page_title: Marcel Lefebvre
section_title: Early life and family
hierarchical_section_title: Marcel Lefebvre / Early life and family
caption_attribution_description: English: René Lefebvre and his family (including his wife Gabrielle Wattin and his son Marcel Lefebvre). Polski: René Lefebvre ze swoją rodziną (włączając jego żonę Gabrielle Wattin i syna Marcela Lefebvre'a).
context_page_description: Marcel François Marie Joseph Lefebvre CSSp was a French Roman Catholic archbishop. In 1970, he founded the Society of Saint Pius X as a small community of seminarians in the village of Écône, Switzerland, with the permission of Bishop François Charrière of Fribourg. In 1975, after a flare of tensions with the Holy See, Lefebvre was ordered to disband the society, but ignored the decision. In 1988, against the expressed prohibition of Pope John Paul II, he consecrated four bishops to continue his work with the SSPX. The Holy See immediately declared that he and the other bishops who had participated in the ceremony had incurred automatic excommunication under Catholic canon law, a status Lefebvre refused to acknowledge to his death three years later.
  Ordained a diocesan priest in 1929, he had joined the Holy Ghost Fathers for missionary work and was assigned to teach at a seminary in Gabon in 1932. In 1947, he was appointed Vicar Apostolic of Dakar, Senegal, and the next year as the Apostolic Delegate for West Africa.
context_section_description: Marcel Lefebvre was born in Tourcoing, Nord. He was the second son and third child of eight children of textile factory-owner René Lefebvre and Gabrielle, born Watine, who died in 1938.
  His parents were devout Catholics who brought their children to daily Mass. His father was an outspoken monarchist, devoting his life to the cause of the French Dynasty, seeing in a monarchy the only way of restoring to his country its past grandeur and a Christian revival.
  Marcel's father René had run a spy-ring for British Intelligence when Tourcoing was occupied by the Germans during World War I. René would die at age 62 in 1944 in the German concentration camp at Sonnenburg (in East Brandenburg, Germany), where he had been imprisoned by the Gestapo because of his work for the French Resistance and British Intelligence; the body was never recovered.
caption: The Lefebvre family
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