Society of St Pius X - District of Asia ~Declares 2013 : Year of Archbishop Lefebvre

Society of St Pius X - District of Asia
St Pius X Priory 286 Upper Thomson Rd Singapore 574402 Tel. 65/ 6459 0792 Fax. 65/ 6459 3591 district@sspxasia.com

To all the faithful of the District of Asia 2013 : Year of Archbishop Lef e bvre
January 1, 2013

Dear Faithful,
As we are entering yet another year since the birth of Our Divine Savior, after having dedicated 2012 to the Family, we have decided to dedicate this new year to the memory of our dear founder, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, a man who has left his mark — and what a mark! — in the history of the Church of the twentieth century!

It is sad observation that he is not well known among our people: few of our Asian faithful have read his biography, or carefully studied his books.
By making 2013 the Year of Archbishop Lefebvre, we want to remedy this lack of knowledge which can lead to misunderstandings, and the abandon of the correct fight for the Tradition. This knowledge and wisdom are still so necessary at this moment in the crisis on the Church, which is far from being finished.

It is important to see all the aspects of this great man of the Church, who was deeply Catholic in everything he did and taught. Without the complete view of his life and teaching, one can make him say anything and the contrary of anything. If I may dare to make a comparison, it is almost like so many who use and abuse Sacred Scripture to make it say whatever they want following Luther’s principle of Sola Scriptura, according to which there is no need of the Holy Roman Catholic Church to interpret Scripture. We know the results of such erroneous principle.
Archbishop Lefebvre was truly a man of God, homo Dei, as St Paul wanted Timothy to be. One key to his long and adventurous life is well known: to follow Providence! “O will of God, thou art my Paradise!” he would have said with the great St Francis de Sales. “Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven!” He certainly tried to put this in practice from his early age to his death.

He sought this Divine Will through his superiors, in all the echelons of the Church, for the 14 or 15 various assignments he held in his life. He sought it exclusively when it was time to stand up and be counted for the fight for the honor and rights of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The first skirmishes of this fight were already in the mid-1940s, after his return to France, to Mortain, when, still a simple priest, he noticed and wrote against the false theories of Fr. De Lubac on
salvation. He made himself visible again in the fight when, now as an archbishop, he officially approved the book “Pour Qu’Il Règne” (“That He May Reign”), on the Social Kingship of Christ, in 1959, a book the French Bishops would not endorse. This was soon followed, in 1963, by another clash with the French hierarchy on the wearing of the cassock: the Archbishop explaining to the members of the Holy Ghost Fathers the need to wear it for various reasons, both as a protection for the priest and a witness to the Church and to Our Lord Jesus Christ; and the French bishops allowing their priests to discard it to be closer to the world.

It was always to defend the truth and the will of God, manifested through centuries of clear papal teaching, that he stood up during Vatican II Council, and led, from the Third Session onwards, the 250 members of the Coetus Internationalis Patrum (the International Assembly of Fathers), a true band of Gedeon, to protect the Sacred Tradition of the Church. As it is known, they did achieve some little degree of success in stopping or slowing down the flood of modernism (for instance, in changing some dangerous words in key documents, in delaying rushed votes, etc). but unfortunately, without the support of the Pope, already imbued with the liberal ideas, the Coetus could not achieve all it wanted, and the modern errors did enter into official conciliar texts, for the great harm of the subsequent 50 years so far!

It was again this mysterious will of God that urged him, after his resignation as Superior General of the Holy Ghost Fathers in1968 and already aged 63, to do something for a few seminarians in search of a truly Catholic bishop and seminary. Thus the Society of St Pius X was conceived and born as a proper religious institute of the Roman Catholic Church, outside of which there is no salvation.
If I may dare again, in short I would like throughout this year to apply to the Archbishop what Holy Mother Church asks us of St Pius X: that we may follow his examples and teachings: exempla et instituta sectantes (collect of Sept. 3).

Examples: let us know his life, let us read his biography: his large family with five vocations out of eight children, the Eucharistic Crusade which gave him a Eucharistic spirituality in his tender years, the French seminary in Rome where he learned to love the writings of the Popes, his 30 years in the missions, his fight during the Council, and, always following Providence, as another St Martin who did not refuse the last great work the Good Lord was asking him, in his old age the foundation of the Society of St Pius X.

His teaching: all his books, his writings, his sermons… Which of these do you have in your personal library? Which one have you read?

As I am writing to you, I have been given permission from Fr. De Cacqueray, the SSPX French District Superior, to do an Asian version of the beautiful film/documentary on the Archbishop: Monseigneur Lefebvre, Un évêque dans la tempête—A Bishop in the Storm , which has just come out in French and is being shown now publically in various places in French speaking parts of Europe. I plan to have it dubbed professionally in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Tamil and Vietnamese, and perhaps in Indonesian. Let us organize public viewing in our mass centers and even elsewhere to restore the honor of this heroic man.

With the assurance of my prayers throughout the New Year, which, let us pray, may bring closer than ever the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Fr.Daniel Couture District Superior

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