Chapter 2. They are changing our religion.

Firstly, I must dispel a misunderstanding so as not to have to return to it.

I am not the head of a movement, even less the head of a particular church.

I am not, as they never stop writing, the leader of the

traditionalists. They have come to describe certain persons as Lefevreous, as though it were a case

of a party or a school. This is an abuse of language.

I have no personal doctrine in the matter of religion.

All my life I have held to what I was taught at the French seminary in Rome,

namely Catholic doctrine according to the interpretation given it by the teaching authority of the church from century to century since the death of the last

apostle which marked the end of revelation. There should be nothing in that to feed the appetite

for sensationalist journalists and through them current public opinion. Yet, on the 29th of August, 1976, the whole of France was excited on

hearing that I was going to say mass at Lille. What was so extraordinary about a bishop celebrating

the holy sacrifice? I had to preach before a panoply of microphones, and each of my remarks was

greeted as if it were a striking declaration. Yet what did I say beyond what any other bishop

could have said? There lies the key to the enigma. The other bishops had been for a number of years no longer saying the same things.

How often, for example, have you heard them speaking of the social reign of our Lord Jesus Christ?

My personal experience never ceases to amaze me.

These bishops, for the most part, were fellow students with me in Rome, trained in the very

same manner.

And then, all of a sudden, I found myself alone.

But I have invented nothing new.

I was simply carrying on.

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