained in full communion with Rome. They can be roughly divided into two currents: liturgical traditionalists, faithful to the old doctrine and attached above all to the classical Latin liturgy, and the most numerous group of doctrinal traditionalists who, accepting the new liturgy, strive to defend the continuity of faith, morality, and classical theology.

One can, without great risk of error, put forward the thesis that it was precisely the existence of the Lefebvrist movement that exerted real pressure on Rome over the last half-century and thereby facilitated the functioning of traditionalists remaining within church structures. Many gestures of the Vatican towards traditionalism, from indults for the old Mass, through Ecclesia Dei, to later attempts at normalization and partial recognition of traditional sensitivities, are hard to imagine without the presence of an external reviewer, which the movement of Archbishop Lefebvre became. Even those who reject his non-canonical acts indirectly benefited from the space won by the uncompromising resistance of him and his successors.

All this does not change, however, the most painful contradiction. The traditional Catholic teaching on the primacy of the pope is indisputable. The pope is the principle of unity and guardian of the deposit of faith. Precisely for this reason, the departure of the papacy from traditional language, spirit, and function appears as a catastrophe. Papocentrism, which grew in the Western Church over many centuries and often identified Catholicism with an unconditional psychological attachment to every current decision of Rome, turned out to be a dead end. This was fully revealed when the popes themselves began to tolerate or directly introduce ambiguity in matters of faith, religion, and morality. If the office of Peter no longer confirms the faithful with its former clarity, then for Lefebvrists it remains to hold on to what the papacy should guard. Even when the pope himself... no longer favors it.

Is this a schism? Rome answers: yes. The traditionalist will answer differently: it is a reactive, defensive attitude, forced by the deepening deviations and heresy-generating ambiguities of the mainstream. It is not about rejecting the papacy as such, but about refusing to subordinate the faith to what is considered a break with two thousand years of teaching. Therefore, the consecrations in Écône have in this perspective a sense not revolutionary, but conserving. They are meant to preserve continuity when the current central center of faith produces uncertainty. They are meant to safeguard Tradition when authority no longer gives a guarantee that it will itself be faithful to it.

There is no good way out of the current crisis. A return to full clarity of teaching would mean for Rome the necessity of admitting that recent decades have brought not only abuses, but real cracks in the Magisterium and tragic errors in pastoral practice. Continuing further means the further doctrinal dismantling and liturgical Protestantization of Roman Catholicism: a multiplicity of practices, local doctrines, the primacy of interpretation over definition, pastoral care guided by social fashions over dogma.

If this process continues, the Church of the future may increasingly divide into three worlds:

• traditional Eastern orthodoxy, i.e., Orthodoxy with its multiplicity of national churches and spiritual capital in Constantinople,
• contemporary Western orthodoxy, in the form of traditional Latin Catholicism with its new capital in Écône; a capital that does not want that function and stubbornly hangs in its sacristies portraits of successive Roman popes, describing its situation as extraordinary and temporary; nevertheless, de facto it begins to play the role of a new capital
• and the increasingly liberal, chaotic, and in many respects Protestantizing Roman church, retaining the office, structure, titles, and most of the churches, but increasingly weakly guarding what should be the content of that office.