by Archbishop Lefebvre

By proposing to women the model of the Blessed Virgin Mary, whom God himself chose to be the mother of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Church proves the esteem in which she holds womankind. Whereas in all the ancient civilizations, and in all the history of paganism, one finds universally the contempt of woman. She is considered as a mere object. She has no civil rights; she can be repudiated and even sold.

The Church gives to women freedom, and she guarantees it. I was able to observe in Africa that in all the pagan tribes that I encountered, the great problem is always that of the woman. The men spend their time selling their daughters or purchasing wives or reselling them. They term this arranging the dowry.

This is false, for it constitutes a real commerce. Scarcely have they been born when the girls become the object of trade; someone puts down money to purchase them. As soon as someone else comes along with more money than what a husband has paid, the parents arrange for the daughter to leave her present husband. They return the “dowry” to the husband who had purchased her first, and keep the rest. If a woman is sold for two hundred dollars and another comes along with four hundred, they return two hundred to the first and keep two hundred. It is a real traffic that is almost impossible to imagine.

The missionaries had to fight to uphold Christian marriages, and even then it was difficult because this habit is so deeply rooted in their mores. And then, the parents were not always Christian, but pagan, and acted towards the daughter who had become a Christian and married in the Church as if she were a pagan. The women who had left their husbands at the behest of their parents had nothing against them; they simply were obeying the injunctions of the parents, who always command. If the father tells his daughter to come home and that he will marry her to another, the daughter can do nothing. She is subjugated by her father. If her father dies, she belongs to her oldest brother. She always belongs to someone; she is not free.

Sometimes we were obliged to go and seek in the villages a wife who had thus left her husband. We would go off like commandos with a few young men in a dug-out in pursuit of the woman because the catechists advised us that if the missionary Father did not go and fetch her, all the others would go too. Going to look for women in this way struck me as a rather droll duty.

We made a few examples. But when the parents learned that we were coming to fetch the wife they were intimidating, they made her go and hide in the forest to keep us from finding her. There was always someone in the village, though, who would inform us, and so we always succeeded in finding the woman, for often the woman desired to return to her husband. But in front of her parents she had to show the opposite. Then she would start screaming to prove that she left without her consent. The parents dared not say much in front of the priest. Sometimes we even had to take the woman by force, binding her and putting her in the boat to take her back to the village. As soon as the boat had put out a little distance from the parents, the woman would clap her hands, and show her pleasure at finding herself back with her husband. But before, oh, she put on such incredible scenes: I am going to kill myself... (and then she would jump into the river)... I am going to drown myself. And the young people would go and fetch her back. All this proved quite well that these poor women were not free to dispose of themselves and that they were the object of a veritable traffic.

To protect Christian marriage in such conditions is very difficult!

When one considers Islam and the conduct of Moslems, one observes the same contempt of the woman. When I was in Algeria and Morocco I had a chance to visit some harems. It is atrocious; the women are enclosed their entire lives in a very restricted space, three or four together. They too are bought, sold, and resold. It is an abominable traffic.

Christian marriage is the guarantee of the respect paid to the woman, respect that still exists, thank God, in our Christian families and in many of the Christian regions. But, to the degree that the Masonic doctrines spread with divorce, we see that the woman is more and more despised, less and less respected. Marriage is one of the marks of Christian civilization; that is why the Church has tried to do all in her power to prevent the legalization of divorce. But currently, in most of the countries where divorce has not yet been admitted, the Freemasons have launched campaigns and exerted pressure to introduce its legalization.

Catholics even, and bishops, have helped to a certain extent to encourage divorce, like Cardinal Tarancon, who recommended the institution of two types of marriage, one for those who desired an indissoluble union, and then a civil marriage for those who might eventually like to divorce. I read this in a renowned Spanish journal; the Cardinal explicitly campaigned for the establishment of two kinds of marriage. Yet it is known that Spain is a country of Catholic tradition, therefore he was not speaking of marriage for people who are non-Catholics, but for Catholics. It is inconceivable to see such a proposition emanate from a cardinal!

All this comes from the fact that it is the Freemasons who are at the origin of these ideas, because it involves a worldwide movement. If this were only occurring in a single country, one might think that it was being instigated by the head of the government. But no, it is in every country, one after the other, that the legislative assemblies are occupied with legislation for laws instituting divorce. And that is the work of Masonry: it wants the heads of government to have power over the marriage bond.