On the occasion of the Jubilee of 2025, thousands of faithful will gather in Rome next August 20 to participate in the international pilgrimage organized by the SSPX. This event will also be a privileged opportunity to visit the places in the holy city dear to Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, places that have often been present in his life since the years of his priestly formation.
In fact, on October 25, 1923, Bishop Lefebvre arrived by train in Rome to enter, at less than 18 years of age, the French Seminary in Via di Santa Chiara.
From Santa Chiara he went almost daily to the Gabrielli-Borromeo Palace, where, at the time, the temporary headquarters of the Gregorian University, which later moved elsewhere, was located. The young French student would remain at St. Clare throughout his university studies, including his doctorate in theology, until 1930, when he was appointed vicar in a parish in Marais-de-Lomme (in France).
Chosen by the pope as apostolic delegate for Francophone Africa in 1948, he often returned to Rome to brief the Holy See about the expansion of missions in the immense territories entrusted to his care. During that time, he frequently visited the Propagande Fide.
We find his name engraved, along with all the other bishops of the world who were present at the proclamation of the Dogma of the Assumption of Our Lady in 1950, on a wall of St. Peter’s Basilica..
During his tenure as Superior General of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, an old school of the Sisters of Mary Help of Christians in Monte Mario was purchased and renovated, becoming the headquarters of the Generalate of the Spiritan Fathers in 1966.
But there are also other places connected to the life of Bishop Lefebvre that deserve to be known and visited.
- Apart from priestly ordination and episcopal consecration, Marcel Lefebvre received all holy orders at the Lateran; some in the Roman Seminary Church, others in the adjacent Papal Basilica.
- In the early years after the founding of the St. Pius X Fraternity, it had a room in Villa Lithuania. It was here that he wrote the first version of the Statutes of the FSSPX.
- In 1975 he took all the seminarians of Ecône on the Jubilee pilgrimage to Rome. Since the doors of the Roman churches remained closed to him, Bishop Lefebvre celebrated Sunday Mass in the basilica of Maxentius.
- In 1977 he was invited by Princess Pallavicini to the eponymous palace to give a lecture on the topic of “The Church after the Council.”
It was clear to the French prelate that his seminarians should have a great love for eternal Rome, where St. Peter’s successors live. So he instituted the rule that his seminarians from the northern hemisphere should spend a month in Rome before their priestly ordination. And it is no coincidence that one of the first houses he purchased for the Fraternity was near Rome: the St. Pius X Priory of Albano.
Participating in the Jubilee pilgrimage to Rome is thus not only an act of piety, but also a living testimony of belonging to the Catholic Church and its two-thousand-year-old Tradition.
(Source)
