Spiritual Itinerary
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre

You will read here the complementary notes which are to be found at the end of Archbishop Lefebvre’s last work, which is also his spiritual testament. This text casts a timeless and vivid light on the present crisis.

1. The absolute necessity of the Catholic religion for salvation and sanctity

The seeking after Christian sanctity in Jesus Christ and by Jesus Christ is not optional. "Elegit nos, in Ipso ante mundi constitutionern, ut essemus sancti ‑ He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy" (Eph 1:4).

No human creature can escape this absolute necessity in order to arrive at salvation. All of Scripture demonstrates this. And Our Lord, by Whom all things were made, instituted the Church, the State and the family to contribute, each according to his nature, to the sanctification of souls by Jesus Christ.

The liberty that God gives us is essentially directed as its final end towards Truth and Goodness by the law of Charity. We are not free to love or to not love God, the Holy Trinity and our neighbor. Liberty is correlative to the law of love and of charity.

God took care to give us His laws by His Word. These are divine laws entirely inspired by the Spirit of Charity, the Holy Ghost. The laws of the Church, of the State, and of the family, should be conformed to these divine laws and thus come to the aid of souls tempted by error and sin. Thus they help them to convert to the only Physician: Jesus Christ, Truth and Sanctity.

(To unbind souls from obedience to the laws of civil society, which are but the application of divine laws, and make of this liberation a natural right, is a crime of rebellion vis-a-vis God, vis-a-vis Our Lord. The laicization of Catholic states and their "liberation" from all religion is the crime of apostasy, which cries out for vengeance when one calculates the consequences for the loss of souls. Freedom of worship, and the ecumenism which encourages it, are a "delirium" as Pope. Gregory XVI said in his encyclical Mirari vos.)

2. The objectivity of our spiritual nature and of sanctify. Dangers of conciliar subjectivism.

 Our spirituality is objective in this sense that everything which sanctifies us comes from God by Our Lord. "Without Me," says Our Lord, "you can do nothing" (Jn 15:5). The whole of Chapter 15 in St. John's Gospel is an affirmation of this reality. Our mind is sanctified in the truth which is taught it, which does not come from it. Our will is sanctified in the law and the grace of the Lord, which do not come from it.

This dependence vis-a-vis divine reality, which is not us, is essential in maintaining the soul profoundly anchored in the virtue of humility, in adoration, in thanksgiving and in an always stronger desire to fill and nourish itself at the sources of sanctity, especially those of the Heart of Jesus. [1]

(It is difficult to measure the spiritual damage accomplished by the subjectivist tendency of the Council and by its personalism. It strives, wrongly, to make abstraction from the purpose of human nature and from the ordering of man's liberty to his final end. Thus is explained the exaltation of man, of human rights, of human liberty, especially liberty of conscience. This amounts to a pagan humanism which ruins Catholic spirituality and the sacerdotal and religious spirit.)

How much must we meditate on these realities to remain Catholic and keep the principles and the sources of true sanctity! Blessed are the esurientes ‑ those who hunger ‑ and the pauperes spiritu ‑ the poor in spirit ‑ of the Magnificat and the Beatitudes. Woe to the divites ‑ the rich ‑ , who are filled with themselves and have no need of either God or of Jesus Christ.

Coming from a world where subjectivism rules everywhere, which enshrines the individual conscience, liberty of conscience and the autonomy of the person, as foundations of social relations, justifying all errors and all vices, young seminarians will have at heart to rediscover the path of truth and virtue in the objectivity of our faculties, and to discover anew in Our Lord Truth and Sanctity.

3. The providential choice of Rome as the Seat of Peter, and the blessings of this choice for the growth of the Mystical Body of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

I believe I must add some words to draw the attention of our priests and our seminarians to the indisputable fact of the Roman influences on our spirituality, on our liturgy, and even on our theology.

One cannot deny that this is a providential fact. God, Who leads all things, has in His infinite wisdom prepared Rome to become the Seat of Peter and center for the radiation of the Gospel. Hence the adage: Unde Christo e Romano.

Dom Gueranger, in his Histoire de sainte Cecile, recounts the great part which members of great Roman families played in the foundation of the Church, giving their goods and their blood for the victory and the reign of Jesus Christ. Our Roman liturgy is the faithful witness of this.

"Romanitas" – Romanism ‑ is not a vain word. The Latin language is an important example. It has brought the expression of the Faith and of Catholic worship to the ends of the world. And the converted people were proud to sing their Faith in this language, a real symbol of the unity of the Catholic Faith.

Schisms and heresies are often begun by a rupture with Romanitas, a rupture with the Roman liturgy, with Latin, with the theology of the Latin and Roman Fathers and theologians.

It is this force of the Catholic Faith rooted in Romanitas that Freemasonry wished to eliminate by occupying the pontifical States and enclosing Catholic Rome in Vatican City. This occupation of Rome by the Masons permitted infiltration of the Church by Modernism and the destruc- tion of Catholic Rome by Modernist clergy and Popes who hasten to destroy every vestige of "Romanitas": the Latin language, the Roman liturgy. The Slavic Pope is the most determined to change the little which was kept by the Lateran Treaty and the Concordat. Rome is no longer a sacred city. He encourages the establishing of false religions in Rome itself, accomplishing there scandalous ecumenical meetings. He everywhere pushes for the inculturation in the liturgy, destroying the last vestiges of the Roman liturgy. He has modified in practice the status of the Vatican State. He has renounced coronation, thus refusing to be a Head of State. This relentlessness against "Romanitas" is an infallible sign of rupture with the Catholic Faith that he no longer defends.

The Roman pontifical universities have become chairs of Modernist pestilence. The coeducation of the Gregorian is a perpetual scandal.

All must be restored in Christo Domino ‑ in Christ the Lord, in Rome as elsewhere.

Let us love to see how the ways of Divine Providence and Wisdom pass by Rome. We will conclude that one cannot be Catholic without being Roman. This applies also to Catholics who have neither the Latin language nor the Roman liturgy. If they remain Catholic, it is because they remain Roman like the Maronites, for example, by the ties to the Catholic and Roman French culture which formed them.

It is, moreover, an error to speak of Roman culture as Western. The converts from Judaism brought with them from the Orient all that was Christian, all that which in the Old Testament was preparation and could be a component of Christianity, all that which Our Lord had assumed and that the Holy Ghost had inspired the Apostles to adopt. How many times do the epistles of St. Paul teach us on this subject!

God willed that Christianity, cast in a certain way in the Roman mold, receive from it a vigorous and exceptional expansion. All is grace in the divine plan and Our Divine Savior disposes all as the Romans are said to act, that is, "cum consilio et patientia or suaviter et fortiter ‑ with counsel and patience, sweetly and mightily" (Wis 8:1).

Ours is the duty to guard this Roman Tradition desired by Our Lord, as He wished us to have Mary as our Mother. "

1. Father Garrigoue-Lagrange, in his introduction to De Christo Salvatore, has some very profound things to say concerning the objectivity of spirituality, which are very useful in our times of subjectivism.