679919

research-article2016
FRC0010.1177/0957155816679919French Cultural StudiesSudlow

French Cultural Studies

French Cultural Studies

2017, Vol. 28(1) 79­–94
The Frenchness of Marcel Lefebvre © The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0957155816679919
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Brian Sudlow
Aston University

Abstract
The case of Marcel Lefebvre and the Society of St Pius X (SSPX) deserves fresh perspectives. The
current historiography is too franco-centric, focused on selective aspects of Lefebvre’s biography
and the actions of isolated individuals, rather than with the life of the SSPX itself. After evaluating
the current state of the historiography, this article proposes a new analysis of the SSPX’s political
discourses in France and internationally and undertakes to reframe the relationship between
Lefebvre’s life and his congregation by re-examining his African missionary experiences. Such new
perspectives will be helpful as the SSPX moves towards regularisation under the pontificate of
Pope Francis.

Keywords
Action française, far right, Pope Francis, Marcel Lefebvre, missionary Catholicism, Society of St
Pius X (SSPX)

The Society of St Pius X (SSPX) is one of the most controversial religious organisations of French
origin over the last 50 years. Rejecting many of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962–
5), it has risen from a minor irritation to Vatican sensibilities in the 1970s, to being the focus of a
concerted reconciliation project supported by the last two popes. If, therefore, its significance is
beyond question, the meaning of its French origins, their importance and their influence have been
the subject of constantly evolving, albeit largely homogeneous, critical judgement. This article aims
to bring a fresh assessment of these matters to the academy’s attention, as official reconciliation
attempts intensify under Pope Francis.
The history of the SSPX is easily summarised. It is a religious congregation of priests who live
without vows, founded in 1970 by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre (1905–91). The SSPX lost its

Corresponding author:
Brian Sudlow, School of Languages and Social Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham, B4 7ET, UK.
Email: b.sudlow@aston.ac.uk
80 French Cultural Studies 28(1)

canonical approval in 1975 and Archbishop Lefebvre was suspended from his ministry in 1976,
ultimately for contesting new agendas set by the Second Vatican Council concerning worship, rela-
tions with other religions and the position of the church towards the state. In June 1988 relations
soured further when the aging French prelate ordained four bishops against Rome’s orders.
Lefebvre, another bishop who assisted him and the four men they made into bishops were accused
of committing a ‘schismatic act’ and thereby incurred automatic excommunication (John Paul II,
1988). Lefebvre died in 1991, disputing the excommunication and unreconciled with Rome but
feted as a hero and a saint by his followers.
A brief overview of important landmarks in the current historiography reveals the wide critical
consensus about this slice of history. On the Anglophone side, Colin Roberts’ account (2000: 273)
of the Lefebvrist movement sees it ‘primarily as a religious phenomenon’. Roberts’ summary of
the SSPX’s theology is unusually thorough and competent. Nevertheless, while he admits that it
does have political dimensions, notably an association with the Front National (FN), these discrete
categories and his explanations of Lefebvre’s doctrine would leave one thinking that Lefebvre’s
anxieties are entirely conditioned by their French context, a position this article will strongly con-
test. Writing nearly ten years earlier, Van Der Krogt (1992) ranks the SSPX alongside tiny Catholic
fundamentalist groups like the weird and wacky Palmerian Catholic Church. While it is true that
one of Lefebvre’s seminary professors became entangled with the Palmerians, this kind of assess-
ment looks a little wild now, even if the importance of the Lefebvrist case would only become more
obvious after the millennium (Celier, 2007). In a different mode, Pierre Birnbaum (2006), writing
in English for once, portrays the SSPX as a religious acolyte of the Front National, apparently
reducing the character of the Lefebvrists to the actions of a few priests in the admittedly important
French district of the congregation. These soundings taken of the historiography in English
leave us with a very clear critical consensus: the SSPX are religious oddballs or simply political
extremists.
Among critics writing in French the major lines of the historiography are traced by the
Dominican theologian Yves Congar (1977), historian Emile Poulat (1985) and Catholic intellectual
and political scientist René Rémond (1989), who all tend to see the Lefebvrist movement (though
not always Lefebvre himself) as protestaire. More recently Philippe Levillain (2010) launched a
sometimes excoriating attack on the SSPX: an attack whose long list of embarrassing inaccuracies
was exposed by SSPX priest and philosopher Grégoire Celier (2010). More reliable, though less
expansive, Florian Michel (2009) sees the movement as an ‘antiromanisme ultraromain’. If space
here does not allow a richer exploration of these critics, their general tendency is summarised with
ease. Like the Anglophone historiography, French critics see the SSPX either as a backward reli-
gious movement or else the agent of unpleasant political nostalgia. In their view, therefore, it
would appear the SSPX is neither particularly Catholic nor perhaps authentically French.
The need to revisit this question arises from factors seen in the last ten years and which cause
particular anxiety in France. First, Benedict XVI’s 2007 letter Summorum Pontificum, permitting
the widespread use of the traditional Latin ceremonies of the church (in near-universal use until
1969), had the effect of decontaminating, and thereby invigorating, support for the pre-conciliar
liturgy. Furthermore, the SSPX now accounts for about 10 per cent of French ordinands to the
priesthood, and most of these are in their early to mid twenties. In a context where priestly ordina-
tions run nationally at fewer than 100 a year, and in which the median age of French priests now
stands at over 75 (Hoffner and Gaulmyn, 2010), the SSPX, in tandem with officially approved
traditional congregations – notably the Fraternity of St Peter, the Institute of Christ the King, and
the Institute of the Good Shepherd – offers a tangible injection of traditionally orientated youth into
the French clergy. In 2015 figures showed that of the 652 priests ordained in France since 2009, 19
per cent of the total (107) exclusively celebrate the traditional rites (Nardi, 2015). When these
Sudlow 81

factors are combined with the traditionalist trends towards religiously endogamous marriage, at
least in France (Rostand, 2015), and higher birth rates than other Catholics, it is likely that the
SSPX could play an increasingly important role in the future of French Catholicism. Most surpris-
ing of all, Pope Francis, in a letter announcing the Jubilee Year of Mercy 2015–16, granted permis-
sion to the faithful to approach the priests of the SSPX to hear their confessions – a permission
extended indefinitely at the conclusion of that year (Francis, 2016). Such a burgeoning of the
SSPX’s canonical legitimacy will pose new dilemmas for the church in France, not least because
of the baggage that inevitably comes with the SSPX’s most notorious label of intégriste (CICAD,
2013; Libération, 2012).
In the light of these new factors, this article aims to set out a fresh reading of the SSPX and
Lefebvre’s heritage, especially reassessing the importance of French influences in the congrega-
tion’s history. It thus raises the question of whether the importance of Lefebvre’s political leanings
and hinterland in shaping the movement has been correctly understood. It will do this by evaluating
Florian Michel’s chapter ‘L’Action française et l’intégrisme catholique: les paradoxes d’un antirom-
anisme ultraromain’ (2009) which gathers together many of the common arguments about the char-
acter of Lefebvre’s congregation. To underpin the evaluation of such published sources, I interviewed
five individuals associated with the SSPX: Father Christian Bouchacourt (current superior of the
SSPX in France); Father Grégoire Celier (SSPX priest, author and philosopher); Father Arnaud
Rostand (head of communications for the SSPX General House at Menzingen in Switzerland and
former district superior of the USA), Father X (a senior cleric in a major SSPX district who spoke
on condition of anonymity) and Ennemond, a leading traditionalist blogger and SSPX insider.
The second aim of the article is to reanalyse the SSPX’s political discourses and reconceptualise
its links with Lefebvre’s biography. This analysis will be based, first, on the official communica-
tions of Fr Régis de Cacqueray (the SSPX’s superior in France, 2000–14), and those of Bishop
Bernard Fellay (the SSPX’s general superior during the same period), and, second, on a compari-
son of Lefebvre’s activities before and after the founding of his congregation. The words and
options of these recent leaders and Lefebvre’s trajectory before and after the Second Vatican
Council are far more pertinent to our understanding of the question than the intégriste overtones of
random, passing remarks made by Lefebvre or any of his priests.
In conclusion, this article will address the implications of the SSPX’s potential reconciliation
with mainstream Catholicism under Pope Francis, whose papacy is sure to mark the Catholic
Church in as yet unanticipated ways. Paradoxically, it may take the suppleness of the liberal Pope
Francis to achieve the reconciliation with the intégristes longed for by Francis’s rather more dog-
matic predecessor Benedict.

I
The overwhelming claim of the existing historiography is that Lefebvre’s own biography and his
views on certain events in French political history offer the key to the nature of the SSPX. This of
course raises several problems, not least the matter of how well established are the causal connec-
tions between Lefebvre’s life and the character of the movement he founded, between l’homme et
l’œuvre, as it were. In recent studies Florian Michel’s essay (2009) provides the most concentrated
example of this historiographical trend that stretches from Congar (1977) and Poulat (1985) to
Rémond (1989) and Fouilloux (1997). Thus, Michel’s discussion of the SSPX’s franco-Catholi-
cism will serve as a useful test of the scholarship on the question in this first part of the article.
In his chapter Michel (2009) deploys four lines of argument to demonstrate the filiation of the
Lefebvrists to Action française, and by implication to the wider family of the French far right.
Nevertheless, at least one of his arguments – that Lefebvre and the SSPX are quasi-Gallicans
82 French Cultural Studies 28(1)

because their critique of the pope depends on the possibility of distinguishing the person of the
pontiff (sedens) from his office (sedes) – can be dismissed without further ado. That the pope can
err is a long-established principle not in contradiction with Pius IX’s bull Pastor Aeternus defining
papal infallibility. Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, the greatest theologian of the early modern period
and a canonised Doctor of the Church, wrote in De Romano pontifice (1588) about what the church
should do were the pope ever to fall into heresy. All that said, Michel puts forward three other argu-
ments about Lefebvre and the SSPX that all merit much closer scrutiny.
The first concerns the impact of Lefebvre’s training at the Séminaire français in Rome in the
mid 1920s. There, he came under the influence of the rector Fr Henri Le Floch who, following the
papal condemnation of Charles Maurras’s neo-royalist Action française, was sacked in 1927 for his
pro-Maurrassian sympathies. After his dismissal Lefebvre’s father wrote a supportive letter to Le
Floch, mentioning the great debt Marcel owed the former rector (Prévotat, 2009). Later on in 1947
at the dinner celebrating his episcopal ordination, Lefebvre toasted the name of Fr Le Floch, much
to the horror of Cardinal Liénart (Lefebvre, 1999: 61). In Michel’s logic (2009: 38), this evidence
proves an attachment that illuminates Lefebvre’s habit of dissidence: such are the children of
Action française. Is it any wonder, Michel implies, that such an admirer of Le Floch ended up as a
notorious critic of the official church? Lefebvre and his movement are thus seen as indubitably
Maurrassian.
There is a good deal of confusion here, however. Yves Congar enunciates the complexity of the
question, hinting that Lefebvre was seen as ‘un homme de droite accordé aux positions de l’ancienne
Action française’, while later describing him as ‘trop homme d’Église, maître de soi, au surplus,
amiable pour être à ce point politique et sectaire’ (1977: 13, 15). In this light Michel is frankly too
eager a counsel for the prosecution. He quotes Lefebvre’s claim, made in the 1970s, that he had
never read a line of Maurras, but then refers triumphantly to Lefebvre’s 1987 publication Ils l’ont
découronné (1987) where the archbishop quotes Maurras several times, as if the first claim did not
predate this evidence by ten years. Even then, in Ils l’ont découronné Lefebvre frequently uses
Maurras simply in relation to discussions of Thomistic or Aristotelian political theory, rather than
with regard to more distinctly Maurrassian theses based on the logic of politique d’abord. That
Maurras was part of Lefebvre’s mental universe is, therefore, unquestionable; that he is, conse-
quently, a vital influence on Lefebvre and the SSPX is much less certain.
Since this is the most substantial of Michel’s arguments, the evidence supporting it deserves
further consideration before we move on. Action française’s newspapers have long been sold out-
side some SSPX churches or gatherings, especially in Paris. Lefebvre’s devotion to the figure of
Marshal Pétain did not diminish after the fall of Vichy France. Late in life Lefebvre was found
guilty by a court of having made racist remarks after stating at a press conference his fears for the
impact of Muslim immigration in France.1 On the question of the SSPX’s association with the
wider far right, Fr Paul Aulagnier, then SSPX superior in France, celebrated a mass for Le Pen sup-
porters during the FN’s breakthrough year of 1984 (Chombart de Lauwe, 1991); it is presumably
on the basis of this apparently one-off event that Roberts (2000: 273) makes the claim that ‘annual
Front National party celebration is preceded by a Latin Mass’. Last of all, even the current SSPX
French superior Fr Christian Bouchacourt (2015) admits that a regular Requiem Mass for those
massacred in the Rue d’Isly in 1962 – a pieds-noirs cause célèbre – is held regularly at Saint-
Nicolas du Chardonnet, the Lefebvrists’ principal church in Paris. All these factors considered,
therefore, it would be unfair just to dismiss Michel’s claim of Maurrassian or far-right leanings in
the SSPX.
Nevertheless, voices from within the SSPX contest the hard-right filiation such evidence would
point to. Fr Arnaud Rostand (2015) argues that Lefebvre’s interest in figures such as Maurras or
Pétain arose because of their occasional defence of principles of Catholic social or political
Sudlow 83

doctrine. While hopelessly reductionist, Lefebvre’s remarks on Muslims in 1989 were based less
on native French racism and more on the bitter tensions he lived with in Senegal in the 1950s,
where, much as in parts of today’s Middle East, slavery and the persecution of Christian converts
were features of daily experience (Tissier de Mallerais, 2002: 255). Lastly, according to Priest X
(2015), while Bouchacourt’s predecessor, Régis de Cacqueray, got the SSPX increasingly involved
in public protests that verged on political events (Colard and Moulène, 2011), many of the SSPX
priests in France were unhappy with the prospect of ordinary lay folk being unwittingly manipu-
lated by political forces (Priest X, 2015). This last picture of internal SSPX tension over political
engagements departs from the customarily undifferentiated depictions that we find in accounts of
the movement in France. To sum up, while it is impossible to assess the proportion of Maurrassian
sympathisers among SSPX supporters whether globally or just in France, nevertheless the conclu-
sion that Lefebvre and his congregation are common or garden Maurrassians is simply caricature.
Michel’s second line of argument about the SSPX concerns the personal or familial connections
between Action française and the Lefebvrists. One notable example is Bernard Tissier de Mallerais,
the most senior of Lefebvre’s bishops and also his biographer. Charles Maurras was a witness at
the marriage of Tissier de Mallerais’s grandfather and the family stayed loyal to Action française.
Other Maurrassian figures in Lefebvre’s life, according to Michel, included far-right intellectual
Jean Madiran, a Lefebvre loyalist until 1988, and the theologian Fr Victor Berto, a close friend of
Lefebvre and a lifelong admirer of Maurras. It is worth noting that Régis de Cacqueray’s family
were likewise from Maurrassian circles (Priest X, 2015). Cacqueray, as mentioned above, encour-
aged the noisy activism of the Institut Civitas who see themselves as the heirs of Jean Ousset’s Cité
catholique, an organisation supported by Lefebvre in the 1960s (Senèze, 2012).
Once again, however, the evidence assembled here is suggestive, rather than conclusive; a case
of guilt by association. There is nothing intrinsically political in a Maurrassian like Madiran sym-
pathising with Lefebvre for what were theological motives; after the Vatican Council, dissatisfac-
tion with Catholicism’s modernisation stretched right across French public opinion, from Georges
Brassens to Jean Fourastié. Furthermore, Poulat’s claim (1985) that the larger proportion of the
Lefebvrists actually come from Maurras’s movement has little hard empirical evidence to underpin
it. That Maurrassians have flourished in the movement is clear. That they have caused considerable
unhappiness in the movement (Priest X, 2015) is less known. That Poulat’s accusation arises from
a conflation of Maurrassianism and certain forms of pre-conciliar theology is all the more likely
since, curiously, the burdens of Maurrassianism have long been skewed in the perception of many
French people. Students of Lefebvre at the Holy Ghost Fathers’ seminary of Mortain in 1946 later
‘remembered’ his reading from ‘un livre d’Action française’, whereas the book in question was
actually La Révolution française, à propos d’un centenaire by the bishop of Angers, Mgr Freppel,
written in 1889 (Tissier de Mallerais, 2002: 159).
The final argument that Michel posits to align Lefebvre and the SSPX with Action française and
the French far right concerns Lefebvre’s attachment to Rome. Lefebvre maintained an elevated
notion of romanità, another sign of his debt to the ultramontane Fr Le Floch. He wanted his own
priests to share this Roman passion, to which end he bought a house at Albano near Castel Gandolfo
where his clergy could absorb the spirit of the Eternal City (Tissier de Mallerais, 2002: 479–80).
For Michel, this factor completes a puzzle that points unerringly towards a Maurras–Lefebvre, far-
right convergence.
Prima facie, this argument has more weight to it. Lefebvre’s romanità smacks of the artificiality
of the romanità of Maurras and Action française, an unconscious construction more revealing of
those who embraced it than of the city or civilisation it denoted attachment to (Sudlow, 2011).
Nevertheless, Michel’s evidence here is again oddly chosen. He finds this romanità best epito-
mised by Victor Berto, Lefebvre’s friend and theological adviser, but Berto was dead two years
84 French Cultural Studies 28(1)

before Lefebvre’s SSPX was even founded. Moreover, if Lefebvre’s romanità was so wayward, it
would be a huge paradox not only that he was chosen as a bishop but also that he became the papal
legate for West Africa. On the other hand, were one to concede the waywardness of Lefebvre’s
romanità – for clearly something went deeply wrong in his relationship with Rome – one might
more realistically ascribe it to his long absences in Africa, far away from Rome and its intellectual
and theological climate, rather than to the purported influence of Maurras’s romanità.
To sum up, this article takes direct issue with the historiographical trend that Michel exempli-
fies. The latter’s lines of argument are suggestive rather than wholly persuasive (e.g. Lefebvre’s
training under Le Floch); its evidence is circumstantial rather than substantial (e.g. the family con-
nections with Action française); its observations seem frequently to lend enormous weight to the
incidental rather than the essential (e.g. the supposed role of Victor Berto). This is not to say that it
is simply and wholly wrong about the Lefebvrists. Its argument, however, seems to be beset by
reductionism and critical franco-centricity.
Evidence of the reductionism is found in the tendency to exaggerate the importance of Lefebvre’s
occasional brushes with Action française and its torchbearers, his affection for Pétain or the pres-
ence of hard-right voters at his chapels. Indeed, evidence of the inaccuracy of this reductionism has
been around for years. Against expectations, in the mid 1980s Henri Tincq found traditionalists just
as likely to be voting RPR or UDF (Tincq, 1986) as to be voting FN. Moreover, to say extreme
elements prove the extremism of the SSPX is just as simplistic as saying that a militant tendency
in the British Labour Party makes the party extreme, or that all Muslims sympathise with violent
jihad. Again, estimating how many far-right extremists are present among SSPX supporters is very
difficult. Quite simply, the porous borders of SSPX support, its developing relationship with the
Rome of Pope Francis and the shifting terrain of the French far right render this an exercise fraught
with many unquantifiable factors.
What compounds the reductionism noted above is that some historians seem to assume there is
no such thing as a religious motive; or that all religious motives are political agendas with theologi-
cal pretexts. In the case of someone like Lefebvre, whose intellectual sources were overwhelm-
ingly theological – a fact easily borne out by the footnotes and bibliographies of his four principal
works (1976; 1985; 1987; 1989) – this is an egregious mistake. Crucially, Lefebvre spoke far more
often about the principles of Catholic political theology, notably his preoccupation with the
Catholic state (Lefebvre, 1987), than about the circumstances of political history. In this light, his
occasional sallies into political commentary – for example, his praise in a sermon in 1976 for the
regime of General Videla in Argentina (Tissier de Mallerais, 2002: 517) – reveal more a clumsy
and unworldly naivety, blind to certain political realities, rather than politically extremist engage-
ment. In fact, if we follow Lefebvre’s logic to the bitter end, the conclusion might be otherwise:
that when he and the SSPX have proffered political commentary as an application of theological
conviction, they have often thoughtlessly inflicted on themselves a case of ‘collateral baggage’. By
collateral baggage we mean the ideological and partisan burdens resulting from political or histori-
cal dialectics that get attached to positions that are properly theological or philosophical.
Contemporary historians easily and rightly accept that not all Muslims are jihadists. They might
just as easily accept that not all Lefebvrists are Maurrassians.
The second reason for arguing that the historiography about the Lefebvrists is unsatisfactory is
because it tries to explain Lefebvre and the SSPX in the rather narrow frame of his French origins
and experiences. Michel and Levillain admit the role of other nationalities in the SSPX, but the
latter’s place in the resulting analyses remains minimal. Paradoxically, while many historians like
to theorise Lefebvre’s options from a franco-centric perspective, it is their own start and end points
that remain largely franco-centric. Proof of this franco-centricity lies in the theorisations linking
Lefebvre’s biography to the character of the SSPX that consistently omit Lefebvre’s 30 years in
Africa, where he served principally in Gabon and Senegal. If Lefebvre had died in the 1960s, he
Sudlow 85

would be remembered as a major figure in the development of West African Catholicism, a fact
that bewilderingly many historians have overlooked.
To point out the limitations of this historiography is not to sanitise the movement or the man; it
is obvious why large sections of the contemporary French church would quail at the prospect of
reconciliation with this group. Nevertheless, the critical consensus represented by Michel seems
partial and selective. To understand the politics of the SSPX we need a closer examination of what
exactly the leaders of the SSPX say. To grasp the relation of Lefebvre’s life to his congregation, we
need an account of Lefebvre’s life that does not exclude arguably its most significant portion: his
30-year ministry in Africa. It is to such analyses that this article now turns.

II
In order to counter the two historiographical weaknesses of reductionism and franco-centricity, the
second part of this article will address three questions.
First, by way of testing the real political views of the SSPX, we will consider how politico-
theological theses have been advanced recently by the SSPX leadership in France, weighing up
whether they should be seen as far-right political theorisations or else as a form of political theology.
This analysis will be based on a corpus of texts by Fr Régis de Cacqueray, French superior for the
SSPX until 2014, beginning in 2005 with a keynote interview with the far-right review Présent.
Totalling 23,987 words, these texts include his ‘Letter to Friends and Benefactors’ (2010–14), and a
range of other statements, letters and sermons published on the SSPX’s French website, La Porte
Latine. Unlike the superior general’s letters, this collection of official letters by the French superior
is not complete. The gaps are compensated for by the variety and date range of the other texts ana-
lysed. In this sense, the corpus used is taken to be a representative sample of Cacqueray’s writings,
though by no means an exhaustive one.2 The preoccupations that emerge from this analysis will then
be compared with the concerns of the international ‘Letters to Friends and Benefactors’ of the SSPX
written by Bishop Bernard Fellay, the current superior general of the congregation (15 letters from
2005 to the present, containing 34,105 words). Rooted in an understanding of thematic intertextuality
recently observed in other political discourses (Austermuehl, 2014: 38), the aim of this comparison
is to establish what specific difference the French district offers when compared to the international
body of the SSPX, at least at the level of official discourses on political matters broadly defined. The
shorter corpus of the French superior is justified on the basis that Cacqueray is perceived as having
been the most politicised holder of the office of French superior (Priest X, 2015). The empirical
basis of this analysis and juxtaposition of French and international questions should offer a way out
of reductionist interpretations and provide a more reliable account of the political contours of the
SSPX than can be found in loose associations and circumstantial allusions.
The second task of this section of the article will be to break with the franco-centric interpreta-
tion of Lefebvre’s biography to offer an analysis that establishes the importance of Lefebvre’s
African missionary experience to the way in which the SSPX has evolved. Lefebvre’s missionary
activities in Africa and in the SSPX saw him erect or develop communities that can be seen as
social learning systems. Primarily, a social learning system (Wenger, 2000) is a means by which
knowledge is acquired through the shared contexts and practices of some organisation or commu-
nity. More importantly, it is a system in which identity and unity are affirmed through a complex
convergence of practices and perspectives. The argument here will be that Lefebvre’s practices of
evangelisation (that were not of course exclusively his) contributed to a holistic formation not only
in Christian values and practices but also in a Christian Weltanschauung. What most historians of
the SSPX seem to have missed is that the ten years separating Lefebvre’s return from Africa and
his founding of the SSPX are a comparably short hiatus in nearly 60 years of continuous practical
missionary activity in Africa and across the globe. Indeed, since for five of those ten years he was
86 French Cultural Studies 28(1)

superior general of the Holy Ghost Fathers, an international missionary congregation, we could
reduce the hiatus to five years. We will better establish this hypothesis of the contiguity of
Lefebvre’s African and SSPX phases by identifying the key practices Lefebvre deployed in Africa
and then by correlating these with the development of the SSPX. This approach should provide a
response to the franco-centric nature of the analyses hitherto considered.
Finally, in the light of the answers to these two inquiries, the article will address the current state
of the SSPX under the papacy of Francis, a pope whose politico-religious options have surprised
many.

An initial examination of the corpus of erstwhile French SSPX superior Fr Régis de Cacqueray
suggests his political engagements lie between religious tokenism and illiberal protest. His 2005
interview with Présent illustrates this abundantly. Therein, for example, he denounces the suppres-
sion of Whit Monday as a jour férié, even though no Catholic is required to go to church on this
day. He likewise praises the work of the Collectif contre l’homofolie, a Belgian movement that
opposed early moves for gay marriage; in this sense Cacqueray’s anxieties preceded by a few years
the politically varied constituency that eventually coalesced in the Manif pour tous. To these
themes Cacqueray adds the cause of the pro-life movement who must aim to ‘expier le massacre
des enfants innocents’ authorised by the Loi Veil (Cacqueray, 2005). Here again, even if the lan-
guage is hard-hitting, the issue is hardly an exclusive concern of the far right.
Cacqueray is most often associated with the Civitas Institute, although this body does not figure at
all in the corpus and is notably absent from his ‘Letters to Friends and Benefactors’ (2010–14). In
fact, when he addressed the Civitas colloquium in 2014, the principles that he evoked were an agenda
for moral politics, rather than a far-right manifesto (Dickès, 2014). Civitas itself has links to far-right
movements, notably Action française, Carl Lang’s Parti de la France and Renouveau français. Yet,
when reporting on the 2015 Jeanne d’Arc March in Paris, Libération itself observed that the politick-
ing and slogans of such groups were at a strange remove from the rosaries being quietly muttered by
some following the same procession (Sauvaget, 2015). According to well-known traditionalist blog-
ger and SSPX insider Ennemond, this was one of the problems (also identified by Priest X) that began
to drive a wedge between the SSPX in France and the Civitas Institute: it was not always clear when
a religious ‘procession’ might turn into a political ‘manifestation’ (Ennemond, 2015).
If such examples reinforce the existing characterisation of the SSPX as part of the far-right family,
we must take account of the grounds on which Cacqueray advocated political activism. Behind his
various engagements stands a tangible political theology that draws on well-known, pre-conciliar
sources. Cacqueray, for example, references St Augustine’s treatise De Civitate Dei, concerning the
tensions between the City of God and the City of Man, the latter conforming to an anthropocentric
vision of human life impermeable to the divine. Crucially, this distinction of the two cities envisages
for Cacqueray a hierarchical resolution to the relations between church and the secular state, mark-
edly different from the largely cooperative and egalitarian strategy envisaged by Gaudium et Spes
(1965), the Second Vatican Council’s charter for relations between the church and the modern world.
Following Lefebvre’s lead, however, Cacqueray’s contemporary politico-theological reference
(2005) is the encyclical letter Quas Primas (1925) of Pope Pius XI concerning what political theol-
ogy used to call the social reign (or kingship) of Christ. Pius XI taught the necessity and beneficial
effect of the public marriage of Christian doctrine with legal, judicial and social structures appro-
priate for the post-monarchical age. Oddly enough, reductions of Lefebvre’s political attitudes to
those of the Maurrassian family never mention Lefebvre’s far more profound and explicit attach-
ment to Quas Primas, the work of the very pope who condemned Maurras’s movement.
The practical implications of such theological reference points are not party-political so much
as theologo-hierarchic. Cacqueray denies he is a practitioner of clericalism, but in his interview
with Présent his defence of the indirect power of the clergy over the political action of the faithful
Sudlow 87

smacks powerfully of Gambetta’s apodictic enemy. In this sense Cacqueray’s agenda cannot prop-
erly be aligned with any contemporary far-right movement or party, nor even with the tradition of
Action française, but should be seen as a throwback to the movement of Catholic political action
initiated by Popes Leo XIII (1891) and Pius X (1905) wherein the Catholic laity were enjoined to
promote Catholic values and principles in the political domain. Cacqueray himself could easily
have written the following lines which come from an encyclical of Pope Pius X. According to the
patron of the Lefebvrists, every Catholic must:

[accept and fulfil] public offices with the firm and constant resolution of promoting by every means the
social and economic welfare of the country and particularly of the people, according to the maxims of a
truly Christian civilisation, and at the same time defending the supreme interests of the Church, which are
those of religion and justice. (Pius X, 1905)

Insofar as Cacqueray has a political agenda corresponding to this political theology, it thus amounts
to the instrumentalisation of potential political partners and the actualisation of the laity’s subsidi-
arity in the temporal order, in pursuit of the realisation of values identified in the concept of the
social kingship of Christ. Ils l’ont découronné, as the title of Lefebvre’s book (1987) suggests, is
principally a lament about the deconstruction of this theological model of the social order, rather
than about French royalist nostalgia.
This subsidiarity of the laity applies also to political leaders whose conversion to the Catholic
faith would, Cacqueray believes, inexorably determine the fate of Catholics and of others around
the world. Such is Cacqueray’s argument (2010) in response to Islamist attacks on Catholic
churches in Iraq in 2010. Yet this last example also illustrates Cacqueray’s tendency to confuse the
categories of religious imperative (conversion) and political sociology (the social effects of such
conversion). Cacqueray’s use of these attacks on Iraqi Catholics is particularly incoherent, not least
because he declares them to be martyrs, while at other times bemoaning the kind of Catholicism
that they espouse (Cacqueray, 2013a).
It is also in this theological frame that Cacqueray’s views on Islam can best be inscribed. In the
corpus of his writings and addresses, he mentions ‘Islam’ only three times and ‘Musulmans’ six
times, yet only in one instance does this concern the customary far-right anxiety of the growth of
Muslim numbers in former Christian nations (Cacqueray, 2010). In all other instances Cacqueray
attacks contemporary Catholic attitudes to Islam that he considers theologically relativist or at least
irenicist. His model is St Francis of Assisi who, he argues, met with Sultan Al Malik Al Kamil only
to convert him to Christ (Cacqueray, 2013b). The term ‘croisade’ only occurs twice in Cacqueray’s
corpus: once in relation to a recruitment drive for vocations to the priesthood, and once in relation
to the campaign of prayers organised by Bishop Fellay for the sake of reunion with Rome. In nei-
ther case, therefore, does such language refer to a politically conflictual relationship to Islam itself.
All this evidence points to the conclusion that under Cacqueray (superior from 2000 to 2014)
the SSPX in France was offering not a religious version of the far right but an attempt at a soft cleri-
cal dirigisme, aimed at encouraging at worst the spread of an admixture of traditional Catholic
values and conservative authoritarianism. This dirigisme is soft because none of the ‘political’
injunctions above are enforced by any kind of ecclesiastical discipline. That the partners Cacqueray
would choose to instrumentalise are mostly members of the far-right family is yet further proof of
the SSPX’s unconscious proclivity for ‘collateral baggage’. Of course it is their own fault if the
formal theological motives for approaching the political domain in this way are simply ignored or
assumed to be window-dressing for covert extremism.
Such conclusions are corroborated when we look at the international context of the SSPX under
Bishop Fellay, the superior general of the congregation since 1994. An analysis using AntConc soft-
ware shows that religious or theological terms in Fellay’s ‘Letters to Friends and Benefactors’ (e.g.
88 French Cultural Studies 28(1)

Dieu, Église, Messe, Seigneur, Jésus, etc.) are three to four times more frequent than terms that denote
more ideological preoccupations (e.g. liberté, révolution, libéralisme). Whatever entanglements indi-
viduals might contract at ground level, the institutional SSPX remains focused on the theological.
Like those of Cacqueray, Fellay’s letters contain only a few references to France or French cur-
rent affairs. His December 2011 letter criticises the failure of Catholics to protest against blasphe-
mous theatrical performances in Paris: again, the concern is primarily a religious one, and while it
can be seen as an illiberal position, it is an engagement broadly in step with Catholic sensibilities,
rather than with any political coloration. A further reference to France in Fellay’s December 2013
letter quotes Lefebvre’s call for Catholics to work for the conversion of the nation. Here again,
there is nothing particularly unusual about a Catholic organisation dwelling on its commitment to
evangelisation, regardless of the apparent hopelessness of such a cause in the current sociological
conditions of unbelief. The last reference to France in Fellay’s corpus comes in a letter of April
2014, again quoting Lefebvre in associating the French and the Russian Revolutions. While such
an association results from a schematisation of political modernity, what drives it are religious
markers that have been well established on theological grounds. Indeed, for Fellay – following
Lefebvre once more – Pope Pius XI is a lodestar not only for his teaching on the social reign of
Christ, but also for his opposition to communism (Divini redemptoris, 1937), and his strict teach-
ing on ecumenical relations (Mortalium animos, 1928). Crucially, when the term ‘État’ is used,
both in Fellay’s letters and Cacqueray’s texts, it is in almost all circumstances associated with a
discussion of the theory of the ‘État catholique’ and the ideal of a society that publically acknowl-
edges the Catholic faith as its prime cultural value.
To sum up our answer to the first part of this section, a close examination of the official interven-
tions of the recent SSPX leadership in France, and on the international stage, at least since the year
2000, make it much harder to sustain the far-right characterisation that the existing historiography
has lent to the SSPX. Surprisingly the word ‘juif’ does not appear once in the Caqueray corpus.
Where it appears in the Fellay corpus (2009), it is either in the context of pressure on Pope Benedict
in the wake of the Williamson affair, or in relation to controversial theories about the continuity of
the Old Testament after the death of Christ (Fellay, 2011). The SSPX’s political discourses, at least
since 2005, are better explained as an attempt to realise an indirect clerical dirigisme over the laity
as a tactic to encourage the wider strategy of the social reign of Christ, rather than as a sign of its
political affiliation. The SSPX stands much more for the social kingship of Christ than it does for the
political prospects of the French far right. Once again, this is not to wholly dismiss the evidence
assembled by previous historians on the question of the SSPX: the recent notoriety of the now
expelled Bishop Richard Williamson is evidence enough that the SSPX has at least been a haven for
some extreme political views. Nevertheless, the writings of Cacqueray and Fellay show that the
loose associations historians have emphasised between the Lefebvrists and Maurrassians are now
better classed as peripheral than as essential factors in the construction of the SSPX’s identity.

Moving now to the connection between Lefebvre’s life and the character of his congregation, the
aim here is to eschew the franco-centric perspective adopted by others and replace it with a richer
account of Lefebvre’s biographical trajectory and its impact on the SSPX. As we noted above,
Lefebvre’s political sympathies or brushes with far-right movements throughout his life are
believed by many to provide the key to exposing the real character of the religious congregation he
founded. The gap in this analysis, as we have noted, is that Lefebvre spent most of his life until he
was 65 as a missionary in Africa, well away from French current affairs but wholly invested in
spreading Catholicism throughout Gabon and Senegal. Indeed, after his departure from Africa, his
memory remained keenly alive in Gabon, where a commemorative set of stamps was issued in
1996, five years after his death.
Sudlow 89

For reasons of space we can only suggest here an outline of how Lefebvre’s African experiences
illuminate his subsequent work with the SSPX across the globe. To undertake this analysis, ele-
ments of Étienne Wenger’s social learning system theory (2000) will be used to elucidate the paral-
lel strategies of belonging that Lefebvre practised in Africa as a missionary and later encouraged
within traditionalist circles. These strategies are three in number: engagement, by which Wenger
means common practices that shape the subject’s view of the world; imagination, by which Wenger
refers not to fantasy but to the kinds of imaginative communality identified by Benedict Anderson
(1983); and alignment, by which Wenger envisages the harmonisation of local practice with that of
the wider community.
Now, a broad sweep of Lefebvre’s missionary activities and his development of the SSPX reveal
that all three forms of belonging appear to be strongly characteristic of his agendas in Africa and
across the globe. The source of the data that follows concerning Lefebvre’s missionary activities
and the SSPX’s own development is Tissier de Mallerais’s biography (2002). While shot through
with ideological overtones, the biography is widely accepted as an extensive documentary work
whose exploration of pertinent primary sources was only hindered by the refusal of some Catholic
institutions to allow Tissier de Mallerais’s research team access to their records.
The first of Wenger’s modes of belonging that characterises Lefebvre’s missionary activities is
that of engagement. By engagement Wenger refers to ‘doing things together … The way in which
we engage with each other and with the world profoundly shapes our experience of who we are’
(Wenger, 2000: 227). In Africa such agendas were tangible in the many missions Lefebvre built or
managed between 1929 and 1961. Later he would tell his seminarians at Écône, ‘Regrouper les
gens autour de l’autel: tel est le but du prêtre. Aussi, en mission, la première chose à faire dans le
secteur, c’est bâtir une église’ (quoted in Tissier de Mallerais, 2002: 135). Yet for Lefebvre, schools
were also central to this process. As a newly ordained bishop in Dakar he established the college of
Sainte-Marie de Hann for boys in 1947 (there were already four schools for girls) and commis-
sioned religious congregations other than the Holy Ghost Fathers to teach in the diocese. None of
this could have been accomplished without the benefactor network that Lefebvre constructed dur-
ing a tour of France in February 1948 (Tissier de Mallerais, 2002: 179). For Lefebvre, engagement
was thus a reciprocal intercontinental practice, stretching from the construction of missions in
Africa to support of the missions by wealthier Catholics back in Europe.
Significantly, the way in which the SSPX has developed its missions reflects exactly the same
agenda, although the SSPX schools and parishes act as alternatives to the mainstream parishes and
schools which the traditionalist faithful flee. Before the Second Vatican Council the Swiss theolo-
gian Hans Urs von Balthasar had called for a razing of the bastions of Tridentine Catholicism. If
anything Lefebvre was aiming to build them up again. The SSPX priory was meant to function as
an ‘apostolat de diaspora’, from which the priests would travel out to distant missions ‘comme en
brousse’ (Tissier de Mallerais, 2002: 539). From the 1970s the SSPX supported the traditionalist
schools of Fanjeaux and Brignoles run by Dominican sisters. Many secondary and primary school
foundations followed across France and then the rest of the world. In 2015 the SSPX could count
175 priories globally, served by 590 priests, while in France the figures are proportionally impres-
sive: 150 priests scattered across 36 priories, 30 primary schools, 12 secondary schools, a univer-
sity institute and a seminary.3 If doing is believing, Lefebvre’s missionary activities, especially in
education, were clearly meant to engage the faithful in practical ways that help engender belief.
From this perspective Lefebvre’s African engagements and the SSPX’s were in strong sociological
continuity, even if the latter’s were canonically irregular.
In Wenger’s schema, imagination is a second feature of social learning systems, intensifying
the sense of belonging facilitated by engagement. Wenger’s understanding of imagination
(2000) echoes that of Benedict Anderson. In fact imagination’s contribution to belonging echoes
90 French Cultural Studies 28(1)

in the psychological sphere the work done by common practices of engagement in the material
sphere.
Now, in Lefebvre’s African missions the psychological parallel to schools and parishes was
provided by the contemplative orders. Lefebvre had a predilection for the Carmelites and the
Benedictines whose vocations were those of prayer and liturgy, prime sources of the Catholic
imagination (Greeley, 2001). When the Carmelite sisters arrived in Dakar in 1951, Lefebvre pre-
sided over the ceremony of ‘enclosure’. Later, he deferred the refurbishment of his residence to
fund the construction of a new building for them (Tissier de Mallerais: 2002: 192). In addition to
being influenced by Dom Chautard’s L’Ame de tout apostolat (1912), a widely read work that
placed the contemplative life at the heart of the church’s missionary activity, Lefebvre belonged to
that generation who absorbed St Thérèse of Lisieux’s writings on the unity of the contemplative
and missionary dimensions of the church. This active/contemplative paradox is embedded in the
Catholic view of evangelisation in the early to mid twentieth century. Crucially, two years before
Lefebvre went out to Africa, Pius XI (1927) declared St Thérèse (a nun from an enclosed Carmelite
convent in Normandy) ‘patroness of the missions’.
Lefebvre’s commitment to contemplative life – and to encouraging the Catholic imaginative
worldview that it facilitates – has been recapitulated strongly in the SSPX. The SSPX even has its
own contemplative wing of religious sisters who live a rule of dedicated silence and prayer. The
SSPX has likewise supported the foundation of other traditionalist versions of religious orders,
otherwise reformed under the aegis of the Second Vatican Council. These include Benedictine
monasteries at Bellaigue, Silver City (USA) and Le Barroux (now reconciled with Rome) and
Carmelite convents at Quiévrain in Belgium and Spokane in the USA. The traditionalist Dominican
fathers at Avrillé near Angers lost some members to Rome in 1988, while the rest have recently
aligned themselves with Bishop Richard Williamson, one of Lefebvre’s four bishops who was
expelled from the SSPX in 2012 for constant insubordination and Holocaust revisionism. This kind
of imaginative belonging under the Lefebvrist umbrella is another proof that the SSPX are not
simply the religious inflection of a political view. If refreshing the deep imaginative sources of
contemplative life represented one of Lefebvre’s keenest ambitions while in Africa, it remained so
in the development of his own traditionalist congregation after the Second Vatican Council.
The last function of social learning systems classified by Wenger (2000) is alignment. This
requires the calibration of individual actions with those of the wider group to which one belongs.
It involves, moreover, a coordinating of perspectives, interpretations and actions, all of which fuse
in the identity that any social learning system enshrines. In other words, alignment completes the
social learning to which engagement and imagination have offered the initial coordinates.
If there is one dimension of Lefebvre’s work that corresponds to this process, it is surely his
training of priests. From early on in his career, he was involved in forming the clergy, contributing
significantly to a church policy that developed the indigenous clergy of the African continent
(Tissier de Mallerais, 2002: 112, 243). By 1934 he was the rector of the seminary in Libreville with
nearly 50 students under his guidance. He was a talented director of seminarians, such that the
Holy Ghost Fathers drafted him back to France in 1945 to take over their philosophy scholasticate
at Mortain in Normandy. While Wenger disassociates authority from the process of alignment, it is
clear that the kind of alignment required by a Catholic worldview demands the constant readjust-
ment that can only be provided by authoritative guides.
In essence, the training of priests was what the SSPX was established to do when it was founded:
such were Lefebvre’s stated aims in the constitutions (Tissier de Mallerais: 2002: 437). Moreover,
Lefebvre had no ordinary ideal of the priesthood, evincing an almost Bernanosian passion for the
sacerdotal vocation. For him, it was theologically and strategically at the heart of Catholicism’s
fight with modernity and the decline of faith. In one of his last works, Itinéraire spirituel, he
describes being haunted by the desire to ‘désigner les voies de la vraie sanctification du prêtre’
Sudlow 91

(Lefebvre, 1989). Thus in the 1970s and 1980s the SSPX would open six seminaries: in France,
Switzerland, Germany, the USA, Australia and Argentina. Lefebvre placed the SSPX under the
patronage of the Pauline-inspired title of ‘Christ, the High Priest’. As an agent of alignment the
priest in Lefebvre’s eyes is clearly the alter Christus. The priest’s training in alignment with the
church is quite simply a propaedeutic of the alignment with Christ that the priest facilitates in the
faithful.
Analysing Lefebvre’s missionary practices and the development of the SSPX in the light of
Wenger’s social learning system shows the degree to which the evolution of the SSPX after the
Second Vatican Council was deeply embedded in Lefebvre’s missionary experience. So much of
what now characterises the SSPX in France and on the international stage relates directly to these
practices of engagement, imagination and alignment, much more than to the supposed importance
of Lefebvre’s occasional associations or supporters.
In this light, moreover, and far from the franco-obsessive nature of some historical judgements
on the matter, Lefebvre and his congregation could be much better defined as quasi-nationless mis-
sionaries, bent on both individual and societal evangelisation, more than on French political
engagement. If Lefebvre was of course engaged strategically and diplomatically with the French
authorities while in Africa, and in this sense might be seen as one of the ecclesiastical dignitaries
who acted wittingly or unwittingly as vectors of French cultural and political influence (White and
Daughton, 2012), this was hardly a role he continued in after his departure from the continent.
Indeed, it is surely the quasi-nationless character of the SSPX that explains why they have pros-
pered so well in so many different countries. In this context, the temptation to pin the character of
the SSPX on Lefebvre’s francité does not even come close to exposing these deeper and arguably
far more influential factors in Lefebvre’s life.
There is a clear parallel here with the franco-centric analyses of the SSPX’s political tendencies.
Just as an analysis of the SSPX’s political theology provides a clearer grasp of what they stand for
than can be gleaned from incidental political friendships, so an analysis of Lefebvre’s life that
embraces his African experience provides a better understanding of the roots of the SSPX than
vignettes taken from Lefebvre’s French origins. Of course we cannot discount the formative power
of the very real disagreements that the SSPX have had with Rome and which have not been the
focus of this study. Neither, as we have said, would it be wise just to dismiss the fact that even if
the SSPX is not the acolyte of the FN or the heir of Maurras, extremists such as Richard Williamson
have dwelt within it with some ease. Nevertheless, narrow accounts of Lefebvre’s life and its influ-
ence on the SSPX will no longer do. In the medium to long term, a better understanding of the
relationship between all these phenomena will help make sense of what looks like the coming
reconciliation of the Lefebvrists, at least if Pope Francis has anything to do with it.

Concluding remarks
In his book preceding the conclave that elected Benedict XVI, John Allen (2002), perhaps the lead-
ing English-speaking Vatican specialist, distinguished three broad tendencies within the Sacred
College of Cardinals that are reflected throughout the worldwide church. The first was the ‘border
patrol’ tendency, comprising those cardinals most attentive to the contours of Catholic dogma and
determined to preserve Catholic identity in the face of relativism and secularisation. There was also
the ‘salt of the earth’ tendency whose emphasis was less on dogmatic purity and more on the
church’s engagement with the world, especially in matters of social justice. Finally, there was the
‘reform’ tendency who were looking for greater devolution of power from Rome to the national
churches and for a revival of the spirit of Vatican II (Allen, 2002: 138–52).
Being of the ‘border patrol’ tendency has been both the SSPX’s strength and Achilles heel. It has
been their strength since, for example, their dogged defence of the traditional rites has in a sense
92 French Cultural Studies 28(1)

won out. Some have even argued that without Lefebvre’s defence of the traditional rites, there
would be no approved traditionalist movement, and no official recognition of the pre-conciliar
liturgy. It has also been their weakness, however, since it is precisely their wariness over doctrinal
purity that has prevented them signing up to a series of potential agreements with Rome, most
recently in 2012. If for once, however, the SSPX could adopt a more ‘salt of the earth’ approach to
relations within the church, they might find certain conditions most auspicious.
For example, as mentioned above, Pope Francis allowed the faithful to approach SSPX priests
for confession during the recent Year of Mercy, and this permission has now been extended
indefinitely. In practice, this move lifts a taboo on the SSPX that has kept some conservative
Catholics from openly participating in the sacraments in their churches. In France another
notable factor affecting the appeal of the SSPX is that since the Manif pour tous many of the
younger traditionalists have become less partisan about where they attend the traditional liturgy.
According to Ennemond (2015) and Priest X (2015), these young traditionalists are much readier
for a policy of coalition than the generation before them who were scarred by the rupture in
1988. A third important factor again goes back to Pope Francis and it is the fact that his noted
openness towards a latitudinarian Catholicism – exemplified in his readiness to contemplate
allowing the divorced and remarried to receive the Eucharist – has discredited him in the eyes of
even moderate Catholic conservatives more accustomed to the steady doctrinal hand of Benedict
XVI and John Paul II. An ever-larger conservative caucus within Catholicism, strengthened by a
softer traditionalism and a harder conservatism, is a growing possibility. Time will tell.
There are, nevertheless, other factors that could militate against a welcoming back to the fold of
the SSPX, especially in France. First, while recent trends in French Catholicism suggest to some
(Bastié, 2015) the growth of a ‘révolution silencieuse’ among ‘catholiques d’identité’, notably
since the Manif pour tous, there is no guarantee that this constituency will simply embrace the
intégristes after so many years of separation and with all the latter’s collateral baggage. Second, the
political decontamination of the SSPX is far from assured, even under the leadership of the rela-
tively moderate Swiss Bishop Fellay. Those priests of the SSPX who continue to hit the headlines
in France, most recently Fr Xavier Beauvais (Le Figaro, 2015), tend to be from its extremist ten-
dency. Lastly, since the rest of the church in France is unlikely to return to a celebration of the
traditional rites – in spite of the fact that 20 per cent of France’s new priests are now celebrating
those rites – it is far from certain that the traditionalists’ most emblematic stances will be integrated
into the united front that French Catholicism must offer in the face of a France drifting ever further
from its Catholic roots.
However, no papacy lasts forever. In these circumstances, the traditionalists of the SSPX might
be best advised to profit from the freedom that the latitudinarian Francis has paradoxically allowed
them. ‘Tout est grâce’, St Thérèse of Lisieux was noted for saying, even perhaps the proffered hand
of a liberal pope.

Notes
1. The exact remarks are available at: www.dailymotion.com/video/x2t3jzn.
2. Available at: http://laportelatine.org/accueil/accueil.php.
3. For further details, see the statistics on the websites of the SSPX in France, available at: http://laportela-
tine.org/district/france/france.php and http://sspx.org/en/general-statistics-about-sspx.

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Author biography
Brian Sudlow is a Lecturer of French with Translation Studies at Aston University. He is the author of Catholic
Literature and Secularisation in France and England 1880–1914 (2011) and he has written about a wide
range of twentieth-century Catholic intellectuals, from Charles Péguy and Georges Bernanos to René Girard
and Dietrich von Hildebrand. His current book project focuses on French Catholic techno-pessimists of the
1940s and 1950s. He was also the translator of the English edition of Marcel Lefebvre: The Biography (2004).