Archbishop Lefebvre's Religion
Hammond, Margo
Olds would do as well. If the engines are the same, they'll all do as well---or as poorly, as the case may be. Was it Hegel or Engels who said, History always repeats itself, but as farce? I...
...This is the accusation that the French archbishop Monsignor Marcel Lefebvre, suspended a divinis a year ago, has leveled time and again against Pope John XXIII, Paul VI and the others involved in the "well-organized plot of Vatican II...
...Trying to call back the ghosts of the past, the lefebvrians and the "black nobility" are at best a source of folklore and at worst a pole of attraction for reactionary movements across Europe and South America...
...Addressing a crowd of 2000, including many of Rome's noblemen and noblewomen, Lefebvre warned of the dangers of the ecumenical movement, of religious liberty and of Communism...
...In the early stages of the Geneva Conference, the Head of the U.S...
...MARGO HAMMOND ( Margo Hammond, a previous contributor who writes regularly Jor the Christian Science Monitor and other publications, is an American ]reelance writer based in Rome...
...Is cooperation between the two sides possible or is the future to be marked by confrontation...
...African countries are especially keen on the diversification account...
...The world is no longer the world of the Papal noble guard dressed in white trousers, tall boots, embroidered red tunics with gold buttons and sashes and plumed helmets...
...The 77 also found encouragement in the EEC position...
...Lefebvre, however, also has a political attraction...
...Lefebvre, of course, is right...
...The third world is angry and frustrated about the lack of progress at the Conference which was held as a followup to last year's UH Trade and Development Conference in Nairobi...
...8 July 1977:422 "The more one sees the roots from which Lefebvre's movement springs, the more one has--from an historical point of view---a feeling of distance and detachment from his revolt, as from a thing already dead," said Pietro Scoppola, a progressive Catholic historian, in a recent article in Corriere della Sera...
...Stephen Bosworth, said that the Carter administration accepted the principle of a common fund...
...The nations of the third world have the idea of a common fund as something which is set up quickly, in advance of negotiations on individual commodities...
...Lefebvre's speech, uttered in the Holy City itself, was certainly an open challenge to the Pope's authority...
...UNCTAD 4 ended with a resolution which said "steps will be taken towards the negotiation of a common fund...
...He deplored the fact that the Church was no longer defined as an infallible, hierarchical, perfect society, but rather linked to such words as communion, people and assembly...
...It is not legitimate," he said, "to obey those who are working to diminish the faith or to make it disappear...
...I can't seem to pin it down...
...Lefebvre and the princes and princesses, marquis and marquises, counts and countesses, barons and boronesses who gather around him belong to a world that no longer exists...
...that Spain was considering the establishment of freedom of religion...
...For the Roman aristocracy who accepted the invitation of the Princess Pallavicini despite the condemnation of the initiative by the vicar of Rome, Ugo Cardinal Poletti, Lefebvre offers an ideological banner under which they can gather...
...Peter's itself...
...He in effect invited his followers to disobey the Pope who was putting into practice the principles of Vatican II...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 COMMON FUND RICH WORLD, POOR WORLD The recent failure of the Geneva Common Fund for Commodities Conference means that rich world-poor relations embark on a tense and uncertain stage...
...However the West did agree to consider a fund--its member-nations too have an interest in steadier commodity prices...
...FRANK GETLEIN 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 IN THE SHADOW OF ST...
...The common fund is seen by the third world as a step on the way to an international economic order which is more tuned in to its needs...
...They have changed his refigion, a religion of rigid tradition that refuses to accept the changing world...
...delegation, Mr...
...But that lift from that Ford in our past also harked back to and reversed an ancient GM doctrine: now, at last, what was good enough for the country was good enough for General Motors...
...These are principles that do not belong to the Catholic tradition, Lefebvre insisted, but to liberalism which aims at destroying the true religion and morality...
...Doubled, in fact...
...The changes introduced by the Council," Lefebvre concluded, "are contrary to the tradition and the teachings of the Church...
...They maintain that lack of finance is the chief factor which has so far largely hindered commodity agreements from getting off the ground...
...Its members see the fund as the acid test of whether rich countries are prepared to cooperate with them in the building of that order...
...EEC Heads of Government had agreed at their March summit meeting that "there should be a fund...
...This time, however, he dared to repeat it in the shadow of St...
...and that the last two Popes have spoken of the Declaration of the Rights of Man as a conquest for humanity...
...After GM pulled itself together following the dread discovery, the grand old supercop announced that in the future all General Motors cars would have the basic GM engine, heretofore known as the Chevy, and that would be that...
...the other to finance measures to help them diversify their economies away from dependence on cash crops and minerals...
...The West does not like the idea of such a vast common fund because it believes it might lead to an unacceptable degree of intervention in world trade market forces...
...He attacked the Archbishop of Milan, Giovanni Cardinal Colombo, for saying that a state should not propagate any particular ideology and attacked the Pope for receiving Communist leaders in the Vatican and adhering to the Helsinki conference which, according to the French bishop, is a capitulation and a pact with the enemy...
...But as the Geneva Conference dragged on, it became clear that a common fund means many things-and it can mean virtually nothing...
...The issue now is whether a sterile clash between rich and poor countries can be avoided...
...Affirming that Communism was the "most dreadful danger of our time," Lefebvre insisted that the present Pope was persecuting anti-Communist Catholics and "encouraged and nominated bishops that were favorable to Communism," citing such names as Helder Camara of Brazil, Mendez Arceo of Mexico, William Wakefield Baum of the United States, Silva Enriquez of Chile as well as Franqois Marty of France (who, Lefebvre claims, sang the Internationale with the secretary general of the French Communist Party Georges Marchais) and Johannes Willebrands of Holland...
...This sense of detachment is more profound for the believer: the tradition which Lefebvre claims to represent is only a segment of the past, a moment which he isolates from the life of the Church of our time and of the great experience of the Council...
...They seek two accounts to this fund, one to finance buffer stocks of up to 18 raw commodities and so stabilize prices...
...For the Catholic integralists, Lefebvre represents the last attempt to turn back the clock to the time of the Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent, a last-minute attempt to revive the traditions of the Sapini~re, a clandestine organization working against Church reform that was condemned by the Pope at the beginning of this century...
...Excluded as a privileged class from the Vatican in 1964 when Paul VI dissolved the Papal noble guard, the Roman nobility--once called the "black nobility" because of their support of the Pope against the monarchy and now because of their open sympathies for the neo-Fascists--also dream of turning back the clock, back to the time of the ancien rdgime, back to the traditions of the Action Franqaise...
...Anyway, the old dialectical Laugh-In sequel turned up here, too...
...This was seen by the 77 as an encouraging step forward from the U.S...
...position at UNCTAD 4 when the Ford administration had seemed implacably opposed to the fund idea...
...The Conference ended on a note of bitterness with no agreement on a final statement and with no date fixed for a future meeting...
...Invited by the Princess Elvina PaUavicini, Lefebvre spoke June 6 in Rome in the palace of the princess in via XXIV Maggio under the same canopy where Pope Clement IX, a relative of the PaUavicini family from the Rospigliosi branch, had spoken over 300 years before...
...No steps, no negotiation," characterized the Geneva Conference...
...PETER'S ARCHBISHOP LEFEB VRE'S RELIGION "They have changed our religion...
...But the West takes the view--sign the commodity agreements first --and then talk about finCommonweal: 423...
...They are at any rate living symbols of the drama--and the evolution =that both the Church and the civil society have experienced in the last centuries...
...Western countries cannot accept that the fund should be the "central source" of finance...
...The appearance of Lefebvre in the salon of the Rospigliosi Palace, only a few yards away from the Quirinale (the Italian Presidential Palace) in the heart of the Eternal City, has both religious and political repercussions...
...The Group of 77 want a $6000 million common fund to act as the "central source" of commodity finance...
...Both the West and the Group of 77 (now 114) developing countries stuck rigidly to their point of view and refused to move...
...In the first farcical repetition, this goes back to the immediate past and Gerald Ford's (!) plan to stop the FBI from committing burglary by declaring that when the FBI burglarized an American home, it wouldn't be burglary but something else, protective entry, no doubt, like an awning over the doorway...
...That is the question, and it was made even more urgent by the subsequent failure of the Paris Conference on International Economic Cooperation at which Secretary of State Cyrus Vance represented the United States...
Vol. 104 • July 1977 • No. 14
