Exactly 21
years ago, Archbishop Marcel-François Lefebvre died in Martigny, Switzerland, a few miles away from the International Seminary of Saint Pius X, in Écône (Riddes), to which he had dedicated the last decades of his life and in which he would be buried. Regardless of one's opinion of some events of his life, or of some of his decisions, or of some of his stronger words, it would be unjust not to acknowledge that without him the struggle for the preservation of much of what we cherish would probably have been lost. The fact that 21 years after his death "the question of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre" is still discussed in the highest halls of the Church, that his name is still mentioned among the words included in some of the gravest decisions of the Supreme Authority of the Church (cf.
Letter to Bishops regarding the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum), and that the universal Church experiences in our age the great impact of the publication and implementation, not without hurdles, of the
motu proprio Summorum Pontificum and its instruction
Universae Ecclesiae show that the global movement for the advancement of the Traditional Roman Rite is inseparably linked to the life of this passionate man.
