Political Controversies
Prominent members of the SSPX, including Lefebvre himself, have expressed approval or support for a restoration of an absolutist French monarchy, the Vichy government (1940–1944), and the party of Jean-Marie le Pen. On the basis of statements made by Bishop Richard Williamson, the Anti-Defamation League has accused the Society of being "mired in anti-Semitism". It was in an SSPX priory, where he had been granted asylum as "an act of charity to a homeless man", that French Nazi collaborator and war criminal Paul Touvier was arrested, and a priest of the Society publicly offered Requiem Mass for him on his death in 1996.
Read more about this topic: Society Of St. Pius X
Famous quotes containing the word political:
“In bourgeois society, the French and the industrial revolution transformed the authorization of political space. The political revolution put an end to the formalized hierarchy of the ancien regimé.... Concurrently, the industrial revolution subverted the social hierarchy upon which the old political space was based. It transformed the experience of society from one of vertical hierarchy to one of horizontal class stratification.”
—Donald M. Lowe, U.S. historian, educator. History of Bourgeois Perception, ch. 4, University of Chicago Press (1982)