The Battlefield

On the battlefield, more than anywhere else, one is likely to face death, injuries and traitors. The first crack took place, only ten years later, in 1955: it was a deviation that tended to turn the Order into a worldly intellectual circle. But the most serious was undoubtedly the one that followed the implementation of the Conciliar reforms, in 1970.

Nevertheless, in that same year, faithful to their pre-Conciliar Rule, a number of knights confirmed their rejection of the erroneous concepts that had emerged in the wake of “Vatican II”, as well as of the reformed liturgy. The new members henceforth received the liturgical dubbing – Benedictio Novi Militis from the Roman Pontifical – from Archbishop Lefebvre himself. His 1974 Declaration and numerous reminders, like his 1976 Lille sermon and 1988 homily in which he explained that, if he was to consecrate four bishops, it was due to the necessity to secure valid ordinations and other sacraments, were adopted as the Order’s own guideline. In 1995, the traditional branch called the “Order of the Knights of Our Lady, Observance of the Holy Hearts of Jesus and Mary” were approved by a decree from the Canonical Commission of the Society of St Pius X. The blue patonced cross of the Order was stamped with the scarlet Holy Hearts.

More casualties on the battlefield were however to be expected, as a rapprochement of SSPX with Conciliar Rome seemed to be taking shape in 2012, and in 2022, with a “coup d’état” by a perjured newly elected Magistral Lieutenant, who remained at the head of a splinter branch with the support of a religious, while two clerics had found it opportune to start their own tiny Order “of Our Lady of the Assumption” for their own service, with 2 of our former members in Europe for one and 3 of them in America for the other one, without ever recruiting anybody else in so many years.