Dear Reader,

The Society of Saint Pius X is a deeply Marian congregation. From the profound Marian life of the founder, with a priesthood sharing in the hypostatic union which took place in the womb of the Virgin Mother, through key Marian feasts punctuating its 50 years’ existence, to a major front role in the apocalyptic battle raging against the Church, this “small band of Gedeon” is definitely, like the rosary, a battling ram in the hands of the Immaculate.

Few people know that it was on October 13, 1969, that Archbishop Lefebvre himself welcomed the first batch of nine seminarians in Fribourg, the embryonic SSPX, a mere 50 days before the New Mass started and war broke out against the Traditional Latin Mass. Rebecca made sure her little Jacob got the patriarchal blessing in time.

In the northern hemisphere, seminarians always receive their black cassock on the feast of the Purification, February 2, and the day chosen to become canonically a member of the SSPX is December 8, feast of the Immaculate Conception. The members, “the seed of the Woman,” thus publicly enter the enmity with the infernal serpent.

The Society has repeatedly consecrated itself publicly to the Mother of God, as a whole, such as in Martigny in 1984, or at other times in all the districts, and has frequently answered the call to go on pilgrimage: at Fatima in 1987, 1997, 2005 and 2017; and in Lourdes in 2008, 2014—the next one to be in 2020. We must mention, too, that it resurrected the traditional branches of the Legion of Mary and of the Militia Immaculatae which reached 100,000 members in 2017.

Our superior general, with the advice of his counsel, has recently decreed that in the SSPX, as of this year 2020, the two feasts of Our Lady of Sorrows (one in Lent, one on Sept. 15) will be raised to the rank of First Class.

Lastly, when considering the worldwide persecutions Archbishop Lefebvre and his Society went through, that too could be a symbolic and profoundly Marian touch. Listen to a saint speaking of the apostles of the latter days: “In the eyes of the world they will be little and poor and, like the heel, lowly in the eyes of all, downtrodden and crushed as is the heel by the other parts of the body…” And the saint concludes: “In union with Mary, they will crush the head of Satan with their heel, that is, their humility, and bring victory to Jesus Christ” (True Devotion, n. 54).

Fr. Daniel Couture