Yves Chiron and Catholic Traditionalism: A Response to Jesse Russell

Jesse Russell recently published his response to Yves Chiron, Between Rome and Rebellion: A History of Catholic Traditionalism with Special Attention to France (Angelico, 2024) as a book review for Catholic World Report.

As the English-language translator of that work, I should like to make a few comments on what strikes me as an essay presenting Mr. Russell’s views on Catholic Traditionalism, rather than as a review of Chiron’s book.

I shall skip over the first four paragraphs of his piece, which Mr. Russell devotes to John Paul II and the generation often named after him, except to say that they seem off-topic.

The foray into the state of traditionalism in the U.S. (“considered largely a marginal phenomenon” during John Paul II’s pontificate) is also beside the point in the sense that the title of the book under review contains this: “With Special Attention to France.”

Mr. Russell next gets to what is manifestly on his mind: what is wrong with contemporary Traditionalists in the U.S. and how Chiron, in Mr. Russell’s view, refutes notions commonly held among them.

The two defects for which he upbraids (American, it seems) Traditionalists are “internet conspiracy culture” and the mistaken notion among traditionalists that priests who “said some version of pre-1970 Catholic liturgy were immune” to committing sex abuse. Whether or not the latter is true, and if so to what extent, it provides Mr. Russell with a segue to an actual discussion of Chiron’s Between Rome and Rebellion.

Mr. Russell introduces his subject by stating that Chiron “has explored some of the core pillars of traditionalist thinking, providing an objective analysis that topples some of the central trad shibboleths.”

I am afraid this seems rather to be what Mr. Russell was hoping to find in the French historian’s output than what anything the latter actually says.

Here are some examples.

He praises Chiron for depicting Paul VI fairly in his Paul VI: The Divided Pope (Angelico, 2022)—the praise is deserved, but unfair treatment of Paul VI is surely restricted to a narrow band of Traditionalists (and extends to a much broader band of progressives, disappointed by Humanae Vitae and The Credo of the People of God). Most take him to be a complicated man who made imprudent decisions in liturgy and staffing. As for “one of the key trad conspiracies about Paul VI’s personal life,” as Mr. Russell calls it, Chiron deals with it by “noting that this harmful allegation. . . was fabricated by an Italian tabloid.” It is more precise to say that the Italian tabloid in question (it was Il Tempo) published an article by famous French pederast Roger Peyrefitte,¹ who in the Propos secrets he was about to publish at Albin Michel in 1977, accused many public figures of sharing his own proclivities, including John XXIII and Paul VI. This gratuitous and baseless accusation has never been a “key trad” concern. Now, there is no reason to doubt that Mr. Russell heard it from a Traditionalist. Level-headed Traditionalists (whom I take to constitute a majority), however, steer clear of the waspish barbs that Roger Peyrefitte made a career of peddling.

What Mr. Russell has gleaned from Chiron’s Annibale Bugnini comes as a surprise to anyone who has read it. The “shibboleth” that he claims has been “topple[d]” here is that “despite traditionalist claims, the archbishop was not even the main architect behind the 1970s missal, nor is there any evidence that he was a Freemason.” There are two claims here.

The more baffling of the two assertions is that Chiron says that Bugnini was “not even the main architect” of the 1969 missal. It is baffling because Chiron devotes the entire biography of the man to the topic of the liturgy. It is baffling also because the book is titled (my bold print) Annibale Bugnini: Reformer of the Liturgy (original title: Mgr BUGNINI (1912-1982) Réformateur de la liturgie). Gleaning through the book, one’s perplexity increases as one reads: “the vast reform whose architect he would be after the Council, Fr. Bugnini. . .” (p. 25); “He was truly to be the architect of the Commission’s work,” p. 62 (granted, Chiron is here speaking of the pre-conciliar commission that wrote Sacrosanctum Concilium); “the secretary, Fr. Bugnini, was truly the architect of the reforms that were about to begin” (p. 106). In fact, page 106 explains in detail why Bugnini deserves to be called “architect,” or in the original French “maître d’œuvre” (pp. 24–25, 68, 91—where the English renders it “manager”—and 120).

Mr. Russell correctly states that Bugnini’s membership in Freemasonry is something “some Traditionalists claim,” starting with Archbishop Lefebvre. Chiron, however, does not close the door; he merely says that rigorous historical criticism (documentary authenticity, sourcing, etc.) provides no evidence, and goes on to say: “Whatever the case may be, the accusation of belonging to Freemasonry was not the determining factor in Archbishop Bugnini’s dismissal” (173–74). That Chiron should write “[w]hatever the case may be” despite Bugnini’s private (in a letter to Paul VI) and two public protestations of innocence in this respect may gauge how seriously Chiron takes these denials. To exonerate Bugnini of the accusation that he was sacked for his membership in Freemasonry, Mr. Russell would have been better served by quoting Cardinal Stickler’s categorical answer to Alcuin Reid (the answer is in Dom Alcuin’s foreword to the Bugnini book, p. 7): “No, it was something far worse.” For those who wish to pursue the issue of Bugnini and Freemasonry, more has come to light since Chiron’s book.

After these two points, Mr. Russell turns to the book under discussion: Between Rome and Rebellion.

It is a “comprehensive and sympathetic portrait of the traditionalist movement”—Mr. Russell is surely correct here—“while also, as he does in other works”—this point is not settled, as the “architect” and “Freemason” misunderstandings indicate—“providing some major clarifications.”

The first “clarification,” that the Traditionalist/Modernist opposition predates Vatican II, is actually not a clarification, as Mr. Russell admits: “This point is well-known throughout traditionalist and non-traditionalist circles.” This covers pretty much everybody.

Mr. Russell’s summary of this pre-Vatican II opposition provides him with the occasion to bring up present-day commentators when he mentions “the current age of social media magisterium, in which individual laymen appear to claim the ability to anathematize popes and to reject the canonization of saints.” He seems to mean—I may be wrong—those who signed the Easter 2019 “Open Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church” accusing Pope Francis of the canonical delict of heresy, and those who contributed to an anthology edited by Peter Kwasniewski, Are Canonizations Infallible? Revisiting a Disputed Question (Arouca Press, 2021). This obiter dictum, in my view, is out of place here.

The next two “clarifications” concern Archbishop Lefebvre, the central figure of post-conciliar traditionalism. He calls them “clear criticisms” on the part of Chiron.

The first of these is a misunderstanding on Mr. Russell’s part: he considers it “shocking” that “Lefebvre. . . claimed to have received a vision in the cathedral at Dakar so he could found an international seminary.” The wording “claimed. . . so he could” is awkward and seems to invite an uncharitable inference. The claim attributed to Lefebvre would be shocking if indeed Chiron had spoken of a “vision.” But he does not, and neither did Lefebvre. The actual terms used are: “Archbishop Lefebvre. . . had long been pursuing a ‘dream’ that God had ‘made him glimpse one day in the cathedral of Dakar’” (p. 204, quoting M. Lefebvre, Itinéraire spirituel [Tradifusion, 1991], 5). The French words are rêve and entrevoir. Anyone who has made a decision after due and prayerful consideration recognizes what Lefebvre here means; one does not see that it calls for the excursus on “private revelations” Mr. Russell provides as commentary. As for the term “vision,” Mr. Russell may here be misremembering Bernard Tissier de Mallerais’s account, Marcel Lefebvre (Angelus Press, 2004), 408, where it clearly has the obvious, natural meaning one associates with corporate “vision statements.”

The second “criticism” concerns the solicitude that two men who knew Lefebvre had for his mental capacity towards the end of his life. Mr. Russell is here again correct: in the chapter on Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, Chiron devotes about a page to “The Psychology of Archbishop Lefebvre.” He quotes unpublished material in which one learns that Dom Jean Roy, Abbot of Fontgombault, and Cardinal Siri had independently reached the conclusion that Archbishop Lefebvre might suffer from arteriosclerosis or some other “mental derangement” (Between Rome and Rebellion, 258–259). In this connection, however, it may be worth noting that all the information on that score relies on the testimony of Dom Jean alone.

After dealing with the irresistible “what if” speculation about the episcopal consecrations (would Rome have been more accommodating if Lefebvre had waited longer and for just one bishop?), Mr. Russell turns to Lyndon Larouche on the Traditional Catholics he tangled with in Northern Virginia. Mr. Russell may be familiar with the facts of that particular case and may agree with Larouche’s assessment that Traditional Catholicism is “a gnostic cult that has nothing to do with authentic Christianity,” but one fails to see how this bears on Chiron’s account of Archbishop Lefebvre and the SSPX in France.

In his abrupt conclusion (one would like to hear more about the other chapters of the book) Mr. Russell puts forward the claim that Chiron “has demonstrated” that “at least some (if not all) of the trad conspiracies [he means “conspiracy theories,” surely] are false, and there have been major issues and pathological behavior among some traditionalists since the beginning.”

May I propose that this will not do? Mr. Russell appears to have seen in Chiron’s meticulous and even-handed book just what he wanted to see in it: the trads are wrong. He can be forgiven for not knowing that Yves Chiron hears Mass at SSPX priories. For my part, I translated Chiron’s Between Rome and Rebellion as well as his Annibale Bugnini, and I helped copy-edit his Paul VI: The Divided Pope—and I am afraid I recognized none of those books in Mr. Russell’s essay.

Endnote:

¹ See “Pope Paul Denounces ‘Horrible Insinuations’,” The New York Times, 5 April 1976, p. 12.