Every ecumenical council in the history of the Church was prompted by turmoil, conducted in turmoil or resulted in turmoil. The Second Vatican Council, which brought two young central Europeans named Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger to prominence on the world Catholic stage, was no exception. The post-conciliar turmoil following Vatican II is generally thought to have taken place on the port side of Catholic life, with liberal and progressive theologians publicly dissenting from authoritative Catholic teaching while attempting to stretch the boundaries of acceptable Catholic thought and practice with the aid of acquiescent bishops and religious superiors. Yet the only schism following Vatican II - the only formal, legal break in the unity of the Church - did not come on the Catholic Left (which knew that its magnetic attraction for the world media required staying formally inside the tent). It came on the far reaches of the Catholic Right. Its protagonist was a French archbishop with extensive missionary experience in Africa, Marcel Lefebvre.

Throughout the world, Lefebvrists and other traditionalist Catholics are known for their preference for the older forms of Catholic worship, particularly the Mass celebrated in Latin according to the missal established by the Council of Trent and revised by Pope John XXIII in 1962. Yet the gravamen of the hardcore Lefebvrists' rejection of Vatican II involved, not liturgy, but politics, and specifically Catholic church-state theory. Vatican II's definition of religious freedom as an inalienable human right - carrying the implication that religious establishments of the ancien régime type were no longer the preferred arrangement - was, in fact, a development of Catholic social doctrine. To the Lefebvrists, however, it was heresy, and the opening wedge to a fatal Catholic accommodation with modernity. Archbishop Lefebvre's war, in other words, was not simply against modern liturgy - it was against modernity. To those who took the trouble to look, there was no surprise here, for the ideological sensibilities of the Lefebvrist movement sprang from the same French political-cultural sources that gave rise to the anti-Dreyfusards of the late 19th century and the Petainists of the mid-20th century. Paul VI, a Francophile who knew Lefebvre's politics and detested them, was nonetheless patient with the French intransigent, fearing a formal schism like that of the Old Catholics after the First Vatican Council. Yet the often indecisive Paul finally suspended Lefebvre from the public exercise of his priestly and episcopal functions in 1976, although he and his followers remained in tenuous communion with the Church.

Popes are duty-bound to try to prevent schisms and to repair breaches in the unity of the Church. Thus John Paul II and then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger made every effort, over a long decade, to reconcile Archbishop Lefebvre and his followers - which would have meant allowing them the use of the pre-conciliar liturgy while securing their agreement that Vatican II had been an authentic expression of Catholic faith. But Lefebvre, as Ratzinger once said, was a "very difficult man", and he eventually reneged on a deal he had struck with Ratzinger, who was acting as John Paul II's agent. Moreover, having reneged, he proceeded to commit what is perhaps the ultimate offence for a Catholic bishop - in 1988, he ordained other bishops without the mandate of the pope. Those bishops (including Richard Williamson) and Lefebvre himself were immediately excommunicated. The Lefebvrist movement, the Society of St Pius X (named after the pope who instigated the "anti-Modernist oath" as a precondition to priestly ordination), went into formal schism. From Rome's point of view, Lefebvre's ordinations triggered the worst of worst-case scenarios - for the Church considered the episcopal orders of the men Lefebvre had ordained to be sacramentally valid (although illicit), which meant that the Society of St Pius X now had the capacity to perpetuate its schism indefinitely, through further illicit but valid ordinations of bishops. In secular terms, this was treason, sedition and rebellion in one lethal package.