Marcel François Marie Joseph Lefebvre (French: [maʁsɛl fʁɑswa maʁi ʒozɛf ləfɛːvʁ]; 29 November 1905 – 25 March 1991) was a French Roman Catholic archbishop. Ordained a diocesan priest in 1929, he 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.
Upon his return to Europe he was elected Superior General of the Holy Ghost Fathers and assigned to participate in the drafting and preparation of documents for the upcoming Second Vatican Council (1962–65) announced by Pope John XXIII, and was a major leader of the conservative bloc during its proceedings. He would later take the lead in opposing certain changes within the Church associated with the Council. Refusing to implement council-inspired reforms demanded by its members, he resigned from the leadership of the Holy Ghost Fathers in 1968.
In 1970, Lefebvre founded the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) as a small community of seminarians in the village of Écône, Switzerland, with the permission of Bishop François Charrière (fr) 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,[Notes 1] a status Lefebvre refused to acknowledge to his death three years later.[3][4]
In 2009, 18 years after Lefebvre's death, Pope Benedict XVI lifted the excommunication of the four surviving bishops at their request. However, it was not done retroactively, meaning that it had no effect on Lefebvre.