Marcel Lefebvre - Death

Death

Archbishop Lefebvre died in 1991 at the age of 85 from cancer in Martigny, Switzerland and, eight days later, was buried in the crypt at the society's international seminary in Écône, Switzerland. Archbishop Edoardo Rovida, Apostolic Nuncio to Switzerland, and Bishop Henri Schwery of Sion, the local diocese, came and prayed at the body of the dead prelate. Later that year, on 18 September 1991, Cardinal Silvio Oddi, who had been Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy from 1979 to 1986, visited Lefebvre's tomb, knelt down at it, prayed, afterwards saying aloud: "Merci, Monseigneur". Thereafter Cardinal Oddi said he held Archbishop Lefebvre to have been "a holy man" and suggested that the Society of St Pius X could be granted a personal prelature by the Holy See like that of Opus Dei. In January 1992, the then-superior general of the Society, Fr. Franz Schmidberger, rejected this hypothetical offer by an unpublished private letter to the Holy See. The letter's content was described by bishop Richard Williamson as basically saying that, "as long as Rome remains Conciliar, a fruitful and open collaboration between the two does not seem possible."