In his classic This Tremendous Lover from 1946, Dom Eugene Boylan emphasized the unbreakable connection between union with God and keeping His commandments:
“When asked by the disciples for instruction on prayer, Our Lord gave them a model prayer which, however, contains no other appeal for their sanctification than ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.’ (Matt. 6:10). And He tells them: ‘He that doth the will of My Father who is in heaven, he shall enter into the kingdom of heaven.’ (Matt. 7:21). ‘If anyone love Me, he will keep My word and My Father will love him, and We will come to him, and make Our abode with him.’ (John 14:23). The whole tenor of His doctrine insists on the close connection between true love of God expressed by doing the will of God, and the consequent entering into life and abiding union with Him. St. John had learned the lesson so well that he writes: ‘He that keepeth His word, in him in very deed the charity of God is perfected; and by this we know that we are in Him.’ (1 John 2:5). ‘He that keepeth His commandments, abideth in Him, and He in him. And in this we know that He abideth in us, by the Spirit which He hath given us.’ (1 John 3:24).” (pp. 74-75)
If we want to please God and save our souls, we must cooperate with His grace to keep His commandments. The entire purpose of the Catholic Church relates directly to helping souls to learn and follow God’s law.
In essence, Lefebvre’s “crime” was that he remained constant in helping souls follow God’s commandments while those in Rome were acting as though God’s commandments were no longer important. This controversy persists today, and with the recent announcement that the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) founded by Archbishop Lefebvre will consecrate bishops with or without papal approval, there is some natural curiosity about how such a situation developed.
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre’s September 1965 intervention read at Vatican II highlighted his understanding of God’s law in connection with conscience, human dignity, and religious liberty:
“Liberty is given to us for the spontaneous observance of divine law. Conscience is natural divine law inscribed in the heart and, after the grace of baptism, is supernatural divine law. The dignity of the human person is acquired by observing the divine law. He who despises the divine law thereby loses his dignity. . . . It is impossible to speak with veracity of liberty, of conscience, of the dignity of the human person except by reference to divine law. This observance of divine law is the criterion of human dignity. Man, the family, civil society, possess dignity in the measure in which they respect the divine law. Divine law itself indicates to us the rules for the right use of our liberty. . . . Divine law itself gives the measure of religious liberty.” (Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, I Accuse the Council!, p. 64)
Archbishop Lefebvre was concerned that the Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom, Dignitatis Humanae, would speak of these concepts in a way that would blur the distinctions the Catholic Church had always made, and thereby lead souls into believing that they could legitimately divorce their consciences from God’s law in the name of religious liberty. Moreover, he continued his intervention with a strong defense of the Catholic Church’s claims to alone possessing the fullness and perfection of divine law:
“As the Church of Christ alone possesses the fulness and perfection of the divine law, natural and supernatural; as she alone has received the mission to teach this law and the means to observe it, it is in her that Jesus Christ, who is our law, is found in reality and truth. Consequently, she alone possesses a true right to religious liberty, everywhere and always.” (I Accuse the Council!, p. 64)
Archbishop Lefebvre knew that the Council’s progressive architects had devoted their efforts to establishing the ecumenical framework we see today, which is entirely opposed to the idea God entrusted the Catholic Church — and no other church — with the mission of leading souls to do His will.
Despite heroic efforts, Archbishop Lefebvre did not succeed in blocking all of the liberal initiatives at the Council. And yet he continued his battle, remaining firm, while those following the “Spirit of Vatican II” drifted far away from the true Faith. We can gauge the immense gulf between the positions of Archbishop Lefebvre and the progressives in Rome from a 1976 article by Jean Madiran, which Michael Davies included in his Apologia Pro Marcel Lefebvre (and which appeared in The Remnant of 21 July 1976):
“That there are now two Churches, with one and the same Paul VI at the head of both, is not our doing, we are not making it up, but simply stating the way things are. Many episcopates, which declare themselves to be in communion with the Pope, and whom the Pope does not reject from his communion, are objectively outside the Catholic communion. The episcopate of Holland, in an official document, has explicitly called into doubt the virginal conception of Our Lord, but they have not been summoned by the Pope to retract or to resign. On the contrary-they have spread through-out the whole world their ‘Dutch Catechism’ which doesn’t contain the things necessary to know for salvation, and which inspires all the new catechisms. . . . Archbishop Lefebvre is not in his present situation through any fault of his own. He didn’t innovate anything, he didn’t invent anything, he didn’t overturn anything; he has simply preserved and transmitted the deposit which he received. He has kept the promises of his baptism, the doctrine of his catechism, the Mass of his ordination, the dogmas defined by Popes and Councils, the theology and the traditional ecclesiology of the Church of Rome. Just by his existence, by his very being, and without having willed it, he is thus the witness of a crisis which is not of his making, but that of an uncertain Pope at the head of two Churches at the same time.”
One need not necessarily agree with Madiran’s characterization of “two churches” to grasp the reality that Archbishop Lefebvre became so controversial primarily through a refusal to deviate from the immutable teachings of the Catholic Church rather than through any sort of rebellious activity. In essence, his “crime” was that he remained constant in helping souls follow God’s commandments while those in Rome were acting as though God’s commandments were no longer important.
Prior to the Council, the popes continuously warned that the enemies of the Church — including Freemasons, Liberals, and Modernists — sought to cause precisely the damage we see in the Church today. As the popes explained, some of these enemies were animated by an explicit desire to liberate Catholics from the burden of following God’s commandments.
This controversy persists today, and with the recent announcement that the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) founded by Archbishop Lefebvre will consecrate bishops with or without papal approval, there is some natural curiosity about how such a situation developed. In this regard, it is useful to consider that while the SSPX has not budged from the Catholic Church’s teachings defended by Archbishop Lefebvre during the Council, Rome has overseen the following evident deviations from God’s commandments:
- When Paul VI reaffirmed immutable Catholic teaching about artificial contraception with his 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae, an overwhelming number of clerics around the world refused to comply. To this day, it appears that the majority of those identifying as Catholic reject this teaching of Paul VI and the Catholic Church.
- The Church’s teaching that there is no salvation outside of the Catholic Church (absent invincible ignorance ) is so rejected today that most Catholics appear to assume that all baptized souls are on the path to heaven. Astoundingly, this does not prevent the SSPX’s opponents (who side with Rome) from insisting that the priests, religious, and laity attached to the SSPX — all of whom are baptized — are not on the path to heaven.
- Whereas Rome seemed to be at least somewhat reserved about the prevalence of homosexuality among the clergy during the time of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, Francis ushered in a period of flamboyant celebration of the LGBTQ agenda. Today, it is more common to find bishops who openly support the LGBTQ agenda than those who openly condemn the heresies plaguing the Church.
- With false ecumenism now extending to even non-Christian religions, Rome routinely honors Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, etc., and we see almost no objection to this from the clergy. As Fr. Davide Pagliarani, the SSPX Superior General, pointed out in his February 2, 2026 interview about the episcopal consecrations, Francis’s 2019 Abu Dhabi declaration blasphemously claimed that the plurality of religions had been willed as such by divine Wisdom.
- Even though the promulgation of the Novus Ordo Mass has led to countless sacrileges and blasphemies, Rome has taken no effective steps to curtail these outrages. Conversely, Rome has devoted tremendous efforts to persecuting those who truly want to worship God through the same Traditional Latin Mass that nourished the saints for hundreds of years.
Thus, we have Rome unambiguously opposing God’s commandments and encouraging all souls to do the same. This is a great mystery, a great tragedy, and it seems that we are right to think of it as the Passion of the Mystical Body of Christ. As such, those who proclaim that they have a complete explanation for the crisis are scarcely persuasive — we must humbly acknowledge that God alone knows how we have reached this point and what it will take for us to purge these errors from the Church.
Nonetheless, God has not left us completely in the dark. Prior to the Council, the popes continuously warned that the enemies of the Church — including Freemasons, Liberals, and Modernists — sought to cause precisely the damage we see in the Church today. As the popes explained, some of these enemies were animated by an explicit desire to liberate Catholics from the burden of following God’s commandments. Unless we completely disregard the principle of cause and effect, it should be obvious that Rome’s acceptance of the errors condemned by the pre-Vatican II popes has played a significant role in the proliferation of the harms against which the popes sought to protect the Church.
Beyond this, the recent news from the SSPX naturally leads Catholics to take sides, for or against the episcopal consecrations. If there were no crisis in the Church, the matter would be clearly against the SSPX. But we are experiencing a crisis so profound and unprecedented that it would have seemed almost incomprehensible to Catholics throughout the centuries. Here is a thought experiment: if all that we and our favorite saints knew about the “opposing sides” of this battle was that one side was doing all it could to preserve what the Church had always taught and the other side was overtly opposing God’s commandments, which side would we and the saints choose? The answer is obvious, right?
Put another way, for nearly two thousand years, Catholics generally had sight of the reality that we must always try to do God’s will. But with the Vatican II revolution, religious belief for most Catholics was effectively untethered from the immutable Catholic Faith.
In the minds of many Catholics, the answer changes when we add the fact that Rome appears to be against the SSPX. Then, in the eyes of the SSPX’s opponents, it no longer matters that Rome is also against God’s law, as manifested by the scandals that have become so well known: Pachamama, the Synodal Church, Amoris Laetitia, Fiducia Supplicans, the Abu Dhabi declaration, etc. But does not the persistence of these abominations suggest (rather emphatically) that we cannot reflexively rely on the ordinary need to side with Rome?
It is also reasonable to surmise that our ability to rightly judge these matters has been dramatically impaired by the passage of over sixty years of the crisis. Going back to the 1976 article from Jean Madiran, it is useful to ponder the fact that so many Catholics — including almost the entire hierarchy — are no longer scandalized by realities far worse than those that were so scandalous fifty years ago:
“If the Catholic religion, such as it was in 1958 at the death of Pius XII, contained some things optional, variable, which (let us suppose) have become anachronistic in 1976, to remain attached to them does not, all the same, constitute a crime. Anachronism is not necessarily in itself something which puts you ‘outside the Church.’ If we are going to talk about anachronisms, pure, simple, and unlimited, they are in the new catechisms from which the things necessary for salvation have been excised; they are in the vernacular Masses, accompanied by Marxist chants and erotic dances; they are in the falsification of Scripture imposed by the episcopate, such as where a (French) liturgical reading proclaims that ‘to live holily it is necessary to marry’; they are in all the other infamous things of like kind of which none, for the past ten years, has been either retracted by those guilty, or condemned by higher authority. There are indeed crimes really going on in the Church, those just mentioned, but they are considered less criminal than preserving the Catholic religion such as it was in 1958 at the death of Pius XII.”
Already in 1976, those with eyes to see could detect the complete inversion: crimes against God’s will were permitted by Rome, and the worst crime was to faithfully adhere to God’s commandments. Unfortunately, many otherwise faithful Catholics are effectively blind to these realities today, and this is both a symptom and ongoing cause of our inability to judge matters as we should.
We do not always know the designs of God’s Providence, but today it seems that He is offering us an invaluable opportunity to rationally and prayerfully take stock of what has gone on for over sixty years.
Put another way, for nearly two thousand years, Catholics generally had sight of the reality that we must always try to do God’s will. But with the Vatican II revolution, religious belief for most Catholics was effectively untethered from the immutable Catholic Faith. Like a sailor who loses sight of a fixed point of reference, Catholics who lose sight of the immutable Faith have far greater difficulty in assessing how far off course they have gone.
Bishop Joseph Strickland’s February 3rd reflection on the SSPX news put all of this in perspective, and offers a reliable point of reference for those who might have lost sight of the importance of immutable truth:
“Unity in the Church is not preserved by ambiguity. Fidelity is not a threat. Tradition is not an enemy. When those who openly contradict the Church’s teaching are tolerated, while those who seek continuity are treated as suspect, something has been inverted.”
As a true shepherd who was once skeptical of the SSPX, these words are spoken for the good of the Mystical Body of Christ and with great love for Our Lord. We do not always know the designs of God’s Providence, but today it seems that He is offering us an invaluable opportunity to rationally and prayerfully take stock of what has gone on for over sixty years. Unless we have made our religion into an unholy superstition, it should be clear that at this time in which those in Rome are actively leading souls to despise God’s commandments the Catholic Church needs the SSPX to remain firm in doing all it can to help souls follow His will. Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us!
