
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, March 25, 1991                   TAG: 9103250315
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: EVENING 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: GENEVA                                LENGTH: Medium

CONSERVATIVE FRENCH ARCHBISHOP DIES AT 85

Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, an arch-conservative whose crusade against Vatican reforms led to the first major split in the Roman Catholic church in more than a century, died today. He was 85.

Lefebvre died at the Martigny Lefebvre hospital one week after undergoing emergency surgery for a cancerous growth in the abdomen.

Martigny is near his seminary in the western Swiss city of Econe, where his international traditionalist movement was born more than two decades ago.

The French-born archbishop organized a separate Catholic movement and ordained priests in his fight against what he denounced as the "satanic influence of neo-modernist and neo-Protestant tendencies" in the church.

"Our future is the past," he once said.

His movement rejects many reforms introduced since the Second Vatican Council of 1963-65, including the replacement of the Latin Mass with a simplified liturgy. His St. Pius X Fraternity of Priests was named for the pope who condemned modernism in a 1907 encyclical.

Lefebvre's fight against the Vatican culminated July 30, 1988, with his consecration of four traditionalist bishops at Econe.

The Vatican reacted swiftly by excommunicating Lefebvre, the four new bishops and a prelate who had assisted the archbishop in the consecration. Pope John Paul II warned that Lefebvre's followers would also be ejected from the church unless they broke with him.

It formalized the first major split, or schism, in the church since the Old Catholics broke with Rome because they opposed the doctrine of papal infallibility, proclaimed by the 1870 Vatican Council.

Traditionalist Catholics venerated Lefebvre with fervor, as a representative of the "true church." Critics viewed him as an incorrigible reactionary who admired Spain's Generalissimo Francisco Franco and would have liked to see the monarchy restored in France.

There is no firm estimate on the number of Lefebvre's active supporters.

According to the Rev. Franz Schmidberger, the titular head of the fraternity since 1984, the movement includes more than 200 priests, many of them ordained by Lefebvre.

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by CNB