At last! the long-awaited answer
from Rome has come via
a questionnaire from the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith

I received on April 23, 2019, the feast of Saint George, this letter dated April 15, 2019 :

Georges PONTIER
Archbishop of Marseille,
Marseille, April 15, 2019

To Monsieur Bruno BONNET-EYMARD
Head of the Movement
“Catholic Counter-Reformation”

Sir,

In an open letter dated November 29, 2012 to Bishop Marc STENGER of Troyes, in response to an attempt on his part to reconcile your movement with the Catholic Church, you laid down preconditions for this reconciliation. I quote you: “If we are determined never to separate from the Church, neither can we accept in conscience that which we regard as heretical. Any attempt at conciliation must therefore be preceded by a doctrinal judgement. Indeed, if Father de Nantes’ theological demonstrations led to our reasoned and irreducible adherence, we do not claim to be infallible any more than he did. This is the reason why our Catholic Faith and our rights as baptised persons compel us to demand a judgement on the precise points that we contest in the conciliar innovations.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has informed me that the only precondition to be taken into consideration for this reconciliation is your adherence to the Church and to her Magisterium, in particular to the Second Vatican Council, as well as the ecclesiality of the functioning of your movement.

Given the presence of your movement in a number of dioceses in France, in my capacity as President of the French Conference of Bishops, I am therefore responsible for sending to you – and I do so as an attachment – the questionnaire approved by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This questionnaire is intended for each member of the CRC, who is asked to answer it individually. As I do not know the membership, I am counting on your loyalty to transmit it to each of them and to allow each of them to respond. I entrust Bishop Yves PATENOTRE, Archbishop Emeritus of Sens-Auxerre, with the task of collecting the individual responses to be sent to him at the following address:

Monseigneur Yves Patenôtre
3 rue du Cloître Saint Étienne
10000 TROYES
[email protected]

I ask that everyone to please reply no later than Pentecost Monday 2019, which is June 10. I wish everyone the light of the Holy Spirit. You should know that in the event of refusal, the appropriate canonical censures will be issued, according to the terms of canon 1347:

1. “A censure cannot be validly imposed unless the offender has beforehand received at least one warning to purge the contempt, and has been allowed suitable time to do so.”

2. “The offender is said to have purged his contempt if he or she has truly repented of the offence and has made, or at least seriously promised to make, reparation for the damages and scandal.”

May the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the Pentecost, enlighten you.

+ Georges Pontier
Archbishop of Marseille
President of the French Conference of Bishops

4 Place du Colonel Edon – 13 007 Marseille – Tél. 04 91 14 28 90 – fax 04 91 31 06 81 – [email protected]

Questionnaire to submit to the community
of the Catholic Counter-Reformation

On Doctrine and the Catholic Faith:

1. Do you profess the Catholic faith as taught in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed and in all the Ecumenical Councils recognised by the Catholic Church?

2. Do you recognise the dogmatic and Magisterial authority of the Second Vatican Council, in particular with regard to the doctrine of the Church, Divine Revelation, the liturgy and religious freedom?

3. Do you recognise the legitimate and uninterrupted Magisterium of the Popes, successors of the Apostle Peter?

4. Do you recognise the ordinary Magisterium and the authority of the bishop on whom you depend?

On the organisation of the community:

5. What are the statutes or regulatory texts of the community? Would you be willing to forward them to us, and if necessary, to work towards their evolution if the legitimate ecclesiastical authority considers it appropriate to do so?

Jesus! Mary! Joseph!

Monseigneur Yves Patenôtre
in the care of
Monseigneur Marc Stenger
Bishop of Troyes
3 rue du Cloître Saint-Etienne
10000 Troyes

St-Parres-lès-Vaudes, June 13, 2019
Second Apparition of Our Lady at Fatima

Excellency,

It is my honour to acknowledge receipt of Archbishop Georges Pontier’s letter dated April 15, 2019, in which the Archbishop of Marseilles sent me a five-question form to be given personally to each of the 120 religious who recognise me as the Superior General of the Communities of the Little Brothers and Little Sisters of the Sacred Heart, founded by Father Georges de Nantes whom I have succeeded. Nevertheless, I would like to point out that the true General and Protector of our Order has been the most Blessed Virgin Mary ever since our Founder “made way” for Her, on the feast of the Immaculate Conception of the year of grace 1997. Archbishop Pontier wishes each one of us the light of the Holy Spirit. It is therefore to Her, the vessel of the Holy Spirit, that we entrust ourselves so that, in writing to you, the virtues of faith, hope and charity may be kept intact.

I have three observations to make before I answer the questionnaire:

First observation: Archbishop Pontier passes over in silence a name that cannot be ignored: Father Georges de Nantes, well known in particular for having publicly commented on and criticised the texts of the Second Vatican Council at the very time when they were being debated and adopted. We, his spiritual sons, intend to remain faithful to him and it is from his immense work, which has never been doctrinally censured, that we will formulate the answers to the questionnaire imposed on us.

Second observation: I sent a letter to Bishop Stenger on September 29, 2012, a few days after having met with him in his office. It was not an open letter but a personal one. Six years passed, during which not the slightest indication was given to me about my request, and now I have received a reply from Archbishop Pontier. It is true that the Houses of our communities are located in several dioceses, true also that he writes to me in his capacity as President of the French Conference of Bishops. Yet is this elective mandate, which is about to expire, sufficient to grant the Archbishop of Marseille jurisdiction over all the territories of the dioceses of France, and of Canada (!), to enjoin people, whose religious state he voluntarily disregards, to answer a series of five questions within an imperative period of two months under penalty of canonical sanctions? I am going to answer the questionnaire, but I will send my letter to you through the Bishop of Troyes, Marc Stenger, for we recognise that we are subject to his authority.

Third observation: the questions put to us are presented in a very simple way, but the answers are difficult because, in order to be accurate in regard to the Church’s rules for exercising the power of teaching, distinctions must be made, at least for the first four questions. I am writing this not to obtain, in turn, a reflection period of six years (!) but to explain to you why the religious of our communities, who have all personally read Archbishop Pontier’s letter and the questionnaire, have asked me to present their responses on their behalf, wishing furthermore, that this should bear testimony to the supernatural unity that exists among us on such subjects to which we have devoted our entire lives.

FIRST QUESTION

“Do you profess the Catholic Faith as taught in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed and in all the Oecumenical Councils recognised by the Catholic Church?”

1. Under the apparent pretext of professing the Catholic Faith, or even worse, in the name of the Catholic Faith without which no one can be saved, the author of this question forcibly assimilates, but without explicitly saying so, the Council of Nicaea with the Second Vatican Council. Thus, the authority of the former surreptitiously warrants the orthodoxy of the latter. Why is this reference to the “Nicene-Constantinopolitan” Creed made? Does the author of the question seriously think that we are questioning the dogma of the consubstantiality of the divine Persons? His concern is perhaps to avoid offending the sensibilities of our schismatic ‘brothers’ from the East? All this is neither very serious, nor very loyal, but it will not discourage us from answering this and all the others questions very seriously.

Yes, we profess the Catholic Faith as taught in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed and in all the oecumenical councils recognised by the Catholic Church, but with two major reservations.

2. After two thousand years of history, can the Catholic Faith as taught by the Church be reduced to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed and oecumenical councils, as the author of the questionnaire would suggest? No, obviously not!

With our Father, Georges de Nantes, we profess accurately with respect to the Catholic Faith that God has revealed His Mysteries and all the truths necessary for salvation to men, the objects of His Mercy, principally through His Son Jesus Christ. The Apostles alone handed down the fullness of this Revelation to the Church, through personal inspiration, in an oral form: Tradition, or in written form: Sacred Scripture. Their corpus constitutes the Deposit of the Faith. We have access to the knowledge of these Mysteries through the teaching of the Church. She infallibly presents, interprets, and explains this divine Revelation. Scripture and Tradition are the Sources of our Faith; the teaching of the Church is the “channel” that communicates its doctrine to us in an ordinary, spontaneous, and living manner, with an admirable coherence, through the liturgy and through catechetical teaching. A certain number of truths have been specified, defined, imposed in an extraordinary or solemn manner because of their importance or because they were contested by heretics. These are the dogmas, which are the unassailable framework of revealed doctrine. This profession of the Catholic Faith contains the seeds of the answers to all the questions of the form that is imposed on us.

3. Did the Second Vatican Council, like the previous oecumenical councils and in particular the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, lay down a dogmatic teaching without which a son of the Church cannot claim to confess the Catholic faith? Despite flagrant irregularities that seem to have marred the voting and promulgation procedures of the various texts, Father Georges de Nantes and we who follow in his footsteps recognise the Second Vatican Council as a true and legitimate Oecumenical Council of the Holy Roman Church, because it bears all the canonical hallmarks of such, perhaps more so than any other Council since the first one, that of Jerusalem. The Pope played a considerable role at this Council and conferred his full authority on it. Never had so many bishops been gathered, and from almost all over the world. It assembled and took place with no interference from secular powers. No one contested it; it seems to have been recognised by everyone. We therefore recognise the full canonical legitimacy of the Second Vatican Council, the 21^st Oecumenical Council, the greatest of all times.

Nevertheless did it set out a dogmatic teaching? It is impossible to answer this question without giving the rationale for the answer to the second question on the form.

SECOND QUESTION:

“Do you recognise the dogmatic and Magisterial authority of the Second Vatican Council, in particular with regard to the doctrine on the Church, Divine Revelation, the liturgy and religious freedom?”

We will discuss the magisterial authority of the Acts of the Second Vatican Council (V) after having briefly summarised the analysis of Father de Nantes, as a private theologian, with regard to the conciliar doctrine on Divine Revelation (I), the liturgy (II), the Church (III) and religious freedom (IV.)

I. ON DIVINE REVELATION

We believe with full certainty that, during His earthly life, the Son of God made man revealed all the divine truth that it pleased the Father to make known to us for our salvation: He thus brought to fullness once and for all, the knowledge that men should have of divine mysteries. The Apostles saw and heard this subsisting, unique divine Word. Inspired very specially by the Holy Spirit for this work, they taught and thus fixed in human language all this life and this doctrine, these divine and historical facts and these spiritual revelations that form the sacred sources and foundations of our religion.

Thus, the Church gives us access to the apostolic Tradition in which we hear and read the Word of God, without any veil other than that of the Faith. The work of the Church herself has consisted of a continuous and faithful “transmission” of this initial Revelation to successive generations. She has fulfilled this mission by translating the original words in accordance with the languages of men, by precisely condemning false interpretations or developments that appeared here and there, by defining and gathering into a corpus of doctrine what the apostolic Tradition taught in a divine manner, no doubt more perfectly, but less adapted to us. The dogmas, liturgical prayer, the Creeds and quite simply our catechism are thus the works of ecclesiastical Tradition, in which we truly and conveniently find God’s authentic Revelation. The Church has done the work well, under the fully solicitous authority of her Pastors and by having frequent recourse to their infallibility. The Holy Spirit guarantees this zealous and attentive work of the servants of God’s Word: “We must not distinguish between the Church and Jesus Christ, between the Church’s Tradition and Revelation; they are one and the same thing.” (Saint Joan of Arc to her judges at Rouen) It is through this total teaching, through and in her formulas and rites, that the Catholic reaches by means of faith the very mystery of God and achieves union with his Saviour. We can read Holy Scripture, rediscover the teachings and customs of the early Church – this is even recommended – but we will always find therein the same teaching as that of the modern-day Church, the same faith, the same truth. Nevertheless, the teaching most adapted to us, the surest, is obviously the faith of the catechism as explained by our good parish priest in keeping with the Church the whole earth over and recapitulating or evoking the teaching of all his predecessors.

No revolution is possible, no historical evolution either, no alteration due to exterior influences, no foreign contribution. If the Church develops her teaching, it is by drawing from her apostolic treasure these new things in keeping with the ancient, without denying or changing anything. On the contrary, it is the apostolic deposit that then seems better known, and the new teaching appears lucidly drawn from the Tradition. Thus, there is nothing nebulous, fanciful, “prophetic” in this Magisterium, and we believe in it precisely because of this fidelity and this lucidity. It itself affirms that no other revelation or divine illumination can contradict it. The teaching of the Church is the Faith, and the Faith is the Tradition through the Church of the Word of God received from Jesus Christ and first taught by the Apostles. It is clear.

Despite some admirable formulas inserted in a deliberately ambiguous text, the Constitution Dei Verbum, intentionally distorted the classic doctrine of Divine Revelation with the aim of freeing itself from the encumbrance of dogma, in the name of Scripture and the vital experience of present-day Christians. The Constitution, emancipated from Church Tradition by means of a surprising glorification of Scripture and a presentation of the “Word of God” currently uttered by the men of the Church as though it were a real and contemporary presence of the living and acting Christ, substituted a Word that does not exist personified, structured, or objective in our common experience for the teaching of the Church that had been firm until then.

Here is the result of this thesis that emanates from illuminism: an immense and scandalous confusion of language, the substitution of a hundred opinions for the unique Creed, the crumbling of the Faith. What is more, by order of the hierarchy acting in the name of the Council, the liturgy and catechetics have been systematically renewed in view of a new, informal, immanentist ‘training in the faith.’ The ancient rites and catechisms have been reproved and banished precisely because they preserved the Roman faith in its unchangeable form.

II. ON THE LITURGY

Because the Church is a “mystical person” – the social Body of Christ, the Soul of which is the Holy Spirit –, all that she says and accomplishes is “priestly”, i.e. mediatory of the life and holiness of Jesus Christ “diffused and communicated,” as Bossuet said. This function is different and necessarily separated from all other human activities [...]. Thus it is the essential life of Christians of all races and conditions, and of all times, throughout the centuries, from generation to generation. It thus defines a social, Catholic and apostolic rule, which is one and holy, the manifestation of an unchanging faith and the work of an organising Church. Vice versa, once the priestly liturgy has become the normal practice of God’s holy People, it nourishes and maintains the faith, it builds the Church and organises it into a hierarchy. “Lex orandi, lex credendi.” Supernatural life sets prayer in motion, but this movement maintains life. If faith were to disappear, if the Church were to disband, the liturgy would be the first thing to perish. Conversely, however, if the liturgy deteriorates, the Church breaks up and faith is extinguished.

Until the Second Vatican Council, the liturgy was a priestly work, a work of Christ and the Church, more divine than human, a work of preaching, sacramental sacrifice and divine praise, which was celebrated for the spiritual good of the faithful, but not without their pious participation. After the Council, more often than not, it has become either insipid or a spontaneous, ostensibly aesthetical, modern creation of man who is rendering a cult to himself. Unconcerned with pleasing God and meriting His graces, the postconciliar liturgy is wholly occupied with both pleasing man as though it were an art and meriting that he take interest and participate in it.

That is why the Second Vatican Council itself did not define the liturgy of the future. It was a decisive stage in opening the Church up to novelty. That stage was soon overtaken and it became accepted that “obedience to the Council” meant “going beyond” what had been authorised and in “developing” what it contained in germ. For more than fifty years, there has not been a single heresiarch who has not appealed to the Council in carrying out his action in broad daylight with full immunity. This is especially true in the liturgical domain through all the liberties, orientations and creativity opened up by the conciliar reform, particularly with regard to demolishment of the Mass and the suppression of all Eucharistic ceremonies and devotions.

The true problem is not the rite per se. We are not asking that we be granted a few furtive ceremonies in Latin and the right to make three genuflexions instead of one. We have always recognised that the Mass said according to the Novus Ordo of 1970 is valid. No, in order to reconcile us, it is a question of being reconciled first of all with God by avenging the insults made to Him officially in the sacrament of His Body and Blood by heretical theologians and perjured priest.

We can no longer remain insensitive to the sadness of God that deeply moved Francisco of Fatima nor to the pressing request of the Angel of Fatima in 1916: “Eat and drink the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, horribly outraged by ungrateful men. Make reparation for their crimes and console your God.”

III. ON THE CHURCH

We profess that this society, the Church, is a human organism or created instrument by means of which God calls all men to salvation and gives them, if they adhere to her through faith, justification and grace for eternal life. Thus, the Church is the means and the source of the true religion, the union of men with the One God. The Church is a Mother who engenders the sons of Adam, through a new birth, to restored grace. She is a family in which divine life is transmitted, beginning with Christ, from generation to generation. The Church is human and divine. Revelation alone makes it known to us in two connected and complementary truths. First of all, the Mystery of the Church is that of a human society of which the Son of God is the human founder and remains the Sovereign Head always living and glorious. He, in fact, governs it Himself with the assistance of a hierarchy that He founded and equipped with His own divine Powers and His rights. It is through Himself, then through His Apostles and through their successors that Christ creates and organises His Church as a social, living, life-giving, holy and perfect Body. The hierarchy is the efficient cause, the created, human, historical and visible cause.

Nevertheless, the union of the human Church with her divine Head is not physical, as in the Incarnation, but moral. It supposes in the Church a holy will, a divine energy, a principle of fidelity that keeps her indefectibly united to her Head. This “uncreated Soul” of the Church is the Person of the Holy Spirit, Who was sent to her on Pentecost by the Father and the Son. The divine Soul of this unique and particular Body, the Paraclete has a profound affinity for this Church, the Catholic Church alone.

Even when He calls all men to the divine Life, it is in subordination to and in view of His one Church. This work of the Holy Spirit is the “formal cause” or the “immanent principle of organisation” of this social Body of which Christ is the Head: that is to say, His Energy descends and communicates itself hierarchically from the Head to the members according to the degrees of the Powers established by Christ. Even where the Holy Spirit acts in complete liberty by the gift of “charisms”, it is neither in contradiction to nor separate from the hierarchical institution and its apostolic discipline.

The Constitution Lumen Gentium perverted this enlightening Catholic definition of the Church.

First of all, it made the Church the light of the world. She is therefore no longer self-sufficient. She is no longer oriented towards the service of God, drawing all men to this superior life for which she alone holds the keys. She is busy, with a passion for the world, for its success, providing it vaguely with an energy said to be divine, a light of the Spirit, a Christlike unction, in order to allow it to attain its complete fulfilment on earth. One could soon come to the conclusion that wherever “spiritual” or “cultural” animation, generosity, liberating struggles take place among men, in a new form, the Church is there.

Then, the Constitution proceeded with a revolution by first presenting the Church as the “people of God” before dealing with the Hierarchy. Thus, the pyramid found itself inverted. The People would have thus pre-existed, and this People is presented, as entirely alive, wholly illuminated and utterly sanctified. It is gathered together by the direct, invisible, disinterested, unexpected, and unlimited action of the Holy Spirit before the hierarchy even remotely intervenes! The entire structure of the Church is overthrown and her boundaries torn down. This people of God goes far beyond the narrow limits of Catholicism and, full of the Spirit, it is adorned with all perfections: all its members are prophets, kings and priests. When thought was finally given to the Hierarchy, there was nothing left to ascribe to it other than a secondary and vaguely antagonistic role. It is put “at the service” of this people of gods!

Moreover, and despite a quickly forgotten Nota prævia, the Constitution Lumen Gentium gave the semblance of having the idea of collegiality triumph, by making the episcopal College the primary factor, the depositary of the “spiritual gift” granted by the Holy Spirit to the Apostolic College. Thus “the collegiate character and aspect of the episcopal order” are asserted. In an extraordinarily ambiguous sentence, the Council makes this College “the subject of supreme and full power over the universal Church.” This was stated with much tact so as to show consideration for the Pope’s authority! With the decree Optatam totius ecclesiæ renovationem, the bishops, who until then had enjoyed a real and personal authority over a limited territory, now exercise an appearance of power without real authority over immense regions and an unlimited universe. This is in direct opposition to the Divine constitution of the Church, such as had been provided for by her Founder, Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Finally, this subversion of the Hierarchy, this new service of the world, has logically resulted in the promotion of the laity to the detriment of the priest who no longer has a specific function wherein he would be irreplaceable, except for the validity of certain sacraments. The real work is left to the laity, of whom he is only and vaguely an animator, an adviser, a bearer of the Word. As a result, there are no more priests, the bishops continually handing them over to the diktats of the laity who are finding themselves with ever more new ministries: conducting funerals, distributing communion, preaching, and one fine day, they will preside at the Eucharist!

IV. ON RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

We profess that the great apocalyptic combat about which the Revelation speaks to us unceasingly is that of men rebellious to God. They follow the example of Satan, their Prince, whose war cry is: Non serviam, I will not serve! This revolt is the demand for the autonomy of the creature eager to deify himself, to become equal to God by claiming to be free! Eritis sicut dii, you will be like gods. As God enters into the society of men for their salvation, this rebellion would become more aggressive.

In our modern world, the whole tradition of atheistic Humanism and of the Revolution – “Satanic in its essence” – is the refusal of the sovereignty of the God made man, by man who wants to make himself god. The charter of this revolt is the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the substance of which is more metaphysical than political. Its political content aims at attacking our religion and ending with the substitution of the cult of man for the cult of God. Thus, it is normal that the main adversary of the Revolution, more than families and thrones, is the Church, the work of God and Christ among men. This does not mean that the Church has denied human freedom through absolute contradiction of a Revolution that has proclaimed such freedom to be sovereign and employed it against God.

The Church has always recognised that every man has the right and duty to follow his conscience, even if, correctly informed, it is erroneous. The Church knows that “God left man to his own counsel” (Si 15:14.) In order to act as men, all must heed their conscience and follow its orders. It is on this interior obedience that God will judge them. Since decisions relative to religion and morality are spiritual works that are a matter for the conscience, no one can be coerced into believing or adopting a moral rule by duress, for what God wants is the assent of the heart. The Church, however, has never defended a conscience that raves.

Even if the duty to follow his conscience is incumbent on each individual, it does not create a social right. As soon as it is a question of life in society, it is no longer the sincerity of the subject that determines freedom but the truth of the action. In every field of social life, it is God who is the Sovereign Legislator and no one can claim any authority or any right unless he obtains it from God Himself by doing His Will. The Church and the State, acting in accordance with God, in the name of God and for God, cannot recognise any right to the man who is mistaken, whether sincere or not, for it would be tantamount to withdrawing from God a part of His authority and sovereign domain in order to abandon it to His Adversary and to abolishing all objective justice. Nevertheless, a certain “tolerance”, which the Church has always allowed, can be left towards one who is mistaken, in the practice of his error, for the good of peace.

Consequently, social liberty, political as well as religious, which is proclaimed as a human right is, in any case, a crime against God and a delirium, as the Popes – in particular Blessed Pius IX in his encyclical Quanta Cura – have always declared. For it is both a declared break in man’s subjection to God and a break in the social order, which is atomised by the anarchy of a myriad of individual liberties before being solidified into a Leviathan totalitarianism where the freedom of the strongest places the multitude in slavery. Moreover, the Church has struggled against her own members who claimed that the demand for man’s rights could be reconciled with the rights of the Church, as though one vast whole might be formed by reconciling this better part, the Church’s rights, with man’s. In fact, she cannot accept this reconciliation without renouncing her very essence, and her unique dignity as the one true religion of the One God and Saviour Jesus Christ.

The conciliar declaration Dignitatis Humanæ Personæ, which was adopted following odious manoeuvres, raised the error of a strict and universal right of man and of every human community to religious freedom in the field of civil and social activities to the status of a principle. “Let no one be hindered, let no one be coerced.” The authors of this Declaration were unable to base it on any doctrine or found it on Holy Scripture, much less on Tradition, as it was completely contrary to both.

With this Declaration, the Church relinquishes her truth, her dignity and her law, in order to recognise that man, every man and states have the freedom that they claim. In this way, it hopes to cooperate in a “harmony” and “peace” of the whole “human family,” which will go beyond the religious differences considered of secondary importance. “In addition, it comes within the meaning of religious freedom that religious communities should not be prohibited from freely undertaking to show the special value of their doctrine in what concerns the organisation of society and the inspiration of the whole of human activity.” (n° 4.) This affirmation of the Declaration means nothing more than a desire to build a fraternal world without basing it on Christ, but with the participation of all human religions and ideologies, fraternally associated. This is the main idea of this Declaration, the guiding idea of a new doctrine that Father de Nantes entitled: Movement for the Spiritual Animation of Universal Democracy (MASDU).

As Father Congar wrote: “Such things cannot be proclaimed with impunity (sic!). Loyalty to what one has proclaimed in this way has many consequences.” Hence, after proclaiming freedom everywhere else in the world, license also entered the Church. Anarchy followed. As this is always accompanied by intolerance, the Pope and the bishops, who have become mere ‘guardians of public order,’ no longer tolerate those who ‘create division’ by rising up against freedom, against their abdication, against their Council and all its ruin. Today in the Church, it is either freedom or anathema!

If we consider the contradiction of the conciliar declaration on religious freedom with all our holy Catholic doctrine and the devastation that has resulted from this novelty in families, in schools, in Catholic nations and in the Church, we must rather seek the inspiration for this plot against God and against His Christ in a wicked, infernal Evil Spirit, the same one who supported the Counter-Church in its obstinate claim in favour of man’s and the state’s rights for Freedom and who finally triumphed at the Council.

The declaration on religious freedom is openly heretical and even constitutes a practical act of apostasy in irreconcilable rupture with the ordinary and extraordinary Magisterium of the Church. It is the focal point of our opposition to the Second Vatican Council. We must now give our verdict on its authority.

V. ON THE AUTHORITY OF THE SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL

“Councils have always had the prestige of infallibility in the Church.” (Bartmann) The fact is that they were all convened with the formal intention of exercising the supreme Magisterium of the Faith, “in order to decide wisely and prudently what could contribute to a definition of the dogmas of the Faith, to unmask new errors, to defend, elucidate and develop Catholic doctrine, to conserve and elevate ecclesiastical discipline and to reaffirm morality that had become relaxed among peoples.” That is what Blessed Pius IX wrote in summoning the bishops to the First Vatican Council. The work of a Council was always both dogmatic – the pure divine truth of the Faith had to be declared, uncertainties dispersed and the errors of the time condemned – and canonical – the obligations arising from this Divine truth had to be presented to the faithful for their eternal salvation and in opposition to the maxims of this world. (cf. Journet, The Church of the Incarnate Word, Vol. I, p. 536-541.)

Vatican II thus broke with this tradition from the beginning and set out on a completely different path.

On the one hand, it renounced the exercise of its infallible doctrinal power and the canonical power that follows therefrom, in contradiction to what history and theology have taught concerning the unfailing exercise of this extraordinary Magisterium. On the other hand, it turned towards an entirely different work, that of aggiornamento, ecumenism, and opening up to the world – which is an original and vague work. Its real authority and legitimacy, and the degree of divine assistance it can enjoy, are difficult to estimate according to the norms of law. This surprising decision was imposed on the Council by John XXIII on October 11, 1962. It was then that the Fathers learned that they were not to do any dogmatic work, to define divine truths and denounce contemporary errors, nor above all to condemn anyone.

Pope Paul VI confirmed this orientation by adding a notification to the dogmatic Constitution Lumen Gentium, quoting the Doctrinal Commission’s declaration of March 6, 1964: “Taking conciliar custom into consideration and also the pastoral purpose of the present Council, the sacred Council defines as binding on the Church only those things in matters of faith and morals which it shall openly declare to be binding.” Then, on January 12, 1966, thus one month after its closing, the same Paul VI confirmed: “Given its pastoral character, the Council avoided proclaiming in an extraordinary manner dogmas to which the mark of infallibility has been assigned.”

After having renounced to exercise its supreme and infallible authority in matters of dogma and morals, the Council laid claim to a prophetic power of evangelical Reform in the Church, equal to that of the College of the Apostles, as though it enjoyed the same privileges from which the latter alone benefited to found the Church. It claimed to be pastoral, not to make itself less than the previous dogmatic Councils, but to appear more than them altogether. The first words of the Constitution Dei Verbum clearly show on what this claim is based: the Fathers affirm that they are in direct, immediate and inspired contact with the very Word of God in order to found freely a new Church.

There resulted sixteen texts promulgated in the course of the four sessions of the Second Vatican Council – and all of them are fallible since none of them were declared infallible. The consideration given to each of them must differ according to their various titles, their canonical form and their “theological note.” These sixteen texts are controvertible to a greater or lesser extent. It is all a mishmash of Constitutions, Decrees and Declarations. No one knows what Vatican II means. It is everything and nothing, a mixture of the traditional and the novel, the certain and the doubtful, the true and the false, the best being used to endorse the worst. To treat all this as equal to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed is to decerebrate the Church, to putrefy the Faith by giving it a confused and unintelligible object, one that defies analysis and resists any definition.

OUR ANSWER TO THE FIRST AND SECOND QUESTIONS

Under the authority of the first 261 successors of Saint Peter and the first twenty Oecumenical Councils, and with our Father, Georges de Nantes, we profess the Catholic faith as taught, notably, in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed and in all the Oecumenical Councils recognised by the Catholic Church, with the exception of the Second Vatican Council. We impugn the latter’s authority of infallible teaching since, dogmatically and canonically, it defined no truth of the Faith in any of its Acts comparable, for example, to the dogma of the consubstantiality of the divine Persons, which is the essence of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. Whoever denies this dogma would be cut off ipso facto from the ecclesiastical communion.

We infer from this that since the sixteen texts promulgated during the second Vatican Council, are all fallible, all controvertible, the consideration given to each of them differs according to their various titles, their canonical form and their “theological note.” Therefore, in such circumstances we cannot pronounce ourselves with certainty on the degree of authority that the Acts possess. It is incumbent upon the Magisterium of the Church through the voice of its Sovereign Pontiff to perform powerfully and decisively a work of discernment and to decide in an infallible and definitive manner which of the Acts of the Second Vatican Council proceed from the Spirit of God, and which proceed from the spirit of Satan.

Pending this infallible doctrinal judgement, in conformity with the right and the duty recognised to every baptised person to remain faithful to the Catholic Faith that he receives from the Church, we suspend our adherence to what we consider clearly heretical in the teachings of the Second Vatican Council; the same applies to the social right to religious freedom, contained in the declaration Dignitatis Humanæ, which was promulgated on December 7, 1965, which we refuse.

April 10, 1973. Father de Nantes, accompanied by a group of representatives of the League of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, went to Rome to lodge his first Book of Accusation: “To Our Holy Father Pope Paul VI: complaint against our brother in the Faith, Pope Paul VI, for heresy, schism, and scandal.”

“Not one of us comes back without a certainty increased tenfold of being on the surest and the holiest line of Catholic Tradition, through the Counter-Reformation.

“Not one of us fails to bring back an immense love of Rome and an absolute faith in her divine destiny. This pontificate will pass and its reformation will perish, but Peter remains eternally and his Roman Catholic Church with him!” (CRC no. 67, p. 4)

THIRD QUESTION:

“Do you recognise the legitimate and uninterrupted Magisterium of the Popes, successors of the Apostle Peter?”

Our first movement would be to respond with a wholehearted yes, since our Father taught us and communicated to us his love for the Roman Church, Mistress of all the Churches, and especially his true and genuine devotion to the Pope, “our sweet Christ on earth,” the common and immediate Father of all the faithful. Father de Nantes was Roman and correlatively to his admiration for the papacy, he transmitted to us his abhorrence for all schism – and even for anything that might bear semblance to it –, for any separation from the See of Peter from which one cannot deviate, even in the slightest, without endangering the salvation of his soul.

Nevertheless, the reformation carried out by the Second Vatican Council and the hierarchy’s abstention from exercising its Magisterium have placed our Father, our communities and all the members of our Catholic Counter-Reformation movement in a situation of withdrawal of obedience, which we must explain to justify our definitive answer to the question put to us.

I. THE OPPOSITION OF THE SON TO HIS FATHER

From 1963 onward, Father de Nantes had the time to keep abreast of the works of the Council and comment on them at the very moment when it was setting its decisive orientations. Our Father had providentially prepared himself for such a task since, in 1951, he had led an extensive campaign against the book of the Dominican, Father Yves Congar, True and False Reform in the Church, which was to become the charter of the Second Vatican Council. Our Father weighed up the danger and thought it was his duty to bring it to the attention of Rome, on June 3, 1951. Following the meeting that he had with the future Cardinal Ottaviani, from the Holy Office, Rome forbade re-editions and translations of the book. Between 1959 and 1963, Father de Nantes published a theological study entitled The Mystery of the Church and the Antichrist, which dealt with the progressivism that he saw in action in the Church of France.

From Maison Saint-Joseph, our Father understood what was at stake in the debates, and unrelentingly denounced the heresy that was shamelessly being flaunted in the conciliar aula. However, parallel to his opposition to the Council, our Father had to begin “the fight of the son against his Father, of the priest against the Pope.” (Contre-Réforme Catholique no. 82, August 1974, p. 1. Abridged translation in CCR no. 53, “I Have Been Fighting Alone,” August 1974, pp. 16-18.) Nevertheless, the encyclical Ecclesiam Suam of August 6, 1964, forced our Father to recognise that Paul VI was personally committed to the very principle of Congarian reformism.

Thus, our Father had to warn his readers that a Pope can fail in his duty as Pastor and supreme Doctor. (Letter To My Friends no. 188, November 1964).

On January 6, 1967, a year after the closing of the Council, in his Letter To My Friends no. 240, our Father was able to make an assessment of a year during which every sort of disorder flourished in a Church carried away by her masdu (Movement for the Spiritual Animation of Universal Democracy) pipe dream. He was forced to admit that “a fundamental compact, a collusion, exists between the highest responsible Authority and the subordinate executors of the reformation with the aim of ‘creating a new Church in the service of a new world’.” The highest responsible Authority within the Church is none other than the Pope himself, Pope Paul VI.

Our Father thus decided to publicly denounce the reformation of the Second Vatican Council as a second Reformation “in order to encourage all good men to undertake the Counter-Reformation of the 20^th century” (ibid., p. 8). To direct this combat, he established two rules; the first, for him and for those of his friends who were willing to follow him: never to declare that they alone constitute the Church, thus “repudiating this post-conciliar Reformed Church as schismatic and heretical,” the second: to combat “within the Body of the Church, i.e., the visible society in which fallible men conserve the power they have to err or to do wrong, this latent schism, this parasitical heresy, this inadmissible novelty that defiles her divine purity and conceals her true life.” (ibid., pp. 5-6)

The first action taken in this combat that would become a trial consisted in addressing “the Sovereign Pontiff as the Supreme Pastor of the Church, and Our Lord Bishops as the legitimate pastors of our dioceses, in person, in order to demand and obtain the resolution of unbearable doubts, from their infallible Magisterium.” (ibid., p. 6) After having announced it several months in advance, Father de Nantes sent a “Letter to His Holiness Pope Paul VI” on October 11, 1967. It began with these words “The pride of the reformers.” It was a clear and comprehensive presentation of the plan for a certain unprecedented and insane reformation of the Church directed against the very person who was the initiator of this reformation.

Our Father did not lose faith in the Church. Pending her recovery effected by her supreme Magisterium, he solemnly warned the Pope that he would protect himself from this reformation as from the greatest of sins, because it is “Satanic in its essence, impious in its manifestations and its laws [...].” While our Father waited for a doctrinal judgement that presents all the guarantees of infallibility, he was forced into a withdrawal of obedience, which he himself presented to the Holy Father. “We will discern to our best, according to the infallible criterion of Tradition, what proceeds from Your customary and Catholic Magisterium in order to submit ourselves to it, and what comes from this usurped authority for the Reformation of the Church, which we will always hold to be null and void.” (CRC no. 2, November 1967, p. 12)

A month later, Father de Nantes published an analysis on the encyclical, Populorum Progressio. It describes a programme to transform the world, improve the lot of men, instore universal peace, with the participation of all religions and ideologies. This analysis forthrightly raised the tragic question of the Pope’s fidelity to the Catholic Faith and to the responsibility entrusted to him by Our Lord Jesus Christ: to strengthening the faith of his brethren. The question is tragic “because good Catholics [...] are caught in a vice between two temptations which they must resist. They must either accept everything: the chaos and the corruption of liturgy, faith and morals, all of which is ordered or authorised by a unanimous hierarchy headed by the Pope, a temptation to which they are strongly encouraged and constrained to submit! Or else, they must reject everything as a whole because it is all really too stupid, distressing, shameless and evil, but in doing so, they forsake a Church that is provoking them into revolt and openly desires their departure. Now these two easy solutions, too easy by far, are sins. One does not forsake the Church of Jesus Christ! Neither does one rally to the Modernist and progressivist Reformation! So what is the solution? The solution is to reject the Reformation while remaining in the Church. There, however, is no way to dissociate the present Reformation from the Church that is imposing it! Unless...

“... unless we ‘attack’ the very Person of the Pope, since he, and he alone, stands at the crossroads of these two worlds, those of order and disorder, of Tradition and subversion, of the Work of Christ and the machinations of Belial [...]. Yet what if every appeal to Rome should also be in vain? If the Pope should scorn our concern and our indignation? If his obstinate, absolute and terrifying will should uphold those who are demolishing the Church and assassinating the Faith?

“If this is indeed the papal will, the will of the true Vicar of Jesus Christ, then God would be divided against Himself and it would be the end of our faith. There remains one final possibility which explains everything: that the will of the Pope is that of an apostate.” Unless it is we who are mistaken. The only way to escape this unbearable doubt is to provoke the Pope into infallibly pronouncing himself. “Then our faith recovers its certitude, a certitude based on the infallible, immortal Church, which conserves within herself the energy necessary to evict the apostates who are destroying her.” (CRC no. 38, November 1970, p. 7)

II. CAN A POPE BE ACCUSED OF HERESEY AND EVENTUALLY BE DEPOSED?

The issue of the Pope’s deposition obliges us to reflect upon his authority over the Church. “The task of founding the Church in accordance with the plans made by Christ was entrusted to the Apostles and was to be implemented on the Day of Pentecost. It obviously required special gifts from the Holy Spirit, truly singular and extraordinary ones, for the generation of the builders. This is why the Twelve, the Apostles, were made the columns of the Church, endowed with powers so vast and so exceptional that the totality could not be passed on even to their successors.” (CRC no. 69, June 1973, p. 5)

The mission of the Bishop of Rome, the successor of Saint Peter, and of the bishops, the successors of the other Apostles, is to preserve the Church, to guard the deposit of the Faith with dedication and to expound it faithfully. Anything that is alien to it remains suspect, anything that is contrary to it is false. “In order for the Church to have a sound foundation, continuity and perpetual fidelity to the Lord Jesus Christ, the fundamental acts of the Pastors of the Church have to be necessarily and indubitably effective, followed by their divine effects. These acts fall within the province of infallible Powers, unconditionally assisted by the Holy Spirit. Other acts are greatly contingent and depend as much on human frailty as on the assistance of the Spirit of God; they issue from less extensive powers that require discernment.” (ibid., p. 5) The successors of the Apostles exercise the powers of order, teaching and government. Their authority, however, is subordinate to that of the Bishop of Rome who, by the express will of Our Lord, is invested with supreme authority. We will only mention here the power of teaching, since it is the only one that is the subject of the third question put to us.

THE AUTORITY OF THE MAGISTERIUM.

There are several types of authority. It is important to point this out, for the author of the third question makes no distinction by evoking “the authority... of the Magisterium of the Popes.”

The teaching of the private man, whether he be Pope or a simple bishop, remains fallible. Even if they are endowed with a dignity, these individuals have marginal liberty to teach under their personal responsibility, personal theories and opinions in the capacity of “private theologians”. These notions are worth no more than their intrinsic demonstrative strength. It is of utmost importance that this sort of teaching not be confused, at least in appearance, with the Magisterium.

By contrast, the Church in her unanimous belief is infallible. What all the faithful of the Church have always believed together, unanimously, as divine revelation is infallibly true.

As for the Ordinary Magisterium, it unvaryingly appears as the “echo of the unanimous Tradition of the Church.” Yet it is only endowed with a conditional infallibility. “When the Pope, or a bishop, or even a priest, teaches what the Church has always and universally held to be certain, then he is necessarily and infallibly speaking the truth. In this sense, it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that we are all infallible, but only insofar (and the exact extent is often difficult to determine) as we are repeating what we ourselves have learned from the Church. So, with some listening to and believing the constant doctrine of the Church, and others teaching and explaining it without mixing anything new or peculiar therein, everyone has a share in the Church’s certitude.

“On the other hand, if the Pope or the bishops should put forward new or controversial opinions – even as part of their ‘authentic’ teaching, proposed by virtue of their office with the authority of their particular rank –, then such doctrine cannot be considered as coming under the Ordinary Magisterium. It presents no guarantee of infallibility. This is the great weakness of this Ordinary Magisterium that there is no clear line of demarcation separating it from the realm of human opinions.

“Thus, ever since Pacem in Terris and the so-called Pastoral Constitutions or the Decrees and Declarations of Vatican II, an error is commonly made concerning the authority that these Acts of the Pope and Council possess. Though clearly ‘authentic,’ they totally lack any traditional or universal character! As none of this hotchpotch of novelties can justly lay claim to the authority of Tradition, it cannot belong to the Ordinary Magisterium and has no more value than those who have fabricated it.” (ibid., p. 5 et 6)

Finally, there remains the Extraordinary or Solemn Magisterium that is of itself strictly and fully infallible. “This is something indispensable to the Church for, should it happen that on a certain point of doctrine the tradition were not clear or unanimous, or if a long-accepted belief were suddenly contested or even rejected by certain people, then those who possess all power for preserving and defending the deposit of the Revelation will be led to resolve the conflict, to adjudicate the question once and for all by means of a proclamation in the indisputable form of the Truth. The assistance of the Holy Spirit has been promised to them for such decisions. The term solemn or ex cathedra is applied to this infallibility of the Pope and the Council.

“Such a charism is stupefying; it makes man like a God, certain of possessing the absolute truth! Yet it is a truth of our faith, believed from all time and proclaimed by the First Vatican Council, henceforth irreformable. It was necessary that it should be so. Recourse to this intrinsic infallibility, as indicated by the very form of the Act which defines the Faith, is the ultimate solution to the doctrinal crises faced by the Church, for in such situations there is no other solution than to believe without further discussion or argument, simply because ‘Rome has spoken,’ because the Pope has spoken ‘ex cathedra,’ because the Council has promulgated a ‘dogmatic constitution’ accompanied with anathemas. It is then that we may be fully confident of hearing the Truth.” (ibid., p. 6)

Thus, “in certain matters, under certain precise conditions, the infallibility of the Magisterium is indisputable and absolute: it is, as it were, God Himself Who is speaking through the Pope, through the Council. In other matters, or when certain conditions are wanting, it is human defectibility that prevails over divine assistance. Even then, it would be good and prudent to believe those whom the Holy Spirit assists so that they do not err and procure the good of souls. There remains, nevertheless, a certain possibility for the pastors to betray their functions and to be mistaken out of ignorance, or to deceive and mislead us out of malice. (CRC no. 69, June 1973, p. 6)

Even the Pope?

“Yes, outside of his ex cathedra teaching and outside of his Ordinary Magisterium, when he ceases to repeat what the unanimous tradition holds to have been revealed, and therefore when he speaks as a private theologian.” (ibid., p. 7)

Moreover, an explicit reference to the possibility that the Pope has of deviating from the faith, i.e. to his heresy, is found in a canon of the Decree of Gratian. “Let no mortal being have the audacity to reprimand a Pope on account of his faults, for he whose duty it is to judge all other men cannot be judged by anyone, unless he should be called to task for having deviated from the Faith.” Even the First Vatican Council that proclaimed both the dogma of papal infallibility and its limits, “also strongly proclaimed that outside these conditions, the Pope remained capable of erring and thus could not be blindly followed.” (ibid.)

Finally, “several Popes strayed into errors in matters of Faith and persisted in them to the point of condemning the adherents of orthodoxy, sometimes with a certain solemnity.” (ibid., p. 8)

Our Father drew up a list of five Popes who, “for one brief moment in their Pontificate, concerning some particular and obscure point, failed in their duty to uphold the purity and integrity of the Faith, or, to be more exact, the firmness of their Magisterium – they were acting from motives of diplomacy or out of the desire to keep the peace rather than from those of formal heresy. What are five cases among 263 Popes and in almost twenty centuries? Insignificant – but for the fact that they show that such a thing can happen.” (ibid.)

Our Father concluded that such a situation, the case of a heretical Pope, is supremely improbable. Thus it is the last hypothesis, the one to be examined when all the others prove themselves insufficient. “It is the hypothesis of desperation. I can well understand that people do not follow us when we have recourse to this solution, which is possible in the absolute, but statistically improbable [...]. Yet, when no other solution remains, when all the proofs have been gathered and converge, neither is faith shaken, nor does hope die, nor does charity find itself wounded to say: our Pope is a heretic.” (ibid., p. 9)

What then is to be done in such a situation?

THE APPEAL FROM THE POPE TO THE POPE

Theologians propose two solutions, and Father de Nantes a third one. This third solution is so noteworthy that it was presented by Mr. Cyrille Dounot, professor of history of law at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, and Mr. Oliver Échappé, Counsellor at the French Court of Cassation, during the colloquium, which was organised on March 30 and 31, 2017 by the Pantheon-Sorbonne University. This colloquium was devoted to “The deposition of a Pope – Loci theologiae, canonical models and constitutional issues.”

“Papa haereticus depositus est... A heretical Pope is deposed.” This is the solution advocated by Robert Bellarmine in the heyday of the Counter-Reformation. “Heresy being a form of spiritual death, a withdrawal from the Church, any Pope who should fall into heresy, would find himself ipso facto cut off from the Church. He is, by this very fact, deposed. He ceases to occupy the Apostolic See of his own accord.” (ibid., p. 10) This solution is impracticable. It would suffice for anyone to declare, according to his own private whim, that the Pope is heretical and to conclude that there is no longer any pope. This would have no effect other than to cause confusion.

“Papa haereticus deponendus est... a heretical Pope must be deposed.” This is the solution proposed by Cardinal Cajetan and other theologians. It implies two important consequences. “If it so happens that a Pope is a heretic, he must be deposed for him to cease being the Pope. Furthermore, the person who accuses the Pope of heresy must not leave it at that, but must ask for the legal process for his deposition to be undertaken, since he cannot make a universally and immediately executory decision of his personal judgement.” (CRC no. 69, June 1973, p. 10) This is a wise solution, yet it raises further questions, in particular, who will judge the Pope?

Our Father brought the key to the difficulty that Cajetan was unable to solve, and for good reason, since it presupposes a definition of pontifical infallibility. “For, to the decisive question: who in the final resort will sovereignly decide the matter once the trial of a heretical, schismatic or scandalous Pope has commenced? Only the dogma of Vatican I provides the possibility of a realistic solution. Who will judge the Pope? Why, the Pope himself, in his infallible doctrinal Magisterium!” (ibid.)

Who will bring forward the accusation? Any Christian, provided however, and the condition is of importance, that he be a member of Holy Church. Before what court? The only true tribunal competent in matters of Faith is the Church herself, by virtue of her authority as the Spouse of the Lord. Her competence is universal, her judgements are infallible. The believing Church owes her faith to and retains her ‘sensus fidei’ through the constant help given by the teaching Church. The canonical proceedings would have to be instituted before the whole Church, either by representative members of the Hierarchy, or by a tribunal consisting of theologians merely charged with establishing whether or not the teaching and the acts of the Pontiff are compatible with the Catholic Faith and the Tradition of the Church, subject to an infallible sentence that is not within its competence.”

Who will be the Sovereign Judge? The Pope speaking ex cathedra. The infallible Pope will thus pass judgement on the fallible Pope. He alone can be judge and litigant in his own case.

What are the possible outcomes of such a process? The Pope would rebut his accuser and repeat the contested teachings, which until then he had only given in the exercise of his authentic Magisterium, this time in the form of a solemn pronouncement. Or he would admit his own error and recant. Or the Pope might refuse to listen to his accuser, to settle the object of the dispute. In this case, his repeated refusal would constitute a resignation and the sentence of deposition would thus be the canonical conclusion of this acknowledgement of the Pope’s resignation.

No one came forth to give such an admonition, to undertake such proceedings against Pope Paul VI. Our Father, who had been the only person to lead the Catholic Counter-Reformation since the end of the Council, thus took it upon himself, he alone, as a simple priest, to bear this truly overwhelming cross. It would be the “great affair” of his life, an affair in which a son was to rise up against his father, the reigning Pope, to accuse him of heresy, schism and scandal with a view to having him deposed. We must now present a brief account of this unprecedented trial. It began on July 16, 1966.

III. INSTITUTING CANONICAL PROCEEDINGS AGAINST THE POPE

On December 10, 1965, immediately after the closing of the Council, Bishop Le Couëdic, who at the time was Bishop of Troyes, enjoined Father de Nantes to leave the diocese and to stop publishing the Letters To My Friends, under pain of a suspension a divinis. Father de Nantes proposed to his bishop that a doctrinal judgement on all his past writings should be demanded from the Sovereign Magisterium in the Court of Rome, even if it meant suspending, but only temporarily, his criticism of the Council, and submitting his writing to episcopal pre-publication censorship. Bishop Le Couëdic agreed in principal with the proposal.

THE JULY 16, 1966 PETITION

In a petition dated July 16, 1966, Father de Nantes officially deferred to the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith the 220 Letters To My Friends that had been written between 1956 and 1966, and which were organised according to a detailed and precise chronological summary. They formed the substance of the doctrinal examination and constituted incriminatory documents against the Fathers of the Council and Pope Paul VI because of the criticisms that they contained and that were aimed at them.

In a second part, our Father stated the motives for such a singular initiative: “The Council firstly abandoned the exercise of its divine Authority, refusing to engage in doctrinal work,” while demanding everyone’s obedience in the pastoral sphere. Alarming disorders ensued from this situation. The divine authority of the Church, however, must remain in order “to teach us the Church’s dogmas and laws, without first asking us to adopt more new opinions.” (Letter To My Friends no. 231, July 16, 1966, p. 6-8)

“Henceforth, two interwoven but distinct powers, coexist within the Church. The one is divine, unchangeable and sovereign; the other is human, sectarian and ever changing. The precarious survival of an oppressed traditionalist school, of an openly counter-reformist minority, is a sign that the Church cannot be absorbed by any sect, and that the divine, will never be supplanted by the human in her living Magisterium. Beyond reformation, dialogue, ecumenism, opening to and serving the world, and the cult of man, there remains the Church, which is ‘God’s great thought about the World,’ the inviolably faithful Bride of Jesus Christ, Son of God, the One, the Holy, the Catholic, the Apostolic and I add – because this word specifies the mainspring of all our hope – the Roman Church.” (ibid., p. 9.)

Accordingly, Father de Nantes required of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in the name of both the Roman Church, Mother and Mistress of all the Churches, and the Pope, that it powerfully and decisively perform a work of discernment “among the various Spirits disputing the Saviour’s blessed inheritance” (ibid., p. 11.) It would be incumbent upon it to decide between two Spirits. On the one hand, a Spirit in the service of which the conciliar Assembly has placed itself. This Spirit inspires and enlightens each conscience, brings about a mysterious convergence of ideas and commitments, opposite and beyond the ecclesiastical Institution, in order to reach a general reconciliation of all men that overcomes their divergences of opinions, religions and interests. It, however, inspires loathing and contempt for all that was and still remains today of the Roman Catholic Church. On the other hand, the Holy Spirit, Whose mission “is a mission of tradition [...], Who inspires penance, conversion, religious instruction and the sanctification of the faithful.” He cannot separate Himself from Jesus Christ. Neither can He detach Himself from the Church. On the contrary, He “inspires all men, but more especially the faithful and even more so the Pastors of the flock, with esteem, respect and love for all that is Catholic, and with defiance, contempt and hatred for errors and disorders inimical to it.” (ibid.)

Our Father had defined the object of the litigation and imposed on the Holy Office the redoubtable alternative of having to adjudicate between him and the Pope!

Out of courtesy Father de Nantes had given a copy of this petition to Bishop Le Couëdic so that he could take cognizance of it before forwarding it to the Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith through the hierarchical channel. The Bishop who scarcely a few months previously had boasted to his confreres that he would reduce to silence the sole opponent of the conciliar Reformation, was himself “reduced” to transmitting to the Holy Office, and what is more, under his authority, a powerful investigation file that called the Council and the Pope into question. It was not a mere doctrinal examination of the written works of a private theologian!

In these circumstances, Bishop Le Couëdic categorically refused to forward the petition. The stated motive was the alleged offensive nature of the document instituting the proceedings, as though the Bishop of Troyes had the authority to assess the admissibility of petitions addressed to the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, especially for such a reason. Our Father, therefore, sent his petition directly to the Roman dicastery and above all published it, despite an incredible prohibition imposed by the Bishop of Troyes.

Our Father thus saved his canonical action from being lost in the maze of Rome, but he paid a heavy price for this publication: Bishop Le Couëdic immediately suspended him a divinis, for life, since neither he nor his successors ever deigned to lift the suspension – Bishop Daucourt would even try to aggravate it in 1997. As for our Father, he straightaway refrained from appealing. At the very moment when he was publicly contesting the orthodoxy of the Reformation of the Church, it seemed to him that it would be best to show complete submission to the disciplinary decisions of the hierarchy, even if arbitrary, since they were aimed at him alone. For our Father, moreover, it was important not to let himself be distracted from the essential and sacred action that he was undertaking for the triumph of the holy Faith, simply to defend his honour and personal rights.

ADVERSARIAL DEBATES.

For two years, nothing filtered through concerning the meticulous study of the voluminous dossier of the Letters To My Friends that the Holy Office had undertaken. In April 1968, however, the procedure accelerated: our Father was summoned to Rome and found himself before three consultors, “learned, well-disposed theologians with no weakness,” and what is more, experts on the deliberations of the Council (CRC no. 24, September 1969, p. 4., published in English in CCR no. 78, September 1976, pp. 3-20.) They were Fathers Gagnebet and Duroux, Dominicans, and Dhanis, the enigmatic Jesuit.

The substance of what was to be examined was precise: “It was to question the idea of a ‘Catholic Counter-Reformation in the 20^th century.’ Since the hierarchy had proclaimed the Reformation of the Church, might one sustain doctrinally a traditionalism that was fiercely opposed to it and might one oppose practically its authoritative implementation?” (ibid.)

The examiners first assessed the admissibility of the action of the applicant. Did he profess the exact Catholic Faith, which alone could authorise him to act against his legitimate pastors? The examination of the doctrines that Father de Nantes had developed throughout his Letters To My Friends soon proved that he had the Catholic Faith.

Then, when replying to a series of questions intended to put him in an awkward position, our Father had the wisdom to avoid taking a stand based either on a narrow-minded sectarianism or on a certain breadth of vision through which it would have been possible to steer him through the breach towards the openings effected by Vatican II. This first part of the proceedings therefore ended to the advantage of the defendant.

The consultors could then no longer defer dealing with the main object of this trial: the accusations levelled by Father de Nantes against the authors of the conciliar Reformation and foremost among them: the Sovereign Pontiff.

“I, the defendant, became the prosecutor. My examiners were transformed into the counsel for the defence, or rather they became the defendants. By virtue of our exact and firm Catholic Faith, I rose up against the dogmatic presuppositions of a so-called pastoral Reformation. The consultors had not been able to catch me out, but now they sought to refute my criticisms of the new reformed religion [...]. Thereupon ensued some rather confused discussions. On the meaning and significance of the conciliar and papal slogans we were far from agreement: collegiality, the serving Church, religious liberty, opening to the world, ecumenism, peace, culture, etc. It was a war of words.

“At this point my examiners lost the clarity, the objectivity, and the security that the Catholicism of all times affords. Their calmness and self-composure gave way to impatience and aggressiveness. These learned gentlemen sank up to their boots into the sludge of the conciliar equivocations, ambiguities, and confusions that one could sense they had not yet left behind. In order to cope, they accused me of seeing the Acts of the Council and the discourses of Paul VI only through the interpretations of others. They contrasted the promulgated texts with the whole apparatus of the discussions and commentaries that had prepared and followed them. They supported an unreal Council, in conflict with the para-Council and the post-Council.

“The sort of battlefield through which we were galloping was in their dazed eyes the site of a new and radiant human city in mid-construction. They wanted to believe in the mirage. For me, as far as the eye could see, it was the ruins of the Holy City, devastated by a cyclone. Whenever we recalled such and such an act or discourse, they would have me taste its sugar and its tea; they failed to notice the arsenic that made it into a poison [...].

“The madness of the whole world was of little importance for them. They judged none but me, since I had been the only one insolent enough to have requested it, and they condemned my conservative opposition, even more criminal than the other sort, the revolutionary, which it reinforced, they said, causing the greatest damage to Rome’s Authority. I tried to take up some of my proofs. It was useless. One does not clarify in twenty hours what hundreds of cunning theologians have rendered inextricably confusing in five years of conciliar Byzantinism [...].

“They had nothing more to tell me than their conviction, their human, desperate persuasion of grand personages who are secretly just as disquieted and disturbed as we are. I recopy the way I had jotted down their entreaties, which are really in the nature of confessions: ‘Yes, masdu (Movement for the Spiritual Animation of Universal Democracy) exists, but not in the Council, nor in the thinking and the Acts of the Pope, fear not... Take on Cardonnel; no one will say anything, but do not take on the Pope! In the long run, we will manage to reabsorb the aberrations, the postconciliar disorders, but be confident, the Council is the work of the Holy Spirit! No, the Pope is not a heretic, he cannot be! No, there is no heresy in the Council, there cannot by any! Instead of criticising them, you should, with all your talent and your influence, demonstrate that they did not say and desire what some have made them out to say and desire!’

“Poor, admirable, Roman theologians. How I would have liked to share your good faith! Yet when you ended up believing that I was carried away by your example or convinced by your authority, I was only measuring the abyss that separated you from the rest of the Church and from the Pope himself. I remained hurt but inert to your appeal: ‘Tell us simply that you accept the Council and that you have trust in the Holy Father with a pure, straightforward, and unreserved allegiance, and no one will demand anything else from you!’

“I had to bring things to an end. I dictated to the Italian clerk of court: ‘Est, est. Non, non.’ ‘What do you mean by that?’ the president asked me. ‘That means that what is, is and remains so, independently of my accusations.’ ‘You persist, therefore, in your criticisms of the Pope and the Council?’ ‘Yes’” (CRC no. 24, September 1969, pp. 3-4.)

At the end of the canonical proceedings, the applicant was invited to read and countersign the record written by the ecclesiastical clerk of the court. This man, an Italian, had manifestly not understood anything. The judges and plaintiff agreed: this worthless document was inadmissible. What should be done? Who, in three days, could write a precise, accurate, exhaustive and, most of all, impartial report concerning these long hours of subtle theological debate? The judges, quite embarrassed, entrusted this task to the plaintiff who wrote the record that the consultors approved and countersigned!

The case was remitted to the following July 1, the date on which the cardinals, members of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith would announce their verdict.

THE NOTIFICATION OF AUGUST 10, 1969

On July 1, 1968, Father de Nantes was summoned once again to the Palace of the Holy Office. No judgement was rendered, yet he was required purely and simply to retract his criticisms against the Pope, the Second Vatican Council and the French bishops, and to swear a complete, unconditional and unlimited obedience to all of them. Thus the preliminary investigation of the trial that had taken place two months earlier had not been taken into account. The doctrinal judgement that had been demanded with such resolve had not been rendered, yet Father de Nantes was being required to make an unlimited, ‘Muslim’ submission, accompanied by an overwhelming threat: his refusal of a general retraction would be penalised by an excommunication. Our Father refused to sign the formula of recantation, which was being imposed on him.

Thus, during almost a year, our Father received no news from Rome. Undoubtedly, the cardinals of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith would gladly have been satisfied with this status quo if the French episcopate had not, at the same time, published new catechisms inspired by the “Fonds commun obligatoire.” Our Father had shown its scandalously heretical character and had made it his duty to set off on a veritable National Crusade in order to denounce it. Everywhere he went, he spoke before full-house audiences.

Undoubtedly acting under collegial pressure of the Bishops of France, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published on August 10, 1969 a notification in the form of a terse press release that propagated “a spate of blatant lies.” It contained a lie concerning the alleged errors of Father de Nantes. He had purportedly been demanded to retract them. Yet the three consultors had found no doctrinal error of which he was culpable. It contained a lie concerning the alleged rebellion of the accused against the legitimate authority of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Finally, it contained the Church’s defamation of Father de Nantes who, by the alleged bad example of his rebellion against the Magisterium of the Hierarchy, disqualifies his entire work and his activities.

This notification, however, was accompanied by no canonical sanction. Father de Nantes was indeed defamed but not condemned. This implicitly and necessarily acknowledges the fact that the author of the writings, which had been the object of careful study by the consultors of the Holy Office, holds the truth, while the Pope whom these very writings criticise is in error. Thus, the admission of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith which, in the end, had fulfilled its function, raises the question of the indictment of the Pope so that he might be judged. Father de Nantes did not want to act hastily and preferred to appeal to God’s help, to His faithfulness and His mercy in order for Him to move the Holy Father’s heart, or else remove him from his See, “within three years.” In the meantime, another task awaited our Father and which legitimised his appeal from the Pope to the Pope: to defend confused Catholics made desperate by the Conciliar Reformation from the temptation of leaving the Church.

IV. NEITHER HERESY NOR SCHISM!

“I believe that I put all my strength into fighting heresy until July 16, 1969. From July 21 on, we gradually engaged in the fight against schism.”

On that day, Father de Nantes received a visit of several integrist priests who tried to lure him into schism. They considered, on their own authority, that the new Ordo Missæ, which was due to come into force on November 30, 1969, was heretical and made the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass invalid. They contended that Pope Paul VI was deposed by the mere fact that he had promulgated it. Our Father tried, in vain, to show them that even if one were to assume that the Pope had fallen from office from the very fact of having promulgated a heretical and invalid Mass, it would still be necessary for the whole Church to confirm and ratify this “deposition” by a judgement of the competent Roman authority. “You may reason, prove, and argue as much as you like in formulating an accusation of heresy against Paul VI. However, as long as the Magisterium of the Church has not rendered a dogmatic sentence, your thinking will be nothing more than the opinion of a theologian who could be wrong. Therefore, it is essential to obtain a judgement.” Since these priests did not want to listen to these compelling Catholic and Roman reasons, our Father literally threw them out of the house, not wanting to maintain relations with openly schismatic clerics, but he understood that the reform of the rite of the Mass would henceforth threatened the House of God with a new danger.

Being totally unbiased, our Father immediately put his theological analyses to the test of the practice of the local Churches and of Rome. Everywhere, whether in Rome or Madrid, in Germany, Switzerland, Portugal and even in Australia, he had observed that the new rite imposed by the Pope’s will was accepted by everyone, although without enchantment. Thus, it was impossible to affirm that this Mass was invalid since the entire Catholic Church throughout the world accepted to celebrate it every day. “The entire Church could never have accepted, even out of obedience to the Pope, a mere simulacrum of the Sacrifice. This argument is categorical: if today, all over the world, the mass of Catholic priests were celebrating an invalid liturgy, giving the faithful nothing but bread and wine to adore and consume in place of the adorable Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and if the whole Catholic community were taking part in the deception in a mistaken faith, then the promises of Christ to His Church would be void, the Gates of Hell would have prevailed against her and there would no longer exist a Church of God!” (CRC no. 30, suppl., Easter 1970, p. 1.)

Since the new rite of the Mass was valid although bad, Father de Nantes, with an entirely supernatural wisdom, implored his friends and readers, to tolerate it and not to set as a programme “to impose our views, our liturgy and our traditions upon our fathers and brethren in the faith through the use of force. Yet, in our certainty of having remained faithful to the true institutions and the will of Christ, we have the noble ambition of holding on to them, of defending them steadfastly and of getting all the others to love them too, whilst we wait for God Himself to convert the hearts of our Pastors who have gone astray.” (ibid., p. 4) This could only be done by remaining in our parishes to maintain an irreplaceable living, sacramental contact with the Church.

During this period of conciliar disorientation, to despair of the Church to the point of forming one’s own chapel, sect, or even schism was for many traditionalist Catholics the great temptation, to which many finally succumbed. In doing so, they turned away from the only effective fight for the service of the Church: the fight against the Reformation. To wage it, however, it is necessary to remain in the Church, being truly convinced that “we are not the saviours of the Church. The Church is still and always our Ark of Salvation. Even though I cannot see it, I believe with the certainty of faith that the Church’s salvation resides today as yesterday in her Pastors. Even though they have temporarily fallen into error and into the sectarianism of their ‘Reformation,’ grace nevertheless still subsists in them indefectibly, imperceptible, it is ready to irradiate, on the day appointed by God, for the salvation of all. The trouble may be very great and the danger to souls mortal but God does not wish to govern us except through the Hierarchy. [...]. The Church is not in us; she subsists in those very ones whom we see occupied with her ruin yet whom we believe to be the bearers of Christ’s grace by virtue of their Apostolic Jurisdiction. (CRC no. 25, October 1969, p. 12.)

That is why Father de Nantes decided in the spring of 1970 to found a League in the service of ‘The Church, the Church Alone’ (Editorial of CRC no. 30, March 1970) in order to keep on board the members of the faithful who were tempted to “abandon ship” and maintain them on the narrow path of Catholic fidelity. “I do not claim any merit for having shown you the way. It was mapped out for me by article 28 of the Rule under which we live here, and which is much older than our present problems: ‘The Little Brothers of the Sacred Heart will love one another as members of one family, the Church. They will never set up their Order in rivalry or opposition to any other community of any sort. Only one community exists for them and that is the one that includes them all – the Catholic Church.’ [...] We repudiate any integrist ‘esprit de corps’ just as we suffer agony and death as a result of the reformist ‘esprit de corps,’ which has enlisted against us the whole hierarchical chain of the oppressors of the Church [...]. How odious is this sectarian spirit! The only esprit de corps that is inspired by supernatural Wisdom is that which configures us to the Holy Spirit in His unique love for His Body, the Church: the mystical Esprit de corps, the only one that is holy. (CRC no. 31, April 1970, pp. 1-2.)

Alas! Few traditionalists benefitted from these salutary lessons, although they radiated truth in a loving, unwavering loyalty to the Catholic communion that had to be maintained at all costs, then and still today. A large number of them, exasperated by post-conciliar anarchy, preferred to turn their eyes towards Archbishop Lefebvre who was founding a seminary in Econe. It was opened with the temporary permission of Rome, in order “to experience Tradition,” while refraining from designating those who were primarily responsible for the Reformation that he was supposed to remedy stealthily, namely the Pope and the Council.

Father de Nantes publicly urged Archbishop Lefebvre to “strike at the head,” that is to say, to accuse the Pope of heresy, schism and scandal, openly. “As long as you spare the Head, you will not control the members. As long as you obey the Head, you will be crushed by the claws and the teeth of this Masdu (Movement for the Spiritual Animation of Universal Democracy).” (CRC no. 89, February 1975, p. 2)

Archbishop Lefebvre did nothing and what was bound to happen occurred, as Father de Nantes had anticipated. He received an order from Rome to close the Seminary at Econe and despite the prohibition, he ordained fifteen priests on June 29, 1976. Twelve years later, he consummated his schism by consecrating four bishops with no pontifical mandate. “What a mess!” our Father wrote in July 1976: “To be right on the essential issue and put oneself in the wrong by separating from the one Church of Jesus Christ.” (CRC n° 108, August 1976, p. 2) He warned his friends and readers that it was henceforth “not only useless, but reprehensible” to support Archbishop Lefebvre’s foundations.

During these years, the Pope had no change of heart and God did not remove him from his office to pass it on to someone worthier of it. In January 1973, our Father witnessed a veritable self-demolition of the Church: “Catechisms everywhere corrupt the pure souls of children and corrode the faith of priests themselves. The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is the object of countless sacrileges, the consequence of all Roman directives. It has reached the point where the real Presence of the Body and Blood of Christ in this Sacrament is despised. The sexual obsession that devours clergy and religious invades their colleges and abandons Christian society to aberrations that are the most formidable for the future of religion and civilisation. Politics has invaded the sanctuary; it is seditious against the last Catholic states, socialising in our country, servile towards the Power in the Eastern countries. Celebrating Peace as though it were a divinity, is a betrayal of the free world under the threat of immanent invasion. ” (CRC No. 64, January 1973, p. 1)

Our Father was astounded that so many others, that all the others, who are replete with wisdom, science, virtues and holiness, had not risen before him. He concluded that we now had to accept to do with the help of God what God did not want to do without us: “We must attempt the ultimate step. It falls within our competence; it is our duty. We have to go to Rome and remonstrate with the Pope in person concerning the heresy, schism and scandal for which he is primarily responsible.” (ibid.)

V. THE BOOKS OF ACCUSATION

The notification of August 10, 1969, a powerful act of defamation on the part of the Church but bereft of any condemnation, was a remarkable confirmation of the legitimacy of Father de Nantes grave suspicions against the Council and Pope Paul VI. Hence, it fell to our Father to draw up a book of accusation to compel the Sovereign Pontiff to render a sovereign, infallible and liberating judgement in his own case. In the end, our Father would do so three times during the pontificates of Paul VI and John Paul II.

THE FIRST BOOK OF ACCUSATION

After having requested an audience and announced his coming to Rome, Father de Nantes presented himself on Tuesday, April 10, 1973 at the Bronze Door of the Papal Household, accompanied by the brothers of his Community and by around sixty friends of the movement of the Catholic Counter-Reformation in order to submit to the Holy Father a book, a Memorandum, comprising 102 pages written in the course of a few weeks. As he advanced in his drafting, our Father developed an implacable, logical series of accusations that reveal all the elements and interconnections of a system, “which forms the most dangerous and subtle instrument of war to have ever been introduced into the Church for her ruin.” Here is the essential.

Pope Paul VI was accused of pursuing, as his pontifical programme, the chimera of the construction of a new world in which religion would be confined to a mere role of spiritual animation. To achieve this, he “slashed” the divine authority of the Church and proclaimed the cult of man.

a) The obliteration of the divine authority of the Church.

Paul VI forcefully imposed religious freedom on the Church, a freedom that had nevertheless been irrevocably condemned, thus marking a break with the Magisterium of his predecessors and, when that was achieved, he abstained from exercising his legislative, judicial and coercive powers. He wanted to be loved rather than obeyed, to charm rather than command, disregarding the rights and wills of Jesus Christ, Whose Vicar he was. During his pontificate there was a profusion of all sorts of errors and distressing scandals. He did not want to remedy them and was their consenting accomplice. Two examples are particularly illustrative.

First of all, the scandalous affair of the Dutch Catechism: Pope Paul VI was fully aware of its heretical character as evidenced by the clarifications that he made in the articles of the Creed, which he published in 1968. Yet, he did nothing to prevent the diffusion of this so-called catechism throughout the world. Through the fault of the Sovereign Pontiff, the teaching of the Faith was irremediably corrupted in the entire Church.

Another scandal is the abandoning by thousands of priests and religious of their vocation after the Sovereign Pontiff created, on February 2, 1964, an ad hoc commission and made known that he would annul of the vows of all those who would asked him to do so. Paul VI became the greatest tempter of his priests [...], the powerful accomplice of the flesh [...] by accepting to release them from their vows in the diocesan officiality in order for them to be able to go the very next day into a church to get married before God, the betrayed but happy Spouse, and with His blessing. Thus a form of divorce by mutual consent was introduced into this mystical marriage by forcing God to withdraw in favour of the love for a human creature, The duties of Paul VI’s charity would have obliged him to say no, to cause distress, to thwart, to insist on self-denial, forcing chastity upon them.

“As in the decadent epochs of the past, it is through the marriage of priests that moral ruin has entered the Church. Today, however, for the first time in history, this has taken place with the consent, the complicity and the collaboration of the Vicar of Christ!” The clergy’s moral scandals that arise today allow us to measure the extent of the consequences of this tragic corruption of priestly celibacy. Paul VI’s personal responsibility is considerable.

By allowing all errors defile the Church, Paul VI was at the same time guilty of a rebellion against her. He cast aspersion on the Church’s past, taught his people to despise her heritage. The liturgical reform of the Mass was a tragic illustration of this. He abusively invoked the authority of the Council and the obedience due to it in order to impose it, in reality, on his own authority. This reform proved to be the primary instrument of the deterioration of the Magisterium of the Church, in particular through both the disorder in the ritual for the Sacraments and the calling into question of the propitiatory Sacrifice of the Mass.

Paul VI presented his encyclical Ecclesiam suam, of August 6, 1964, in this way: “Nor do We propose to make this encyclical a solemn proclamation of Catholic doctrine or of moral or social principles.” Thus, he introduced a new relation both within the Church and with the world. She no longer wanted to deliver teaching in an authoritative manner, but she was to become “conversation” and promote dialogue at every opportunity. “It is a way of making spiritual contact [...] avoids peremptory language, makes no demands.” Nevertheless, since Paul VI claimed to be illumined by the Holy Spirit, he did not hesitate to confer on his personal, innovatory magisterium, unknown to those who had preceded him on the throne of Saint Peter, “a supposedly divinely inspired extra-canonical infallibility. Having no lawful basis, this infallibility is not at all of an authoritative nature, but it is rather an enticement, a communication of love devoid of any other force of obligation.”

Paul VI thus obliterated the traditional Magisterium in order to have the Church accepted as the servant of the world, which is nevertheless dominated by Satan. It would be a world in which all men would be fundamentally good and whose vocation would be to unite, for all of them would be motivated by a sincere desire for friendship, peace and justice, in order to bring to it a ‘supplement’ of faith and love. “Without, however, offending in any way against the autonomy or the justifiably secular character of the earthly city, but merely through a silent osmosis of example and spiritual virtue.” (Sermon of June 17, 1965) In reality, it was a betrayal by Paul VI of the charge entrusted to him by Christ, which required him not to strengthen but rather to curse this new, ideal and secular City as a house built in defiance of the Lord.

This unobtrusive Magisterium led to the attenuation of dogmas and the commandments of God considered as obstacles to universal brotherhood, and of the Sacraments, which had become unnecessary on the building site of the world under construction. Ultimately, it meant both the annihilation of our entire religion, invited to fraternise with all the others, to work together in the temporal task that has become a new and common justification for their existence, and the collapse of the institution of the Catholic Church. Christians are required to deny that they are any different from the rest and, unknowingly, they will finish in apostasy, the path that Pope himself has opened, in the name of a Christian humanism, which has become atheist.

Through Pope Paul VI’s actions, the Catholic religion has become – at least to all intents and purposes – one opinion among many and has actually ceased to govern the world of men. “Its objective quality will be clouded over. The distinction between Heaven and Hell, between the Grace of God and His Malediction, between piety and impiety, will pale into insignificance,” Father de Nantes pointed out while addressing himself to the Holy Father. “What increases consequently is man’s pride, for by your dialogue you have invited him to make himself judge of divine realities. From the moment that you proclaimed dialogue as the only lawful tool of the apostolate, the world of Christianity began to shake in its foundations: for instead of God being the acknowledged Judge of man, it is now man who is called upon to judge God.”

b) The proclamation of the cult of man.

The innermost mainspring of Paul VI’s teaching was an unfettered, strange love of every man, whoever he may be, a love that adores its object and has no regard for the Truth of God, or His Law: Love, love for the men of today, whoever and wherever they may be, love for all.” (Speech of September 14, 1965)

Such a love knows no constraint because it is no longer dependent on the love of God nor modelled by Him, and soon turns into idealisation and idolatry of its object. This leads the Pope to a most extravagant faith in man: “For we have faith in Man. We believe in the good which lies deep within each heart, we know that underlying man’s wonderful efforts are the motives of justice, truth, renewal, progress and brotherhood – even where they are accompanied by dissension or sometimes even, unfortunately, by violence. It is your task, not to flatter him but to help him become conscious of his true value and his true potential.” (Declaration of December 2, 1970, in Sydney)

This faith in man is nothing other than the cult of man, which the Holy Father dared to proclaim openly, on December 7, 1965, before the entire assembled Council, in the course of a discourse “unlike any other in the annals of the Church and unlike any other that is ever to come:”

“The Conciliar Church has also, it is true, been much concerned with man, with man as he really is today, living man, man totally taken up with himself, man who not only makes himself the centre of his own interests, but who dares to claim that he is the principle and finality of all reality. Secular, profane humanism has finally revealed itself in its terrible stature and has, in a certain sense, challenged the Council. The religion of God made man has come up against a religion – for there is such a one – of man who makes himself God.

“And what happened? A shock, a battle, an anathema? That might have taken place, but it did not. It was the old story of the Samaritan that formed the model for the Council’s spirituality. It was filled only with a boundless sympathy. The attention of this Synod was taken up with the discovery of human needs – which become greater as the son of the earth (sic!) makes himself greater.

“Do you at least recognise this its merit, you modern humanists who have no place for the transcendence of the things supreme, and come to know our new humanism: we also, we more than anyone else, have the cult of man.”

This allows us to assess how your heteropraxy is inexorably slipping into a full and entire heterodoxy,” our Father commented. “I can no longer refer to it as heresy, but as apostasy. And all through your apostolic generosity! Against all the wise counsels and infallible teaching of all your Predecessors, you want to be the Good Samaritan of the Gospel, affectionately turning your attention to every man his brother. And in your unfettered love you make friends with the Goliath of the Modern World, kneeling before the Enemy of God who only defies and hates you. Instead of steeling your heart and fighting, like David, against the Adversary, you express yourself full of love for him, you flatter him, and end up in his exclusive service! Your charity turns into adoration and service of the Enemy of God to the extent even of rivalling him in his error and even in his blasphemy.”

Paul VI did not need to read this book. He was aware of the accusations brought against him by Father de Nantes because of the Trial of 1968 during which the judges were unable to find any doctrinal errors against his accuser. So as not to be obliged to recant and in defiance of the duties of his office, Paul VI obstructed the examination of this complaint. Several serried rows of plain-clothes policemen and armed carabinieri of the Italian police before the Bronze door to prevent its deposit, were his only response to this Book of Accusation, which alone invalidates the canonisation of him who has been profaning our altars since October 14, 2018.

It is undoubtedly in order to avoid the instituting of an adversarial trial of John Paul II’s cause that Benedict XVI hastened the proceedings of his canonisation, on April 27, 2014, without responding to the numerous criticisms that were formulated by Father Georges de Nantes, our Founder, in the form of a “complaint against our brother in the Faith Karol Wojtyla, on account of heresy, schism and scandal.”

THE SECOND BOOK OF ACCUSATION.

The grounds for this complaint were collected in a “Book of Accusation” presented to the Holy See on May 13, 1983 by Father de Nantes and two hundred delegates of the League of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Although this action was in accordance with the Canons 212, 221, and 1417 of the Code of Canon Law, the authorities have always refused to examine or even to accept this accusation against the reigning Sovereign Pontiff. It is thus still pending judgement. If the Holy See recognises its legitimacy, it would have to forbid the “cult” of dulia that is fraudulently rendered to the “holy” Popes of the conciliar Reform.

Today, Father de Nantes, though dead, still speaks against John Paul II’s heresy, the corollary of “the faith in man who makes himself God,” which was proclaimed by his predecessor and “spiritual Father,” Paul VI. In the exordium of this second Book of Accusation, Father de Nantes cited a text on which he declared himself prepared to stake his entire faith and his eternal life: “One on which the whole case could be judged.” It concerns pages 222 to 227 of the “Dialogue with André Frossard – from his book N’ayez pas peur (Be not Afraid) –, in which the part attributed to you,” Father de Nantes wrote, addressing himself to John Paul II, “was, in fact, written, revised and carefully amended by you before being published in 1982.”

In the incriminating pages, John Paul II quoted the reply of Jesus to Pilate: “Yes, I am a king. For this was I born and for this came I into the world that I should give testimony to the truth. Everyone that is of the truth hears My voice.” He commented: “Christ is king in the sense that in Him, in the testimony He rendered to the truth, is made manifest the ‘kingship’ of every human being, the expression of the transcendent character of the person. Such is the proper heritage of the Church.”

This affirmation categorically contradicts Catholic tradition according to which the truth for which Our Lord Jesus Christ died concerns God His Father and Himself, in His unique, sacred, inviolable and inaccessible Holiness, in other words, in His “transcendence” as Son of God, only King of the universe and Saviour of His people. On the other hand, John Paul II makes Christ into a martyr of the dignity, the kingship, and the so-called transcendence of man.

a) Esotericism.

Father de Nantes reveals what biographers ordinarily conceal: Mieczyslaw Kotlarczyk, master and friend of Karol Wojtyla, was a disciple of the theosophist Rudolf Steiner, an adept of a non-dogmatic and evolutionist cosmic Christianity. This cannot be seen as a simple influence on Karol in his youth, fascinated by the enthralling magic of the theatrical art, since, when he became the Archbishop of Cracow, he wrote an introduction for Kotlarczyk’s book, “The Art of the Living Word.” In this introduction he develops a theory according to which “a group of people of one mind subject to the poetic word (sic) assumes an ethical significance: the significance of solidarity in the Word (sic!), and of loyalty with regard to the Word.”

Oddly enough, this preface of Karol Wojtyla does not figure in the inventories of his works... Is this omission made so as not to hinder his canonisation?

In order fully to grasp how contrary to the Catholic faith is this alleged “transcendence of man,” the principle of dialogue with atheists faithfully practiced by Pope John Paul II, one only has to read the transcription of the retreat “Sign of Contradiction.” In it, he refers to the words of Simeon to the Virgin Mary on the day of the Presentation:

“Behold this Child is set for the fall and for the resurrection of many in Israel and for a sign that shall be contradicted.” (Lk 2:34)

By applying it to the Hegelian contradiction between the Catholic religion (thesis) and modern atheism (antithesis), he intends to show that the idea of a God Who does not accept the kingship of man is an appalling misunderstanding, which he gives himself the mission of dispelling.

For, instead of condemning the “speculative deicide” by which the scientist and the modern philosopher refuses to submit to the authority of God, substituting their own for it, as though they were themselves God, Cardinal Wojtyla justifies this crime of deicide through an entirely new exegesis of the first three chapters of the Book of Genesis. His entire reasoning rests on a novel interpretation of the Biblical account of original sin, according to which the fault would have consisted not in rising up against God, but in succumbing to the “lie” of Satan, making Adam and Eve believe that God was jealous of their kingship!

“It all began with an untruth that one might think was merely based on faulty information and showed an innocent intention: ‘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 into question the veracity of God: ‘You will not die!’ Thus he attacks the very existence of the Covenant between God and man.” (p. 43)

Father de Nantes points out that Cardinal Wojtyla has, in his account, “skirted around the existence of a God-given precept to our first parents:” “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” (Gn 2:16-17) The result of this clever “omission” is the effacing of this first truth ‘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.” According to Wojtyla, it is totally the fault of Satan, whose “statement is intended,” he says, “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 on the very reason of man.”

Thus, according to this exegesis, love excludes any law that would exceed what “the very essence of man” under the control of “reason” demands. This amounts to making authority a sin, and disobedience a natural and virtuous reaction to any trampling on the liberty of man by God or anyone else.

The result is that obedience, submission, and adoration are three demands falsely attributed to God by Satan, according to Wojtyla:

“The God of the Covenant is effectively presented to the woman 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.” (p. 44)

This would have created a tragic “misunderstanding”, which has traversed all of history down to us:

“One might say that here we are at the beginning of the temptation of man, the beginning of a long process that will unfurl itself throughout history.” (p. 44)

Today, this trick of the Devil explains modern atheism, and has pitted modern man against God since the birth of humanism. Fortunately, this misunderstanding was dispelled by Second Vatican Council when it solemnly proclaimed “the fully legitimate autonomy of human society and science.” (p. 45)

This is how Karol Wojtyla sacrifices the traditional Catholic religion to its modern antithesis, atheist humanism. He has this “speculative Good Friday” followed by a “dialectical Holy Saturday,” a “descent into Hell,” in order to “dialogue” with atheists. To André Frossard, he stated: “If the situation of man in the modern world – and above all in certain circles of civilisation – is such that his faith, let us say his secular faith (sic) in humanism, science and progress is collapsing, there is surely opportunity to tell this man about the God of Jesus Christ, the God of the Covenant, and the God of the Gospel, quite simply (this “quite simply” is of an incredible density, Father de Nantes commented) in order that he may recover thereby (through faith in God, in Jesus Christ, and in the Gospel) the fundamental and definitive meaning of his humanity, that is to say, the proper meaning of humanism, science and progress, which he does not doubt, and which he does not cease to regard as his earthly task and vocation.” (Be not Afraid, p. 273)

It is obviously on Cardinal Wojtyla’s own admission, “a reinterpretation of the Gospel” that “opens up new ways of teaching. Christians have the duty to fashion the face of the earth and to make life more human. It is their duty to give what is called social progress its true meaning.” (Blazynski, John Paul II. A Man from Cracow, editions Stock, 1979, p. 253)

Consequently, this affirmation from his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis attains its full import: “The missionary attitude always begins with a feeling of deep esteem for ‘what is in man’.” Reference is made to John 2:25. Yet, if we refer to this passage of the fourth Gospel, we must remark that Jesus, far from showing such esteem for men, “did not trust Himself to them, because He knew all men and needed no one to bear witness of man; for He Himself knew what was in man.”

In order to make his “faith in man” agree with Scripture, Pope John Paul II is forced to misinterpret it!

In “Sign of Contradiction,” one can also read: “The glory of God is the living man! And God leads him towards glory... This glory is what God wishes above all. Only He has the power to reveal the glory of the creature, to reveal the glory of man in the mirror of His Truth, and consequently in the dimensions of the final Fulfilment... The glory of God is the living man.” (p. 231) »

Father de Nantes commented: “Here at last is the synthesis of the old Religion and of contemporary Atheism. It is their final fulfilment in living Man, rich in possessions and in existence, brought to completion in the feeling of the sacredness of his existence and in the glory of his freedom. Man and God are reconciled, but in Man. Saint Irenaeus, understood it quite differently; the reconciliation he had in mind was not in Man but in God: “The glory of God is that man might live. And the life of man is the vision of God” (Adv. haer. IV, 20:5-7)! Here man depends entirely on God and on His grace, and not on his own freedom and on his own pride! Between the two there is all the difference between a religion and its opposite, between the worship and love of God leading to the sacrifice of oneself and to death on the cross, and the worship and exaltation of self to the death of God and the obliteration of Jesus Christ.” (Liber accusationis II, p. 81)

The theocentrism of our holy Catholic religion gives way, in the heart and thought of John Paul II, to anthropocentrism; the cult of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, gives way to the cult of man who makes himself god. This idolatry was expressed, for example, in the discourse delivered at Unesco, on June 2, 1980:

“Man must be regarded in his entirety and his highest importance as a particular and autonomous value, bearing within himself the transcendence of the person. Man must be valued for himself alone and not for any other motive: only for himself. Furthermore, we must love man simply because he is man, and we must demand love for man by reason of the particular dignity that is his. All these claims made on behalf of man are integral to the message of Christ, despite what critical minds may have had to say on the subject or whatever various trends opposed to religion in general and Christianity in particular may have succeeded in doing.”

In this same discourse, John Paul II declared that “in the cultural domain, man is always the primary factor: man is the primordial and fundamental factor in culture... In thinking of all cultures, I wish to say here in Paris, at the seat of Unesco, with respect and admiration, Behold the man!”

Father de Nantes called these words a “blasphemy.” It is indeed significant that Pope Benedict XVI, in his message addressed to Unesco for the twenty-fifth anniversary of this memorable discourse, quoted this passage, but not this last sentence.

In the face of such a text, the theologian of the Catholic Counter-Reformation wondered:

“Might this be an intellectual construction, intended to attract atheists, unbelievers and the indifferent to the Church, and might this be a way of showing that the Church is open to their problems, even though the eloquence is a little exaggerated?” If that were so, “it would be a lesser evil, but its total failure should be sufficient to call a halt to such an apologetic.” It is legitimate, however, to wonder whether it is not more: “A true passion, an obsession with the grandeur of man, for love of man and his success?” “If it is,” Father de Nantes announced in his Book of Accusation in 1983, “this humanism will occupy more and more of your heart and mind, and will take up more of your time and activity! It will be all the more serious in that you have ascended to the highest degree of the hierarchy of the Church. From that height, all that is given to man will be taken from God, and all that is kept for God will appear to have been refused to man, the rival of God.” (Liber accusationis II, p. 88)

In 1983, Father de Nantes accused John Paul II of stifling religion. Seven years later, the latter himself admitted that “the number of those who do not know Christ and do not belong to the Church is constantly on the increase. Indeed, since the end of the Council it has almost doubled.” (Redemptoris Missio, December 7, 1990, no. 3)

b) Jesus Christ united to all men.

John Paul II continually quoted a statement, which he himself had inserted into the Constitution Gaudium et Spes, when he was at the Council as Archbishop of Cracow: “By His incarnation the Son of God has united Himself in some fashion with every man.” Confusing nature and grace, human life and divine life, Pope John Paul II attaches no condition to the union with Christ of “each man without any exception whatever, even when he is unaware of it.” (Redemptor Hominis, no. 14). From whatever religion or irreligion he may be.

In his last Apostolic Letter, Mane Nobiscum of October 7, 2004, he ended up writing about Our Lord Jesus Christ that “in Him, the Incarnate Word, both the mystery of God and the mystery of man are revealed. Because in Christ human nature was assumed, not absorbed, by that very fact this nature has been elevated in us to a matchless dignity. For by His incarnation the Son of God has united Himself in some fashion with every man.” (G.S. 22:2)

There ensues what Father de Nantes called an “Idealist Pasch,” following the “Speculative Good Friday” and the “Dialectical Holy Saturday.” This means that the Church will save her faith (“Idealist Pasch”) by accepting the atheistic, materialist humanism (“Speculative Good Friday”) of a world that rejects her (“Dialectical Holy Saturday”.)

It needs only to be pointed out that the “faith” that must be reconciled with contemporary humanism, is the fruit of the spontaneous and universal creation of the deepest human sentiment: it is a Modernist “faith.”

As an example of this Modernism, we can cite the interpretation considering the “descent into Hell” of Jesus Christ after His death on the Cross as a “conception,” and not as an historical event. According to Pope John Paul II, this article of our Creed is a pure metaphor referring not to a “descent” but to an ascent “to the fullness of the beatific vision of God,” which rather suggests an “ascension” (allocution at the audience of January 11, 1989)!

This explanation “smacks of heresy,” Arian and Nestorian heresy, which puts Christ into the same category as an ordinary human being, morally perfect, holy, and “admitted” only after His death to “the fullness of the beatific vision of God.” Unlike the teaching of the Church, according to which Jesus, Son of God, God Himself, enjoyed, from the first exercise of His human faculties, the beatific vision of His own deity, of His divine Being, of His personal identity. The Church forbids all contrary teaching and Saint Thomas shows the reason for it in the existential union of the two natures, divine and human, in the Person of the Word:

“Through such a union, the Christ-man is Himself blessed with uncreated beatitude, just as He is also God through this union. In addition, however, His human nature had to possess this particular created beatitude through which His soul was in possession of the ultimate end of His human nature.” (III a, Question 9, article 2, ad 2) This is why, beginning here below, “His soul was raised up by a participated light from His divine nature to the perfection of the beatific knowledge that consists in the vision of God in His essence.” (ad 1)

The cult of man in whom Christ abides by the simple fact of His Incarnation leads to considering the Church as the “sign” of the close union of all men with God, and of the unity of the human race in its members, all brothers together. She is no longer the “sacrament” of that unity. It is “the whole human race” without any prerequisite conversion or entry into the Church, which is seen to possess a satisfactory union with God and unity among its members, as it was the case at the meeting of all the “other religions” in Assisi, on October 27, 1986.

“Of course,” Father de Nantes commented, “there was ‘not the slightest confusion or syncretism” at Assisi. There was much worse: in this carnivalesque and gaudy procession of all the Afro-Asian folklore, there was a suicidal obliteration of Christ and of His Church.” When John Paul II justified this meeting of Assisi by a quotation from the Gospel of Saint John: “The Lord offered His life not for the nation only, but to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad” (Jn 11:52,) Father de Nantes protested against “another abusive quotation from Holy Scripture to support a heresy that could not be more contrary to it. Our Lord died on the Cross so that all, Jews and pagans, abandoning their age-old ‘ignorance’ or ‘perfidy’ might yield to the prompting of Truth and enter into the one, holy Church.” (CCR no. 197, February 1987)

On the contrary, Pope John Paul II dissuaded them from doing so when he religiously kissed the Qurʾān, on May 14, 1999, in Iraq, where a delegation led by the Shiite imam of the Khadum mosque presented it to him. This gesture of devotion, which was shown on Iraqi television, encouraged the Muslims to believe that the author of the Qurʾān was right when he accused Christians of having “apostatised” the religion of Abraham – following the example of the Jews: “Long ago they apostatised (kafara), they who said: ‘There is God, He, the Christ, the son of Mary.’” (Sūrah V, 17 and 72)

The term “son of Mary” is intended to permanently supersede the Christian titles of “Son of the Most High” and “Son of David.”

On Sunday, May 6, 2000, after having ritually removed his shoes, the Pope entered into the mosque of the Umayyads at Damascus, in order to listen to the reading of the verses of the Qurʾān, and the litany of the names of Allah, followed by the homily of the great mufti affirming that “Islam is the religion of brotherhood and peace,” and that “we all adore the same God.” John Paul II thereby reinforced a billion Muslims in their “faith” in the Qurʾān, according to which God does not have a son.

c) The Wojtylian gnosis.

During his long pontificate, Pope John Paul II turned Christian hope away from the Kingdom of God by emptying Hell and Heaven of all concrete reality, in order to call for the construction of a new world here below on the occasion of the beginning of the third millennium.

Due to the fact that “by His incarnation the Son of God has united Himself in some fashion with every man,” does He accompany him into Hell? Of course not! John Paul II concludes from this that quite probably, there is no one in Hell. For example, in his book “Enter into Hope:”

“The possibility of eternal damnation is certainly proclaimed in the Gospel with no possible ambiguity,” he recognises. “But to what degree is it actually realised in the afterlife?” The Pope replies to this question with another question: “If God desires that all men be saved, if God, for this reason offered His Son Who, in turn, acts in the Church through the Holy Spirit, can man be damned, can he be rejected by God? From time immemorial, the question of Hell has preoccupied the great thinkers of the Church, from Origen to Mikhaïl Boulgakov and Hans Urs von Balthasar. The first Councils rejected the theory called the final apocatastasis, according to which the world, after its destruction, will be renewed and every creature will be saved; a theory that implicitly abolished Hell. The question, however, continues to be posed. God, Who so loved man, can He accept that he reject Him and for this reason be condemned to unending torments? Yet, the words of Christ are unequivocal. In Matthew, He speaks clearly of those who will experience eternal punishment.

“Who will these be? The Church has never wanted to take a position. There is an impenetrable mystery between the holiness of God and the human conscience. The silence of the Church is thus the only appropriate attitude.”

In saying this, Pope John Paul II cast doubt on the statements of Sister Lucy according to whom the Virgin Mary did not adopt this “appropriate attitude” at Fatima on July 13, 1917, by showing to Lucy, Francisco and Jacinta “Hell where poor sinners go,” a vision that is well attested if only by the cry of horror that Lucy let out, which was heard by the witnesses of this third apparition:

“Our Lady opened Her hands again, as She had done the two previous months. The reflection (of the light) seemed to penetrate the earth and we saw what looked like a vast ocean of fire. Plunged in this fire we saw demons and souls (of the damned). The latter were like transparent burning embers, black or bronzed, having human form. They were floating in this fire, lifted up by the flames that issued from within themselves, along with clouds of smoke. They fell back on all sides, like sparks in huge fires, without weight or equilibrium, amid cries and groans of pain and despair that were horrifying to hear and made us tremble with fright. It must have been this sight that caused me to let out the cry that the people around me heard. The demons could be distinguished (from the souls of the damned) by their horrible and repellent likeness to frightening and unknown animals, but they were transparent like burning black coals.

“This vision lasted but an instant, thanks to our good Mother in Heaven Who, during the first apparition, had promised to take us to Heaven. Were it not for this, I believe we would have died of fear and terror.”

We should not be surprised that John Paul II totally disregards this vision, since he denies Judas’ certain damnation:

“Even if Christ said of Judas who had just betrayed Him: ‘It would be better for that man if he had never been born,’ this sentence must not be understood as eternal damnation.”

d) Heaven is not a place.

If Pope John Paul II wrongly taught us not to fear Hell, he did not inspire the desire for Heaven. It is noteworthy that the Wednesday allocutions of 1989, in which the Pope was finishing a methodical commentary on the Creed, article after article, which had begun in January 1982, he came to deny the physical fact of the bodily Ascension of Jesus into Heaven. According to Pope John Paul II, the Ascension is not a local translation of the Risen Jesus, from earth into some Heaven, but His “complete and definitive abstraction from the laws of time and space.” “In other words,” Father de Nantes commented, His “dematerialisation.”

After which, it should be noted that the allocutions of subsequent Wednesdays change subject, without finishing the explication of the Creed, in which he should have dealt with the physical reality of Heaven and Hell!

e) A new world here below, for the year 2000.

If John Paul II only had abstruse words for speaking of Heaven, on the other hand he put all his immense intellectual capacities and his charisma at the service of the utopia of a world of peace through universal democracy of which the Church would be the spiritual animator here on earth! “Breaking with Catholic morality, with the honour of civilised peoples and with the immemorial rules of papal diplomacy,” Father de Nantes observed, “John Paul II has not come out against this revolutionary uprising with a trade-union pretext and a religious mask. He has not, like his valiant predecessors of the last century, demanded that the peoples submit to the powers that be, and ordered the Church to co-operate with the State either in Poland or anywhere else in the world. He has not reserved his solicitude for the salvation of souls and public tranquillity, but has wasted it on the doubtful causes of justice, human rights and freedom.” (CCR no. 145, April 1982, p. 4)

The encyclical “Sollicitudo Rei Socialis,” of December 30, 1987, offers a flagrant example of this. The Pope makes it a duty for everyone “to commit himself to the development of peoples:”

“It is an imperative that obliges each and every man and woman, as well as societies and nations. In particular, it obliges the Catholic Church and the other Churches and Ecclesial Communities, with which we are completely willing to collaborate in this field.”

We are at poles apart from Saint Pius X, according to whom, in his Letter on the Sillon, “we do not have to demonstrate that the “development of peoples” is of no concern to the action of the Church in the world;” what is important for it, on the other hand, is to lead the peoples, “each and every man and woman,” if it is possible, to the happiness of Heaven.

No, in the “integral development of man,” John Paul II does not include entry into Heaven, in order to take one’s place at the wedding-feast of the Lamb! His naturalistic application of the parable of the evil rich man and the poor Lazarus to economic and social life confirms it for us:

“It is essential, as the encyclical Populorum Progressio already asked,” he declared in the encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis “to recognise the equal right of each people ‘to be seated at the table of the common banquet [of the goods of this world] instead of lying outside the door like Lazarus, while ‘the dogs come and lick his sores’ (cf. Lk 16:21).” (no. 33)

Already, on June 2, 1980, parodying the words of Jesus in the desert, John Paul II had openly proclaimed at the headquarters of Unesco: “Man does not live by bread alone, but also by culture.” By replacing “all the words that proceed from the mouth of God,” by culture, John Paul II shows that his “religion” is reduced to the sole cultural function of contribution. Or, to be more precise, he says, “it strives to contribute the supernatural component to human cultural elaboration.” (Discourse at Camerino, March 19, 1991.)

Far from being “supernatural,” the so-called “component” is purely natural, according to John Paul II. In order convince oneself of this, it suffices to acquaint oneself with his discourse to the diplomatic corps on January 10, 1998. In it he reveals his ambition of becoming the mentor of all the peoples of the world, as the best “expert in humanity,” dealing with all their problems by appealing to the ideology of the rights of man, of his liberty, of his cult; but the orator does not say a word in it about his own religion!

The discourse at Funchal on the feast of the Ascension 1991 is just as convincing:

“Thus, the Ascension of the Lord is not a simple departure,” Father de Nantes summarised. “It is first of all the beginning of a new presence and of a new saving action”... those of the Spirit, who “gives divine strength to the earthly life of humanity in the visible Church.” No sooner is it recalled than this limit of the visible Church is overturned. The fullness of “all the restored creation,” the “new creation of the world and of man” that “we celebrate in the Sunday Eucharist”, fills “the Church and the world” without further difference and without condition. Here we find this gnostic unanimism in which the dilution of the Body of Christ is total and definitive, while humanity and even the material world assume their stature of “Body” at the breath of the “Spirit;” and this will be the second Coming of Christ, in the Age of the Spirit, which will soon appear.

“The Ascension of the Lord is, in the light of the liturgy of today,” the Pope concluded, “the solemnity of maturation [of whom? of what? do not try to guess: of everything that is not Christ, but that becomes Him...] in the Holy Spirit for the fullness of Christ.” Thus there is no longer, in any Paradise, a true and living Man-God Jesus Christ, in the flesh, in company of His glorious Mother assumed into Heaven, nor any real Presence in any Mass. There is no longer any coming to expect of this Christ Saviour, other than that of the year 2000, “the second and definitive Coming of Christ the Saviour:”

“Thus the new man in dignity, in contemplation and in adoration, approaches God with confidence, in a great feast of all restored creation. We celebrate the renewed splendour of the full goodness [sic] of the world in God: the risen Christ, in His infinite grace, frees man of his limits. Pasch is the new creation of the world and of man.” (CRC no. 273, May 1991, p. 16)

Under John Paul II’s pontificate, the Church had as the sole aim of all her works not to lead all souls – if possible – to Heaven, but “to bring her own contribution to the preparation of men who will enter into the new millennium.”

Rejecting “the ‘prophets of woe,’ ready to see catastrophes everywhere,” John Paul II paid homage to “the prestigious objectives that were reached” as so many “moments on the road of man at the threshold of the year 2000:” the conquest of space, nuclear energy, genetics, computer science, robotics (Discourse at Camerino, March 19, 1991.)

All of these conquests, according to him, lead the Church to realise “that she is living a phase that is among the most innovative of history,” owing to the extension of the “very concept of culture.” Now, as man must nourish himself not only from the “bread earned through the work of his hands, but also through the bread of science and progress, of civilisation and culture” (Laborem Exercens, 1,) in this profusion of “forms of multicultural societies that go beyond the traditional geographical and political borders,” the Church has only one thought: “In the light of God, to assert the primacy of man!”

Indeed, in the year 2000, John Paul II thought that he would inaugurate a new, definitive era, a new civilisation.

On March 26, 2000, he went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem with this intention. He celebrated its first “station” on the ancient esplanade of the Jewish Temple, which has become the esplanade of the Dome of the Rock, the “memorial,” according to the Qurʾān, “consecrated so that men may faithfully return there and celebrate the ‘Place of Abraham’ with prayers” (Sūrah II, verse 125.)

Let us point out that, indeed, John Paul II’s plan presents an extraordinary resemblance to that of the author of the Qurʾān, which is to restore the “perfect” (ʾislām) religion born of Abraham, and to substitute it for Judaism and Christianity that are in perpetual conflict with one another!

Thus, he therefore formulated this wish that “the All-Powerful might bring peace to this entire beloved region, so that all peoples dwelling there might enjoy their rights, live in harmony and cooperation, and give witness to the one God in an act of goodness and human solidarity” (quoted in Resurrection no. 1, January 2001, p. 11.)

Even though, since then, violence has only increased in the aforesaid region, as was foreseeable because “without Me, you can do nothing,” Our Lord warned, John Paul II persevered in his hope for a world of peace without the necessary recourse to Christ.

The second “station” of the pontifical pilgrimage was the Wailing Wall, where the Pope went to deposit the text of the repentance (teshouva) of the Church regarding the Jewish people and to touch with his palm the stone of the “Qotel,” the western Wall that supported the Temple of Jerusalem, wherein resided the “presence” of the living God until its destruction in 70 a.d. by the Romans.

John Paul II thus behaved as the successor of Peter... before the Apostle “recovered” from his denial and invited the “men of Israel” to repent and be baptised “in the name of Jesus Christ” for the remission of their sins, in order to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit: “For the promise,” he told them, “is made to you and to your children and to all those far off, whomever the Lord our God will call.” (Ac 2:38-40)

In 2001, John Paul II went to Greece, Syria and Malta, “in the footsteps of Saint Paul.” At Damascus, in a formerly Christian church, which has been transformed into a mosque, he declared to his Muslim hosts: “Our meeting in this renowned place reminds us that man is a spiritual being, called to acknowledge and respect the absolute priority of God in all things.” He did not say: “of Christ Who is God,” as a true disciple of the author of the Qurʾān but not of Saint Paul who, as soon as he was converted on the road to Damascus, “began at once to preach Jesus in the synagogues, proclaiming that He is the Son of God” (Ac 9:20.)

“It is my ardent hope,” he continued, “that Muslim and Christian religious leaders and teachers will present our two great religious communities as communities engaged in a respectful dialogue, and never again as communities in conflict.”

Thus we must “never again” speak of Jesus Christ as the Son of God.

During Pope John Paul II’s long pontificate, the Church, without supernatural hope, became a movement for the spiritual animation of universal democracy, in accordance with the wish of Paul VI.

We can legitimately wonder whether the words of Jesus Christ are not being fulfilled before our eyes:

“But when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on earth?” (Lk 18:8)

THE THIRD BOOK OF ACCUSATION

The answer to this question will be negative if Jesus is long in coming back and if, in the meantime, the supposed “Catechism of the Catholic Church” (CCC,) is used to teach several generations their religion. This so-called catechism was prescribed for the Holy Church, of whom Jesus is the Bridegroom and the King, by His Vicar John Paul II, in the Apostolic Constitution “Fidei Depositum” of October 11, 1992. Father de Nantes then wrote his third “Book of Accusation,” that he brought in person to the Vatican on May 13, 1993, accompanied by 250 representatives of the CCR.

“The whole work has been much too much governed and executed “in the light of the Second Vatican Council,” Most Holy Father, and for that very reason has been drawn up, not in accord with “the whole of the Church’s Tradition” (CCC, no. 11,) but in contradiction with it. It is my well-founded conviction, therefore, that its author is either deceived or is deceiving us.”

Nevertheless, the Pope gave it the full weight of his authority:

“The Catechism of the Catholic Church, which I approved June 25 last and the publication of which I today order by virtue of my Apostolic Authority, is a statement of the Church’s faith and of Catholic doctrine, attested to or illumined by Sacred Scripture, the Apostolic Tradition and the Church’s Magisterium. I declare it to be a sure norm for teaching the Faith and thus a valid and legitimate instrument for ecclesial communion.”

Now, our Father declared that “this supposed Catechism is replete with errors, deceptions, insults against God, His Son Jesus Christ and Their Holy Spirit, and numerous manifest absurdities and incongruities.” Consequently, he presented in a third Book of Accusation a “complaint against X,” that he brought “before your apostolic Tribunal, Most Holy Father,” in order to “to make them the object of an infallible ex cathedra judgement.”

The main error of this “Catechism” is the one that the Holy Father himself commits by imposing it on the whole Church as the expression of her ordinary Magisterium. As such, it is considered to be infallible by the sole fact that it has been “fervently received by the whole people of God,” with the exception of ourselves who, of course, count for nothing!

Yet, for the consent of the people of God to be invested with the mark of infallibility, it must be the expression of its unanimous adherence, not only it adherence today “by the dogmatic and Magisterial authority of the Second Vatican Council,” but also the adherence of the people of God of the past and of all times. This is not the case for the CCC, which Father de Nantes described as a “Catechism of Pride, Catechesis of Deceit.” It breaks with both the teaching of the Council of Trent and the catechism of Saint Pius X (whose name is not mentioned in the CCC), concerning the four chapters that are the objects of the second question: “in particular with regard to the doctrine on the Church, Divine Revelation, the liturgy and religious freedom.”

On the Church.

“The mere thought of belonging to the Church is enough to renew the jubilation of our souls, for the Church is Holy like her Bridegroom Jesus Christ from Whom she has received such a likeness that there is nothing in this world so beautiful, so wise, so majestic as her face and her whole being. She is our Mother, and I add: she is the unique, incomparable Spouse; she alone is holy, wise, sublime, leaving false religions and philosophies far behind in their delusive darkness. In her is found, united and prosperous, all that is best in the world.” (Georges de Nantes)

According to the new Catechism, however, Jesus Christ “has united Himself in some fashion with every man.” (G. S. 22:2) We can read in number 1612 of the CCC:

“The nuptial covenant between God and His people Israel had prepared the new and eternal Covenant in which the Son of God, by becoming incarnate and giving His life, has united to Himself in a certain way all humanity saved by Him (G. S. 22:2), thus preparing for the ‘wedding-feast of the Lamb.’” (Ap 19:7-9.)

This text introduces a totally new idea, according to which this union of Christ with all of humanity that has been saved would constitute the indissoluble bond of the new and eternal Covenant – eternal and therefore retroactive –existing between Christ the Bridegroom and Humanity, which invisibly constitutes His Spouse. Thus, His Spouse is no longer the visible hierarchical, priestly Church, mediatrix of grace through the distribution of the sacraments, from Baptism, which introduces the new-born child into the Church, to the Extreme-Unction that prepares entrance into Heaven.

This bizarre “union,” which Christ thus establishes with all men, seems to be a substantial supplement and soon, doubtless, an automatic substitute for baptism. Anathema sit!

On Divine Revelation.

We can read in number 99 of the CCC: “Because of their supernatural sense of faith, the People of God as a whole never cease to welcome the gift of Divine Revelation, to penetrate it more deeply and to live it more fully.”

The whole history of the Church proves that this is obviously not the reality, neither yesterday’s nor today’s. Through the fallibility of human minds and the defectibility of human hearts, all the terrible crises which, from century to century have succeeded one another, shook the Church, so that none may glorify himself before the Lord for his personal infallibility! It is still this same unfathomable human fragility that explains the increasing anarchy in which is falling today, the holy City of the people of God, the “large city half in ruins” of the vision of July 13, 1917 at the Cova da Iria.

“How then is it possible to parade such a claim to an unlimited, perpetual infallibility and indefectibility for the Pope, the bishops and the whole people of God,” our Father asks, “when, since 1960, everyone has known, or should have known, the Secret of Fatima, announcing the general apostasy of the Church, in her Roman Head and in almost all her members, in their abandonment of the true Faith and their sin against the Holy Spirit, as a punishment for their contempt and rejection of Our Lady’s requests formulated in the name of Her Son Jesus Christ our God?”

This text dates from 1993. The “Secret” was only published in 2000, and it confirms all the predictions point by point.

On the liturgy.

The liturgy is the service of the worship rendered to God in order to unite with Him through the mediation of Jesus:

“2602. He includes all men in his prayer, since He also assumes our humanity in His Incarnation, and He offers them to the Father in offering Himself. He, the Word Who ‘took flesh,’ shares by His human prayer in all that ‘His brethren’ experience (Heb 2:12.)”

“2606. All the perennial distress of humanity enslaved to sin and death, all the requests and intercessions of salvation history are gathered up in this Cry of the Word incarnate. Now, the Father welcomes them and, beyond all hope, answers them by raising up His Son. Thus is fulfilled and consummated the drama of prayer in the economy of creation and salvation.”

Nevertheless, our Father recalled, in this same sacerdotal prayer, Jesus said: “I am praying for them; I am not praying for the world but for those whom You have given Me, because they are Yours.”

“When I read in this Catechism certain of its triumphant thoughts, lacking all fear or love of God, about the glory of man whom Christ has supposedly united to Himself for ever, I am fearful that this heresy – the master idea of this gnosis animating postconciliar catechesis – may triumph in the Church by means of this Catechism of pride:”

“1741. By His glorious Cross, Christ obtained the salvation of all men. He redeemed them from the sin that held them enslaved. “For freedom Christ has set us free” (Gal 5:1). In Him we have communion with the “truth that makes us free” (Jn 8:32.) The Holy Spirit has been given to us and, as the Apostle teaches, “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor 3:17.) Even now we glory in the “liberty of the children of God. (Rom 8:21)”

We? To whom does we refer? To everyone! To all men. I think I hear Jesus interrupting this insolent paean: “You? I never knew you; depart from Me, you evildoers!” (Mt 7:23)

On Religious freedom.

The men of our time heard with pleasure the proclamation of religious Freedom. Thereupon, they sunk themselves in their errors, their rebellions, their disorderly loves, and their earthly greed: “They made idols of themselves, taking themselves as genuinely being what they were not, but which you falsely told them they were: a people of gods, a people of priests, of prophets and of kings!

“This arrogance, this pride, this dignity, this liberty, which they boast of and which you profess to admire in them as an exact likeness to God the Father and Son, they delight in it as a perpetual defiance of their Creator. It has reached the point where a battle is going to break out between the two worlds. Theirs is the world of your gnostic anthroposophy – will you be part of it? Ours is that of Jesus and Mary, ever triumphant.

“What is to be done now? Nothing other than to preach Jesus and Mary, Jesus crucified and Mary transfixed. Men must be taught that the moment has come to adore the true Man, the true image and likeness of the Father, His Son Jesus Christ, and the Immaculate Conception, His Holy Mother Who gives Him to us to cherish in order that we may grieve over our dissimilarity and our misfortune in this vale of tears, while we wait for the grace of salvation, which proceeds from an incomprehensible and inestimable predestination.

“Our mirages have led us astray, Most Holy Father; we have lost our way in our gnosis and we are filled with pride for having dreamed of a plan of grace more wonderful than that of God Himself! We have thrust the human race back under the yoke of Satan, a Liar from the beginning. Today, he believes he can triumph through our false Gospel. Ah, let us repent, let us preach the true paths of salvation! It will never be too late to repair our errors and our extravagant behaviour. Through the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Sacred Heart will allow Himself to be touched, and our world, humbly athirst for Life, Truth and Love, will find or rediscover the way of the Church, the way of Rome, which is that of the Kingdom of Heaven in this world and in the next.”

V. THE RECONSTRUCTION: A CATHEDRAL OF LIGHT

The successive Pontiffs, John XXIII who opened the Second Vatican Council, Paul VI who carried it through to completion, John Paul II who put it into practice, all pursued the goal of establishing a deep understanding with all the religions, peoples and cultures of the world. Father de Nantes defined it as a transformation of the Roman Catholic Church into a Movement for the Spiritual Animation of Universal Democracy (masdu.) Its purpose was to prepare the Church for a renovation of her Faith and her pastoral activity in view of a “new evangelisation” and a “new humanism” for the third millennium.

The work of our Father, Georges de Nantes, is nothing other than the defence and illustration of Catholic doctrine, which is “unchanged, unchangeable, and non-negotiable by reason of its divine perfection.” He did not cease meditating on it and perfecting it to form a “total” doctrine in order to respond to the immense apostasy that is resulting from this adultery of the Church. As unique Bride of Jesus Christ, she engenders, through a new birth, the sons of Adam to restored grace, introducing the “other religions” in her family.

TO PREPARE VATICAN III.

On May 13, 1971, Father de Nantes launched a campaign that took up Cardinal Suenens’ challenge: “Instead of lamenting and preaching pointlessly a return to the past or a ‘measured reform’ of Vatican II, let us prepare the future!” He carefully and critically studied the Acts of the Council, which consist of sixteen texts, ‘constitutions,’ ‘decrees’ and ‘declarations.’

After having detected the seeds of heresy, schism and scandal that had been sown in these documents, he devised, in a dogmatic exposition, the counterpropositions of reparative and victorious schemata.

He rebuilt all the theological treatises, that Archbishop Wojtyla had demolished with his “dogma” on the Incarnation defined as the union of Christ with every man, whoever he may be, making him a god. Father de Nantes, however, did not merely content himself with teaching a “total theology” and a Catholic mysticism of the true union with God in word and writing, he lived out such a union by a continual contemplation and an incessant colloquy with God the Father, God the Son, nurtured by all the gifts of God the Holy Spirit, striving to have us, brothers and sisters, enter into this divine family.

John Paul II made religion a Hegelian dialectic, while Father de Nantes made of it a love, like Father de Foucauld, like Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus. Throughout his whole life, he applied himself ‘to making Love loved.’ The first Mystical Page, dated from February 1968, is a cry from the heart: “Our Father Who art in Heaven, I love You and I suffer.” What does he suffer from? Like Saint Francis of Assisi, he suffers seeing that Love is not loved.

In order to make Love loved, he undertook a “Catholic Counter-Reformation” to attack not only the third “Reformation”, that of the 20^th century, but the first one, Luther’s (1517.) Protestantism took “the first step” on this path, as Saint Pius X said when condemning “the second,” Modernism (1907,) in prevision of “the third,” that would lead into “atheism,” in which we find ourselves today.

“The questions debated are new, at least in part,” our Father admitted, “and they oblige us to resolve difficulties that were unknown to the Ancients. Our Catholicism, therefore, will have to make both theological and institutional progress [...]. We have no desire to “return” to Vatican I, nor to the Council of Trent, nor to that of Nicaea! We want Vatican III to clarify Vatican II and to isolate and eliminate its poison.”

This was the programme that Father de Nantes fulfilled through monthly lectures in the great hall of the Mutualité, in Paris, for twenty-five years, and in the monthly bulletin of The Catholic Counter-Reformation in the 20^th Century, which became He is Risen in 2000. His intention for “the beginning of the third millennium,” was to rebuild a Church, depicted as “a large city half in ruins,” in the “Third Secret of Fatima, which was published in the year 2000.

KERYGMATIC THEOLOGY.

From December 1972 to October 1973, the programme that was announced under this title unfolded as though it were a proposal of superior reconciliation that would remedy the narrow confines and the sectarian fits of rage that the novelties of the Second Vatican Council have spread within the Church, and that John Paul II’s dialectics only worsened. To return to the apostolic “kerygma” is tantamount to returning to the frank proclamation of the Word of God, on which the Apostles founded the Church after Pentecost, after having received the fullness of the Holy Spirit.

Is God, our God, His Son Jesus Christ, Their Spirit of Love, a God of Order or of Revolution? Here is a “kerygmatic” response to this antagonism that has torn our Christianity apart for five hundred years:

« I am a revolutionary with Christ, to overthrow the power of the Prince of this world, and I am a conservator of Order, which is the result of nature and grace, from which mankind has already received and is still expecting a thousand marvels.”

This principle governed his analysis of the current political and religious events that he set out in the first hour of the monthly meetings held in the Mutualité hall until 1996. Political and religious events were understood and explained from God’s point of view, in order to discern what others call “the signs of the times,” or as we would say, the will of God, according to a divine orthodromy, i.e. the way that leads the most directly to God.

This kerygmatic theology prepared the way for mystical aesthetics (November 1977-September 1978,) the subject of the conferences that preceded Paul VI’s death and John Paul I’s accession for a thirty-three day pontificate in 1978.

The goal was still the same: “The pursuit of an open and practicable way to God, for a union with God that is possible, meaningful and sure.” This aesthetics becomes dramatic once beauty manifests itself in the ugliness of the Cross and on the Holy Face of Jesus crucified, the “centre and the summit of all aesthetics,” since Jesus and Mary have vanquished sin, purified us of it through this mystery of death and resurrection. Accordingly, to find the Father in the Son is to attain Glory through the Cross, to seek happiness in trial, wealth in poverty, life in sacrifice. This is what true religion, the only true one is.

Ever since Pentecost, the Church has throughout her history strived to established the temporal reign of the Sacred Heart over the whole earth: “It is in such a mystical ascent and at its highest point that the root and the source of this apostolic, social, political charity is to be found, a charity that is expressed in the second petition of the Pater Noster, dear to Father de Foucauld, leading to the third: ‘Your Kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.’”

Throughout the centuries, the Church has been resplendent with all the wonders that the Holy Spirit has accomplished in her by the lineage of the saints who were both intrepid defenders of the pure Catholic Faith and tireless reconcilers of the filial and fraternal community.

LOVE OF CHURCH.

In order to understand what our Father called our “high ground,” which was neither integrist nor progressivist, rather traditionalist, it is essential to read this masterpiece of the history of the Great crises of the Church, contained in the issues from February to November 1975 of the French bulletin:

“The deepest, most objective and most solid distinction between these two great attitudes, which subsist down the centuries and which divide the Christian intelligence between them from the beginning, is to be sought in their understanding of the revealed Mystery. On the one side, faith, mystical (I do not say sentimental) certitude dominates; the sense of the supernatural, of grace and of the Divine prevails. On the other side, reason, logic, naturalism, humanism, man’s freedom and concern for the present world prevail. On the one side, Heaven attracts the being in a state of ecstasy for an eternal life; on the other side, the earth holds back the man who is passionately concerned to make for himself a happy and independent life here below.

“It would seem that right always and entirely lies with the party of God, whilst wrong always and entirely lies with the party of man. In the end, however, the total truth always seems to emerge from a reconciliation of the two Parties, by dismissing their extremes. The total truth is always the mysterious, revealed synthesis of supernature and nature, of freedom and grace, of the twofold yet related knowledge of faith and reason that God presents and explains to men. It is the party of God that has the good role whenever a conflict arises in the Church.

This role is the one of an “intelligent traditionalism.” Our Father’s entire monumental work is its fruit.

His theological and pastoral study on the Sacraments (November 1976 – August 1977) provides abundant proof of this. Even Father Congar (!) expressed his admiration at this reply to the integrist revolt by a serene assessment, an extensive study of the exact worth of the postconciliar innovations. He had in mind the necessary and reconciling synthesis that would be the work of Vatican III, “when past routines will be definitively restored and corrected in the light of today’s novelties, which in their turn will be amended and purged of their disfiguring errors. Does that complicate the strategy of the opposing parties by breaking the Manichean dualism from which they draw their militant strength? On the contrary, it reinforces the only party to which we adhere, that of the Church, and it is only by following this unique path that I can see any outcome, any light ahead.”

This was the judgment of a true son of the Church, and of Mary!

SON OF MARY.

An illumination that he received when he began his dogmatic theology in the seminary enlightened his whole life. This insight would lead him to reorganise all the knowledge that he would teach to us, his spiritual sons and daughters. He relates in his Memoirs and Anecdotes: “I paid particular attention when Monsieur Guilbeau dealt with the definition of the person. Several times in philosophy courses, I had been upset by having misunderstood it and by soon hearing things inferred about it that went against my ‘familial [and Maurrassian] biases,’ such things as autonomy, independence, the sublime dignity, the inalienable rights of the person, of every person to the service of whom the whole world must subject itself. On the other hand, the individual [but is he not the same being!] is no more than a member of a social entity and is committed to serving it to the point of sacrificing his life.

“I asked Father Guilbeau how this same word of person could evoke two ideas so different that they seemed not only opposed but even contradictory. The one that he had taught us that morning came from a centuries-old philosophic tradition. It characterises the human individual by his incommunicability. The other that he had previously drawn from ecclesiastical tradition, from the Greek Fathers and from Saint Augustine, who define the divine Persons as pure relations, ‘subsistent relations’ Were not ‘subsistence’ and autonomy terms irreconcilable with this total gift, with these ‘processions’ that constitute the three Persons in God?”

In brief: “Is it not regrettable to designate by the same word, in human society, the independent being, jealous of his rights and claiming to be sovereign, and in divine society these Persons Who are and Who want to be wholly relation, unreserved gifts to one another, pure paternity, filiation, love? Should there not be coherence, analogy, from one sphere to the other? Should not human persons define themselves in the image and likeness of the divine Persons rather than contrary to their admirable perfection?”

Father Guilbeau listened to his student, “as though caught off his guard on this path where I was running along like an impulsive child.” Thereupon, he fell ill, was rushed to the hospital and underwent an emergency operation. To his student who went to visit him, he smilingly said: “I haven’t forgotten you. I am thinking... It is a very interesting question, but difficult. Undoubtedly it is the key...”

“I had the foreboding that I would never get from him the answer to this question, a question that had become his own in his dialogue of a dying man with the Holy Trinity. A few days later, he saw what he was seeking.” (Memoirs and Anecdotes, Vol. II, pp. 162-163)

“This is the tragedy that introduced me to true theology. Its weight of grace has not ceased to increase with time, as this question made an immense metaphysical novelty and a total theology well up in me. For forty years, they have not ceased to enlighten my mind.”

Father de Nantes’ “total theology” runs counter to John Paul II’s philosophical rationalism and generalised solipsism, which are totally inspired by the “philosophy of the Enlightenment,” and against “the cult of man,” which Paul VI established in the world. This total theology is Mistress of Truth and introduces us “into the only religion that established between Heaven and earth the bonds of a divine and human circumincessant charity: the Son of God becoming Son in this world, the Son of Mary in the village of Nazareth, teaches us to love every kind of filiation on earth.”

Philosophy itself was renewed by it: since relation returned to the sources of being, our Father reorganised all human knowledge by defining the privileged being that is the human person by his relations of origin.

The relation of filiation is the formal constituent element of the “person:” from the child, who is turned towards his father and mother as the only begotten Son of God, the Word, is turned towards His Father, derive all the other relations: the disciple turned towards his master, the spouse towards her husband, the head of State towards the common good, the colony towards the mother country, the head of the Church towards Christ, in a constituent “ascending dependence” that builds a mystical body. Therein the bonds of nature join with the bonds of grace and every personal life, like that of the social body, is ordered to charity. This view was plenary, satisfying, and balanced. Our young minds, however, were unable to weigh up its divine height, its human depth, its orthodromic length and its Catholic breadth.

“We are so constituted that we are entirely relative and in many respects. We are born from relationships to our fathers, we live in relationships with our contemporaries, and we imagine a future for our successors and our descendants. Ah! It is already a decisive liberation for the charity and the service of the community, the Church and the country!”

It is a question of demonstrating to man that he is not the centre of the universe nor its end, that he himself is not his own finality. Being only a creature of I AM, he is called by Him to fulfil himself and to save himself by being inseparably bound with his human brothers, in the Body of Christ to the praise of the Glory of God! Morality and mysticism are modified, becoming inconsistent with the principles in force in the last century, when all was due to man alone as though he were the absolute.

Today we know that the good, the beauty, the glory of “relative man” consist in the service of others, love, conviviality, the union in one Body, in the joyous docility to God Who leads everyone to universal plenitude.

This total Metaphysics (November 1981 – September 1982) develops into an apologetic demonstration (November 1984 – June 1985) that describes the order of the universe in the light of this certainty of the Presence of God, acting constantly in His creation in order to bring it into being and to direct its development according to a divine “orthodromy.” Our Father thus examined universal history to seek its “axial” force: from the big bang of the origins to the Revelation of Jesus Christ in which God declares His love, to the foundation of the Church, and to the return of the whole creation to God in Her and through Her, in love.

Thus, our Father proposes to whoever has the soul of a “disciple” and who places himself under his guidance to model his personal trajectory on this trajectory of the universe, and to follow the music by taking his place in this movement of divine orthodromy. In so doing, the disciple will be a living element in it and not a cadaver on the verge of the road, where the Holy Father is advancing with halting step according to the vision of the “Third Secret,” in order to belong to this Kingdom of God, to participate actively by joining this grand mystical body that is the Church, in order to struggle there with one’s brethren against the opposing forces coming from Hell, for the honour of God, “served first,” for the salvation of all men.

From October 1988 to June 1996, our Father endeavoured to discover the mainsprings of the interpretive history of holy and gracious France, and her place as “Eldest Daughter of the Church” in the great universal plan. In this perspective, he highlighted the key to our contemporary history: in 1689, the Sacred Heart made requests to Louis XIV who, by his refusal to respond to them, brought the misfortune of the domination of a Satanic republic over France, from then until today.

From these lessons of world history and, particularly, the history of France, there resulted a...

“TOTAL” MORALITY AND A “TOTAL” POLITICS.

From November 1983 to June 1984, by teaching a Total Politics, our Father renewed the thought of Saint Augustine, Bossuet and Maurras regarding the restoration of political and religious authorities who create order. In order to respond to the errors that cause the current chaos, particularly through the effects of an aggressively anti-establishment, anarchist and revolutionary human rights morality, he links political science to all other sciences: history, philosophy, metaphysics; and finally to Christian religion and mysticism.

He reaches sublime heights when he calls for the restoring of a sacred politics inherited from Saint Joan of Arc.

Such a politics is truly ‘total.’ The king of France is its keystone. He is the bond of the moral, affective, voluntary unity of his people, the ‘mystical’ condition, cause and source of everyone’s life and security because between them there exists a constant and active adherence of the members to the will of the head. Such a communion can only exist in a Catholic nation, for it presupposes a civic, patriotic, nationalist instinct, supported by a supernatural energy capable of overcoming the forces of disaggregation that prevail in our modern societies in which each person yields to the original temptation: “You will be like God.”

It is the King who dispenses this victorious grace by virtue of the anointing that confers on him a power of government assisted from On High. This Christian ‘mystical’ legitimacy is based on the loyalty of the subjects, members of the Catholic Church, to Christ and His Church.

Suffice it to say that the virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity are the pillars of this covenant that God made with His ‘personal’ creature by giving him existence, and in a particular way with His “lieutenant” anointed in Reims and to whom he entrusted the Kingdom of France “in commendam.” It is an unequal contract that obliges our gratitude. The creature has the delightful duty of returning to God love for love, to place in Him all our trust, keep our Faith, unchanged, unchangeable, by reason of its divine perfection. Loving Him, loving Him entirely, all His thoughts, all His wills; we are called to love the whole universe that He created: our dear neighbour, all men, but most particularly those who have been placed in our own familiar universe, with whom we maintain daily relations.

Since the “human person” is defined not so much by his “essence” as a “rational animal” as by his relations, a ‘Total Morality’ (November 1985 – June 1986) turns us towards others: we exist much more by others, for others, with others than we exist as autonomous, independent, and ultimately egocentric individuals, not to say autists as “modern pathologists” would call them. I am not “for myself,” but I am “for others” and this is the field of a “total” morality detailing my obligations, my delightful duties and finally my beatitude, my value, my merit, and my glory.

FATIMA.

In Her Apparition of July 13, 1917, Our Lady entrusted Lucy, Francisco and Jacinta with a “Secret” in three parts. The first one is a vision of Hell:

“You have seen Hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to My Immaculate Heart.”

This vision reveals the atrocious, unspeakable chastisement, sorrows and despair, which are already amongst us, with no light, no love and not the least relief for these impious, the “poor sinners” who Our Lady gently pities, for they are tomorrow’s damned who, here and now, close to us, are on their way to Hell.

God is saddened as He looks at this already damned, pleasure loving and insolent world for which Christ did not pray (Jn 17:9,) that is persecuting the Church and defying God.

Nevertheless, “if what I am going to say to you is done, many souls will be saved and there will be peace.” This is the second part of the “Secret,” which concerns our temporal affairs: Purgatory here below. Orthodromy, which is based on divine authority unveils and explains the consequences of the “bad peace” of 1919 and the refusals on the part of the hierarchy to the demands of Our Lady. Thus, the Secret of Fatima is “the veritable main thread of the Virgin to enlighten our route in this world and bring us to both temporal and eternal salvation.”

The conclusion of this second part remained conditional: “God wishes to establish in the world devotion to My Immaculate Heart.” The salvation of souls and world peace depends on the obedience of the Church to this divine will. Therefore all is in the hands of the Holy Father: it is up to him to consecrate Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, after having ordered the bishops to join with him in doing it, in order for her to be converted. It is up to him also to recommend the devotion of the five First Saturdays of the month. By means of these simple demands, it is the necessity for conversion to the Catholic Church, the mediation of the Virgin Mary, the universal authority of the Vicar of Christ the King, the existence of Heaven and Hell that are recalled to the world, all of which are explicit truths that clash head-on with the “Wojtylian gnosis.”

This is why, when Pope John Paul II recommended the recitation of the Rosary, on October 28, 1981, he was careful not to mention explicitly the specific demand that Our Lady of Fatima made at each of Her apparitions of 1917, for daily recitation of the Rosary.

During his pilgrimage at the site of the apparitions on May 12, 1982, not only did he not reveal the so long-awaited secret, but he spoke of it in an offhand way:

“Do you want me to tell you a secret...? It is quite simple and it is no longer a secret: ‘Pray much, say the rosary every day.’”

The only thing that had never been a “secret!”

In his preaching during this pilgrimage, not only did the Pope not give approval to the reparatory devotion but he turned the faithful away from it:

“In the jubilant expectation of giving concrete expression to all that, fully, at holy Mass tomorrow, let us live our pilgrimage to the full, here and now, in Eucharist, by offering ourselves to God through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, in thanksgiving and receptivity let us offer our sacrifices in union with Christ the Redeemer and let us repeat in an expiatory and propitiatory prayer of our souls: ‘Lord Jesus, it is for the love of You, in reparation for sins, and for the conversion of sinners.’” Now, the exact formula of the prayer taught by the Blessed Virgin is: “O Jesus, it is for the love of You, in reparation for sins committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and for the conversion of sinners.” Moreover, the Pope substituted for the consecration to Mary or to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, the offering to God through Mary.

He also quoted the prayer of the Angel:

“My God, I believe, I adore, I hope and I love You,” but he passed over in silence the second part of this prayer: “I beg pardon for those who do not believe, who do not adore, who do not hope, who do not love You.” Why?

On the morning of this May 13, at 1982, he met Sister Lucy in private. During the meeting, which lasted from twenty to twenty-five minutes, the messenger of Heaven handed him an important letter in which she confirmed that the visions of the “Third Secret” are closely connected with the words of the Blessed Virgin that preceded them: they describe, in an allegorical manner, the divine promises and, above all, the chastisements connected with the refusal of the high authorities of the Church to satisfy the demands of Heaven:

“The third part of the Secret, that you are anxious to understand,” she wrote to the Pope, “is a symbolic revelation referring to this part of the Message, and is conditioned by our response or non-response to what the Message itself asks of us: ‘If My requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, etc.’ Since we did not heed this appeal of the Message, we see that it has been fulfilled and that Russia has invaded the world with her errors. If we have not yet seen the complete fulfilment of the final part of this prophecy, we are marching towards it with great strides.

Until her death, sister Lucy pointed out that, in keeping with the words of Our Lord, during the revelation of Rianjo, in 1931, His ministers did not want to listen to His demand.

The thoughts of Pope John Paul II ran contrary to those of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The Pope wished for the reconciliation of the “separated Churches of the East and the West,” but he did not want for all that “to convert” Russia to Catholicism, since his great millenarian plan was to unite all denominations, on an equal footing, without letting the Catholic Church claim any superiority over “the others”. His whole programme responded to his chimera of a peaceful world in which religions would form one single “Movement for the Spiritual Animation of Universal Democracy,” a chimera of which the meeting that he organised at Assisi on October 27, 1986 was the symbol.

The violent contradiction that exists between the desires of God, revealed at Fatima, and the interfaith enterprises for peace was made manifest, precisely in the course of the meeting of Assisi, by a very moving event. A procession had advanced, bearing a processional litter on which stood the statue of Our Lady of Fatima, above a spray of flowers arranged in the form of a white heart bearing the wound, on a background of red flowers. The stewards, however, had turned it back and the litter with the statue had to be abandoned there, on the ground, in the grass.

“This is the incident,” Father de Nantes commented, “that provides food for thought: the heavenly sign in a long, cold, joyless day, without faith and without light, when God seemed deaf to the prayers that rose to Him. What were all those people concerned with in that place, on that day? Peace. They were concerned with procuring peace for the world. Through whom and by what means? Through all religions and all cults.

“It is then that the Person who has received from the one true God the gift of peace came forward. She approached and came to offer the assembly of all religions the gift of Her grace to all those who would pray to Her and beseech Her, and through Her touch the Heart of Her Son, without whom no man and no people can do anything. And here She was turned back! What a sign! Out of respect for the Chief Rabbi of Rome and the grand Mufti of Mecca, the snake worshipers and the fire worshipers, and the devotees of Buddha, whose golden statue was enthroned for the occasion above the empty tabernacle of the church of Saint Peter!

“What did they do at Assisi? The aim, the supreme desire of Jesus is that men, that the Pope and all the bishops, that all should open their hearts to Mary. At Assisi the other evening, they repulsed Her and turned Her away! They preferred to pray to Buddha and to Allah for peace!

“Fatima teaches us that She alone can help us to obtain the peace of the world and the end of war. Yet She alone was turned away at Assisi. By a Pope whom She had – he said so himself – saved from death on May 13, 1981, five years earlier. What an irreparable aberration!” (CCR no. 195, December 1986, pp. 9-10)

OUR RESPONSE TO THE THIRD QUESTION

Like Father de Nantes during his lifetime, we fully recognise the legitimate and uninterrupted Magisterium of the Popes, successors of the Apostle Peter, in particular that of Popes Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and finally that of Pope Francis obviously. As sons of the Church, we declare ourselves to be a priori and on principle fully subject to their magisterium, but within the canonical limits of the legitimate exercise of their power of teaching, as supreme and immediate heads of all the pastors and all the faithful.

In fact, although the Magisterium of the Sovereign Pontiffs, whether ordinary or solemn, and in all cases infallible, has endured beyond the accession of John XXIII, but above all beyond the accession of Paul VI, it has been altered, diverted from its original destination to such a point that it has been rendered sterile by a concomitant magisterium of a new type, a strange, “prophetic,” “pastoral,” “authentic” magisterium whereby the Sovereign Pontiffs assume a power equal to the one that Our Lord Jesus Christ conferred on the Apostles alone for the foundation of the Church; it is by virtue of this innovatory magisterium, alien to their primary responsibility of strengthening their brethren in the faith and improperly subordinated to the authority of the Second Vatican Council, that Paul VI and John Paul II had the pretension of leading the Church along the subversive path of a continual reformation, of an opening to the world inevitably followed by the falsification of dogmas, a radical disorder in the sacred liturgy and the destruction of Catholic morality and law, a total break with the traditional Magisterium of all the Popes who preceded them on the See of Saint Peter.

Father de Nantes found fault with this innovatory teaching, publicly made known his opposition to the errors that it contained, in particular the cult of man replacing the cult of God that Paul VI had proclaimed and for which John Paul II then claimed to have laid the doctrinal basis. Nevertheless, Father de Nantes deferred to the definitive and sovereign Magisterium of the Church by preparing three Books of Accusation for Heresy, Schism and Scandal against Popes Paul VI and John Paul II, in order to admonish them to retract or to define infallibly the innovations contained in their teachings; these three books have remained unanswered to this day. Conversely, no error has ever been attributed to Father de Nantes.

As spiritual sons of Father de Nantes, and therefore his heirs, we make our own the accusations contained in these three Books of Accusation and we consider that they incriminate indirectly any Sovereign Pontiff insofar as he intends espouse the innovatory and hence fallible teachings of Popes Paul VI and John Paul II as a basis for the decisions within the remit of his Magisterium.

As long as these accusations are not the subject, either directly or indirectly, of an infallible and definitive decision on the part of the Magisterium, we the Little Brothers and Little Sisters of the Sacred Heart, will continue to remain in a state of withdrawal of obedience, a state in which we will discern as best we can, according to the infallible criterion of Tradition, that which proceeds from the customary and Catholic Magisterium of the reigning Supreme Pontiff in order to submit us to it, and that which comes from this authority usurped for the Reformation of the Church, which we consider null and void.

FOURTH QUESTION:

“Do you recognise the ordinary Magisterium and the authority of the bishop on whom you depend?”

We have doubts about the meaning of the term “ordinary magisterium.”

Does the author of the question understand it in the ‘ordinary’ sense, namely: a teaching that the Church has always and universally held to be certain? Probably not.

In any event, our response will be the same as for the third question.

We fully recognise the legitimate authority of the bishops, successors of the Apostles, on whom we depend and we declare ourselves fully subject to their magisterium, but within the canonical limits of the legitimate exercise of their power of teaching, as heads of their respective Churches.

By virtue of our state of withdrawal of obedience and whilst awaiting an infallible and definitive decision of the Magisterium on the serious suspicions of heresy that we have concerning the new teachings – that is to say those for which it cannot be claimed that they originate from the unanimous Tradition of the Church –, we will discern to our best, according to the infallible criterion of this Tradition, what proceeds from the customary and Catholic Magisterium in order to submit ourselves to it, and what comes from this usurped authority for the Reformation of the Church, which we will always hold to be null and void.

FIFTH QUESTION:

In actual fact, this fifth question is a two-part question.

“What are the statutes or regulatory texts of the community?”

Despite all Archbishop Pontier's efforts to ignore ostensibly our religious state, the author of this question uses the term “community” when referring to us. It is all too obvious that, in the absence of any legal recognition, we do form a de facto religious community in the canonical sense of the term. Like all religious community, ours is in fact subject to a Rule.

Our Founder, Father Georges de Nantes, wrote this Rule in 1957. It is entitled “Provisional Rule of the Little Brothers of the Sacred Heart of Villemaur.” Villemaur, because it was in this small parish of his diocese that Bishop Julien Le Couëdic, at the time, Bishop of Troyes, authorised its establishment, on September 15, 1958. This provisional Rule is most certainly to be found in the archives of the Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life because Msgr. Philippe, then Secretary of the Congregation of Religious, approved it ‘ad experimentum’ in June 1963.

Sixty-one years have elapsed and our Order is still governed by this ‘provisional’ Rule, which has not prevented us from persevering in our vocation as Little Brothers of the Sacred Heart, drawing our inspiration from Saint Margaret Mary and Father de Foucauld, under the guidance of our founder, Father de Nantes, their fervent disciple. And vocations have poured in...

Nevertheless, our religious vows of poverty, chastity and obedience remain ‘private vows’ since they have not been recognised by the legitimate Authority who is the local Ordinary in communion with the Pope. In the meanwhile, however, we take them under the veil of the Most Blessed and Immaculate Virgin Mary, the true General and Protector of our Communities since our Founder “made way” for Her, on the feast of the Immaculate Conception of the year of grace 1997.

Since this time, just as for the devotion to the Sacred Heart, the Little Brothers and the Little Sisters of the Sacred Heart embrace the devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary and zealously spread it in order to comply with God’s will as revealed by Our Lady of Fatima in 1917: “God wishes to establish in the world devotion to My Immaculate Heart.” (June 13, 1917) In particular, the brothers and sisters practice and make known the reparatory devotion of the First Saturdays of the month that brings together the friends of our movement at Maison Saint-Joseph. At least one chaplet is recited every day in community to obey Our Lady of Fatima.

So as to keep the Spirit of the Church, and “undertake the purification of their minds from the venom of independence and criticism in order to seek truth and unity” (Provisional Rule, Article 22,) postulants and novices begin by steeping themselves in the whole doctrine and work of our Founder, which is nothing other than the defence and illustration of Catholic doctrine. He constantly meditated on this doctrine and perfected it in response to the errors propagated by the Second Vatican Council.

“Would you be willing to forward them to us, and if necessary, to work towards their evolution if the legitimate ecclesiastical authority considers it appropriate to do so?”

We reply to the author of this question: your request is unseasonable! Here is why.

Our religious Rule itself, conceived and written in 1957 before the death of Pius XII, constitutes a Rule of life in all respects contrary to the “evolution” that the hierarchy considered “appropriate” to impose on all traditional religious Orders, particularly in regard to the chapter on obedience towards their founders. The Church today is experiencing the cruel consequences of a ‘Reformation’ that has abolished the very notion of masters and disciples in the name of freedom! It is precisely out of fidelity to our vow of obedience that we refrain from communicating our Rule to an ecclesiastical authority, however legitimate it may be, but which has clearly resolved to make it evolve even before having examined it.

Our Father has always considered the personal vocation of Little Brother and Little Sister of the Sacred Heart that is ours, and the canonical recognition of our Communities as secondary issues in relation to the fight for Counter-Reformation, which is the service the most useful to the Church, although this is certainly not always understood by the hierarchy.

Since we question the orthodoxy of the Second Vatican Council and the subsequent teachings of the Supreme Pontiffs and the entire hierarchy, our withdrawal of obedience also and necessarily implies the maintenance of the ‘provisional,’ ‘ad experimentum’ status of our Communities, pending the doctrinal judgement that our Father, and we follow him, forcefully require. This humiliated and humiliating status, rejected by all traditionalist movements, is the one to which our Father has consented for him and his Communities, wisely judging that it is the only one that is appropriate to remain in the Church, certainly in the last place, but without compromising with the Reform initiated at the Second Vatican Council and which we publicly denounce.

According to the rule laid down by Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, works in the Church are primarily judged by their fruits. We are obliged to admit that those produced by our Communities and our movement are certainly modest from a natural point of view, but excellent from a supernatural point of view. Is not Archbishop Pontier’s intervention, despite all the terminological precautions he took in his letter, sixty-one years after the foundation of our Order in the diocese of Troyes and its subsequent installation in several other dioceses, indirect recognition of these fruits?

In the absence of any support, protection or pastoral care that the hierarchy could and should have shown us, despite our serious doctrinal dispute, the Little Brothers and Little Sisters of the Sacred Heart have persevered, with the grace of the Good God, in their vocation of religious missionaries. Their Communities have overcome all the obstacles that have constantly arisen, some of which were humanly insurmountable. Somehow, they have managed to preserve their unity, which is humanly inexplicable. No scandal, no disorder, no irregularity of any kind whatsoever has come to taint their reputation and therefore that of the Church, their one and only family. In the 1990s, an attempt was made to label us as a sect. Paradoxically, social, fiscal and police investigations have had no other effect than to highlight the perfect regularity of our Community life. All our houses are honourably known, and on all matters!

Since our Founder was called into the presence of God on February 15, 2010, our unity has not in the least weakened and this demonstrates that it is based on the Truth of the Catholic Faith received from the Church. Our attachment, our affection, our admiration for our Founder were not focused only on his person. His prodigious work – which he has entrusted to us and on which we and our friends live every day, while awaiting the time when we will be able to entrust it to the legitimate ecclesiastical authority – and his very paternal heart encourage us to love above all the Good God, Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Blessed Virgin and the Church whom we want to serve.

Our Communities never make those who want to follow us in our Counter-Reformation fight lose the faith. On the contrary, these Communities strengthen their love, their admiration for the Church, and not only for the Church of the past. Furthermore they dissuade them from letting this Reformation drive them to despair, to the temptation of abandoning all religious practice or of taking refuge in an integrist chapel. Our communities, through the regularity of our religious life, through prayer and through the teachings of our Father, help them to maintain a supernatural trust in the Church and her legitimate pastors. On all occasions, and despite our dispute on doctrinal matters, we take part in all liturgical or parish services celebrated by ministers of religion in communion with the local Ordinary and we ask our friends to do the same by remaining ‘faithful’ to their parishes, to their priests.

In short, our Order has long proven its ecclesiality. So as far as its canonical recognition is concerned... let us leave it at that. The conditions have not yet been met for this issue to be included on the agenda.

APOCALYPSE

Our Lady of Fatima wanted the ‘Third Secret’ to be revealed in 1960. Today we can understand why: Her warnings were intended to dissuade the Holy Father from undertaking a “reformation” of the Church. The most clear-sighted of his entourage could foresee that it would lead the Church to her ruin.

John XXIII, however, after having read this text, spurned it, declaring: “This does not concern my pontificate.” That is why he did not pay heed to the Angel’s threefold appeal to penance, according to the forecasts of Sister Lucy to Father Fuentes in 1957:

“We should not wait for an appeal to come from Rome, on behalf of the Holy Father, calling on the whole world to do penance. Nor should we wait for it to come from our bishops in their dioceses or from the religious congregations. No! Our Lord has already very often used these means and the world has not paid attention. That is why now, it is necessary for each one of us to begin to reform himself spiritually. Each person must not only save his own soul but also all the souls that God has placed on our path.”

John XXIII’s successor, Paul VI, was in reality “the Bishop dressed in white.” The three children of Fatima had the presentiment that he was the Holy Father, although he had been divested of the insignia of his sovereignty. Today, we understand that Pope Paul VI had laid down his tiara as a sign that he was forsaking his triple crown: the infallible doctrinal Magisterium, the universal primacy of his government, the work of sanctification of his flock through the sacraments, which have been abandoned or even desecrated by an oecumenical “communicatio in sacris.”

It is the Angel who makes a triple call to penance:

“Penance, penance, penance!”

“And we saw, in an immense light that is God, ‘something similar to the image a mirror reflects when a person passes in front of it’ a Bishop dressed in White – ‘we had the impression that it was the Holy Father.’

“Several other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious were climbing a steep mountain, at the top of which there was a large Cross of rough-hewn trunks as of a cork-tree with its bark. Before reaching there, the Holy Father passed through a large city half in ruins and half trembling, with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way.”

He remains the head of this Church. That is why he is said to be only “half trembling, with halting step” as he passes through this Church, itself “half in ruins.” The Church is built on the “rock,” the Pope, who is “afflicted with pain and sorrow.” Pope Francis seems predestined to live out the tragic outcome produced by the abdication from the Magisterium, the government and the sanctification for which he nevertheless remains responsible.

“In Portugal the dogma of the faith will always be preserved. In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph.”

During the past century, we have been living through all the phases of the great Secret. Its conclusion reveals the Paradise of Mary, the domain of the Blessed Virgin, the land, the home, the family of Fatima, “oasis of purity, of freshness, of joy and of Marian devotion, which remains the showcase of Paradise in the midst of this world’s hell and purgatory, so that none of Mary’s children go astray or get lost in these difficult years.” Knowing that “Fatima is to be found wherever a soul, a family, a parish, a convent, a nation adheres to Heaven's messages, a veritable catechesis, and fulfils Our Lady’s requests which, through Her grace, are a true practice of the unchanged true religion.”

“There is plenty of room in this ‘new Jerusalem, come down from Heaven, from God, the holy City, perfect and prepared as a bride adorned for her Husband’ on the day of her wedding.”

The Immaculate Heart of Mary is in fact a “refuge for all,” always willing to welcome the “castaways of this world,” and it is in this “City of Mary” that the definitive victory of the Eucharistic Heart of Jesus is being prepared, firstly in Rome, and via Rome, throughout the world, including the land of Islam: from Rabat to Djakarta. At the very moment when our Father founded our Community of missionary monks, he made me responsible for proposing a new translation of the Qurʾān, in the light of an intuition that proved to be extremely fruitful: the Qurʾān is the work of “a scholar from elsewhere.”

This arduous but fascinating work was made possible by applying to the Qurʾānic text the historical and critical method, and particularly the method of exegesis that our Father had enjoyed learning in the seminary to study Holy Scripture. He communicated to us his enthusiasm for the historical and critical method. Once the Qurʾān has been studied in this way, it proves to be the product of a Jewish and Christian wisdom, which its author claims to “fulfil,” – after Moses and Jesus! – in Islam, the perfect religion of the unique Covenant of the One God with Abraham – and Ishmael!

This prodigious discovery prompted our Father to write: “Whereas for sincere believers, from Islam as much as from Judaism, and still more for those of our holy Catholic religion, the constant reference of the author of the Qurʾān to the Torah and to the Gospel, which you have brought to light, not only provides the key to a text thereby made intelligible and coherent, but is more especially an urgent invitation to return together to the one and pure truth of the divine Revelation, so that we find ourselves all united, if possible, in the same worship and the same love [...].

Thus we are brought back by the author of the text, better than by all the modern, and often modernist, commentaries generally encumbered by a repellent scientific apparatus, to the mystery of Jesus Christ, Son of God, Son of Mary, in that fullness of truth which Saint John beheld and was inspired to reveal to the world,” after having “taken into his home” the Virgin, Whom Jesus had given to him as Mother for ever, from the summit of the Cross.

Please accept, Excellency, my respectful and devoted wishes,

Brother Bruno of Jesus-Mary,
Superior General of the Order of the Little Brothers and Little Sisters of the Sacred Heart.

OUR APPEAL BEFORE ROME!

Jesus! Mary! Joseph!

To his Excellency,
Cardinal Luis Francisco Ladaria Ferrer S. I.
Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
Palazzo del Sant’Uffizio
00120 Città del Vaticano
Saint-Parres-lès-Vaudes, June 13, 2019

Second apparition of Our Lady at Fatima

Recorded delivery with acknowledgement of receipt

Most Reverend Eminence,

Having the honour to address to Your Lordship, and before exposing the object of my request, I must make my own the words that Father de Nantes addressed on July 16, 1966 to Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, one of your predecessors at the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Prefect of which you are today, by the decision of our Holy Father, Pope Francis.

“It is right that, before all else, I should declare my supernatural, docile, certain and entire faith in all that we are taught by the Holy Apostolic and Roman Church, as revealed by Our Lord Jesus Christ Who, being the Son of God, God Himself, can neither deceive nor be deceived. I profess that the Magisterium of the Church, in her legitimate Pastors, Our Holy Father Pope Paul VI and the Episcopal Body in union with him, has the authority to fix in dogmatic terms the Truths in which we must believe, and to set down in canonical terms the Laws to which we must subscribe in our religious life and moral conduct; not in a totalitarian or arbitrary manner, but as defined and justified by this same Magisterium. It is, therefore, with perfect confidence and serene submission of mind and heart that I dare to address this Sacred Congregation in the person of its Pro-Prefect. To incline me to prompt and wholehearted obedience, it is enough for me to know that my request is no longer addressed to men of uncertain convictions and wavering wills, but to an Authority that is divine in its source, legitimate in its action, dependent in all things on Jesus Christ and intent on invoking His sovereign Authority by surrounding its decisions with all the safeguards of law.”

Enclosed herewith, Your Eminence, the letter dated April 15, 2019 that Archbishop Georges Pontier of Marseille personally addressed to me in my capacity as “Head of the Movement ‘Catholic Counter-Reformation,’” in other words, in my capacity as Superior General of the Order of the Little Brothers and Little Sisters of the Sacred Heart, founded by Father Georges de Nantes whom I have succeeded. The Archbishop of Marseille has forwarded to me the questionnaire prepared by your Congregation and I inform you that this morning I presented three copies of a memorandum in reply for the attention of Bishop Marc Stenger, of Troyes. One of these was forwarded to Archbishop Yves Patenôtre

It is my honour to send you two copies of this memorandum.

In response to my letter of September 29, 2012 to Bishop Marc Stenger, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith questions us concerning our adherence to the Second Vatican Council and the Magisterium of the Supreme Pontiffs. Therefore, it seems logical to me, Eminence, to ensure that you are personally the recipient of our detailed answers to the five difficult questions that have been asked of us. I have formulated them on behalf of the religious of our communities since, on such matters, we are but one heart and one soul.

Our Father, Georges de Nantes, and we, his disciples, question the orthodoxy of the doctrinal innovations proclaimed by the Second Vatican Council and Popes Paul VI and John Paul II. Our insurmountable doubt raises a fundamental question: the legitimacy of this formidable reformation of the Church, undertaken by our legitimate pastors as a forced march, yet in the name of freedom, since 1965. This question is therefore of such import that it far exceeds the interests of our own selves, of our Community and even of the local Churches where our houses are located. It concerns the universal Church and therefore falls within the universal jurisdiction of the Holy Father and the Congregation charged with assisting him in the defence of the doctrine of the Faith.

At the very same time as they were being debated, our Father criticised these doctrinal innovations contained in the Acts of the Council. As soon as they were adopted, like a good son towards his father, he hastened to reveal his painful doubts to the Sovereign Pontiff. While he publicly and firmly opposed this innovating, fallible and reformable teaching, he appealed to the extraordinary Magisterium, so that the Church might bring about unity and peace in the name of the Truth of the Faith. Popes Paul VI and John Paul II, however, left Father de Nantes’ appeals unanswered,

I let you take cognizance of our memorandum which, once it has been lodged with you, Your Lordship, gives me the right to renew my request, which was submitted to you by Bishop Marc Stenger and which was aimed to obtain that the Church of Rome, Mother and Mistress of all the Churches, powerfully and decisively perform, with all the safeguards of infallibility, a work of discernment among the new teachings contained in the Acts of the Second Vatican Council, teachings that Father de Nantes denounced as heretical, schismatic and scandalous, notably in his three Books of Accusation against Popes Paul VI and John Paul II.

Please accept, Excellency, my respectful and devoted wishes,

Brother Bruno of Jesus-Mary.
Superior General of the Order of the Little Brothers and Little Sisters of the Sacred Heart