After a brief term of pastoral work in Lausanne, in April 1924 he became professor of moral theology and sociology at the major seminary there.
[1] He was teaching at the seminary when Pope Pius XII appointed him bishop of Lausanne, Geneva and Fribourg on 20 October 1945.
[3] In 1969, near the end of his tenure in Fribourg, Charrière gave Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre permission to establish a seminary within his diocese in Écône.
On 1 November 1970, Charrière issued a decree that established Lefebvre's Society of St. Pius X as a "pious union" for six years "by way of an experiment", to be extended for another six subject to the intervention of the bishop of Fribourg.
The decree anticipated that after 12 years the Society "will be able to be definitively erected" by the diocesan bishop or the appropriate body within the Roman Curia.