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<http://click.icptrack.com/icp/relay.php?r=38542893&msgid=550586&act=C8LS&c=305005&admin=0&destination=http%3A%2F%2Finsidethevatican.com>
The Rest of the Story -- Lefebvre's Father
The father of the conservative French Archbishop
Marcel Lefebvre died in 1944 in a Nazi concentration camp
By Robert Moynihan
February 8, 2009 -- The worldwide uproar
over the opinions of Bishop Richard Williamson
about the Shoah, following on the decision of
Pope Benedict XVI, announced in Rome on January
24, to lift the 20-year-old excommunication of
Williamson and three other bishops consecrated
illicity in 1988 by French Archbishop Marcel
Lefebvre, has been loud, emotional -- and very
confusing. Reasoned discourse has been ill-served.
[]
(Photo: British-born Bishop Richard Williamson is
pictured at an airport in Frankfurt, Germany, in
this Feb. 28, 2007, file photo. Pope Benedict XVI
has lifted the excommunication of Bishop
Williamson and three other bishops of the Society
of St. Pius X. In a Swedish television interview
conducted in November and aired January 21,
Bishop Williamson provoked Jewish and Catholic
protests with assertions that the Holocaust has
been exaggerated and that the Nazis did not use
gas chambers to kill their prisoners -- CNS photo/Reuters)
As the attacks against Pope Benedict XVI
began to include suggestions that he resign his
papacy because of this decision regarding
Williamson, it almost seemed as if the fabric of
goodwill and trust, carefully woven between
Christians and Jews through numerous meetings and
common actions over several decades, was unraveling.
There are many open questions in this
affair, and in our upcoming February issue of
Inside the Vatican, which will soon go to press,
we will have a comprehensive report on the
controversy, from the Pope's reasons for lifting
the excommunications, to the views of Bishop
Williamson on the Holocaust, to the concerns
expressed by representatives of the Jewish
community (to obtain a copy of this issue, click
on the link at the bottom of this email.)
But in this brief newsflash, we thought it
right to make a point which has not received
sufficient attention in the midst of the tumult.
That point is that the man at the remote
origin of this entire controversy, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre,
[]
who in 1988 consecrated Williamson a bishop,
along with the three others, in order to ensure
the continuation of his Pius X Society after his
death (he died in 1991), experienced "in his own
flesh," as it were, the same cruelty millions of
Jews experienced prior to and during the Second
World War: his own father died in a Nazi concentration camp.
(Photo: Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre presides
at the 1988 ordinations of Bishops Richard
Williamson, Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, Bernard
Fellay and Alphonso de Galarreta in Econe,
Switzerland. Archbishop Lefebvre and the four new
bishops were excommunicated after participating
in the ordination that had been forbidden by Pope
John Paul II. Archbishop Lefebvre, who died in
1991, founded the Society of St. Pius X -- CNS photo/Catholic Press Photo)
Marcel Lefebvre was born in Tourcoing, Nord
(département), the second son and third child of
factory-owner René Lefebvre. René Lefebvre died
in 1944 in the Nazi concentration camp at
Sonnenburg (in East Brandenburg), where he had
been imprisoned by the Gestapo because of his
work for the French Resistance and British
Intelligence. (Reference:
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Marcel_Lefebvre#encyclopedia)
At the time of the First World War
(1914-1918), Mr. Lefebvre had served his country
by operating as a spy. Decades later, when the
Nazis occupied France, he resumed this work,
risking his life an incalculable number of times
helping soldiers and escaped prisoners return to
un-occupied France and London. (Reference:
http://leflochreport.com/site/?Rene-Lefebvre-and-the-Holocaust
RENE LEFEBVRE AND THE HOLOCAUST; see also the
Russian web site: http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enwiki/47825)
"Not very far from Cracow, in the Polish
town of S?onsk, near the German border, there
(was) a small concentration camp and prison. In
the Sonnenburg prison, a brave Catholic Frenchman
died after years of torture and suffering in the
hands of the Nazis. His name was René Lefebvre
(photo below, with his wife and children), loving
father of the founder of the Priestly Fraternity
of Saint Pius X (FSSPX/SSPX). (Reference:
http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2006/05/wit-alert.html)
[]
And there is perhaps even more information about Lefebvre's father.
A recent Reuters new story on Williamson
(Go to:
http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2009/02/06/holocaust-denying-bishop-holed-up-in-the-pampas/#comments)
contains, among other comments sent in and posted
by readers from around the world, a statement by
Dr. Chaim Lehmann (his comment is the 6th comment
down from the top) who says he is a Jewish
citizen in France. Lehmann describes how
Archbishop Lefebvre's father, René, helped rescue
his (Chaim's) Jewish relatives, and how René
himself died in a concentration camp. Here is the
passage (the text is left exactly as it was
posted on the intenet, grammatical errors included):
February 6th, 2009
1:49 pm GMT
Why all the insults against the Society of St.
Pius X, a monarchist but very tolerant group whom
my brothers as a Rabbi in Lyon highly respects.
They are open and not politically correct
nice-talkers, but their founder, Archbishop
Marcel Lefebvre, lost his own very pious Catholic
father René Lefebvre, who helped some of my
Jewish relatives escape to neutral Spain from the
Nazi tyranny. Marcel lost his own dad to the
Nazi’s tyranny campaign, and now the entire
Catholic Church and Pius XII (who saved almost
one million Jews by helping them flee, go
underground, hide or emigrate! cf. Pinchas E.
Lapide, Three Popes and the Jews), as well as
this great SSPX group are being demonized by
anti-religious mass media. It is insulting to me
as a Jew, that the suffering of my relatives in
the Shoah camps, is instrumentalized by
anti-Catholic propagandists and their political
agenda! I am insulted also by the ADL this time.
They seem to have become anti-Catholic bigots
themselves. I respect Bishop Fellay much. I only
loathe Williamson’s hurtful statements. But why
should I care? I just ignore his ridiculous
claims. Nothing more. We as Jews should be solidarious with the Catholics.
- Posted by Dr. Chaim Lehmann, France
We have not yet been able to confirm that
this passage is authentic. We do not know for
sure whether this Dr. Chaim Lehmann really
exists, and whether he really has relatives
helped by Lefebvre's father, or not, so these
words are not yet ones we can take as reliable
information. But, if it were proven to be
true, we would have a witness to the action of
Archbishop Lefebvre's father in helping Jews
escape from France to Spain during World War II.
(Note: Any corroboration of this information would be greatly appreciated.)
It is important as we report this story,
and as readers read about it and try to
understand what is happening, that we keep in
mind that there may be elements that are
overlooked -- like the actions and fate of
Archbishop Lefebvre's father -- which can shed
important light on the suffering, tragic fate,
and heroic courage, of those who made the often
tragic history we have inherited.
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the Vatican magazine is one of my favorite
magazines. I love it!” Fr. Benedict Groeschel, CFR
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