To safeguard the Catholic priesthood, which carries on the Catholic Church and not an adulterated Church, Catholic bishops are needed. We therefore see ourselves compelled, because of the invasion of the modernist spirit into the present clergy, even to the highest levels within the Church, to proceed to the consecration of bishops, the fact of this consecration having been admitted by the pope in Cardinal Ratzinger’s letter of May 30. These episcopal consecrations will be not only valid but, in view of the historical circumstances, probably licit. Whatever may be said of their liceity, it is sometimes necessary to abandon legality in order to remain within right. † Marcel Lefebvre Archbishop of the one Church of Jesus Christ, holy, catholic, apostolic, and Roman, by the grace of God and the election of His Holiness Pope Pius XII.