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 Franz Schmidberger, rejected this hypothetical offer by an unpublished private letter to the Holy See.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."
Read more about this topic: Marcel Lefebvre
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“It is better to sit down than to stand, it is better to lie down than to sit, but death is the best of all.”
—Indian proverb, quoted in Sébastien-roch Nicolas de Chamfort, Maxims and Considerations, vol. 1, no. 155 (1796, trans. 1926)
“The only way out is the way through, just as you cannot escape from death except by dying. Being unable to write, you must examine in writing this being unable, which becomes for the present—henceforth?—the subject to which you are condemned.”
—Howard Nemerov (1920–1991)
“To die, to sleep—
No more, and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to—’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep.
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil
Must give us pause.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)