Did Lefebvre have supplied jurisdiction? NO

 From CCR XXTH century

“ Question: Monsignor, the young priests coming out of your seminary at the present time are not able to confer the sacraments in a valid manner. For example, if a priest were to officiate at the sacrament of marriage, would this sacrament be valid ?

 

“ Archbishop Lefebvre: In this matter of the jurisdiction of priests, we base ourselves on the extraordinary cases mentioned by canon law. Canon law has provided for extraordinary circumstances for all the sacraments, for the jurisdiction of confession, for marriages. And since, in my opinion, – and clearly this a judgement which is of course somewhat personal, if you like – we find ourselves in extraordinary circumstances, circumstances which are rarely seen in the Church, well then, I think that these young priests are in the position of being able to make use of those faculties allowed for by canon law in extraordinary circumstances.

 

Take confession for example : if there is a road accident, even if you have no jurisdiction in the diocese, you can approach the dying and give him the sacraments. When a ship is sinking, you can also give the sacraments. You have jurisdiction; the law gives you jurisdiction at that moment. Say a fire breaks out or war is declared, you have no time to ask the bishop for jurisdiction; you already have jurisdiction. They are extraordinary circumstances. I think that we are in extraordinary circumstances, not physical but moral, such that our young priests have the right to make use of these extraordinary faculties. ”96

How pitiful ! “ Such a demonstration is, alas, quite worthless ”, Fr. de Nantes will write. ” And the theologian of the Catholic Counter-Reformation will prove this easily. Let us read what he says : “ The Code of Canon Law recognises objective extraordinary circumstances, that is to say, circumstances which are specified by law, incontestable, and necessarily recognised by episcopal and Roman authority. The Code provides for these circumstances precisely in order to prohibit any subjective interpretation and to put a stop to private judgements all too eager to find ways of avoiding ordinary episcopal jurisdiction.

“ Thus, it is recognised that any priest, even an irregular one, has the right to confer the sacraments of salvation on a person who is in positive and proximate danger of death. But in order for a priest to organise a regular Catholic ministry outside the knowledge and power of the local Ordinary, three conditions are necessary : 1) that he himself be a bishop, 2) that the local hierarchy has been destroyed, annihilated or impeded, and 3) that the moral consent of the Sovereign Pontiff is positively certain (cf. Dom Gréa, L'Église et sa divine constitution, p. 235-238).

“ Archbishop Lefebvre personally fulfils the first of these conditions. Not the others. To say that the second is realised, is to judge without appeal – and I employ the term in its strict juridical acceptation – that nowadays there is no longer any episcopal Body on earth, or at the very least that there is no longer any bishop in this country… As for the third condition, to maintain this, one would have to make out that the Pope is drugged, that he has a double, that he is confined to his room, or else roundly state that there is no longer a true Pope...

“ Consequently... Either there still exists on earth a visible and hierarchical Church, one that is Catholic, apostolic and Roman, whose divine order is established and maintained according to the rules of canon law in force. In this case, Archbishop Lefebvre’s attempted justification has no value; confessions and marriages conferred without the ordinary powers of jurisdiction and, in the case of marriage, without the parish priest’s personal delegation, are indisputably null and void in law.

“ Or else, there is no longer a Pope in Rome; there are no more bishops in our dioceses or elsewhere, other than Archbishop Lefebvre alone. But in that case, why bother to call on canon law, using a shaky argument ? If today he is the sole Successor of the Apostles, then it his authority alone that subsists as the fount of law in the eyes of men and of God. Let him concede powers throughout the world to whom he will, where he wills and as he wills ! But that is not what lies behind his thinking, as can be seen by the timid and hesitant justification we have just read. But it must be the thinking of a number of priests and faithful who follow him and urge him on.

“ It is extremely grave : for souls who receive absolutions that are invalid and who become accustomed to this protestant subjectivism; for families that accept marriages which no ecclesiastical court, knowing of the facts, would hesitate to declare null and void; for the undivided subsistence of Holy Church, broken by this reasoning and this behaviour, which can only be called schismatic, because that is what it is and, sad to say, is so even more formally than the latent schism of those who camp within the Church, taking advantage of the complicity and inertia of those who occupy the highest positions, the better to destroy her. ”97