“Your thought on death”

(Saint Charles de Foucauld)

I. THE END OF LIFE

IN the West, caring for the terminally ill and dying is nothing new. Often forgotten by the healthy, they have been the object of special care by Our Lord and the Church. In traditional society, let us say pre-war society, “caring for the dying is first and foremost a domestic practice. It essentially concerned the patient’s family and friends. The hotels Dieu, founded by the bishops and administered by their chapters, were hospices that took in indigent patients who could not be cared for by a family. This duty of charity towards the dying flows from the pastoral teaching on the last things, which recommends doing everything possible to enable the dying to die a holy death and ensure the salvation of their soul. In this context, there is hardly any question of alleviating the patient or improving his comfort, but rather of persuading him to do penance and implore God’s mercy, by inviting him to offer his suffering for the remission of his sins. This pastoral approach is summed up in a series of common-sense manuals on the ‘good death,’ the patron saint of which is Saint Joseph, who died in the arms of Jesus and Mary. These manuals, intended for family members, were published from the 15^th to the early 18^th centuries. They described the various temptations that the dying person could expect and suggested resolutions to be taken in order to “succeed” their departure from life and ensure their entry into Paradise.”●

Later on, when Louis XIV founded the Hôpital Général in 1656, incurables became the objects of hospital care. Medical care given to these patients was improved by Jeanne Garnier, a woman from Lyon who, after losing one after the other, her husband and her two young children, devoted herself totally to the crucified Jesus by helping incurable women. At the age of twenty-four, she devoted all her time and fortune to caring for them in a spirit of charity and concern for the salvation of souls, housing them in her own home, punctuating their days with spiritual exercises according to a religious rule and accompanying them to the moment of their death under the sign of the Cross. The Work of the Ladies of Calvary, begun in 1842 in Lyon on the Fourvière Hill at the foot of the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, inspired other pious women to create other ‘Calvaries’ in France and abroad.

After the Second World War, however, the religious crisis combined with advances in medicine changed people’s morals. Easy access to healthcare and hospitals brought about a number of important changes, which Father de Nantes summed up as follows: “The patient goes from being a subject to becoming an object, from being questioned to being an avid and frustrated questioner, from being responsible for himself to becoming an inert and submissive patient, like a machine being repaired.” When the end comes, “man ceases to be the sovereign master of his own death, and is systematically, tyrannically dispossessed of it, robbed of it.” Less and less often, the priest is called to the bedside of the dying, and less and less is he authorised to go there, when it is not the priest himself, (alas!) who refuses to go. It is now said that it is a happy fate not to see oneself dying, whereas for our ancestors, this was considered a punishment.●

In the 1970s, when the majority of the French population died in hospitals – today, three quarters of all deaths occur in healthcare establishments – this medicine without religion was characterised by its omnipotence, sacrificing the human aspect to technicality. Public opinion remembers the emblematic image of death in intensive care units which, under the pretext of restoring life, subjects the patient to aggressive and futile therapy, giving no heed to his psychological pain, to his accompaniment nor, above all, to the salvation of his soul.

It is at this point that we see the emergence of a new period of life, the ‘end of life’. In the past, “the population was young,” Father de Nantes wrote, “in a society where life expectancy did not exceed twenty to twenty-five years. Illness was often the sign of an acute health crisis that had to be resolved quickly. There were few incurables or invalids. You either got better or you died.” Now, with life expectancy increasing, the throes of illness and agony are becoming more visible to family and friends, but also to the medical profession, which cannot bear this situation. To avoid this feeling of powerlessness, many doctors take refuge in technical procedures, resuscitation to the point of exhaustion, futile medical care, and then, when they can do no more, put the dying away in a room ‘at the end of the corridor’. The suffering of these patients is often not relieved, because the side effects of morphine (respiratory depression, mental confusion) are frightening. When it becomes intolerable – for the patient or the doctor! – the teams resort to lethal injections that plunge the dying person into an artificial coma. According to the only study available, which dates from 2009 and extrapolates the results obtained from a sample of 4,700 deaths, an estimated 3,000 euthanasia and terminal sedation procedures are carried out in France every year.

On the pretext of refusing futile medical care and this highly technological death, the Freemasons want to impose an alternative on society: euthanasia, with no regard for the afterlife.

If death is the inexorable and absolute end of all human existence, then why prolong a life which, in any case, is worthless when it is felt to be unbearable? In whose name, and on what grounds, should we deprive anyone of the possibility of throwing themselves into nothingness, thereby putting an end to unspeakable suffering forever? Only Christians, enlightened by the intelligence that the Catholic Faith provides, can answer this question, because they know, through the Resurrection of Our Lord, Who returned from the death He endured on the Cross, that a new life awaits us after death. It therefore is only a passage, but with this tragic alternative: either Heaven or Hell, and for all eternity! This alternative, which depends entirely on the holiness of Justice and Mercy of the Good God, and is entrusted to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, is determined by the life that each of us leads on this earth, and in particular, by the way that we give up to God our soul, which comes from Him alone.

The lucid acceptance of death, with all the anguish, pain and suffering that necessarily accompany it, but which only lasts for a short time, makes it an ultimate act of faith and love rendered to God by His creature. Jesus offered us the ‘unique’ model of this on the Cross.

Consequently, the Church alone has the authority and wisdom to give final judgement on the very difficult moral questions raised by advances in modern medicine. The seriously ill, especially those who are coming to the end of their pilgrimage in this valley of tears, as well as their families and even doctors are confronted with these questions: what is permissible in the eyes of the Good God?

Notwithstanding this, the republican State has arrogated to itself the right to decide and legislate in this eminently religious area. By excluding the Church on principle, out of hatred for the Good God, it has ostensibly gouged out its own eyes. In this way, a subject on which the salvation of souls depends is handed over in an absolutely sacrilegious way to democratic discussion, with all the political, media and electoral passions that ensue, where everything, absolutely everything, is biased.

On the other hand, there is one force that does not have ‘gouged-out eyes’. It is Freemasonry, which is leading the way in this affair, as we shall show. Its objective is well-defined and precise, and it knows how to take the time and the means to achieve it: to tempt souls about to appear before their God, with the ‘blessing’ of a republican law, to commit the ultimate act of despair that is suicide, whatever the motive, coupled with complicity or even a crime committed by those who intentionally give a lethal injection, because euthanasia is murder.

A MASONIC BATTLE

Henri Caillavet was a Freemason who had a major influence in the post-war period. He was initiated into the Grand Orient de France in 1935 at the age of twenty-one, which is rare enough to merit mention, and died in 2013. Close to libertarian and anarchist circles, he trafficked in arms for the International Brigades, which fought alongside the Spanish Republicans. During the war, Marshal Pétain prosecuted him and later, as a parliamentarian, he was a member of the High Court of Justice responsible for judging certain leaders of the Vichy regime. A former member of parliament and minister under the Fourth Republic and senator under the Fifth, he became a leading member of the Grand Orient and for many years was president of the ‘Fraternelle parlementaire’, an association of Freemason sitting in parliament.

He distinguished himself by his intense activity as a legislator on moral and social issues. He prepared a number of texts on organ donation, artificial insemination, abortion, divorce by mutual consent, psychiatric internment, etc. “To allow a disabled child to be born,” he argued, “is a parental fault and perhaps even a sign of excessive selfishness.”●

He also proposed legislation on homosexuality and transsexualism.

As a radical-socialist senator, he was the author in 1976 of the first bill to legalise euthanasia. “Assisted suicide and euthanasia are Masonic programmes,” he explained. Fortunately, the Senate rejected the bill in 1978.

Despite this setback, Freemasonry did not abandon its project. Caillavet worked behind the scenes with the fierceness of a demon. In the early 1980s, together with other ‘brothers’, he set up the Association for the Right to Die with Dignity (Association pour le droit de mourir dans la dignité –ADMD) which, over the years and as a result of intense collaboration with the Lodges, ended up leading the fight to legalise euthanasia and assisted suicide in France. Supported by a committee of leading figures from the worlds of politics, academia, the media and science, their initiatives were widely reported in the media.

As Serge Abad-Gallardo, a convert from Freemasonry with great Christian faith and rare courage, wrote in his book Fin de vie: les manœuvres maçonniques pour le “droit à mourir”: “The current debate on the question of euthanasia owes nothing to chance, to a supposed ‘evolution of society’, to a plebiscite of the people, but everything to a kind of gradual and surreptitious ‘coup d’état’ by Freemasonry. And behind this Masonic approach lies an ideology that the Initiatory Institution (which governs recruitment to Freemasonry) has been working to impose since its creation: a complete upheaval of our social and anthropological paradigm.”●

PALLIATIVE CARE

In 1985, the Ministry of Health set up a working group on the lot of the dying, and from these debates the Laroque Circular was drafted. In 1986, it formalised the existence of palliative care in France. Five years later, a law made palliative care a hospital function.

Between medicalised death and euthanasia, palliative care was seen as a third way, more ‘humane’, more ‘social’ and more ‘supportive’, making it possible to respond to a large number of situations experienced by incurable or dying people.

In fact the principles of this medical science are found in the former works of Catholic charity. It made immense technical progress in the 1970s. It consists of providing patients suffering from a serious, progressive or terminal illness with active care, either at home or in a hospital unit. The aim is not to cure the patient, since this is no longer possible, but to reduce his suffering and all the distressing symptoms by integrating the patient’s psychological, social and spiritual dimensions, and by treating death as a natural process.

The emergence of palliative care has given professionals and volunteers alike a new attitude towards the terminally ill and dying. The patient is addressed as a human being, not as an object. If possible, an attempt is made to send him home, which is the case for 30% of patients admitted to palliative care units.

There are three types of support for this type of care: doctors, of course, humanists and Christians.

Christians and some humanists are united in their support for the existence and progress of palliative care, which avoids the inhumane excesses of medicine, effectively relieves 95% of the sick and dying and thus avoids the ‘solution’ of euthanasia. The Church invokes the duty to care for the entire human being, in his physiological, psychological, familial and above all spiritual dimensions, and sees in ‘palliative care’ the possibility for Catholic medical staff to reconcile obedience to the law of the Gospel with respect for their professional obligations. However, and this is their major error, by confining themselves to a strictly rational argumentation in order to make it acceptable in the eyes of humanists, our bishops are renouncing both their authority, which they hold from Our Lord, and their supernatural mission to prepare souls to enter eternal life.

However, the Freemasons point out that palliative care is certainly effective, but not in all cases. When the pain is intolerable, they imagine that there is no other solution than euthanasia. Totally disregarding what our bishops have to say, they are making the most of the bishops’ abandoning their role and their betrayal.

The first French palliative care unit (USP) opened at the international hospital of the university residences in Paris. Since they shared very similar medical objectives, and in particular because they refused to contemplate killing patients in their units, a large number of healthcare professionals and support associations quickly decided to combine their efforts and, in 1989, created the Société Française d’Accompagnement et de soins Palliatifs (SFAP) to represent the interests of the palliative care movement to the public authorities, medical societies and associations. Over time, this society and other support associations became increasingly outspoken in their opposition to the advocates of euthanasia.

Another body that came to play an important role in the debate on euthanasia was the Comité Consultatif National d’Éthique pour les sciences de la vie et de la santé (CCNE). Created in 1983 by President Mitterrand following the birth of France’s first baby by in vitro fertilisation, this multi-disciplinary committee, which can be called upon by various bodies, or even by the government or the Head of State, is tasked, according to its official website, with responding to “societal issues raised by advances in knowledge in the fields of biology, medicine and health”, such as the donation of human body parts, the end of life, genomics and, above all, medically assisted procreation. In reality, its role is to give moral authority to the most immoral laws that rulers want to pass in France.

Slyly, and in order to make public opinion believe that a broad consensus can be drawn from any debate, it was decided that its method of discussion would be based “on the development of benchmarks that are valid for all and accepted by all, and that are not limited to a catalogue of authorisations and prohibitions, but on the contrary are based on shared values.” It is therefore not a question of knowing which principles determine why a particular practice is prohibited, but of knowing which arguments determine whether that practice is denounced or approved. The opinions of the CCNE, which currently has one hundred and forty-one members, are the culmination of the collegial deliberations of a large assembly made up of a chairman and thirty-nine members (doctors, researchers, philosophers, lawyers, theologians) appointed for renewable four-year terms.

Officially, its opinions do not have the force of a political decision and are only consultative: it is up to the legislator to decide, regardless of the position taken by the CCNE. However, as the CCNE is perceived as a legitimate and prestigious body, the political powers hold it in high regard.

THE LEONETTI LAW OF 2005

Over the last twenty years, Freemasonry’s fight for euthanasia has taken on a new virulence thanks to several extraordinary medical cases that it has skilfully exploited. In his book, Serge Abad-Gallardo explains several stages in this ‘coup d’état’, to which I will add a few more facts.

One of the first cases began on December 24, 2000, when “Vincent Humbert, a young nineteen-year-old fireman, was the victim of a road accident. Coming out of a six-month coma, he found himself quadriplegic, blind, mute (...), but still lucid (...). After two years of fighting, the doctors told him that his body could not recover. His mother passed on her son’s request to the then President of the Republic, Jacques Chirac: ‘I ask you for the right to die.’ The President replied that he ‘did not have the right’ to grant his request.

“It was in these circumstances that his mother, Marie Humbert, announced on the programme Sept à Huit on September 21, 2003 that she would ‘help him to die.’ Three days after this public declaration, she gave him a high-dose injection of sodium pentobarbitone. However, she only succeeded in plunging him into a deep coma. Vincent Humbert was admitted to Dr. Chaussoy’s intensive care unit, while his mother was taken into custody. Following a collegial meeting, the doctor stopped resuscitation. Vincent, however, began gasping and suddenly sat up on his bed, trying to draw in air. The doctor administered potassium to stop the gasping. Vincent was euthanized on September 26, 2003. The doctor and the mother were charged with ‘premeditated poisoning’. The investigation was ‘cumbersome and painful’, but the examining magistrate, Anne Morvant, dismissed the case on February 27, 2006.”

Under the pressure of emotional blackmail skilfully exercised by Freemasonry, the State finally admitted the alleged need to legislate on the ‘end of life’. That was all it took; the opening of a democratic discussion in such an area was already a first concession that would lead to others in favour of the pro-euthanasia party.

In 2005, the Leonetti Law introduced several provisions into the Public Health Code. 1. Every patient is entitled to consider that whatever treatment he receives constitutes for him “unreasonable obstinacy”, in other words, futile medical care. He may therefore refuse it, even if this refusal may have life-threatening consequences. That being the case, the patient has the right to receive palliative care. 2. The law obliges healthcare teams to ban unreasonable obstinacy, which requires them to discontinue treatment for a patient who is no longer able to express his wishes, when they consider that it no longer makes medical sense to continue it, provided that this has been discussed beforehand as part of a collegial procedure. 3. This law makes it possible to draw up “advance directives”, valid for three years, enabling patients to express their wishes in the event that, at the end of life, they are no longer able to do so themselves. In 2005, these instructions were for information purposes only and were not binding on the doctor.

At first glance, this law, which was passed unanimously, seems good. It defines a “right to be allowed to die”, condemns futile medical care and does not legalise euthanasia. It also allows considerable freedom in the use of powerful sedatives, provided that the aim is to relieve the patient and not to kill him.

THE AMBIGUITY OF THE LEONETTI LAW

Nevertheless, despite all these good provisions in the law, it was rigged, giving rise to serious doubts about the purity of the legislator’s intention.

An article in the Libération newspaper of June 24, 2014 neatly sums up all the ambiguity of this law in relation to futile medical care, and in particular regarding the problem of discontinuing clinically assisted nutrition and hydration (CANH).

At the end of life, patients regularly find it extremely difficult to assimilate food and hydrate themselves, for a variety of reasons. Medicine allows for clinically assisted nutrition and hydration to alleviate these difficulties through various intrusive techniques that require the patient’s consent. Yet should clinically assisted nutrition and hydration be considered care, i.e., an act that responds to a vital need of the patient, such as grooming, touch-massage, mouth or eye care, which, in all situations, must be maintained until death, or is it a medical treatment, in which case it is liable to incur the qualification of unreasonable obstinacy and therefore to be discontinued?

“It is true,” as Libération pointed out, “that the text [the Leonetti Law] prohibits any active gesture and remains within the logic of ‘leaving patients to die’ rather than ‘provoking their death’, but the legislator has explicitly opened up the possibility of discontinuing clinically assisted nutrition and hydration in order to hasten death. This is possible in two cases: firstly, when doctors consider that unreasonable obstinacy is being practised, and that it is better for the patient if ‘it is discontinued’. Secondly, when the patient is conscious, and then only he can decide to have it terminated.”

This is a terrible ambiguity in the law, which allows clinically assisted nutrition and hydration to be equated with ‘medical treatment’ and therefore authorises doctors, in certain cases, to literally let their patients starve and die of thirst. When the time came, this terrible ambiguity was exploited by Freemasonry that proposed a clearer, more radical and ‘milder’ solution. It will constantly refer back to the dissatisfaction with this law to say that it must be changed and euthanasia allowed in order to put an end to this “hypocrisy” (sic!).

THE CHANTAL SÉBIRE AFFAIR

In 2008, a new press campaign was launched to publicise another extraordinary case. Chantal Sébire, a fifty-two-year-old resident of the Côte-d’Or, had been suffering for several years from a rare incurable tumour of the sinuses and nasal cavity that horribly deformed her face. Suffering, she said, from excruciating pain and having lost her sense of smell, taste and finally her sight, she said that she refused to commit suicide and was asking the courts and President Sarkozy to authorise a doctor to prescribe “the treatment necessary to enable her to end her life with respect for her dignity.” This was a first for the courts. The Humbert case had inspired the Leonetti Law and secured the right to “leave someone to die” without going as far as euthanasia. The Chantal Sébire case would go further, granting the right to put an end to unrelievable suffering.

The judge, however, ruled that he could only reject her request, “given the state of French legislation.” The decision of this judge is purported to have prompted Chantal Sébire to commit suicide at home. She did so, on March 19, 2008, the day when her doctor, Dr. Emmanuel Debost, a young general practitioner, was invited to Élysée Palace, by ingesting a massive dose of barbiturates, Pentobarbital, which is banned in France. This led to the opening of a police investigation.

A few days later, Dr. Jean-Louis Béal, head of the Mirandière palliative care unit at Dijon University Hospital, told Le Parisien newspaper that his home hospitalisation team, which had been working on Chantal Sébire’s case since October 2007, had gradually been “ousted” by the patient, leaving Dr. Debost in sole charge. He was “rapidly overwhelmed by this extraordinary case.”

He added that this situation subsequently enabled “the Association for the Right to Die with Dignity (ADMD) to seize upon this emblematic case to advance its cause.”

Jean-Luc Romero, a socialist, homosexual, HIV-positive and promoter of the LGBT movement, who was President of ADMD from 2007 to 2021, explained in 2022 that this woman had made the cause progress: “She wanted people to see her face, which was unbearable to look at, because it amplified her message. She was the only one to have such a media impact, along with Vincent Humbert.”

THE LEONETTI REPORT OF 2008

In the wake of this uproar, Jean Leonetti submitted a new report to the National Assembly in December 2008. He argued against legalising euthanasia and assisted suicide. He considered that the current legal framework “resolves the vast majority” of the problems encountered at the end of life. He noted that wherever palliative care has been developed, “euthanasia is declining, because this type of patient care considerably reduced the number of demands for death.”

This report was considered by doctors to be “a great step forward”, because it recommended a series of measures to make palliative care an absolute priority. In four years, the number of patients receiving palliative care rose from 100,000 to 200,000. 1,200 new palliative care beds were created in hospitals.

The report also addressed the eminently dangerous practice of “terminal sedation”, and proposed that a Council of State decree should authorise it “not to artificially prolong life, but to interrupt it.” This “terminal sedation” would make it possible to “significantly lower the person’s level of consciousness, until he falls asleep completely.” “Combined with the cessation of medically assisted hydration and nutrition, sedation usually leads to death within a maximum of ten days.”

The Association for the Right to Die with Dignity, through Gilles Antonowicz, immediately declared that “terminal sedation” is “supervised euthanasia”, but that it is unsatisfactory because it lasts ten days instead of the short time required for euthanasia by injection.

In 2010, never wearied the 50,000 ‘brothers’ and 1,200 lodges of the Grand Orient de France once again took up the issue of euthanasia. A dossier made it all the way to the top of the secret Institution and was passed on to the elected ‘brothers’ of the Republic, who introduced a bill on euthanasia in the Senate in January 2011.

Opposition was still strong, however. “As Damien Le Guay, a philosopher opposed to euthanasia, explained in Le Figaro (June 13, 2022), “French-style ethical bodies, including the Comité Consultatif National d’Éthique (CCNE) [which had apparently moved to the right], have always been against euthanasia, against legalising it, against an easy solution, against a ‘gentle death’ seen as care. So there was a particular ethical situation in France. An established and respected body with authoritative figures and decisions that apply to everyone. For the advocates of euthanasia, however, it was a bottleneck to be eliminated, a resistance to be rallied to the ‘good cause’.”

The Order of Doctors also reiterated its opposition to medical assistance in dying: it entails “exerting extremely violent pressure on doctors” to ask them to “perform a lethal act contrary to their ethics without respecting their conscience.”

Above all, however, the Prime Minister was François Fillon. He published an op-ed in Le Monde (January 24, 2011) opposing the legalisation of euthanasia and defending the “development of palliative care” and the “refusal of futile medical care.”

“The question is whether society is capable of legislating to grant itself the right to give death. I believe that this line should not be crossed! However, I know that this is a debate in which no conviction is unworthy,” he wrote.

Although there was a definite liberalism in these remarks, which heralded the fissures to come, the Freemasons had to wait for a more favourable opportunity.

THE VINCENT LAMBERT AFFAIR

The Socialist Party and the Grand Orient of France are intimately linked. The election of François Hollande in 2012 allowed the ‘initiates” to resume their manoeuvres. During his campaign, Hollande had said that he wanted to allow “medical assistance to end one’s life with dignity” and had planned a bill for June 2013.

“A law such as the Leonetti Law (...) no longer suffices for the Freemasons of the Grand Orient de France.” This was published on their blog. “Euthanasia must become part of the movement for progress and the emancipation of man faced with his destiny.” (January 29, 2013)

Asked to comment on the issue, the Comité consultatif national d’éthique (CCNE) published an opinion in July 2013 in which it considered “by a majority that legalising euthanasia is not desirable.” This was unacceptable for the Freemasons. Twenty-two new members, – more than half! – including some close to the government, were appointed to join the institution. “We want to return to the principles on which the Council was founded in 1983 and call on lay people to represent the religious movements,” the Élysée explained.

It was above all the Vincent Lambert affair that was going to serve to amend the Leonetti Law and advance the cause of euthanasia.

Vincent Lambert was the victim of a car accident on September 29, 2008 at the age of thirty-two. Plunged into a deep coma, he was hospitalised in the intensive care unit of the Reims Hospital. When he came out of the coma, he was not in a chronic vegetative state (CVS), which would cast serious doubt on his self-awareness, but in a “state of minimal consciousness”. He was breathing naturally, without the use of a respirator, and was able to open his eyes. Although his consciousness was much altered, it left him real capacities for communicating, which was verified by those around him. He was fed and hydrated through a tube placed in his stomach.

This diagnosis was confirmed in July 2011 by a report from Belgian Professor Stevens Laureys, a specialist in neurology and palliative medicine and one of the world’s leading experts on the mechanisms and degrees of consciousness. Vincent Lambert was quite alive and conscious; he did not have an incurable disease and was not at the end of his life. He was disabled. In 2012, Vincent spent a few days in his family home. He was still considered a “normal” patient.

Yet when he returned, everything changed. Vincent was not transferred to a specialised establishment, but to the hospital’s palliative care unit, even though, it should be remembered, he was neither incurable nor dying. The physiotherapy required for patients like Vincent was no longer administered on the grounds that it “does not improve his neurological condition.” Finally, Dr. Kariger, head of the department, initiated a collegial review to determine whether or not the patient was being subjected to unreasonable obstinacy: should clinically assisted nutrition and hydration be continued? In April 2013, in agreement with Vincent’s wife Rachel, he decided to stop feeding and reduce hydration, but without informing his parents. When the parents learned of this by chance seventeen days later, they appealed to the administrative court, which ordered that the procedure be halted. Vincent had survived thirty-one days without nutrition!

This marked the start of a six-year media and legal battle between Rachel and her half-nephew François Lambert, supported by the Reims hospital and pro-euthanasia movements on the one hand, and on the other, Vincent’s parents, supported by medical societies specialising in disability, pro-life movements and the Catholic Church, who, on the basis of medical expertise, confirmed that Vincent was disabled, not dying, not subject to “unreasonable obstinacy” and that he should be given clinically assisted nutrition and hydration (CANH).

Vincent’s parents were about to win this legal battle and save their son’s life when a new player entered the fray. Marisol Touraine, the French Minister for Health, personally intervened in the case so that Vincent’s wife and the Reims University Hospital could lodge a final appeal with the Conseil d’État.

Why did the government intervene in this dramatic, strictly private family dispute? Because, as the newspaper Le Monde explained, the Élysée Palace had just announced a bill on euthanasia for the end of the year. The Lambert case would thus allow the Leonetti Law that François Hollande had promised to “improve” to be called into question. It was therefore important to relaunch the legal battle.

Shortly afterwards, Manuel Valls (an initiate of the Grand Orient), appointed Prime Minister in March 2014, followed the recommendations of his ‘brothers’ and asked the two deputies, Alain Claeys and Jean Leonetti, to prepare a bill on the end of life, amending the 2005 law.

THE CLAEYS-LEONETTI LAW OF 2016

This law provided for: 1. upgraded advance directives for end of life; they were no longer subject to a time limit and became binding on the doctor, except in exceptional cases, 2. a strengthened role of the trusted support person, 3. But above all, it opened up the possibility for patients to request access to continuous deep sedation maintained until death (SPCMD). In theory, access to this right was subject to very strict conditions: the illness had to be “serious and incurable”, the pain “intractable” and the prognosis “undertaken in the short-term”, and the implementation of this sedation was to be subject to a discussion in a collegial procedure to check that the patient’s situation falls within the conditions laid down by law.

Continuous deep sedation is relatively new in France. Until 2016, only palliative or proportional sedation was employed. It consists of using sedatives to relieve intractable symptoms by lowering the level of consciousness until the pain disappears. The patient is then woken up. Continuous deep sedation consists of putting the patient into a deep sleep in such a way as to abolish his consciousness so that he no longer suffers, and maintaining him in this state until he dies under natural conditions.

The application of continuous deep sedation is extremely delicate, because the borderline with euthanasia is indistinguishable. Too high a dose and the patient dies. Since sedation is only to be used at the very end of life, which is unknown to us, how long before the patient is expected to die should it be carried out? A few days? A few weeks? “When death occurs too quickly, there is a suspicion of euthanasia. When it lasts several weeks, it is unbearable for both the medical team and the relatives,” explains a psychologist.

What is more, it is often used in conjunction with the discontinuation of nutrition and hydration, because “as this can be very painful,” Msgr. Suaudeau of the Pontifical Academy for Life explained, “consciousness is abolished to anticipate potential suffering.”

If clinically assisted nutrition and hydration are discontinued because they are doing the patient more harm than good, this is perfectly acceptable morally. It becomes perfectly immoral though if they are discontinued, when the patient is not at end-of-life, and only because the patient or the doctor has decided that his life is unbearable or no longer has any meaning. And it is precisely clinically assisted nutrition and hydration that is considered by the 2005 law as a treatment that can be suspended, and it is precisely the Claeys-Leonetti Law that makes it possible to avoid the suffering associated with stopping it through sedation maintained until death.

This is exactly what happened in the case of Vincent Lambert. At the end of a new legal battle, he died of hunger and thirst, under continuous deep sedation, as authorised by the Claeys-Leonetti Law.

EUTHANASIA

The Claeys-Leonetti Law and the Lambert affair were merely a stage in preparing people’s minds for the adoption of euthanasia. We know this for three reasons: 1. because, during the discussions on this bill, Manuel Valls had presented it as “undoubtedly” just a “stage”; 2. because the “good” Dr. Leonetti, who is supposedly against euthanasia, had called for a “majority conviction”; 3. because the Freemason Jean-Louis Touraine had tried to push through amendments to move the bill towards euthanasia and assisted suicide, but Marisol Touraine adroitly called for these amendments to be rejected, saying that “French society should not be rushed”.

Indeed, in 2017, the law had barely been adopted when Olivier Falorni, a notorious freemason, submitted a new bill for “a freely chosen end to life”. The bill was not adopted, but that was only a temporary setback! All the determination of the Lodges can be seen in this message published by the Grand Orient on the very day of Vincent Lambert’s death: “The tragedy of Vincent Lambert obliges us collectively to change our law to finally allow a free choice at the end of life, with strict respect for the metaphysical appreciations and conceptions of each individual”.

The result was a mesh of intrigues that only our democratic system makes possible.

Impeded for a while by the Covid crisis, Falorni submitted a new bill in April 2021, which was worse than the Belgian model since it authorised euthanasing depressives within four to six days. It was supported by Macronists of all persuasions and by certain right-wing deputies who needed to prove to the Macronist deputies whom they were getting ready to join that they had abandoned their convictions. Yet once again the proposal remained a dead letter, because it had been obstructed by thousands of amendments submitted by a few Les Républicains deputies.

At the end of November 2021, the National Assembly appointed Falorni chairman of the mission to evaluate the 2016 law. How is this possible? Is our democratic system so flawed that it allows a euthanasia fundamentalist to be judge and jury in the evaluation of a law on the end of life? No, this system is not flawed, it is so designed to destroy us. This was the first intrigue.

Polls showed that 96% of French people were in favour of euthanasia. This was doubtful. The pro-euthanasia deputies knew full well that the subject was highly sensitive and that it would be wiser to wait until their re-election in the parliamentary elections of June 2022 before bringing it back up for discussion. To win the elections, Macron needed the votes of the right too much. He pretended to be undecided on the subject and decided to postpone the debate until the next five-year term. This was the second intrigue.

Everyone knows that the proper functioning of a democracy is measured by the extent to which citizens are able to decide their own political destiny. After the presidential and legislative elections, Macron, in a bid to open up a national debate, announced the formation of a Citizens’ Convention. It was to bring together 184 volunteers representing public opinion to raise awareness of the issue. Chosen by the executive, the Convention would be set up and run by the Republic’s third assembly, the Economic, Social and Environmental Council, which, lo and behold, had already come out in favour of the introduction of “explicitly lethal deep sedation” in 2018. This was the third intrigue.

The manipulation of participants during the nine sessions of this Citizens’ Convention is obvious: interventions by promoters of the Belgian model of euthanasia and the Swiss model of assisted suicide from the outset of the procedure, opacity of the criteria for choosing speakers, a round table to allow all religions to express themselves and another of equal duration for the Freemason lodges, exclusion of works hostile to euthanasia from the bibliography available to the Convention members, absence of contradictory debate with the promoters of foreign legislation that legalise euthanasia (Belgium, Quebec, Switzerland), a discussion limited to one and a half hours out of a twenty-seven-day deliberative phase between the LGBT president of the Association for the Right to Die with Dignity and Dr. Claire Fourcade, president of the French Society for the Support of Palliative Care, the exclusion of philosophers with reservations about the legalisation of euthanasia, the limitation of the voice of doctors to a single morning, and the refusal to organise visits to palliative care units in the field.

Serious doubts were also expressed about the procedure, in particular the questionnaire submitted to the members of the Convention to express their opinion on palliative care and euthanasia: only a very short time was allowed for answering the questions (fifteen seconds at the eighth session), malfunctioning of the votes on essential questions, etc. The Convention members had to decide immediately on the subject of assisted suicide. They had no alternative; either they could vote in favour of assisted suicide for adults, for adults and minors or to abstain. No possibility of a vote against it was taken into consideration. This led some of the Convention members to refer the matter to the President of the Economic and Social Council, but as he was in favour of euthanasia... The fourth intrigue.

And who would actually discuss and vote on the law? The parliamentary assemblies. It is common knowledge, L’Obs observed this in 2011 in an article entitled: Euthanasia Bill: the Role of the Freemasons); Marianne also mentioned it in an article published in 2022: The Freemasons’ Last ‘Crusade’, Abad-Gallardo also talks about it in his book, that the Freemasons of the two Assemblies are federated in an association, the Fraternelle parlementaire, (Frapar in abbreviation), and that they stand together, whatever their party of origin, when it comes to voting for a law that they consider to be major. “We are now in the operational phase, and our aim is to get this legislation through during this term of office,” explained one deputy who is a member of the ‘Frapar’. “Since we are transpartisan, we have a greater impact on this kind of issue.”

Our Father, going far beyond Maurras in this respect, never ceased to explain to us that democracy constitutes a visceral, a profound impiety. Here, however, there is more than an impiety. There is a diabolical, infernal hatred of Our Lord, of His Most Blessed Mother, that is unleashing Freemasonry, perfectly united in its ranks, to control the institutions, in order to ‘offer’ the French people the ultimate temptation of euthanasia to close the gates of Heaven and lead them gently, painlessly and unconsciously through the gate that is wide, along the way that is easy, into Hell.

This is why attempts to secure a majority to prevent the legalisation of euthanasia or any other form of assisted death is not only an illusion, but a transgression. Because to agree to take part in a democratic discussion on such a subject in the name of personal conscience alone is already to play into Satan’s hands, instead of appealing to the blessed Immaculate Who crushes the head of the accursed Serpent.

Democracy is satanic in its essence, not only because France is badly governed and the French people are being pilfered, but because democracy is an obstacle, a fierce adversary to the salvation of their souls, because today it kills our children in their mother’s womb, because it kills their innocence in our schools, and because tomorrow it will kill our old folks by preventing them from fulfilling that particular vocation of sickness that Sister Lucia explained so well in a letter of May 2, 1979 :

“The diseases that the Lord chooses for our last days on earth replace the small number of penances and sacrifices that we choose to offer Him. Now it is He who chooses, and He sends us the sacrifices that He requires from us, and those are much more painful to us. So when we do not seem to be doing penance, that is when we immolate ourselves the most for the Lord in an acceptance of total self-giving out of love. We are in the month of Mary. She will help us right to the end.”

II. “I AM ENTERING LIFE”

Indeed, in the eyes of human beings, death has become so awful, so difficult, since original sin for which it is the punishment, that it was absolutely necessary, in order for us to prepare ourselves fittingly for it during our lives, that God Himself give us the example. For death is not only a punishment, a trial, but also a redemption, a salvation, a resurrection, a transfiguration, a glory that we would never have been able to understand or accomplish on our own, if the Son of God had not come to provide us with the “unique Model.”

We did not need of the Son of God to know how to be born; the Son of God was not absolutely necessary as an example for us to learn how to live on earth daily, to learn how to earn our bread, but for us to know how to die and attain eternal life, God had to send His own Son.

Everything in life, in our own personal life, as in human history, as in the life of Jesus Christ thrusts us towards Passion, suffering and death, which are the essence of human life. Every year, after the few weeks of joy granted by the liturgical time of Christmas, all our attention is focused on the mystery of Christ and of His Holy, His Divine Mother, the Virgin of Sorrows Who stands at the foot of the Cross. This is where Saint John received Her from Jesus as Mother, and where Sister Lucy saw Her in Tuy on June 13, 1929.

THE DEATH OF THE SAINTS.

Fatima is not a message of anger, even if we are threatened with terrible chastisements. No, what God is revealing to us is His Heart. After showing them Hell, Our Lady told Lucy, Francisco and Jacinta: “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.” (July 13, 1917)

At Valinhos, on August 19, 1917, She expressed with unspeakable sadness and in one word the tragedy of our life, the danger that threatens us, and She launched the most urgent appeal to generous love for poor sinners:

“Pray, and pray much; make sacrifices for sinners for many souls go to Hell because there is no one to sacrifice or pray for them.”

Yet, as early as July 13, 1917, the Virgin Mary announced: “In the end My Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to Me, and she will be converted and a certain period of peace will be given to the world.”

What a prophecy of a wonderful future, for the Church and for Christianity! Shortly before leaving for the hospital, Saint Jacinta said to Lucy:

“It will not be long now before I go to Heaven. You will remain here to make it known that God wishes to establish in the world devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. When the time comes to say this, do not go and hide. Tell everyone that God grants us His graces through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, that it is from Her that people are to ask for them; that the Heart of Jesus wants the Immaculate Heart of Mary to be venerated together with His; that people are to ask the Immaculate Heart of Mary for peace, since God has entrusted it to Her.”

She died after her brother Francisco. Both leave an emblematic example of the “end of life” in our times of diabolical disorientation.

Like Bernadette at Lourdes, they had received from the Immaculate Conception the assurance of going to Heaven! Bernadette nonetheless said: “I must earn Heaven!” But how? When her continual sufferings would come, she attached herself to Jesus crucified as her only support, not ‘palliative’ but Heart to heart support.

In 1877, she made the effort to send a letter thanking the superior of the boarding school in Cahors, who had offered her a large crucifix. She wrote: “I have long wanted a large crucifix to place beside my bed; how can I show you how grateful I am? So I said to myself as I clasped and kissed it that my dear Mother Sophie had been well inspired. I have permission to keep it. I am happier with my Christ on my bed than a queen on her throne.” As he quoted these words to us, our Father exclaimed with admiration: “What a comparison!” Indeed, this sovereign happiness that the sick Sister declared she drew from contemplating Christ on the Cross sustained her throughout the last year of her life, during which her suffering were so violent that she spent nights without sleep. If she happened to doze off for a few moments, more acute suffering would soon awaken her with a jolt and she would utter moans, but she would ask the nuns who were looking after her to forgive her, and she would repeat: “My God, I offer it to You, my God, I love You.”

In March 1879, she was striding towards the ‘end of her life.’ A sort of galloping consumption made appalling progress. Sister Marie-Bernard asked for all the pictures that had previously been attached to the canopy of her bed to satisfy her devotion to be removed. Pointing to the crucifix, she said: “That’s enough for me.” So, in her last days and at the moment of her final death throes, Bernadette did not want to take her mind off Jesus crucified. Not even to look at a picture of Our Lady of Lourdes!

During her last days, Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus had a picture of the Holy Face hung on the canopy of her bed: “Oh, how it has helped me,” she exclaimed after one of her most painful nights.

On Easter Wednesday, the day she died, Sister Marie-Bernard was sitting in an armchair, hardly breathing and suffering the cruellest pains. To a sister who said to her: “My dear sister, you are at this moment on the cross”, she replied, outstretching her arms in the form of a cross, her eyes fixed on the Crucifix: “My Jesus, oh, how I love Him!” To another who said: “I am going to ask the Blessed Virgin to console you,” she replied: “No, no consolations, but strength and patience.”

TO CONSOLE GOD.

At Fatima, the roles are reversed. Francisco died on April 4, 1919 and Jacinta on February 20, 1920. Lucy and her cousins had never been sick. Jacinta was still only eight years old, and Francisco ten, when they were stricken with the dreaded Spanish flu. Despite everything, Lucy testified, François “was always joyful and content. Sometimes I asked him:

“ ‘Are you suffering greatly, Francisco?’

‘Enough! But what does it matter? I suffer to console Our Lord and then, in a short time, I will go to Heaven.’ ”

Not only did these children not ask for consolation, but it is the Immaculate Heart of Mary, outraged by the sins of men, Who asked them to console Her. As early as May 13, Francisco was very distressed by God’s sadness: “I loved seeing the Angel,” he said, “but what I loved even more was seeing Our Lady. What I loved above all was seeing Our Lord in that light which Our Lady placed in our chests. I do love God so much! But He is so sad on account of our many sins! We must never commit any sins again…”

One night, his father heard a sigh coming from Francisco’s bedroom. He jumped out of bed, lit a lamp and anxiously entered his son’s room. He found him lying on his stomach, his face buried in his pillow to stifle his tears.

– “Why are you crying?”

Surprised, Francisco raised his head and answered nothing. Confronted with his father’s insistence on questioning him, he shyly replied with sacred modesty:

“I was thinking about Jesus, Who is so sad because of the sins that are committed against Him.”

“Since we saw the Angel and Our Lady,” he said “singing does not appeal to me any longer.”

When his condition grew worse, his throat was congested but he could no longer expectorate, the fever rose. In barely six months, the terrible malady had overcome his robust health. From then on, he never left his bed. “Oh! Mama, I no longer have the strength to say the Rosary! And the Ave Marias I say, I recite them with my head so empty!” No longer able to pray, Francisco felt that the end was near.

“Oh! Dad,” he said in a whisper to his father, “I would like to receive Our Lord before I die!

“I’ll see to it.”

When Lucy returned in the evening, Francisco was beaming with joy: he had made his confession to the parish priest who had promised to bring him Holy Communion the next day. The dawn of April 3 finally rose. It was a beautiful spring day. From the room one could hear the singing of birds, while the embalmed air of the Serra entered through the narrow window. Everywhere things were being reborn. Detached from this world, Francisco aspired only to be born to eternal life. The next day, Friday, April 4, 1919, when night fell, he called his mother:

“Mother, look! What a lovely light, there, by the door!”

And after a few minutes:

“Now I can’t see it any longer.”

At about 10 o’clock in the evening, his face lit up with an angelic smile and, without any sign of suffering, without any agony or groaning, he gently expired. Jacinta, already very ill, was near her brother’s bed. Seeing everyone burst into tears, she said, “Why are you crying, since he is happy?”

His mother testified at the parish inquiry: “He smiled and finally stopped breathing.” His father said with the same simplicity: “He died with a smile.”

He was ten years and ten months old.

Jacinta was moved to Francisco’s room. Although she knew where he was, and Who had come to fetch him to take him up to Heaven, she sorely missed him. As for Lucy, not a single day did she fail to kneel by his grave to converse with him. One day, Olimpia, Jacinta’s mother, whispered in Lucy’s ear: “Ask Jacinta what she is thinking, when she covers her face with her hands and remains motionless for such a long while. I have already asked her, but she just smiles and does not answer.”

Lucy put the question to Jacinta. “I think of Our Lord,” she replied in her weakened faint voice, “of Our Lady, of sinners,” and she mentioned certain things related to the Secret. “I like thinking very much.”

Olimpia asked Lucy what she had answered. Lucy repeated Jacinta’s words to her, without mentioning the Secret. Olimpia said to Maria Rosa: “The life of these children is an enigma to me, I can’t understand it!” Lucy’s mother replied: “Yes, when they are alone, they talk nineteen to the dozen. Yet however hard you listen, you can never catch a single word, but when someone approaches, they lower their heads, and do not say a word! I just can’t understand all this mystery.”

Now that we know the Secret, and speak about it ourselves constantly, we understand that the children did not stop thinking about Hell and praying for sinners who have not yet fallen into it, unlike the “souls of the corpses” that the Holy Father found on his way, whose fate had already been decided at their death. The children, on the other hand, offered sacrifices and prayers for the “conversion” of the sinners they knew throughout their lives, for example the ‘Tinsmith” who had kidnapped them, and all the republicans who did not want to hear of God and the Blessed Virgin. They had tried to force the children to say that they had lied by threatening them. With what? Why, with martyrdom. They, however, knew that “beneath the two arms of the Cross there were two Angels, each with a crystal aspersorium in his hand, in which they gathered up the blood of the martyrs and with it sprinkled the souls that were making their way to God.”

If the Holy Father prays only for the souls of the “corpses” he meets on his way, we understand the insistence of Our Lady saying to the children, on August 19 at Valinhos: “Pray, and pray much; make sacrifices for sinners for many souls go to Hell because there is no one to sacrifice or pray for them,” since the Holy Father does not pray for them when they could still be converted. What a worry!

The ‘reparatory devotion’ announced by Our Lady on July 13, 1917 at the Cova da Iria, and instituted on December 10, 1925 in Pontevedra, five years after Jacinta’s death, would respond to this anguish.

Since the end of October 1918, apart from a few days when she felt slightly better, Jacinta hardly left her bed. After bronchopneumonia, a purulent pleurisy set in. It caused her great sufferings. Yet she bore them with a resignation, a joy even, which does not surprise us, because we learned from Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus “that there is no greater joy than to suffer for Your love, O Jesus!”

Jacinta, however, confided to Lucy: “My chest hurts so much, but I am not saying anything to my mother, I want to suffer for Our Lord, in reparation for the sins committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary, for the Holy Father, and for the conversion of sinners.”

Jacinta spent hours meditating on the Four Last Things and continued to experience through her thoughts, prophetically, the terrible chastisements foretold in the great Secret of July 13, 1917.

“My cousins Francisco and Jacinta,” Sister Lucy said, “made many sacrifices because they always saw the Most Blessed Virgin very sad in all Her Apparitions. She never smiled at us and this sadness, this anguish that we noticed in Her, on account of the offences committed against God and the chastisements which threaten sinners, penetrated our souls and all we could do, in our small childish imaginations, was to invent ways of praying and making sacrifices. What also sanctified my cousins was the vision of Hell.”

Before Francisco’s death, Jacinta’s health had improved somewhat and she could spend her days with her brother. Our Lady appeared to both of them to tell them that She would soon come to take Francisco to Heaven, and to ask Jacinta if she wanted to convert more sinners. Jacinta replied: “Yes.” Our Lady told her that she would go to a hospital and there she would suffer greatly for the conversion of sinners, in reparation for the sins committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and for love of Jesus.

During the month of June 1919, the doctor advised her parents to send Jacinta to Saint Augustine’s Hospital in Vila Nova de Ourem; She knew “that she was not going there to be cured, but rather to suffer.” She underwent intensive treatment there, but it had no effect. The two months she spent there were a continual martyrdom for the child. At the end of August, it was decided that she would return home. The disease wasted Jacinta’s emaciated body making her suffer more and more. Yet her longing for sacrifice did not diminish. She continued to carry her efforts at sanctification to the extreme. She would even get out of bed at night to recite the Angel's prayers.

The thought of Hell never left her mind. This child under the age of ten was haunted by the concern for the salvation of souls. Shortly before leaving for the hospital, she said to Lucy:

“It will not be long now before I go to Heaven. You will remain here to make it known that God wishes to establish in the world devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. When the time comes to say this, do not go and hide. Tell everyone that God grants us His graces through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, that it is from Her that people are to ask for them; that the Heart of Jesus wants the Immaculate Heart of Mary to be venerated together with His; that people are to ask the Immaculate Heart of Mary for peace, since God has entrusted it to Her.”

Knowing in advance, like a prophetess, the lukewarm response that the Church would give to these requests, Jacinta added: “Ah! If only I could put into all hearts the fire that I have here, in my chest, that burns me and makes me love the Heart of Jesus and the Heart of Mary so much!”

As a compassionate Mother, Our Lady wanted to prepare Her child Herself for the ultimate renunciation. In December 1919, She came to tell her that the time had come:

“Once again,” Sister Lucy related, “the Blessed Virgin deigned to visit Jacinta, to tell her of new crosses and sacrifices awaiting her. My cousin gave me the news, saying:

“She told me that I will be going to Lisbon to another hospital; that I will never see you again, nor my parents either, and after suffering a great deal, I will die all alone; but I must not be afraid, since She Herself will come to take me to Heaven.” Jacinta hugged me and between sobs, said:

“ ‘I’ll never see you again! You won’t be able to come and see me there. So pray for me, because I am going to die all alone!’ ”●

To die all alone! Nothing frightened her more.

“ ‘Don't think about it,” Lucy said softly.

“ ‘Let me think about it, for the more I think, the more I suffer, and I want to suffer for love of Our Lord and for sinners.’ ”

Sometimes, when kissing her crucifix, she would exclaimed: “O my Jesus, I love You, and I wish to suffer much for Your love!”

She often said: “O Jesus! Now You can convert many sinners, because this is really a big sacrifice!”

In Lisbon, on January 21, 1920, Mother Maria Godinho welcomed Jacinta and her mother to the orphanage of Our Lady of Miracles, of which she was the foundress. In the religious atmosphere of this home, Jacinta quickly found herself at ease, notwithstanding her great timidity. The orphanage had a gallery overlooking the chapel, where an elderly and deaf priest said Mass every day. Jacinta's joy was indescribable. To live under the same roof as Jesus the Host was a happiness she had never imagined! Not to speak of receiving almost every morning ‘Hidden Jesus’ in the tabernacle!

Indeed, Mother Godinho herself took the initiative to have her little boarder receive Communion. Jacinta had been preparing for it for so long, and with such ardour! Olimpia took her to Estrela Church for Confession. On leaving, Jacinta, greatly consoled did not cease to exclaim: “Oh, mother! What a good Father! What a good Father! He asked me so many things!”

Jacinta spent in the gallery all the time she was allowed. Sitting on a small chair, for she could no longer kneel, her eyes lovingly fixed on the Tabernacle. Mother Godinho remembered that one day Jacinta said to her: “Please leave the room, Godmother, I am waiting for Our Lady!” From Lisbon, she sent word to Lucy that Our Lady had come to tell her the day and hour of her death, while “recommending to her [Lucy] to be very good.”

Jacinta left Our Lady of Miracles on February 2, 1920, to enter the hospital, repeating: “All this is useless, Our Lady came to tell me that I would die soon.” Yet she consented to this new sacrifice.

Jacinta was, henceforth, a person in an “end-of-life” situation. What a difference with the small room at Rua de Estrela! Jacinta became just another number. There was no longer anyone to whom she could talk to about the only important things she learned from Our Lady of Fatima: “Patience! We must all suffer to go to Heaven!”

When she, who had seen the damned plunged into the flames of Hell, forever, saw the nurses and visitors of the sick pass by, dressed immodestly, she would say to herself: “If people knew what eternity is!” When she heard the reflections of the atheist doctors, she would think of Amelia, Lucy’s friend, who was in Purgatory until the end of the world and she pitied them: “Poor people! They do not know what awaits them!”

On February 10, Jacinta underwent an operation without general anaesthesia. The only words the surgeon heard her utter were: “Ouch! Jesus! Ouch, my God!”

The doctor testified to her “certainly heroic patience, especially considering everything she suffered, the manner in which she suffered it.”

The result of the operation seemed encouraging at first. Two ribs had been removed; the wound was as wide as a hand. The renewal of the dressings was very painful. Yet all she could say repeatedly was: “Patience! We all have to suffer to get to Heaven!”

“She had such beautiful eyes that child!” said the nurses’ supervisor: “Very patient... A little saint! She was never heard crying out, she was never seen angry. She stood out from the others in everything.

“She prayed a lot and invoked Our Lady in her moans.”

As for ‘Godmother’, Mother Godinho, she spent long moments every day with Jacinta, but when she sat at the foot of the bed, where the Virgin had appeared, she protested: “Move yourself from there, Godmother! That is where Our Lady stood!”

Jacinta knew the day and hour of her death, which occurred on February 20, around 10:30 p.m.

She died, alone.

Thus was fulfilled the prophecy of Our Lady: Jacinta died alone, without parents or friends, and without anyone to attend her in her last moments. Silently, the Immaculate Virgin had come one last time, to bed number 60, and had taken the soul of Her confidant to Heaven.

Three days after her death, “the fragrance she exhaled was that of a bouquet of varied flowers.” According to Our Lady’s promise that extends to anyone who embraces devotion to Her Immaculate Heart: “To those who embrace this devotion I promise salvation; these souls will be favoured by God, like flowers placed by Me to adorn His throne.” (June 13, 1917)

Brother Bruno of Jesus Mary