Marcel Lefebvre - Society of Saint Pius X

Society of Saint Pius X

After retiring from the post of Superior General of the Holy Ghost Fathers, Lefebvre was approached by traditionalists from the French Seminary in Rome who had been refused tonsure, the rite by which, until 1973, a seminarian became a cleric. They asked for a conservative seminary to complete their studies. After directing them to the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, Lefebvre was urged to teach these seminarians personally. In 1969, he received permission from the local bishop to establish a seminary in Fribourg which opened with nine students, moving to Écône, Switzerland in 1971.

Lefebvre proposed to his seminarians the establishment of a society of priests without vows. In November 1970, Bishop François Charrière of Fribourg established, on a provisional (ad experimentum) basis for six years, the International Priestly Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) as a "pious union".

The French bishops, whose theological outlook was quite different from Lefebvre's, treated the Écône seminary with suspicion and referred to it as "the Wildcat Seminary". They indicated that they would incardinate none of the seminarians.

In November 1974, two Belgian priests carried out a rigorous inspection on the instructions of a commission of cardinals, producing, it was said, a favourable report. However, while at Écône, they expressed a number of theological opinions, such as that ordination of married men will soon be a normal thing, that truth changed with the times, and the traditional conception of the Resurrection of Our Lord were open to discussion, to which the seminarians and staff objected to as scandalous. In what he later described as a mood of "doubtlessly excessive indignation", the Archbishop wrote a "Declaration" in which he strongly attacked the modernist and liberal trends that he saw as apparent in the reforms being undertaken within the Church at that time.