The inconceivable canonisation of John Paul II (1)

IN 1983, Georges de Nantes, our Father, addressed Pope John Paul II, elected in 1978 : “ It must be said to your face, Most Holy Father, that your religion is no longer that of the Roman Catholic Church, Christ’s unique Church, whose Head you are. Your religion is the religion of man who makes himself god and not the religion of God, the Son of God, Who made Himself man. For the one excludes the other. Someone must rise up in the Church and make bold to tell you these things openly, publicly, bluntly and without hesitation, because it is the revealed truth on which our supreme good depends : our ultimate end, the honour of the Church and the future credibility of her infallible Magisterium, the salvation of our souls and the tranquillity of our consciences in rebellion against your teaching. Finally, Most Holy Father, your own salvation depends upon it, if your soul will deign to profit from this remonstrance. For not one of the Church’s children, especially of her pastors, of her supreme Pastors, can be saved unless he holds the most pure, sound and entire Catholic Faith. ”

This dreadful accusation was supported by an analysis of the pontifical acts of the first five years of a long reign. The way the remainder of the pontificate unfolded would but confirm it :

“ For you are no longer Catholic, you are no longer Christian for it is all one, even though you remain in name and in fact the Sovereign Pontiff of this Church whose Faith and unity you reject from the depths of your will and intellect.

“ Have I one deed or one text on which to rest such accusations ? I have five hundred, Most Holy Father. To begin with I shall give only one on which I am prepared to stake my entire faith and life. One on which the whole case could be judged. It is one of your recurring themes : that of the Kingship of Jesus Christ, a kingship which for you is not that of God made man, but that of Man whom you proclaim to be god” (p. 4) through this blasphemy : ‘ Christ is king in the sense that in Him, in the testimony that He rendered to the truth, is manifested the kingship of every human being, the expression of every person’s transcendent character. Such is the Church’s proper inheritance. ’” (p. 6)

“ It is obviously not Catholic ; it is not Christian either.” (p. 14) There was ‘ obviously’ no one to be found who could prove the contrary ; nor was there anyone to oppose the idolatry of man for which a pontificate of twenty-seven years was the stage ; no one other than Fr. de Nantes who professed his crystal-clear Catholic faith :

“ You say, ‘ every man is transcendent,’ the Bible answers : ‘ God alone is Holy. Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord.’

“ It is also of God the King, and of His future kingdom, that the prophets and inspired writers speak, and sing in the Psalms. There is no king in this world who can stand before Him, other than him whom He has first accepted – Saul – and then chosen for himself – David, whom He treated like a son and to whose lineage was given dominion in Sion, in Jerusalem and over His holy people for ever. It is from his descent that the King of kings, the Lord of lords will arise, the Messiah to whom is promised universal and eternal dominion, the Son of David and Son of God, Jesus Christ.

“ One must never have read the Gospel, or else deliberately want to falsify it, not to be mindful that God the Father is always the Holy One, the Lord and the Master of all things, the King and Father of the family… That His Son is the Messiah, the Son of David, and by virtue of this twofold filiation, the King of Israel, to whom moreover was promised dominion over every nation... That the prophets before Him, and the Apostles whom He chose to be His successors, are those servants to whom is promised a share in the power and the glory of His Kingdom to come… And that, in the end, the only ones who are ‘ saints ’ and have a share in His very priesthood, prophetic power, and kingship, are His faithful ones – those who, through faith in His divinity, are made sons of God by adoption and members of His Mystical Body, whose Head He is.

“ Thus, in His famous appearance before Pilate, which you use to justify your theory – a Masonic rather than a Christian theory – Our Lord Jesus Christ and He alone, not just any man, is the King, and He is ‘ King of the Jews,’ not as the ideal representative of a collectivity of kings, all equally transcendent, free and fraternal. If you object that it is precisely this political title of ‘ King of the Jews’ that Jesus rejected, then the answer must be that, on the contrary, He did accept it, and in so doing He sublimated and universalised it by making Himself King as God is King. Indeed it was foretold that His Messiah, the ‘ Son of Man,’ would be a spiritual King, a universal King, an eternal King, deserving and demanding of all men their entire subjection of body and soul, of their private and social life, their political life in particular, Jewish as well as Roman, ancient as well as modern.

“ Those who rejected His Kingship because they refused to have the Son of the Great King to reign over them (Lk 19:14), those who, in their blindness and foolish insubordination, claimed to have no other king but Caesar (Jn 19:5), justly incurred the divine malediction.

“ It is thus – how could it have been otherwise ? – that the Church has always interpreted, understood, commented on and taught about the Kingship of Jesus Christ, together with the Kingship of His God and Father, in the unity of one and the same Spirit. It was precisely to bar the way to any contestation of this Kingship that your predecessor, Pope Pius XI, wrote – as though he saw your contestation coming, Most Holy Father – that admirable encyclical Quas Primas on December 11, 1925, which is a new and invigorating proclamation of Christ the King’s ‘ absolute and sovereign dominion over the entire created universe,’ over every people and over every person, over all orders and powers, both temporal and spiritual. You surely must have read it, and, having read it, how could you dare not accept it ?” (p. 15)

“ You divest Christ of His priestly and royal vestments in order to clothe man – sinful man ? any man ! – in them. You recognise in Christ no more than the mission of ‘ prophet,’ a prophet of ‘ the mystery of man,’ not of His own Mystery or that of His Father ! If Jesus, however, lays claim to Holiness – or ‘ transcendence’ – and Kingship, it is by virtue of His divinity and of His exceptional manhood as Son of God come in the flesh and sacrificed on the Cross for our sins. By replacing Christ with man in your faith, religion and service, you have made man usurp Christ’s many divine perfections and sovereign privileges, with which you then proceed to transfigure him. Man, become transcendent king through your ministry, makes himself god. It is an idol, an idol of the modern world to be sure, for it is entirely in the power of Satan, but it is also an idol of yours, You the Pope !

“ By means of a further shameless falsification of the Gospel, you make Jesus and the Church, His chaste and fruitful Spouse, the servant and handmaid of this idol in your system ! Jesus supposedly came on earth solely and exclusively in order to pay homage to man’s transcendent grandeur and royal dignity ? And supposedly would have striven, He and his martyrs after Him, to have man’s grandeur and dignity universally recognised, to win peoples over to this egolatry, to raise the consciousness of the masses, to teach them their value and so launch them into the fight for their dignity, freedom and rights against all political authority ? And why not also against all ecclesiastical authority, episcopal and pontifical ! The whole thing is preposterous. It is sacrilegious and anarchic madness. Let those who think thus subscribe their names to it... I open the subscription book and wait… Yet nobody, Most Holy Father, will dare to commit such an act of idolatry before God, not even to please you, for fear of incurring eternal damnation.”

On the other hand, Fr. de Nantes dared to expound his terrible accusation in a Book, which he personally delivered to the Holy See on May 13, 1983, accompanied by two hundred delegates of the League of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. He did this with the purpose of submitting his accusation to John Paul II’s infallible tribunal. He, however, like his successor, Benedict XVI, refused to examine it at the cost of committing a dereliction of duty. Although informed about our Father’s accusations, the diocesan tribunal for the beatification of the Pope decided not to carry out the doctrinal examination of the Servant of God’s writings, thus rendering null and void its judgement in favour of the beatification and then the canonisation. Let us pray that one day Pope Francis may lay the matter before his tribunal and at last judge it in order to eradicate the evils that overwhelm us and preserve the faithful from them in the future, thus consolidating his present Catholic renaissance work.

MODERNISM HAS BECOME POPE.

“ How then, ” Fr. de Nantes asked John Paul II, “is the double record of your speeches and thoughts to be explained ? What is your ‘ equal faith in God and in man ?’ It is explained by your predecessor St. Pius X, in his denunciation of the Modernists’ conscious and perverse duplicity. The Modernists, who, through the expedient of an orthodox faith and touching piety, maintain their positions at the heart and even on the highest rungs of the Church’s divine hierarchy, the better to ravage the Church with the poison of their monstrous heresy :

“ ‘ Thus they go their way, reprimands and condemnations notwithstanding, masking an incredible audacity under a mock semblance of humility. They make a pretence of bowing their heads, while they put all their thoughts and all their energies into pursuing their purposes more boldly than ever.”

“ Today, you hardly need to allay suspicions. Modernism has become pope, successor of St. Peter and Vicar of Jesus Christ !

“ ‘ This policy is for them both a wish and a tactic and because it is part of their system that authority is to be stimulated but not destroyed, and because it is necessary for them to remain within the ranks of the Church in order that they may gradually transform the collective conscience. In saying this, they fail to perceive that they are avowing that the collective conscience is not with them, and that they have no right to claim to be its interpreters.”

“ And lest it be thought that I am picking a quarrel with Your Holiness over nothing, nit-picking for the sake of a word or expression or of a paradoxical theme that is merely provocative rather than deplorable, we shall dwell on the point as Saint Pius X did with the Modernists. This in fact is what he wrote with such triumphant lucidity :

“ ‘ It may, perhaps, seem to some, Venerable Brethren, that we have dwelt at too great length on this exposition of the doctrines of the Modernists. It was, however, necessary that We should do so, both in order to meet their customary charge that We do not understand their ideas, and to show that their system does not consist in scattered and unconnected theories, but, as it were, in a perfectly organised whole, so that it is not possible to admit one without admitting all. For this reason too, We have had to give to this exposition a somewhat didactic form, not shrinking from certain uncouth terms that the Modernists have brought into use.

“ ‘ Now, with Our eyes fixed upon the whole system, who can be surprised that We should define it to be the synthesis of all heresies ? Undoubtedly, were anyone to attempt the task of collecting all the errors that have been broached against the Faith and to concentrate into one the sap and substance of them all, he could not succeed in doing so better than the Modernists have done. Nay, they have gone farther than this, for, as We have already intimated, their system means the destruction not of the Catholic religion alone, but of all religion...

“ ‘ Modernism leads to the annihilation of all religion. Protestantism took the first step on this path ; Modernism took the second ; the next one will lead into atheism,’” wrote the holy Pope, Saint Pius X on September 8, 1907.

“ With his perfect knowledge of the system and its tendencies, he was justified in making this announcement. He was also endowed, however, with the gift of prophecy. Well, it is through Vatican II and Paul VI, through You, Most Holy Father, that today, with your humanism, the Church has finally been plunged into atheism in both theory and practice, an atheism for which you have nothing but praise.”

WE AWAIT THE CHURCH’S INFALLIBLE JUDGEMENT.

“ Today, Modernism has become pope. The successor of St. Peter and Vicar of Jesus Christ is reiterating the perfidy of Caiphas, with a view to perpetrating, with the consent of the princes of the Church and of the entire people of God, the new deicide foretold by the Scriptures, that of man dethroning Jesus Christ in His own temple to enthrone himself there instead, and so receive the world’s adoration of himself as God and Saviour.

“ In such an Abomination of Desolation, we cannot but legitimately suspect your authority, Most Holy Father,” and even more, your ‘ holiness ’ !’ “ maintaining a watchful and resolute withdrawal of obedience [to the cult of dulia] until such time as Infallible Truth and Holy Justice be made manifest.” (p. 21)

The accusation, which has remained unanswered and uncontradicted, is elaborated in two charges :

1. “ INNOVATOR, you are betraying Christ.”

2. “ CORRUPTER, you are putting Christ to death.”

The indictment is overwhelming.

“ INNOVATOR, ” “ YOU ARE BETRAYING CHRIST ! ”

First and foremost, the indictment begins with a harrowing question :

“ Today, is it not we who are dividing the Church [...] rather than You, whose novelties demand – contrary to the Tridentine tradition – ‘ a more profound tradition’ and a reformation that is preserving unity around the centre, around Yourself, the common Father ?”

If that is so, it would have to be said that it was Pius XII who began, by banning Teilhard, Congar, Rahner et Küng who “ carried the Holy Spirit off with them,” this Spirit of Whom the greatest of the Councils, guided by its ‘ experts ’, claims to be the follower !

“ Already, however, Pius XI, Pius X, Leo XIII himself and Pius IX above all had all pronounced identical condemnations on the prophets of modernity who claimed the authority of a higher light. From Maritain to Lammenais, from the Second Vatican Council to the false Council of Pistoia, from Pistoia to the Confession of Augsburg, and from there to the Cathars... how far back does one have to go before reaching the original culprit responsible for this fatal division whereby the Church and the ‘ modern ’ world are in opposition to one another ? One must go back to Gnosticism, Most Holy Father, condemned by the Apostle St. John, and to those pagan and judaising cosmologies denounced by St. Paul as Satan’s outworn ideas !

“ You like challenges. Here is a challenge from the traditionalists of the Counter-Reformation, for whom you have no love. Tell us from what date, from what person and for what cause we deserve to be condemned, and in what particular issue we have been unfaithful to the Church’s faith and dogma or rebellious towards her discipline ! That is our challenge, one that we know you cannot accept. That is why we are sure of living and dying in peace, if we remain faithful to our traditions in the truth and charity of the One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church, outside which there is no salvation for either us or You.” (p. 28)

On the other hand, “ I am going to tell You when, through whom and on what fatal doctrines your supposedly evangelical and certainly Conciliar sect parted from the Tradition of the Faith and broke the Church’s holy unity. I shall show you clearly and precisely where the heresy, schism and scandal lie in your personal life. Then, I shall show you how you have worked with all your pontifical authority to make the entire Church topple over into your camp, until the goal of universal apostasy is reached.

“ In demonstrating these things, however, I have perfect confidence in the Church of Peter, the Church of Rome, for it is written that the gates of Hell shall not prevail against her.” (p. 28)

THE BREAK IN POLAND

“ It was Cardinal Adam Sapieha, therefore, the wise, courageous, holy archbishop, friend of Pius X, who singled you out as an ardent, pious child, full of promise. It was he who, from afar, watched over your student years. It was he who opened his arms and his heart, as well as his purse, to you during those years. He wanted you to have the very best training and he sent you to Rome and enabled you to travel in Europe, especially France, to gain a wider knowledge of the Church. It was he who got you off to such a good start in your ecclesiastical career, where a protégé without a coach never gets anywhere, that is for sure.

“ In your friend Malinski’s memoirs, one senses that both you and he had no familiarity, no intellectual, spiritual, or human affinity with the Cardinal. Was it because he was too much the great lord ? You hinted as much one day, in a truly distasteful reflection. The true underlying reasons, however, lie elsewhere. Cardinal Sapieha was faithful to his convictions and to the men of the old Catholic, grass-roots, and nationalist Poland, whilst you were not. There is where the break lies and nowhere else (p. 32).

What impact caused this break ?

“ You were the plaything – and I mean plaything – of two occult forces, whose willing prisoner you still remain. The first and more serious force captivated you because of your great love for the theatre. Yes, theatre people love illusion and life in the unreal ; they imagine themselves in turns to be charmers, overlords, magicians and creators of invisible worlds, communicating with telluric forces, the cosmos and the future… And they are always passionately loved, the idols of the masses. Indeed your friend and master, Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk, was one such baneful initiate and initiator. He, at that time, was a disciple of the theosophist Rudolf Steiner.” (p. 32)

“ It seems beyond contestation that forty years ago, when you were barely twenty years old, you became a Steinerian ! The Steinerian influence is blindingly obvious and it gives an entirely different tenor to your humanist speeches, which are heard by the faithful in their millions and by priests and bishops, who hear without listening and who attribute their confused style and obscure boldness to your ‘ Germano-Slav’ genius, alien to the Latin peoples. But it is not really that at all !”

What is it really ?

“ Steiner’s form of Christianity, for the sake of which he parted from the German theosophical society whose president he was, is a cosmic, non-dogmatic and, of course, evolutionist one. It involves initiation into the occult arts, thereby putting its devotees in touch with dark forces, which it calls ‘ guiding spirits,’ which facilitate the exercise of ‘ thought outside the body !’ The means for spreading Steinerian theosophy were, and still are, the theatre, poetry, and especially the recitation of poetry in conjunction with an almost static dance, ‘ eurythmia.’ Lastly, and most importantly, it is spread through the education of the young.

“ What is more, which would explain another, dumfounding, side of your Person and of your preaching, Steiner had a quite extraordinary theory of sexuality – a mitigated form of Catharism. He advocated the practice of ‘ etheric ’ as opposed to physical love and promoted unconsummated marriages of a keen, because spiritual, eroticism. This would procure for its adepts the supreme energy reserved to lovers who, through a rare form of self-mastery, remain chaste even at the most ardent moment of love [...].

“ ‘ The renunciation of bodily union on earth is a preparation for that union in spirit and in truth that exists only beyond the Threshold…’

“ There are reflections here that would meet with your disapproval only because of their excessively and obviously gnostic form. This for example : ‘ The fact of renouncing physical love by means of a privation not imposed from without, which would be merely frustrating, but as a freely accepted sacrifice, can be a decisive factor in interior progress.’ Is not this the Eros, conjugal or extra-conjugal, which you tirelessly preach ?

“ And this reflection, which I hesitate to quote, so revealing of you is it : ‘ The greatness of a work – any artistic work – proceeds from the spiritual substance to be found therein, often unknown to the artist himself. This substance, when it touches, that is to say, reaches the innermost core of a person confronting the work of art, is always linked to the superior Me, and in some way manifests the hidden laws of Karma. The artist’s divination, his permeability to superior realities, proceeds from the fact that his dream life is more intense and more active than that of other men. These interior perceptions that haunt him are expressed in his works. Now, these works are coloured partly by the artist’s own karmic antecedents and partly by the common situation of the period in general.’ Is not that your prophetism ?

“ Yes, that is the secret of your ‘ prayer,’ of your transcendental ‘ meditations,’ of your unending ‘ hymns ’ to sexual love and Life, to the culture, wisdom and glory of Man !

“ The other circle to which you linked your destiny, and which you have never denied, is that of Tygodnik Powszerchny, the only Catholic newspaper to be authorised in Poland, of which the editor-in-chief was Jerzy Turowicz, of Polish and Jewish descent.

“ So you passed your formative years in the intimate company of Jan Tyranowski, the disturbing lay mystic, Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk, the Steinerian theosophical initiate, and Jerzy Turowicz, a liberal who was open to Masonic ideas – all before going on to Lublin University to study Max Scheler !”

THE BREAK AT CRACOW.

“ Your appointment as auxiliary bishop dates from 1958, and your appointment as Vicar Capitular, on the death of Archbishop Baziak, dates from June 1962. You were then the youngest diocesan administrator in the whole of Poland, and then, in 1968, at the age of forty-eight, you became Metropolitan Archbishop of Cracow. This means that for twenty years you had complete independence to govern the pastoral direction of this pilot diocese. Your biographers all agree that you made changes, without being able to define them precisely.

“ The biographers generally present your activity at Cracow as something new added to the old, a sort of ‘ overheating’ bringing apostolic, militant and pious ardour to a high degree of spontaneity and creativity. Instead of routine, there was zeal, enthusiasm and disinterestedness... The paralytic was made to walk and the cripple threw away his crutches.

“ A close reading of the documents will reveal something else : not a superficial reformism but a profound change. One dare not call it a change of religion, but it was a change in the ‘way of living’ that religion. It is not that the label on the bottle became more attractive, but the contents changed. Contrary to what empty-minded people might think, a manufacturer launching a new product often prefers to keep the old name and label so as not to lose the confidence of his clientele.

“ Here we have a very young bishop succeeding to two venerable Prince-Bishops of the old school – that of St. Pius X, anti-Modernist and anti-democrat, it must be said. A philosophy professor, an intellectual, succeeds two ecclesiastics attached to their dogmas, canon law, liturgy and popular traditions. Is it the useful religion that will change ? No, it is the feeling of the utility of religion that will change. Everything hinges, not on the articles of the Creed, but on the very first word, on the very first act : Credo.

“ Until your arrival, the Metropolitan Archbishops of Cracow shared exactly the same faith as their people. Religion was a necessity. It was imposed on all alike, believers and unbelievers, good and bad, because God is the Master of our existence. He created and redeemed us, washed us in the waters of Baptism and so enrolled us as faithful Christians and submissive members of His Church. There was no shilly-shallying if one remained a Catholic. Everyone knew that this life is a difficult passage, a time of trial, and a ‘ valley of tears,’ where one must pray much, as people had always prayed, do penance, suffer, carry one’s cross, conquer sin, fear Hell and die fortified by the sacraments of the Church, so that finally one might go to ‘ Heaven, the unique object of all our works.’

“ Because this life is not easy – and for countless other moral, political and historical reasons – there are always large numbers of people who live on the fringes of the Church, or who reject it altogether and are hostile. It is necessary to live with these people, however, while fleeing their influence – though sometimes suffering their persecution – for their influence must always be combated if we are to preserve the sacred rights of the Catholic religion, as we wish to do. Thus, in Cracow, there were deeply entrenched Jews and Freemasons, apostates, public sinners and the excommunicated. Now there also were the Communists, a new scourge, monopolising all the good places in society since the war.

“ Life had gone on thus for a thousand years ! In the midst of it all, people had worked out their salvation. It was a closed, stagnant society, turned in on itself and its certitudes, rites, mores and customs, and locked up in its age-old or recent conflicts, all of which were insoluble. And yet the people groaned and prayed, fought and hoped that one day political and social authority would again be restored to Christ the King and to Mary, Queen of Poland, for the glory of God, the liberty and exaltation of Holy Church, the conversion of the infidels. and the regained unanimity of a Catholic Poland set free.

“ You took up your positions of responsibility in this locked-up Church, but you brought to it the contrary idea of a free, open, fraternal society : ‘ Utopia.’ Certainly, you belonged to the country, and its way of living, thinking and feeling is one that you could fully assume. You could play your role as bishop with ease and happiness for you knew it down to its least ancestral obligations. Your dream, however, was to transform this institution from top to bottom. To this end you will inspire it with love and simplicity, spontaneity and freedom – freedom in everyone’s relationship with you and in yours with all. You will change life from grey to rose. You will breath into it consideration for human values and individual dignity, hitherto forgotten, neglected or even frowned upon. You will inspire respect for freedom of conscience and of action, for the diversity of each particular situation and its own value, for the importance of personal action, of responsible commitment, of the present moment, of life on this earth and of the existence of all...

“ Instead of living here below for Heaven, of loving God through fear of Hell and of loving one’s neighbour out of respect for God, you will begin to teach people to live on this earth for its own sake, now, in this present time, loving each man for his own humanity and not waiting until the hereafter before rejoicing in being fully alive and loving. Instead of preaching duty, the law of God, the authority of superiors, dedication to the common good through tithe and tax, political commitment and the sacrifice of one’s own blood, you will prefer to show the other side of things... You will teach people that they can live just as well, better in fact, through respecting each man’s individual rights and fulfilment willed by God ! You will invite them to be free, to create material and cultural goods, to enrich man and society, rather than harping about the merit of suffering, poverty and renunciation. ‘ Joy and Hope,’ as the Council will entitle its Declaration on the Church in the Modern World, rather than ‘ sadness and anguish !’

“ And so we have to make peace with others, be reconciled to the world as it is and abandon this obsessive idea of politically re-conquering society for Christ the King and Mary the Queen ! On the contrary, recognise your opponent’s sincerity and the partial truth that exists in his ideas, for not all is false. Do not judge everything by reference to Heaven and Hell, of which nothing concrete is known. Rather, judge by reference to peace, justice, love and culture in the present-day human, earthly, social context, with a view to the progress of society.

“ In fact, it was not long ago that a systematic analysis of your writings and of your speeches showed me that this substitution of one form of existence for another, of a humanist pastoral approach for a strictly religious one, of an ethic of freedom, happiness and solidarity for one of submission, renunciation and sacrifice, was far from innocent. It was the putting into operation, the praxis to use the word you favour, of a new anthropology. You were fully aware that this substitution would entail a complete overturning of theology and of religion. In place of this obsessive theocentrism you would substitute a conscious and deliberate anthropocentrism, the very anthropocentrism of the atheists, agnostics, Hegelians and Marxists among whom we now have to live. At the same time, we have to establish this humanism at the centre of the Christian Faith and make it an immense act of homage to God and His Christ, liberators of Man and not his exploiters !

“ The priests and faithful of Cracow were obviously a thousand leagues from suspecting anything of the sort. There must have been, however, a few lucid minds and the odd penetrating look that could read you, but their voices were stifled. You were praised for your natural qualities, allied to such great piety. Gradually the world would extol you as the man of providence – not the theorist of an atheistic, humanist revolution, of course not ! – but as the prestigious director of a reform of the Church, the success of which was guaranteed in advance.

“ The Council arrived opportunely. The novelty of Cracow was going to meet the novelty of Rome and of the whole Church. It was even going to direct the latter !” (p. 40)

THE BREAK AT ROME

FROM PIUS XII TO JOHN PAUL II.

In Rome, “ twenty years after the death of Pius XII, in 1978, when you were elected Pope, the break had still not been clearly made, nor had it been stopped. The work of Vatican II was still awaiting its theorist and programmer, the one who would give substance to its dreamlike figures, the one who would give a dogmatic, moral and disciplinary basis to its slogans and big words. Why hide the fact : it is my purpose in writing this Second Book of Accusation – as a sequel to the first such book against Paul VI – to show that You, Most Holy Father, are the theorist who was missing from the complete manifestation of the plan, that You are the wrecker of the Church and that the reason, object and goal of this foretold, irreparable break is to be found precisely in your philosophy – a break that Paul VI could only dream of and prepare for.” (p. 40)

“ Unlike your declared master and father, Paul VI, with you this heterodoxy is primary ; it is a conceptual structure that stands by itself and is absolutely valid in itself.” (p. 47)

It is comprised of :

1° A destruction of our holy religion in a ‘ speculative Good Friday,’ a veritable deicide committed by the praise of atheism inserted in nos. 19, 20 and 21 of the Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes.

2° This ‘ speculative Good Friday’ is followed by the ‘ dialectical Holy Saturday,’ when Pope John Paul II descends to preach Christianity in Hell : “ You, the Roman Pontiff, notwithstanding the condemnation of your great and holy predecessor [Pius IX in the Syllabus,] profess to reconcile yourself to and come to terms with this tyrannical, irreligious and atheistic modern thought, and you are resolved to lead the Church, now become your flock, your over-trusting flock, down this path of perdition ! On the day following this deicidal Good Friday, you have decided to meet the ‘ assassins of the Faith’ and to go down into Hell there to dialogue with them. From the impact of the contradictories, you will produce your new synthesis of a Christian atheism, or of a post-religious Christianity.” (p. 54)

3° He in fact comes back from there for an “ idealist Pasch,” the resurrection, “ the emergence of another transcendence… ” that of man !

It is vertiginous !

A SPECULATIVE GOOD FRIDAY.

What our Father, Georges de Nantes, terms a “ speculative deicide ” results from this thought that Pope John Paul II confided to Frossard :

“ If faith is indispensable to walk on the waters, we must constantly be seeking a form of faith that will measure up to a world that is constantly renewing itself, and does not merely measure up to a past left behind never to return. Besides, it would be difficult for us to identify with this past world, even though we admire it ; we would find it difficult to live in a ‘ pre-Copernicus,’ a ‘ pre-Einstein,’ or even a ‘ pre-Kant’ world. ”

He immediately added : “ I think the Council fulfilled its task by showing an aspect of the Christian Faith that measures up to today’s world, and to tomorrow’s world. ” (N’ayez pas peur, p.282).

“ Here, through clericalism, you fall into integrism, ” our Father observed, “ because if the world was different yesterday, it will be so tomorrow. Therefore Vatican II and You will be left behind ! (Liber II, p. 52)

“ Faith does not constrain the intelligence ; it does not subject it to a system of ‘ ready-made truths.’”(N’ayez pas peur, p. 63) This condemns our Creed to death ! Then, our Father asked John Paul II :

“ In this speculative Good Friday, are you the victim or the executioner ? Are you the servant of God judged and condemned to be crucified, or are you Pilate ? Or maybe Caiaphas, the high priest of these times ?” (Liber II, p. 54)

For “it is false, it is impious, and it is totalitarian” to claim to adapt “ the Christian faith to today’s world,” and it is condemned by article 80 of the Syllabus : “ The Roman Pontiff can and must reconcile himself to and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilisation. ” Anathema !

“ No ! taught Pius IX, with all the weight of his infallible authority and ordinary Magisterium, he cannot and he must not ! One does not reconcile oneself to or come to terms with error, impiety, and mortal danger for souls and cities ! One cannot do so without renouncing his Catholic Faith and betraying his people. A Pope still less than anyone...” (ibid.)

A DIALECTICAL HOLY SATURDAY.

“ On the day following this deicidal Good Friday, you decided to meet the ‘ assassins of the Faith’ and to go down into Hell to dialogue with them. From the impact of the contradictories, you will cause your new synthesis of a Christian atheism, or of a post-religious Christianity, to burst forth.

“ I find the complete proof of this in that ‘ retreat’ you preached before Paul VI at the Vatican In 1976. Its theme is summed up in the title, Sign of Contradiction, involving a dialecticalcontradiction between the religion of the victim and the irreligion of the executioners.

“ What sort of resurrection will this lead to ?” (ibid., p 54)

According to our pure Catholic Faith, man is but nothingness before his Creator, and depends on Him through a relationship of love and grace. Modern irreligion can be explained by original sin, a sin of pride inspired by Satan, and its intellectual and moral corruption that, thereafter, passed on to the whole race of Adam and Eve. Deceived by the Devil, they disobeyed God.

According to John Paul II, Satan, “ this enemy of God and of man will introduce his cunning lies into the clear and natural relationship between God and man in order to create confusion. In this he will succeed only too well !”

“ Because I am not writing a novel, I shall summarise your argument without further ado :

“ Satan persuades man that God wants of him a blind, prompt and disinterested obedience, in itself unjust and odious. That is the first conflict.

“ He then invents the story that God does not tolerate man’s pretension to make himself ruler and king of the world – an irritating and revolting jealousy. The second conflict.

“ Finally, in our day, he invents the story that God will never tolerate man’s making himself God, even though man has the capacity and irrepressible desire for this. God thus provokes man to murder and fatal deicide. Third conflict and end of history.

“ All that is simply a dream and a lie, you say. God is not against man in that way ! Besides, for the first time in the history of mankind, the contradiction is going to be revealed and surmounted by you. Gentlemen atheists and deicides, you will say to them, I have understood you. You did the right thing to revolt, to dominate the earth and to kill off all those false gods obstructing humanity’s forward march. The disciple and apostle of the God of the future views you as his brethren and his forerunners in the new humanism where God becomes man’s friend and no longer his rival. Because, until today you have been misled about God and about the true religion.

“ Such is your new humanism and here it is all set forth. ”

SIN IS NOT TO DISOBEY, BUT TO COMMAND.

“ It all begins,” you say, “ with an untruth that one might think was merely based on faulty information, to which can be given the benefit of an honest mistake : ‘ Has God told you then not to eat of any of the trees in paradise ?’ The woman unhesitatingly corrects the faulty information, perhaps without sensing that this is merely an opening gambit, a prelude to what the father of lies is about to say to her. Here is what follows. First he calls in question God’s veracity : ‘ You will not die !’ Thus he strikes at the heart of the Covenant between God and man.”

“ Very few readers will have noticed, Most Holy Father, that here you are already cheating. You have conjured away one card, and on the next page you will produce another.

“ You have conjured away the existence of a God-given precept to our first parents – an order, which they had only to obey, surely ? In its place, you introduce another principle, of your own fashioning : ‘ Satan’s statement,’ you say, ‘ is intended to destroy the truth about the God of the Covenant, about the God Who creates out of love, Who out of love concludes a Covenant with humanity in the person of Adam, and Who out of love lays upon man requirements that apply to the very essence and to the very reason of man.’

“ Here, it is no longer Satan who is deceiving man, it is you. You deny – by a subtle omission, which is a mortal sin here – that God has the right to command, that He has in fact commanded His creature, under pain of punishment, that which He willed to command him, demanding of him his obedience for the pure and simple good, merit, advantage and glory of obedience. You make authority a sin, and disobedience the natural and virtuous reaction to any trampling on man’s freedom by God or anyone else ! Love, according to your lie, excludes any law that would go beyond ‘ the very essence of man’ under the control of ‘ reason.’” (ibid., p. 57)

“ ‘ The God of the Covenant is effectively presented to the woman, ’you explain, ‘ as a Sovereign Who is jealous of the mystery of His absolute rule. He is presented as an adversary of man against Whom man needs to rebel.’ One would think that you yourself were slipping into the serpent’s skin to make God’s gentle authority over his Creatures absurd, odious, unbearable and revolting. Having thus presented the divine truth as a Satanic lie, having thus sponsored man’s disobedience and his rejection on principle of all divine law, you will draft an initial attempt at reconciliation. You will tell the atheists :

“ This God is not, or at least is no longer, the God we are announcing to you. The God of Love, Love itself, forbids nothing, does not stand in man’s way and would be grieved to vex him ! He allows everything ; He desires and wants all that man in the first place wants. Should He forbid a fruit, it is because that fruit is poison !

“ For you, therefore, Satan is ‘ the author of a false conclusion,’ namely, that God gives commandments, exceeding His rights and violating man’s rights and freedom ! “ However,” you continue, “ the ‘ deity’ of man is of no concern to Satan. The only thing that matters is to transmit to man his own rebellion, a rebellion by which he has identified and established himself in this world of creatures outside the truth and outside the law of dependence on the Creator. That is the message of his Non serviam (I will not serve,) which is the true antithesis of another definition : Mi-cha-El (who is like God ?)”

According to John Paul II, “ the ‘ deity’ of man ” is the human condition that resulted from the creation of the sixth day : “ God said : ‘ Let Us make man in Our image and likeness. ’” (Gn 1:26)

To be the image and likeness of God means that, endowed with intelligence and will, man is able to enter actively into a relationship of love and will with God. Thus, John Paul II recognises in man an inborn deity by virtue of which he had only to follow his own personal law !

“ Being transcendent, he should have known that God could not command anything that his own deitas, his divine nature, his intelligence, his heart and his nature had not itself first commanded. He should not, or rather Eve should not, have fallen into Satan’s trap and believed such a monstrous thing : that God should commit such an abuse of power as to give him an order !” (Liber II, p. 57)

From this original quid pro quo, “ the world becomes the terrain of man’s temptation, the terrain in which man turns his back on God ; a terrain of rebellion against God rather than of collaboration with Him,” but “ this contestation is artificial. It is the result of a new trick of the Devil’s, provoking a second misunderstanding between modern man and God from the birth of humanism, one that has regrettably been made more poisonous by the religions and by the Churches down to our day. Vatican II understood this lie and resolved this misunderstanding by solemnly proclaiming ‘ the fully legitimate autonomy of human society and science.’ Here is the antithesis of this diabolical lie : ‘ not only is this autonomy demanded by the men of our time, it is also in conformity with the will of the Creator.’

“ A Satanic lie, you say, at last denounced and belied by the Council ? Most Holy Father – I have to say this lest we go to our ruin – it is this denunciation and denial that are themselves the lies, because the condemnation of man’s autonomy in the world, which you attribute to Satan, is in fact the sacred and unchangeable Catholic doctrine of the Bible, of Tradition and of the infallible Magisterium ! You attribute this truly divine Word to Satan, so as to allow yourself to reject it. Then you burden the Catholic Church and God with full responsibility for the humanist revolt, for its shattering irreligion and for its desire for a world totally emancipated, secularised and void of God !

“ Is it a Satanic lie, this so-called will of God to reign over all His creation ? Is it a detestable misunderstanding ? And is it, therefore, understandable, just and legitimate, that modern society should revolt against this imperial divinity, its Christ the King, its politicised Church, and all religion ? It is you, the Roman Pontiff, who speaks thus ! It is the Second Vatican Council ! And for this you change the divine Word into a Satanic lie ? Yes, man is free and the whole World belongs to him for good and for all. Let us have no more talk of obedience, you plead ; the word is a trap. Let us talk of justice.

“ Your whole argument, in effect, empties the world of all divine authority, of all God’s law and grace, and of our Heavenly Father’s good pleasure and supernatural designs, in order to agree with the wicked that this world is theirs, entirely and exclusively, so that it could not be more theirs if it were bequeathed to them. They no longer have to submit to any duty, sacrifice, renunciation or prohibition prescribed by God. However, out of an innate sense of justice and out of a free act of gratitude, they have only to give thanks to the Creator for this kingship He has given them, abdicating His own entirely for their exclusive advantage.

“ Here again, in order to explain the existence of divine commandments – like the prohibition of abortion – you refer to man’s possible ‘ follies,’ not to his crimes, still less to his sins. It is thus that you plead the cause of God, your God Who is never seen, a God Who has deliberately renounced His government of the world to abandon it to the power of man. Of men ! for there are many, even billions, of them, and if God is not their great King, since they all claim to be king, which of them will prevail over all the others, and by what absurd and terrible means ? You are not concerned about the result. You have simply once more pleased the atheist of this apostate century by attributing to a Satanic lie what is in fact the Catholic doctrine of the Omnipotence and Kingship of God, of Jesus Christ Son of God made man, over the world and over history – a doctrine which is unbearable to the atheist.

“ Second stage of your agreement with the wicked of this century: sin exists in divine, ecclesiastical, political, patronal, and paternal authorities who govern and reign in the name of God, who impose on men a law of God, an idea of God’s kingship, ‘ unjustly ’ taking from them the government of the world. Sin exists not in the wicked who shouted, ‘ We will not have this man to rule over us !’ You swear that your new God is not ours. The moment has come to say to you, as Jesus said to Peter who tempted Him : ‘ Vade retro, Satana !’ (Mt. 16.23). ” (p. 60)

SIN IS NOT IN MAKING ONESELF GOD, BUT IN CONDEMNING THIS CULT.

If man is God, God cannot be God also. Hence the ultimate Satanic temptation : “ to suppress God from man’s thinking and from his world, to make man himself the object of his faith, hope and love, making him the only object of his cult and adoration. ”

Clinging stubbornly to his plan of agreement with the atheists, John Paul II goes in the direction of their atheism even further than they had dreamed :

“ Secular anthropocentrism,” he writes, “ is even more opposed to admitting man’s relationship with Satan than it is to acknowledging man’s relationship with God or with anything sacred. Man is alone, and his greatness requires that this be so : that he be alone, ‘ beyond good and evil,’ beyond God and Satan. All the same, might not the perfection of human temptation lie precisely in this, that man should believe himself to be alone ?”

Karol Wojtyla does not condemn this idea for, according to him “ this auto-divinisation is the truth of his being and of his history. The crime is not there. It is beyond this. The crime consists in allowing ourselves to be deceived by the Liar and in thinking that there is no God Who is both able and desirous to authorise, support, and love man whilst the latter makes himself God and adores himself in His very presence – and this without any spirit of rivalry or hatred on the part of God. ”

“ A Satanic lie, you say ! Man can make himself God without wounding the God Whom I know (from my gnosis), Whom I and I alone adore, and Who is transcendent and not to be compared with the idols of paganism nor even with the ancient divinities of Christians, the Pantocrator God of the Constantinian age, of the Middle Ages and of the Counter-Reformation age. My God, of the phenomenological age, has nothing to fear, nothing to lose, from man’s divinisation today. On the contrary ! by making himself transcendent, Man will restore within himself ‘ the image and likeness ’ of hyper-transcendence, of the Transcendent Other Who is beyond our world and Who, like His Adversary Satan, is ‘ extra-empirical. ’” (p. 63)

AN IDEALIST PASCH : THE EMERGENCE OF “ ANOTHER TRANSCENDENCE.”

“ Here, then, for you is Easter Morning, the Pasch, the hour of the resurrection of the Faith, or of faith in the resurrection of God in the heart of man.” How is it possible to pass from “ the transcendence of man…” to the resurrection of God “ through humanism, atheism and materialism, accepted in all their rigour ?” (p. 70)

“ This, the most delicate stage of your dialectic, the most unbearable for our pious ears, and the most futile for the ears of the Freemasons and Marxists to whom you nevertheless pay homage, is something you have expounded on many an occasion, principally in your indigestible work The Person and the Act, and then in your equally confused conferences, ‘ The Personal Structure of Auto-Determination,’ ‘ The Auto-Teleology of Man’ etc. (with all this autolatry, we are clearly in the century of the auto !). It is invariably a matter of showing how and why, from what imperative need or desire, and by what process of auto-decision, as Georges Blazynski summarily says, ‘ man surpasses his own humanity and attains the infinitude of God. ’” (p. 72)

This, however, is illusory, for there is “ a dialectical hiatus between the absolute man and the relative notion of image,” into which man projects himself above and beyond, as a future auto-realisation of himself, as a free and transcendent being.

“ If the image comes first, depicted in man’s consciousness through his ‘ faith’ in himself, and if this image be projected into a supreme transcendence, then the God who will appear to him will not be ‘ Being,’ but Image of the image of man. You will not have constituted man as ‘ image of God’ or ‘ man of God,’ but you will have given to the human ideal a usurped divine status : the ‘ god of Man. ’ This hypostasised ‘ image of Man ’ will never be the ‘ true and living God,’ but an idol without being or life !”

“ Altogether, although you are very strong against materialism and strong in your desire to destroy the old religion in the name of the absolute of Man, you are powerless to effect the reappearance of God after having killed Him in souls and buried Him in the tomb of your secular and worldly humanism – the reappearance on the third day of the old God, risen as the brand new Beautiful God in the image of the perfect man. Despite all your efforts, he remains a will-o’-the-wisp, without being, without life, without face. ” (p. 75)

“ For the paschal resurrection of a new God, it is a total failure. From the tomb in which you have walled up the Old God, after having handed Him over to the executioner to be executed, no new god has arisen. ” (p. 78)

There remains morality, the “ last chance for the resurrection of God.” It is not an alienating morality, one of filial obedience to God, Creator and Father. Rather it is the responsible auto-determination of Kantian morality :

“ Man is a subject who must conquer the fullness of his absolute and therefore infinite being by his own efforts, in the name of his own dignity, freely and in accordance with the orientations and norms of his conscience. ”

How is this a resurrection of God ? “ Man is the unique, exclusive and supreme principle of his own moral effort, as he is also his own final, ultimate end. ” This precludes “ the grace and mercy ” that was revealed in the theophany of Tuy, and that is the object of Pope Francis’ insistent pastoral action. It is he who wants to canonise John Paul II !

“ Now, ‘ this conquest of himself, in another dimension, is the conquest of the Kingdom of God’ (oh dear !)[N’ayez pas peur, p.146.] Therefore (therefore !) humanism as such is Christianity... And God ? ‘ I am convinced (sic) that God is the ultimate guarantee of man’s freedom.’ That is all ! It is Immanuel Kant’s ‘ noumenon.’ All his disciples allowed this ‘ noumenon ’ to die out and be annihilated in the infinite void of the starry beyond !

“ Such then is the God of John Paul II, of no more ‘ empirical’ reality than Satan. God and Satan are realities of the sphere of the invisible, the inaccessible, and the Unknowable. Man, on the other hand, experiences within himself freedom, auto-determination, transcendence, ‘ deity ’ – he experiences his own absolute and his own infinite. In him, the ‘ image of God ’ is real and ‘ phenomenal. ’ God is its figure, symbol, projection, or guarantee – who knows ! – in the unobserved, unproven and unprovable ‘ extra-empirical’ order of the ‘ noumenal.’

“ The great advantage of this God is that He does not exist, or if He does exist, it is as though He were non-existent for us – the pure guarantor of our freedom. Man, Man, Man ! For a ‘ phenomenal ’ Pope, there is only Man, guaranteed by a fictitious God Who is ‘ noumenal. ’” (p. 80)

Brother Bruno of Jesus-Mary.