Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre on Conformity to God's Will

It is a great satisfaction for me to report that, fourteen years from the foundation of the Society, its organization, its purpose―particularly sacerdotal―of forming priests shaped in the spirit of Our Lord, in the spirit of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass―is finding its realization in the ministry, in the practice of the priestly life that you lead now, (…) which shows also your concern to keep up and to perfect your desire for holiness. This is our outstanding importance.

You see, I think that if difficulties have arisen, which we know, in the priesthood, and in the sphere of secular priests in particular, since the Council, and these difficulties have been a painful verification of something that was lacking in the formation of these priests, it is without doubt that they had lost at the same time the true notion of the priesthood in which they were clothed, and that they had not taken the means of keeping this desire to maintain their faith and their fervor…

(…)

…And then it is another great trial that we all suffer: the trial of the Church, because we finally have to recognize it, the exterior situation and in a certain way the juridical situation (at last juridical in the sense of purely literal law), well, now it is not normal, that is true. Thus we are not in a normal relation with the bishops, with the priests who are around us and who also have an apostolate―what apostolate?―but in the end, they are priests who are still in the parishes; the relations with them are obviously not the relations, which we normally should have had in the holy Church. So, no normal relations with the bishops, no normal relations with the priests who are around us, no normal relations with men religious or sisters, with a good part of the faithful, with Rome itself. It is an appalling, horrible trial, because it is abnormal. But the anomaly does not come from us. It is from them that it comes, from all those who have not followed the Tradition of the Church, who have themselves put themselves permanently outside all legality, outside the Faith, yes―even outside the Faith!

But however it may be, we are convinced of this, it is they who are wrong, who have changed course, who have broken with the Tradition of the Church, who have rushed into novelties, we are convinced of this. That is why we do not rejoin them and why we cannot work with them; we cannot collaborate with the people who depart from the spirit of the Church, from the Tradition of the Church. But that puts us in a very critical situation of breaking with that mass of Church people who are departing from the Tradition of the Church. That makes thus for an unlikely situation, assuredly unbelievable, that is at times for us a cause for sorrow, for a desire to see the Church rediscover her way, that is to say, her Tradition―at least not the Church, but the people of the Church―for a desire that the Church not be torn anymore as it is right now, and finally that her passion in some way end.

Source: Archbishop Lefebvre gave this address to the priests of the French District on December 13, 1984.