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While Rome burns itself to the ground the valiant firefighters douse each other with precious water!

Perhaps later, when I have more time, I will refute all this nonsense from TIA.

For the moment, I can only marvel at their gullibility and incomprehension, and offer just a couple examples of each:

1) TIA would have you believe SSPX operatives (priests) are organizing and conducting a campaign to discredit their account, for the purpose of preserving an allegedly false “received view” regarding the personal sanctity and uprightness of Archbishop Lefebvre.

But the absurdity and imprudence (I struggle to avoid saying “stupidity”) of the TIA hitching its wagons to a completely contradictory account of Archbishop Lefebvre on the basis of a single “witness’s” allegations, and then accepting those allegations as credible, merely because he has signed his name, is preposterous.

2) TIA alleges that unless someone can prove the “witness’s” accusations false, then Archbishop Lefebvre must be held under suspicion!

OK, well, when later today I pay some bum off the street to sign a completely fabricated letter I will draft for him, announcing I saw Plinio regularly attending Lodge meetings in the 1980’s, then I will expect, by the same rationale, the TIA to hold Plinio under suspicion until someone can prove it DIDN’T happen!

3) Moreover, the superficial defense of the credibility of the signed letter testifies to its own weak foundation: It could only be false if someone can prove its author’s mental illness, or that the dates and facts are not exact!

So the burden of proof is deftly transferred to those who would rightly and prudently (and reasonably, not emotionally!) question the conclusions TIA is coming to, completely at odds with the rest of what is known about Archbishop Lefebvre, on the basis of a single letter, from a man of unknown background and history.

Is it “emotional” for an objective and reasonable person to wonder who this man is, what positions he supports, why he writes decades after the (alleged) fact, and to discount entirely the possibility of questionable motives?

4) TIA throws in additional questionable (to be kind) material to prepare the terrain for receptivity to the idea of a “subversive Lefebvre:” The slander of Fr. des Lauriers, that Archbishop Lefebvre said the new Mass.

Now according to TIA, the claim must be taken seriously, merely because someone said it!  

Even if that same someone left Ecône in a huff of disagreement with the same person against whom he is making the allegation?

But in referencing des Laurier’s lie, TIA conveniently forgets to mention the 16-page unassailable refutation by Madiran which I supplied them, proving beyond any doubt at all that des Lauriers’ account is a fabrication (though they eventually did append s link to the untranslated French at the bottom of des Laurier’s hallucination.  Perhaps I shall have to translate and post that as well).

5) In claiming that Archbishop Lefebvre is a member of a Masonic group known as the ecuмenical Order of Our Lady of Sion, it shows his picture on the page of something from the Knights of Our Lady (ie., a pre-conciliar, ecclesiastically approved order which, after the conciliar crisis splintered, and a wing reorganized in defense of Tradition aligned to the SSPX, and after the crisis in the SSPX, with the Resistance).

I have not yet viewed the other links TIA has provided on this subject (I will do so later), but are they confounding the Order of Our Lady of Sion with the Knights of Our Lady?

6) As regards ABL signing the 16 docuмents of Vatican II, some allege these were only attendance sheets, while Bishop Tissier assents to the fact, and Fr. Brian hαɾɾιson demonstrates beyond any question).

What of it?

He spent the next 25+ years opposing those docuмents regardless of a signature or non-signature.

Time and experience mature the understanding (same as regarded his early permissions to attend the Novus Ordo).

I would have expected TIA to understand that, rather than searching for filler material to help prepare the terrain for the acceptance of the idea of a Masonic Lefebvre.

Lefebvre did more than perhaps anyone in the Church in the wake of the conciliar crisis to expose not only Fɾҽҽmαsσɳɾყ as an enemy of the Church, but show Madonry’s inroads via the conciliar and post-conciliar “reforms.”

So, if Lefebvre was a Mason, he was certainly working against himself, and damaging his own prospects for success by putting people on their guard against Fɾҽҽmαsσɳɾყ.

Very disappointed to see TIA take such a thin story like this and run with it.