The Martyrdom of Obedience to the Faith

IN its 2020/2021 issue, the review: L’année canonique published an article by Father Jean-Eudes Coulomb entitled:

“The Case against Father de Nantes. An Analysis of Canonical Penal Law.”

The author introduces his subject as follows:

“Father Georges de Nantes (1924-2010), whose actions and writings made headlines in the immediate post-conciliar period, found himself at the heart of canonical proceedings of the utmost interest. On the one hand, the procedure for examining his writings was the first of its kind since the close of the Second Vatican Council, and on the other, it was the subject of a rather rare application of the ecclesiastical penal law that was in force before and after the 1983 reform. Thus, the doctrinal, literary and religious history of this priest is coupled with a canonical history, which we propose to study in these pages. This canonical history, which began during the Second Vatican Council, highlights the evolution of the law and its implementation, as well as the relative effectiveness of a canonical penal law that was undergoing a laborious reform.”

So there you have it, Father de Nantes’ ‘great affair’ is going to be treated as though it were an “interesting” biological species undergoing evolution over time!

Father Coulomb presents our Father as a priest who received “priestly ordination on March 27, 1948” and was “incardinated into the diocese of Grenoble. In 1958, he was welcomed into the diocese of Troyes and appointed vicar and bursar of three parishes”. What was the reason for this appointment in parishes in a diocese other than that of his incardination?

Without further preamble, Father Coulomb describes the first adversities our Father had to face: “His pastoral work was coupled with literary activity [this is a reference to the Letters to My Friends] which, in the context of the Algerian war, aroused strong reactions. On several occasions, Bishop Le Couëdic (the ordinary of Troyes from 1943 to 1967) had already asked him to cease his political activities, but these continued, as did the publication of the Letters to My Friends. Their political and critical nature towards the highest authorities of Church and State was disturbing.”

Father Coulomb goes on to set out the canonical sanctions imposed on our Father on four occasions: dismissal from his parishes in 1963 (suspens ab officio), and suspense a divinis in 1966, both inflicted by Bishop Le Couëdic. Then, the doctrinal examination of his writings, which the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith judged in their entirety in 1969 and ‘disqualified’. Finally the interdict fulminated in 1997 by Bishop Daucourt, which gave rise to a series of appeals on our Father’s part, all of which were rejected.

Father Coulomb briefly describes the immediate circumstances in which all these measures were taken, without quoting a single written word, a single spoken word, a single text of our Father himself to explain the reason for these sanctions.

This way of focusing the reader’s attention on the four canonical measures that painfully punctuated a priestly life of sixty-two years devoted entirely to the defence of the Church and the purity of the dogma of the Faith, without which it is impossible to be pleasing to God, appears to us, his disciples, to be a deceitful presentation by omission. It is obviously intended to provide ‘canonical’ support to the depiction that the Doctrinal Commission of the Bishops of France gave in its Warning published on June 25, 2020: that of a rebellious priest, rebellious to his bishop, rebellious to the Holy Father and finally rebellious on principle to the Magisterium of the Church in all its forms.

Readers who will examine the life of our Father exclusively from this canonical angle – with quotations from all the canons invoked as a basis for the proceedings against our Father and his sentencing – will be greatly impressed. They see the life of a priest who was the object of a suspension a divinis throughout almost his entire life, albeit for no explicit reason.

There is one, however, and Father Coulomb is sufficiently familiar with it to content himself with alluding to it in a few words, in the very last lines of his study, in which he finally admits:

“Father de Nantes’ canonical history does not end there. His death in 2010 raised the question of the possibility of granting him an ecclesiastical funeral [such a case already arose in 2002, for the death of our Brother Hugues in Canada!]. But the scope of this article does not allow us to deal with this question,” – and to make his hypocrisy complete, throughout the twenty-eight pages of his article, Father Coulomb passes over in silence this question which, however, is the crucial issue – “nor with the question raised by his famous Liber accusationis, Books of Accusation, addressed to the pope against the pope himself and which partly renew the old question of a heretical pope.”

What are these Books of Accusation for heresy that were addressed to the Pope against the Pope? I summed it up in a few lines to our Ordinary, Bishop Alexandre Joly, in a letter dated February 20, 2022: “Father de Nantes criticised those doctrinal innovations contained in the Acts of the Second Vatican Council that he considered clearly heretical, in particular the social right to religious freedom, at the very time that they were being debated in the conciliar aula. As soon as they were adopted, like a good son towards his father, he hastened to reveal his painful doubts to the Sovereign Pontiff, even going so far as to bring three Books of Accusation for heresy, schism and scandal against Popes Paul VI and John Paul II.

“While he publicly and firmly opposed this innovative, fallible and reformable teaching, he appealed to the extraordinary Magisterium, so that the Supreme Pontiff himself, i.e. through the Church, might restore unity and peace in the name of the Truth of the Faith.”

I did not receive so much as an acknowledgement of receipt.

So the case can be summarised as follows:

On the one hand, a simple priest has developed a significant ‘literary work’ publicly criticising the innovations of the Second Vatican Council and the subsequent teachings of Popes Paul VI and John Paul II, and on the other, the hierarchy has imposed several canonical sanctions on this same priest. There is necessarily a causal link between these criticisms and the measures that sanction them: literary talent in the service of truth comes up against canonical sanctions.

So here is the question of principle raised by ‘the De Nantes Affair’ that Father Coulomb evades: is it conceivable, is it possible, is it permissible, is it legitimate for a Catholic, and all the more so for a priest, to oppose on the grounds of a suspicion of heresy the teaching that the bishops and even the Supreme Pontiff himself present as the ‘authentic magisterium’ of the Church?

The answer is yes! The service of the Church even commands it. Furthermore, the series of canonical measures taken against our Father confirm a contrario that such opposition – which Churchmen invested with the power to teach find very disturbing and which the herald of the Faith finds quite overwhelming – is in conformity with the law of the Church. These sanctions are the stamp of our Father’s heroic witness to the truth of the Faith, up to and including the martyrdom of obedience to the Faith.

In a Letter to My Friends dated April 11, 1964 (Letter no. 169), thus at a pivotal date in his priestly life, Father de Nantes set out the just limits within which the Church intends to subject her children to the virtue of obedience.

The question proved crucial two years after the independence of the French territory of Algeria (July 1, 1962), ordained by General de Gaulle with the support of the Church of France. In the name of charity and Catholic morality, our Father publicly rose up against this independence. It was also one year before the closing of the Second Vatican Council, which he opposed with all his might in the name of Catholic faith, hope and charity:

“The Catholic Church alone has been able to conceive and practise a just definition of obedience, because she alone enjoys a divinely based authority, and she bequeaths to the pastors she has chosen not only her spiritual power but also a tradition of doctrine and rules of law which fix the scope and the exact extent of this power.

“Thus the Church has always proposed religious obedience [not ‘religious freedom’] to her children as the quickest and surest means of attaining perfect renunciation and a proper contempt for the world.”

It is nevertheless true that “obedience is not the first nor the holiest of the virtues.” What matters above all, is the mind’s inviolable attachment to the Truth, its sacred hope of avoiding Hell and going to Heaven, and its charity, i.e. the sovereign love of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary, that nothing can ever contradict or restrain. The measure of these virtues, not only moral but also higher, ‘theological’ virtues, that is, virtues of which God is both the immediate author in the Christian’s soul and the satisfying object, is to be measureless, and obedience to men is justified only for the increase in these virtues (...). Obedience is strengthened only by faith, hope and charity, the better to avoid pitfalls of our own will and whims. That is precisely why it subordinates our behaviour and all our actions to the orders of superiors established by God. Thus superiors have received the power to wrench us from ourselves, but certainly not to detach us from God in order to attach us to themselves alone.

“Thus, we have no obligation to go against natural evidence and the truths of faith (…). Nothing can compel us to go against justice or the charity due to one’s neighbour, and even a decision by authority would be wrong if it seriously wounded our reputation or our interests for no overriding reason, going against equity. Nothing can be commanded concerning one’s intimate convictions or inclinations of the heart, for the powers of men can only govern our exterior life. God alone rules over our inner life, inviolably.”

After evoking these principles, which are part of the most traditional morality of the Church, our Father recalls that they are based on the example set by our unique Model. It is He Whom our Father wanted to follow even to martyrdom, the martyrdom of the obedience of faith: “It is true that this obedience sometimes breaks a man, strips him and leads him to utter desolation. Thus Jesus submits without complaint, without a cry, to Caiaphas, to Pilate, to the executioners who condemn Him and unjustly crucify Him. Factus est obediens… Obedient even unto death, and to the death of the Cross. But see how in this misery and this submission He bears witness to the Truth! How He quickens our hope! How He manifests His Love! In obeying the unjust authorities, as did so many martyrs after Him, He raises the gift of Himself to His Father and to His brethren to the ultimate degree of perfection. We too, after Him, wish to remain silent, to go into exile, to be impoverished and disappear, to advance to certain death through obedience, but on condition that this sacrifice bear witness to the Truth and not allow error to reign; that it may be accepted through love, rather than constitute a betrayal, that it may be a fulfilment and not an abdication! A Christian renounces his goods, his life, his will, his independence, but no one has the right to demand that he renounce his faith, or that he abandon his brethren even were it to be in an act of servile obedience, for there is no authority against such laws!

“It must not be forgotten, if we are fully to understand Christ’s obedience, that His Cross is just as much the price He paid for His refusal to obey the unjust orders of the Jews and recognise the illegitimate authority of the Pharisees, as it is the sign of filial submission to His Father! Thus, a very clear division shows in His holy and exemplary conduct: whereas He refuses all submission to men when it is against the Truth, against charity and the salvation He has come to announce, He gives Himself up and surrenders to their cruel will and their hateful whims when it is only a question of His own wretched human glory, His earthly advantage, His flesh and His blood.”

At the time of writing these very clear considerations on religious obedience, our Father had already put them into practice down to the last detail, particularly during his priestly ministry in the parishes of Villemaur, Pâlis and Planty. His bishop put an end to it by simply dismissing him from his parishes, without any admissible justification!

Our Father spoke out against a French clergy that indulged in Progressivist heresy, against a Council that, by overwhelming majorities, adopted the new charter of a Church more concerned with world affairs than with the salvation of souls, and finally against Popes Paul VI and John Paul II.

The Hierarchy’s main defence against this opposition was not canonical sanctions, but silence. As a result, documentary sources on ‘the De Nantes Affair’ are non-existent in the Hierarchy’s archives!

This is undoubtedly why Father Coulomb knows neither the beginning nor the end of ‘the De Nantes Affair’.

I. DISMISSAL FROM THE DIOCESE OF TROYES
(MAY - SEPTEMBER 1963)

During 1957, Father de Nantes drafted in one go the Provisional Rule of an Order of Missionary Monks modelled on and inspired by the spirituality of Father Charles de Foucauld.

The following year, Bishop Julien Le Couëdic offered our Father, who was incardinated in the diocese of Grenoble where he had been ordained a priest on March 27, 1948, to undertake the planned foundation in his diocese of Troyes, while entrusting him with the responsibility for three parishes. The bishop was well aware of the difficulties inherent in such a foundation. Father Théry met with the bishop to present to him the draft Rule of the Little Brothers of the Sacred Heart. At the end of this meeting, Father Théry gave Father de Nantes the following account of the prelate’s first impressions:

“Submitted to the examination of a very religious priest in his entourage, the rule was approved by him.

“Bishop Le Couëdic himself fully approves of the author of this rule in principle, but he thinks that it will be very difficult to put into practice given the state of mind in the Church and in society today. He will be happy to meet the author of this rule to discuss the matter.”

After an initial meeting on January 9, 1958, our Father thanked the Prelate as follows:

“You guessed, Your Excellency, how impatient I was to submit my personal views, my inner vocation, to the judgement, approval and guidance of the Church. A whole part of my past life was spent suffering and being overwhelmed by the blatant contradictions between persons established in dignity and the convictions that I believed and saw to be clearly conform to the authentic and sure tradition of the Apostolic and Roman Church.”

On the evening of September 14, 1958, Father de Nantes and we, his first brothers, sang Vespers ‘in the choir stalls of the very prayerful church of Villemaur’. The next day, September 15, which was the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, as well as the centenary of the birth of Father Charles de Foucauld, the installation ceremony of the new parish priest took place. Nevertheless, it had been clearly agreed between Bishop Le Couëdic and our Father that the primary reason for this installation was the foundation of our community. The bishop made a commitment to allow it to develop, ad experimentum, as it is termed in Canon Law, including responsibility for the parish. As the three parishes of Villemaur, Pâlis and Planty had been officially vacant since the death of their titular parish priest, Father Gérard Besançon in 1958, our Father was only appointed as curate and bursar to administer them, as provided for in Canon 472 of the 1917 Code.

Father Coulomb insists on the precariousness of this appointment, which apparently left the bishop free to dismiss him ad nutum, on a simple decision, without any justification, as a curate-bursar could not claim the stability to which a parish priest would have been entitled.

Nevertheless, when Bishop Le Couëdic wanted to expel our Father, five years later, he invoked Canon 144 of the 1917 Code to justify his decision: “A cleric who goes to another diocese with the permission of his Ordinary remains incardinated in his diocese and can be recalled for just cause and observing natural equity; moreover, the Ordinary of the other diocese can for a just cause deny him permission to stay longer in his territory, unless he has conferred on him a benefice.”

Thus, in order to legitimately refuse permission to extend the stay of a priest in a diocese that is not his own, a “just cause” has to be stipulated.

What had arisen between the bishop and his adopted priest?

HIS PARISH MINISTRY WAS EXEMPLARY.

Bishop Le Couëdic himself admitted this! How can Father Coulomb not say a word about it!

In fact, Father de Nantes’ parish ministry was remarkable in every way, with overwhelming activity and a rare pastoral zeal for the three parishes entrusted to him. In Bishop Le Couëdic’s own judgement, Father de Nantes became ‘his diocese’s best priest’.

He set about visiting all the parishioners from the first days after his installation. His preaching to them was very rich and much anticipated. Throughout the year, what an intense liturgical life! What an outpouring of activity in all areas. Regular visits to all the parishioners. Three months after his installation, he had already visited two hundred and sixty-five homes! Catechism classes, which he insisted on teaching himself as much as possible; weekly youth activities in which, following the example of Father Emmanuel, the holy monk-parish priest of Mesnil-Saint-Loup whose life he was writing about at the time●, he livened up the games with all his enthusiasm, being as much a friend as it is befitting for a priest to be; organisation of recreational outings for the altar boys; choir rehearsals; Latin lessons for the seminarians; solemn communion and confirmation retreats with brief spiritual direction for each child, and most often the unforgettable pilgrimage, on foot, to Mesnil-Saint-Loup. Recitation of the Rosary together in church during the month of Mary and the month of the Rosary; Stations of the Cross and other special devotions.

In short, this parish ministry proved to be very fruitful and gave rise to a good number of religious vocations, to the great satisfaction of Bishop Le Couëdic, who agreed to clothe Father de Nantes and his Brothers in the monastic cowl, in August 1961. He thus confirmed by this act his intention to give canonical recognition to the religious community that our Father was intending to found.

Yet, a very painful confrontation would take place between him and his bishop. Painful because the mutual esteem and affection shared by the Ordinary and his priest were real, sincere and deep.

Nevertheless, despite obedience, these feelings could not take precedence in our Father’s eyes over the defence of the Truth, in which Bishop Le Couëdic, on the contrary, wanted no part.

THE ABANDONMENT OF THE CHRISTIAN LAND OF ALGERIA.

The case of French Algeria that Father de Nantes defended is presented as the casus belli that supposedly provoked Bishop Le Couëdic’s anger and his decision to expel this priest from his diocese.

This is true, but only partially, because the land of French Algeria was definitively abandoned by General de Gaulle in 1962. Bishop Le Couëdic’s decision to no longer have recourse to our Father’s services was not officially taken until April 1963, and was only implemented in September 1963.

Father Coulomb sums up the events as follows:

“His [our Father’s] pastoral work was coupled with a literary activity which, in the context of the Algerian War, raised sharp reactions. On several occasions, Bishop Julien Le Couëdic (Ordinary of Troyes from 1943 to 1967) had already asked him to cease his political activities, but these continued, as did the publication of the Letters to My Friends, whose political and critical nature towards the highest authorities of the Church and State was disturbing. During a meeting with Father de Nantes on April 8, 1963, Bishop Le Couëdic required that the Letters to My Friends be submitted to his approval in accordance with the law.”

Father Coulomb goes on to quote Canon 1385 of the 1917 Code, which prohibits the publication of written works dealing with religion and the honesty of morals without first undergoing ecclesiastical censorship. And it would have been our Father’s repeated refusal to submit his Letters to the a priori scrutiny of his bishop that led the latter to withdraw his pastoral office and expel him from his diocese!

What really happened?

In a letter dated July 16, 1966, our Father himself explained the dramatic events of the Algerian war to Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani: “I could not remain indifferent to the tears and blood of my brothers and fellow countrymen. But, more than anything else, I could not stand by in silence and see Christian morality corrupted through the lies provoked by fear and servility. The texts of my Letters of those times remain and they testify to the permanence of a human and Christian morality in the face of political and ecclesiastical authorities gone over to the service of the world Revolution. From this complicity was born a new ‘evangelical’ morality, which is the negation of all political order and of all human justice. One day, Your Supreme Congregation will have to answer solemnly whether all legitimate defence of the besieged Christian West is to be condemned and whether all revolutionary activity is intrinsically sacred, even in its worst atrocities and legitimate in its barbarity. In the meanwhile, Christ is in agony in the millions of innocent victims of the Revolution and still more in His Gospel and His moral Teaching, shamefully corrupted in His very Church.”

Our Father is referring here to the Declaration of the Cardinals and Archbishops of France on “Violence before the Law of God” published on October 13, 1961.

This document affirms that “moral precepts, even the most imperative ones, such as those in the Decalogue, must be well understood, defined, interpreted in a sound manner, ranked in relation to one another, and always in relation to Good, the only absolute principle, before which a particular law, in certain practical applications, must be set aside.”

But the archbishops’ declaration abusively deduced from this an unlimited and unconditional respect owed to all men, whatever their crimes, in the name of an invariable, absolute and inalienable ‘dignity’. This text “was a skilful falsification of our Catholic morality, the entire intention and impact of which was to excuse fellaghas, Progressivist Christians and other traitors, and to justify the atrocious anti-French repression by the State and its mobile guards. In the eyes of an indifferent public opinion, the archbishops’ aim was to shift all the responsibility for the violence and crime of this civil war onto these unfortunate “Pieds-Noirs”, French colonials, and the Harkis, who used their sacred right of self-defence, perhaps very badly, as frightened and desperate people,” wrote our Father to Bishop Le Couëdic on December 19, 1965. “So the political moral violence and abuse of authority became ecclesiastical and religious. The matter was, and remains, extremely serious. I wrote a rigorous refutation of this Declaration. No magazine accepted it. When you later received it, you promised to study it, but you never mentioned it again. Six months later, it was Bab-el-Oued and the Rue d’Isly. The Church was then on the side of force and power, against the law, against the vanquished, an indelible stain.”

As our Father had not been able to denounce to the general public this imposture carried out in the name of the Church by men of the Church, he did so as a parish priest, from the pulpit to awaken the French from their lack of concern, to warn his parishioners of the crime of treason they were committing by approving the abandonment of French Algeria. “It would be shameful,” he explained to them at the beginning of 1962, the terrible year of the abandonment of French Algeria and the opening of the Second Vatican Council (October 11, 1962), “to think only of our own personal protection, while doing nothing to help those who are suffering nor to fight for the salvation of the Fatherland and the Church.

“I reminded my parishioners,” he would later explain, “that they had a duty in justice and charity towards their fellow Christians and countrymen, who were at the mercy of the fellaghas’ knives. We had no right to abandon this immense African territory out of cowardice and sloth and hand it over to Islam, then shortly thereafter to Communist barbarity.”

“When lies and murder,” he later wrote to Bishop Le Couëdic, on December 19, 1965, “became State institutions to assist in the treachery, I thought it my duty to warn the faithful of what was going on, and to remind them of the moral requirements to which all political action is subject. All the more so as, through repeated referendums, Charles de Gaulle was asking the French people to endorse the treason and shoulder collective responsibility for this monstrous civil war that was crushing our brothers, the French Christians and Muslims of Algeria. The masses in mainland France were consenting, for reasons of outrageous selfishness. I wanted at least to preserve my good Christians from it.”

Our Father was the only priest in France to clamour the voice, the word and the teaching of the Church, and his forceful words of truth alone represented a danger to the party of the Revolution.

On Sunday March 11, 1962, eight days before the signing of the Evian Accords●, he declared in his sermon that he did not have any plastic explosives, or a stock of weapons, or pamphlets. He was not involved in a plot. But he solemnly warned people that if he was put in jail, it would be for having openly declared that “the capitulation of Mr de Gaulle was the most shameful one of our history.”

Before five days had passed, on Wednesday, March 14, our Father was subjected to a meticulous police search of his presbytery and was taken into custody before finally being handed over to the ecclesiastical authorities. By having him placed under house arrest in the Major Seminary in Troyes would make the Church endorse his forced silencing!

At the very moment when the Evian Accords were signed, handing Algeria over to the FLN● in favour of a unilateral truce, leaving the way open for the worst reprisals against the defenceless population, our Father was subjected to the painful assaults of his bishop, who tried to bring him round to Charles de Gaulle’s views, or to have him consider the future of his religious Order, of its foundation.

On March 20, without thought for human and clerical prudence, our Father, far from justifying himself, tried to bring Bishop Le Couëdic round to the Church’s sole reasons and to Christ’s laws of charity:

“But the most important point, and the one that escapes any question of expediency, is that of the moral doctrine taught and repeated by all the clergy and hierarchy in France. This doctrine of condemnation of all violence ‘wherever it comes from’ seems to me to be false.

“All theologians and moralists without exception teach: ‘Fas est vim vi repellere’ –’It is of divine right to repel violence by force.’

“Through this corrupt teaching of the condemnation of all violence, we have disarmed our fellow citizens and brothers in Algeria, we have been complicit in their abandonment by the Government, we have helped to spread and justify the Communist idea of the ‘dirty war’, to which morality would command an end, even if it means capitulating to the very conditions of the unjust aggressor.

“Can this erroneous doctrine be accepted either out of obedience, or to save the good of unity and peace, or out of fear of a greater evil?”

In response to this question of principle, our Father first of all wrote to his bishop in a spirit of appeasement: “As the days go by, I receive advice from my best friends and spiritual fathers. They all point in the same direction: submit to your bishop, return to your parishes, humbly resume your ministry (...).” And our Father agreed with the advice given to him:

“I therefore renounce distancing myself from my personal duty of state in order to judge the conduct of the Head of State and the doctrine of Our Lordships the Archbishops. Whatever one may think, it was not out of passion or joy of heart that I embarked on this path. What haunted me was these Christians, these French people, being handed over like beasts of slaughter to the Muslim butcher. They are condemned by the highest spiritual and political authorities, so I submit to them and will return, if you allow me, without fuss and without glory, to Villemaur, for Laetare Sunday.” This was accepted by Bishop Le Couëdic, but on the condition of remaining silent about the whole affair.

Commenting on these events, our Father wrote on March 27:

“My right to hold whatever conviction I see fit has been recognised, and His Excellency even added that perhaps, objectively, I was right in every respect; this was no doubt in order to add that, in any case, it was above all important for the priest to keep silence (...). As for the rest, the letters and petitions from the parishes, they made a great impression. I regret that in this affair they only wanted to consider my pain, my legitimate personal concern, without seeing what it is exclusively about and which goes well beyond all other personal considerations: the salvation of the Church, the nation and those poor millions of people sacrificed by the Government and its worshippers. Well, I return to my Parish, and all this will have made my conviction known. My silence will only give him the guarantee of a certain wisdom and a genuine moderation.”

Our Father did return, but he was unable to put down his pen in the face of the appalling atrocities inflicted on Christian and Muslim populations alike because of their loyalty to France, by an all-powerful FLN taking possession of all that had been handed over to it without a fight.

Between May and August 1962, he devoted six Letters to My Friends to French Algeria, a martyr of both the Government of Charles de Gaulle and the Church of France acting in solidarity as a satanic joint undertaking.

“This peaceful Algeria of 1954, these good people who lived in remarkable harmony under French administration and enjoyed the benefits of Christian civilisation, saw their rights challenged, reprimanded, forgotten and abandoned by the highest spiritual authorities, at the same time as the government betrayed them, the army abandoned them and the Gendarmerie disarmed them. All that remained was for them to die, the throat slit by the knife of a fellagha, or to be tortured and sent to concentration camps by the French police because of their rebellion.

“Two names forever personify this appalling affair of a Church and a State turning against their own children. Those who bear these names – Charles de Gaulle and Léon-Étienne Duval, Archbishop of Algiers – gloried in what they did and are praised by others for it. What appeared to be a pitiful state for the Kingdom of France and the Roman Church to be in was a victory for them. Their eulogisers point out that this victory is particularly significant because it was not won by the soldiers of the A.L.N. [National Liberation Army] against our army, but it was a victory of France, and in particular of her ‘Christian elite’ animated by genuine evangelical charity, against herself and against the mass of reactionary Catholics and selfish French people known as the Pieds-noirs (French colonials). The G. P. R. A. [Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic], moreover, publicly acknowledged that only these ‘Christian elites’ had sincerely helped them from the outset, and we have it on good authority that they have expressed the wish to see the Archbishop of Algiers elevated to the rank of cardinal, as a token of their high esteem and satisfaction.”

It was then, on July 1, 1962, feast of the Precious Blood, that our Father delivered a sermon which was to leave a lasting impression as a veritable call for a Crusade.

This Crusade would consist firstly in worshipping the Blood shed by Our Lord for the forgiveness of our sins ‘to the point of never, at any price, wanting to be the direct, brutal and odious cause of so many wounds inflicted on the divine Body of Jesus Christ”; secondly, in venerating the blood of “the martyrs and soldiers of our cause”, by feeling intense emotion “at the sight of so many innocent dead among our fellow citizens and brethren in the Faith”; and finally, and above all, in remembering that “the Church has lived through the ages and that France herself has spanned the centuries and brought the Gospel at the same time as civilisation to the ends of the earth, because this brilliant cohort of heroes and saints has always been found in them both. The best have always understood the words of Jesus, King of Martyrs and of Confessors: ‘Greater love has no man than to lay down his life for those whom he loves.’ Let us understand this and, fostering this ideal of generosity in our families and in our parishes, let us not stifle such vocations when they appear in the generous hearts of some of our children. These children will be the guarantors of our peace tomorrow.”

This sermon immediately became common knowledge and was clearly understood by the small faction of communists, socialists and anticlericals in the region, who swore to go after our Father’s hide.

In August, in order to put pressure on the Prefect of Aube, and through him on the Bishop of Troyes, the majority of Villemaur’s town councillors tendered their resignation as a protest against the maintaining of the parish priest in his post.

Bishop Le Couëdic stood his ground and refused to submit to blackmail, but for all that, he refused to defend his priest. He pointed out that it was up to the bishop and him alone to take disciplinary measures against a priest in the exercise of his office, and not to the civil authorities. The bishop’s opposition was firm and legitimate. He specified though: “That as far as the person of Father de Nantes is concerned, the criticisms levelled at him attack the realm of opinions where individual freedoms are exercised.”

And therein lies Bishop Le Couëdic’s error, for everything our Father wrote and said about the events in Algeria, and the actions of General de Gaulle and the French clergy, did not belong to the “realm of opinions where individual freedoms are exercised”, but to the doctrine of faith and political morality, and thus to the truths taught by the Church for the spiritual and temporal good of France, her peoples and particularly the most neglected of the French lands of Algeria.

The appeal launched on July 1, 1962 from the pulpit of Villemaur should have been made from the cathedra of Troyes and from any other diocesan see, including Rome’s.

Professing that it was not incumbent upon him to take the side of Christian France in the name of the Church, as shown to him by his priest, Bishop Le Couëdic was already abandoning him. Worse still, he was betraying the Church and the duties of his office. This first betrayal, once consummated, would inexorably lead to others, going so far as to seeking our Father’s canonical annihilation, in the event that he not succeed in silencing this man who was becoming, in his own eyes, a living reproach.

A BISHOP ABANDONS HIS BEST PRIEST.

While in Rome for the first session of the Council, Bishop Le Couëdic received a letter dated November 27, 1962 from Father Tollu, superior of the Carmelite seminary, informing him of the Council’s decision not to present Bruno Bonnet-Eymard and Gérard Cousin for Holy Orders, due to the ascendancy exerted over them by Father de Nantes:

“The training we seek to give them will always be confronted with the directives they receive from him, and in the event of divergences, it is not our principles that will be followed, but his.”

Thus, the superior of the Carmelite seminary, on the strength of his erroneous principles of reform and under the pretext of not being able to inculcate them by force in two candidates for the priesthood, had the audacity to refuse their admission to Holy Orders against the recommendation of the bishop of Troyes, who could also read this death warrant penned by Father Tollu:

“We thought that after the serious admonition he received from you concerning his statement from the pulpit against the President of the Republic, Father de Nantes would understand that he is not entitled to found a religious community. We can see that this is not the case.”

The motive behind this arbitrary decision by the superior of the Carmelite seminary is clear: to block Father de Nantes’ plan to found a new religious order.

Bishop Le Couëdic realised, at the height of conciliar euphoria, that all of our Father’s doctrine, made public through his preaching at Villemaur, but above all through the circulation of his Letters to My Friends, was in direct opposition to the most eminent and influential clergy in the Church of France. He realised that he could in no way support his priest without running the risk of publicly putting himself at odds with a progressivist and reformist party in the Church. This party had acquired recognition within the conciliar assembly and had succeed in gaining an obvious influence over the Fathers. This is why, during a meeting that took place at his palace in Troyes on April 8, 1963, the bishop decided to force his parish priest to choose between two possibilities: either to submit, through his silence, to the widespread revolutionary movement that was sweeping through the Church, or to resign. To submit meant keeping silent about the revolution that was being waged before his eyes in Rome. To resign simply meant giving up his office of parish priest.

Should he obey or disobey, or to put it better, refuse to obey? At that very moment, Our Father made two personal resolutions to which he was to remain faithful for the rest of his life.

OUR FATHER’S TWO VOCATIONS.

While very deliberately maintaining his “fight for the triumph of the Faith within the limits appropriate to his modest personal situation and his limited authority, seeking in this struggle neither success nor personal advantage, not even wishing to carry it as far as possible,” he considered that it was “part of his vocation to maintain the received truths, within the small measure of his legitimate influence.”

He never felt that he was allowed to abandon this task, whatever the cost. It was not a personal, natural passion, but in conscience, it seemed to him to be “a divine commandment, a supernatural vocation, just like his vocation of being a missionary monk following the example of Father de Foucauld. These two aspirations, to a life of perfection and to the preaching of the full truth,” seemed to him to be “inseparably linked, always preventing him from totally abandoning one of these vocations in favour of the other.”

THE AB OFFICIO SUSPENSE OF MAY 10, 1963.

On April 28, our Father gave his friends a lucid commentary on the encyclical Pacem in Terris, in which John XXIII advocated the utopian advent of a free, equal and fraternal world community, but which implied the destruction of the traditional order, its historical communities and its legitimate powers. And on the same day, our Father announced to his bishop his intention to go to Rome to “see to what exact extent the hierarchy wants to build this new Church which seems to me to be built only on the ruins of the other one, which I believed to be eternal,” but also to submit a dossier. He had not yet responded to the ultimatum he had been given. “I would be grateful if you could send me the texts of the various complaints you have received about my little Letters, so that I can put this file together properly.”

“I would also appreciate it if you would specify to me in writing the various reproaches that you have to make to me and which you spoke to the seminarians about, so that I can also mention them (...). It is obvious that I would be very happy also to see included precisely what, over the past five years, can be credited to me and for which, I must say with gratitude, you have many times warmly expressed your satisfaction to others – and to me.”

Bishop Le Couëdic replied on May 4. He communicated only one complaint against our Father – that of a parishioner dated November 7, 1962 –, two articles published in the Est-Éclair newspaper on November 3 and 4 at the instigation of the Villemaur communists and finally Father Tollu’s letter of November 27. Above all, the Bishop of Troyes attacked the Letters to My Friends, “these mimeographed papers in which, as I told you in person at the bishop’s palace, you are clearly taking equivocal stances and using language that is exactly untenable, as the following texts prove.” Bishop Le Couëdic referred to five passages from Letters nos. 112, 116, 118, 120 and 123.

And finally he repeated his demands:

“I have therefore asked you to cease absolutely all political activity in your parishes and to send me your mimeographed texts before you pass them on so that I can correct them, amend them and, if necessary, ask you to stop writing them and sending them to anyone. I have insisted that, for the time being and for many months to come, you keep the silence of mind and heart that will be for you and in the eyes of others the true diagnosis of your filial obedience to the Church. I firmly repeat this demand.”

On May 10, without further ado, without waiting for the outcome of the Roman procedure of which our Father had informed him in good faith, Bishop Le Couëdic notified him of two decisions that would supposedly ‘restore his freedom’.

These two decisions must be clearly differentiated. Firstly, the bishop withdrew our Father from his parish duties. Secondly, our Father was asked to leave the diocese. The deadline was mid-June. Bishop Le Couëdic invoked the reasons listed in his previous letter, but gave no canonical basis, citing no “just cause”. With great calm, prudence and foresight, our Father replied that he would obey, but asked for a delay until mid-September. This was immediately granted. “I understand very well your reasons for waiting until September, for it will be you who will be leaving and it will not be your enemies who will have the right to sing their victory.”

As for the decision to have to leave the diocese of Troyes, our Father told Bishop Le Couëdic that he would not submit to his injunction.

“How could I abandon this inestimable moral capital that I have acquired in this diocese, for which I am grateful to God, and in the midst of which shine this esteem, this affection that you have openly shown me up to now?

“Even then, I could not leave this diocese because no other would receive me with dignity in such circumstances. I would not want to clear my name by damning you, and no one would accept to believe that some secret infamy I might have committed was the reason for such ostracism. Slander would quickly do the rest... Besides, if it is my doctrine that is the cause of my ousting, wherever I go, the same causes will produce the same effects. What is the point of starting again somewhere else?”

On this precise point, our Father would explain three years later to Cardinal Ottaviani in a letter dated July 16, 1966: “When I was summoned by His Excellency, the Bishop of Troyes, to choose between publishing my Letters and my ministry as a country parish priest, I realised that the disagreement touched on essentials this time and implicated much more than my immediate superior.

“Something was changing in the Church’s Faith and Law, and it was Authority in its noblest and most universal form that was repudiating works such as mine. Consequently, it was pointless to pursue this work in another diocese or in other climes: the same injunction would be given to me wherever I went. Nor could I once again submit in the external forum whilst reserving my inner freedom. Until then, this freedom had been based on Rome’s steadfastness, and it is from Rome that the repudiation would soon come! I was required, therefore, to effect both internally and externally, that change of mentality announced by John XXIII on October 11, 1962, and which the Council was accepting for itself, whilst awaiting the decree that would impose it on all the faithful. I was not prepared to enter on such a path without proofs of its legitimacy and without guarantees of its morality. Before embracing such a path, I wanted to have a clear knowledge of the reality, the scope and the limits of this aggiornamento for which we had to abandon our old religion. So I gave up my ministry. I decided to withdraw, but only partially, and to continue my work of polemics in order to provoke the Church to be clear about the reason and justification for this practical excommunication brought against my friends and me: Did the conditions for membership of the Catholic Church change between 1960 and 1963? I hold that to be impossible. Others act as though it were so. It remains for us to submit, in our wretched persons, this formidable case for the supreme judgement of the Church of Rome.”

As a result, “in perfect agreement with those in whom I have confided filially about this present difficulty,” wrote our Father to Bishop Le Couëdic, “I have decided to remain in this diocese, as the least of your guests no doubt, on leave from ministry according to your wishes, but free nevertheless to be a man, to be a Christian and a priest of Jesus Christ with all the inviolable rights and privileges that this state entails, including those of telling the truth and writing about it to my friends.

“You know the impasse in which the superior of their seminary, in agreement with you, has placed two of my sons. They will therefore come and live with me this secluded life of prayer, penance, intellectual and manual work that we have so ardently desired for the past five years. To this end, I have acquired a suitable house at Saint-Parres-lès-Vaudes by the grace of God, who has directed everything to this end.

“Of course, it will not be a foundation of a congregation. That is not possible without the authorisation and full consent of the local bishop. It, however, will be a time of providential recollection and a preparation for this great vocation that we will not cease to implore from Heaven and from you, Your Excellency, by offering ever more prayers and sacrifices to hasten that moment. It seems to me impossible, Your Excellency, that you should not examine with all your paternal benevolence the decision I am informing you of and the motives that inspired it.” There was no reply from Bishop Le Couëdic, who by his silence agreed to a two-year status quo until the closing of the Second Vatican Council.

DISMISSAL FROM THE DIOCESE WITHOUT JUST CAUSE.

Father Coulomb affirms the canonical regularity of our Father’s dismissal from his parishes and from the diocese of Troyes on the one hand because of his refusal to submit his Letters to My Friends to the prior censorship provided for in canons 1384 and 1385 of the 1917 Code, and on the other hand because of the ‘hatred’ of the faithful. Neither of these reasons, both bereft of any real and serious character, can constitute a legitimate motive for the sudden and defamatory dismissal of a priest, abandoned without office or income at the end of five years of well-proven, zealous and fruitful service, firstly to three parishes and finally to an entire diocese through the number of vocations that resulted.

As regards the ‘hatred’ of the faithful and the “ever widening gap between parishioners and, in the diocese between fierce enemies and Father de Nantes’ fanatical supporters”, the motive is even more insubstantial. Although Bishop Le Couëdic certainly had the ‘courage’ to invoke this “hatred” before a group of parishioners in June 1963, or to write about it to the Sacred Congregation of the Council, he never had the courage to speak about it to our Father, the main person concerned, who knew, as did his bishop, that no notable dissension existed, certainly not of his own making, within the parish community and even within the diocese, which could also be detrimental to the exercise of his ministry. There is no record of such a motive in Bishop Le Couëdic’s official letters of May 10 and August 16 and 18, 1963.

All things considered, it is undeniably the very content of the Letters to My Friends that constituted the motive for our Father’s dismissal from the diocese by the bishop who had welcomed him. In his letter of August 16, 1963, this was indeed how the bishop justified his decision:

“It is not without great sadness that I part from you, but your writings, which continue to be sent to me, prove to me more and more that your place is no longer in this diocese.”

Our Father was determined to take the side of the Church, to defend her doctrine and morals against the Progressivist and reformist party, whereas Bishop Le Couëdic had taken the side of prudence, capitulation and ultimately a denial that could not constitute a “just cause” in the sense of canon 144 of the 1917 Code. The illegitimate decision to expel our Father from the diocese of Troyes at the same time legitimated his moving to Saint-Parres lès Vaudes on September 15, 1963, the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows.

Providentially, however, this decision inspired our Father as to what his vocation should be. “No doubt it would be more pleasant for me to remain in my parishes, even if it meant moderating my language and giving up writing, or to go and knock at the door of a monastery to forget, in the love of God alone, this painful, terrible struggle in which my neighbour is the stake. Such solutions of wait-and-see and prudence, or of total and definitive submission seem at first sight to be the only ones left for me and my friends.

“When you think of the natural horror we all feel for the slightest act of indiscipline and the frightening nature of ecclesiastical sanctions, it seems that any resistance, however legitimate, is quite unthinkable and beyond human strength. I am told that if the hierarchy silences me, it takes full responsibility for its decision, and I am freed from all scruples. All those who remain silent insist on this, but those who are anxious about the future and those who cannot forget the tragedy of Algeria that we have lost, hope that I will find a path that reconciles honour and discipline, filial obedience and the freedom of faith, peace of mind and civic courage. As for mystical souls, who are oblivious to all human perils, they consider only Jesus Christ, misjudged and scorned.

“After months of prayer, reflection and after receiving more qualified advice, I believe I have found this difficult path. Since I have been freed from duty and it is impossible for me to join the Progressivist movement or to remain neutral by abdication, I will take advantage of this freedom where I have been authoritatively placed, to lead my fight without embarrassing or compromising in my humble person the whole Church of France, certainly quite compromised in other respects!

“In this position of withdrawal, however, I claim the absolute right to seek and speak the truth, to serve the Church by recalling what is right and good, to think about my homeland and defend the poor and innocent who are being crushed. There is an “overall pastoral programme” that has served the cause of the fellaghas and is endeavouring to liberate Angola. This programme is preparing a sympathetic and submissive Church for tomorrow’s Communist world. A new theology is being taught for this, that of Teilhard, a new morality is being constructed to justify this series of crimes, evolutionist morality, a press, radio, movements and unions have every canonical authorisation and mandate from the hierarchy to Christianise the most appalling regression in all history. I said that all this could be excused, could be understood.

“But I take the sacred liberty, since it has been granted to me, to uphold and defend the Faith I was taught, the true one, to demand respect for the morality of the Ten Commandments, the only friend of the poor human race, to comfort, enlighten and support the Catholic and French elite, whose thoughts and hearts are trampled underfoot, even though it is the great reserve of energy and devotion from which the Church still draws, a Church that is bent on destroying it. A doomed priest for the doomed soldiers of a country on its way to perdition, perhaps. The Church intends to leave this ship in distress. I am here to stay.

II. THE SUSPENSION A DIVINIS OF AUGUST 25, 1966

Father Coulomb’s account is accurate as far as the few facts he relates are concerned, but it is far too brief given the doctrinal combat waged by our Father from 1963 to 1965! Let us recall the facts.

HERESY IS IN THE COUNCIL.

Starting in September 16, 1963, our Father carefully followed the conciliar debates from Maison Saint-Joseph as they were made public and commented on them in his Letters, the circulation of which continually broadened to reach an increasing number of friends.

He denounced the intrigues of the Progressivist wing that occupied the key positions of the Synod, and he supported the Traditionalist Fathers with all his might in an attempt to counter the revolutionary wave that was threatening the Church “in her dogmas and structures.” He did so by highlighting the obvious contradictions between certain principles expressed in the conciliar aula and the traditional Magisterium of the Church. And his criticism became, it is true, increasingly incisive when he became alarmed by the fact that clearly heretical theses were being supported with complete impunity by the most Progressivist wing of the Council Fathers, who wanted to arrogate to themselves an authority free from the control of the faith, by refusing “to provide proofs of orthodoxy” and claiming “a majority of votes in order to impose themselves.”

In parallel with this critical analysis of the Acts of the Council as they were being discussed and adopted, our Father was to begin “the combat of the son against his Father, of the priest against the Pope”, in this case Pope Paul VI, when he published his inaugural encyclical Ecclesiam Suam on August 6, 1964. This text showed that the Supreme Pontiff had himself been won over to the execrable doctrine of reformism, of which Father Congar was the leading intellectual figure, and that the suspect and even absurd theories that were spreading among the majority of the Council Fathers were those of the Pope himself. Paul’s VI plan was to transform the Church into a Movement for the Spiritual Animation of Universal Democracy (Masdu).

“It really is a wonderful chimera,” our Father wrote in his Letter to My Friends of March 25, 1965, “to which I merely gave a name, rather as one might quickly pin down a beautiful moth to immobilise it and thus observe it. The name itself, I found in one of the discourses of the Holy Father: ‘The Church cannot be disinterested in the ideological moral and spiritual animation of public life,’ and in this sphere she invites us ‘to work with confidence, yes with confidence, in those institutions which form the norm and history of our society, and which today are the democratic institutions.’ The Church then makes herself the humble discreet servant of the new human society and generously aspires to rival the social ardour of other animators of human heroism. The Church wants to take part in ‘the development of profane civilisation’ by helping to revive in everyone the consciousness of supreme values.

“Therefore only two contradictory solutions can exist: that of a universal democracy, the fulfilment of which is to be guaranteed by Christianity, which is the plan of Paul VI, and the other, that of a world become entirely Christian, which was the doctrine of Saint Pius X. The first of these two solutions finds its charter for an international, classless, multi-racial and multi-religious society in the Gospel and in the Principles of 1789, whereby all these totalitarianisms, without exception, could finally reach peaceful agreement and coalesce. This humanism is said to be in sight. The peoples aspire towards it, everything is leading in that direction with world examples such as UNO and Unesco promoting its fulfilment. The Church, or rather ‘the Masdu’, can have an incomparable part to play in this scheme and thus be called by God to become its soul. That is the objective of the Pope’s efforts and the aim of the Council.” In short, under cover of the Pope’s authority, it became necessary, for certain key points of Catholic doctrine, to put the existence of God in parentheses, to neglect Jesus Christ and especially Jesus Christ Crucified, in order to advocate the establishment of a new City, of peace and brotherhood based on human rights and the exaltation of the ‘human person’.

To carry out this new revolutionary plan, defined by the Pope himself, the Council Fathers drew up an intentionally equivocal text, entitled Dei Verbum, “Word of God,” by distorting the Catholic doctrine of Divine Revelation, with the aim of freeing themselves from Tradition and the unchanging dogma of the faith and their sole object: the salvation of souls.

In the declaration Dignitatis Humanae, the Church affirms the strict and universal right of man and of every human community to religious freedom in the field of civil and social activities. “Let no one be hindered, let no one be coerced.” With this Declaration, the Church relinquishes her truth, and hopes to cooperate in a “harmony” and “peace” of the whole “human family,” established 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.” (no. 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 Masdu. The authors of this Declaration were unable to base it on any doctrine or to found it on Holy Scripture, much less on Tradition, as it was completely contrary to both. A ‘scriptural’ basis for this Declaration really does exist – it is none other than the Universal Declaration of Human Rights! The truth is that it is a practical act of apostasy!

But at the heart of the Acts of the Council, the reformation of the Church herself, with Lumen Gentium, defines the service she must henceforth render to the World in its secular progress. No longer concerned only with the salvation of souls, the Church is expected to spread “a force of generosity, of liberty, of brotherhood that will help men to transform the world”. She is presented as a ‘People of God’ that “is established as fully living, entirely illuminated, sanctified, gathered together even before the hierarchy intervenes in the least, by means of a direct, invisible, gratuitous, unexpected, and unlimited action of the Holy Spirit!” The Church was subjected to the new principle of collegiality, a revolutionary principle that dilutes all forms of authority by depersonalising them in a collectivist and parliamentary sense. This collegiality was to result in a weakening of the power of each bishop, who was over involved in the Synod and even more so within Bishops’ Conferences. This new hierarchical level created from scratch without the slightest traditional foundation was soon to take precedence over their personal and responsible authority, on which Jesus Christ had founded His universal, ‘Catholic’ Church, and divide it into national Churches.

On the other hand, the laity, constituted as a ‘people of gods’, were to experience an irresistible ‘promotion’. Straightaway, the Council considered them as ‘prophets, priests and kings’ on account of their baptism! An exaggerated dignity was thus conferred on them. It would give them the same rank in authority and even in power as the priest who has received the Sacrament of Holy Orders: “Not only must they fulfil their own ministries in the Church, making the most of their ‘secularity’, but in the world, they must also ‘build the temporal order and direct it to God through Christ’.”

The worst in this respect, however, was the fate reserved for the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Council not only hindered a constitution that would have been entirely devoted to Her, but it even dared to relegate Her to the last chapter of Lumen Gentium in order to clearly signify to Her and Her children Her ‘subordinate’ role! The dogma of Mary Mediatrix of all graces was refused to Her as “inopportune and even baneful (damnosa)”, Cardinal Montini, the future Paul VI, already said in 1962! Thus the thesis of the ‘minimalists’ triumphed in imposing a ‘new way’ of venerating the Virgin : it was no longer a question of proclaiming Her privileges of Immaculate Conception, Perpetual Virginity, Divine Maternity, but only Her ‘service’ to the people of gods! Her prerogatives were scorned, Her demands that were revealed at Fatima, stifled.

Consequently, our Father raised the issue without circumlocution in his Letter No. 212 of September 15, 1965, at the opening of the fourth and final session and before the closing of the Council, concerning the authority of the Second Vatican Council.

ON THE AUTHORITY OF THE SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL.

“Is not an ecumenical Council the highest authority of the Magisterium? Does it not possess supreme, infallible, and universal competence? Is it not the place where Christ is eminently present, where His Spirit breathes, powerful and irresistible? God’s work cannot be ‘baneful’? From our Faith we draw certitudes that are superior even to the demonstrations of reason and the perceptions of our senses. Should we not then reject every shadow of criticism, of private judgement, and even renounce the evidence of disorder and decadence to convince ourselves blindly that this Council is good and holy, its convocation edifying, its acts providential, and that its fruits will be wonderful?” Our Father continued:

“In order, therefore, to make filial submission to what is legitimate, no more and no less, I shall examine what is of Divine Authority in the XXI^st Ecumenical Council. I began this close study from the evening of October 11, 1962, when it was announced that this Council would be different from all the preceding twenty, and that it would be of such striking novelty to be hailed as a New Pentecost for the world and the dawn of a new reign. I submit my conclusions with faith and reverence before the Divine Authority of the Apostolic See to which I have given my obedience once and for all. Let the Holy See exercise sovereign judgement in this matter if it so wishes.”

“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. If a Council is to fulfil such a directly divine task it seemed normal and necessary that it should fulfil all the conditions for the exercise of its sovereign independence; fidelity to Tradition, study and formal strictness by which it would merit the absolute infallible assistance to which it dared to lay claim in the end by virtue of the explicit promises of Christ to His Apostles.

“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 gathered for any dogmatic work, for the definition of Divine truths and the denunciation of contemporary errors nor especially were they to condemn anyone. The Solemn Magisterium, therefore, in its ecumenical sessions has decided not to distinguish between truth and error, to admit everything and to proscribe nothing. It has decided to leave men to their own opinions without imposing infallible pronouncements on them or commanding them in the name of God. In order to adopt such a supple attitude, the Council necessarily had to free itself from the Church’s age-old dogmatic and disciplinary procedure.”

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.”

But 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 Reformation 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: “Hearing the word of God with reverence and proclaiming it confidently, the sacred Synod takes its direction from these words of Saint John: ‘We announce to you the eternal life that dwelt with the Father and has appeared to us. What we have seen and heard we announce to you, so that you also may have fellowship with us and our fellowship may be with the Father and His Son Jesus Christ.’ (1 Jn 1:2-3). Therefore, following in the footsteps of the Council of Trent and of the First Vatican Council, this present Council wishes to set forth authentic doctrine on divine revelation and how it is handed on, so that by hearing the message of salvation the whole world may believe, by believing it may hope, and by hoping it may love.” The Fathers abusively claimed to be in direct, immediate and inspired contact with the very Word of God, on a par with the apostle Saint John, in order to found freely a new Church. Yet, “at Vatican II, there was no apparition or illumination! To claim so is the first imposture. A second one is to pretend that the Holy Spirit was there to inspire the Fathers just like the Prophets of the Old Testament and the Apostles of the Gospel.”

In conclusion: a singular equivocation mars the authority of the texts of the Council. The sixteen texts promulgated in the course of the four sessions of the Second Vatican Council are all fallible since none of them were declared infallible. The consideration given to each of them 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 present this as equivalent to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed is to lobotomise the Church, and to corrupt the Faith by giving it a confused and unintelligible object, one that defies analysis and resists any definition.

HOW CAN WE RESOLVE THIS EQUIVOCATION? BY APPEALING TO THE MAGISTERIUM OF THE CHURCH.

One year after the closing of the Council, on January 6, 1967, our Father, in his Letter to My Friends No. 240, made a decisive step in his combat by authoritatively laying down the principles, aims and limits of a Catholic counter-reformation.

He was able to make an assessment of a crazy year, during which every sort of disorder flourished within a Church carried away by her Masdu pipe dream. Throughout the world, the Church was preaching an absurd pacifism that was contrary to the Catholic Faith, systematically betraying the free world to aid World Revolution. 

“Lax morality entered the Church’s teaching: a sensual definition of love and an exaltation of sensuality led the clerics, and in their wake the faithful, down the slippery slope of moral corruption. Whether one likes it or not, the evil goes back to the Council that promised us and made us, despite so many feigned reluctances and so much verbal deftness, a facile, worldly, carnal religion without sin, grace, cross, penance, without Heaven, Hell, temporal punishments or Last Judgement.”

Our Father also noted a Modernist evolution in the whole of theology, which turned the new faith into a nebulous collection of personal convictions. Finally, all religions were called upon to participate in the great Masdu movement, with the Church at the forefront. Her government became collegial and bureaucratic, in the hands of the reformist party apparatus alone.

The global, general, systematic character of this decadence shows that it is no longer the work of a party within the Church, but of the Church herself in her Head and in her members. “It is futile to verbally oppose the Council and the Pope to those who are betraying the free world, corrupting morals, destroying our dogmas, abusing the Word of God, and finally preparing in confusion the transition of the Church to the new stage of a universal religion. The difference between the moderate reformism of the Council, the intermittent and increasingly daring gestures of Paul VI, the decisions of the episcopal assemblies and the overly conspicuous aberrations that scandalise the faithful is analogous to the difference between leaders and their sergeants, between principles and their effects, between theoretical watchwords and their practical applications. A compact exists, a fundamental collusion, between the highest responsible Authority and the subordinate executors of the reformation with the aim of ‘creating a new Church in the service of the whole world. […]. It is because of this seamless coalition that, for the past year, the faithful have been summoned to submit to everything new, out of obedience and submission to the Magisterium of the Church.

“It must be made clear that this is what Pope Paul VI and the Second Vatican Council had been seeking. Well, I ask them: in whose name? And to what purpose? Were they acting as vicars of Jesus Christ and infallible doctors of the Faith, for the glory of God and the salvation of souls? They will never be able to affirm this. They suggest it, but it is an imposture. Were they acting as experts in humanity and religious reformers, for the construction of the world and the cult of man? What proceeds from men must be distinguished from what proceeds from God, and we are always allowed to refuse the former, and accept the latter. Consequently, we speak out against the current disorders, both in their scandalous realisation and in their highest principles. We refuse to believe that the divine authority of the Church was implicated.”

That being the case, our Father 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.”

To direct this combat, he established two rules. The first, for him and for those of his friends who were willing to continue following him: never to declare that they alone constitute the Church, thus “repudiating this post-conciliar Reformed Church as schismatic and heretical,” and at the same time, the second rule: 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.”

The first step in this combat, which would eventually develop into a trial, was to address “the Sovereign Pontiff as the Supreme Pastor of the Church, and Our Lord Bishops as the legitimate pastors of our dioceses, in order to demand and obtain from their infallible Magisterium the resolution of doubts that have become unbearable. All those who do evil, who teach perverse doctrines within the Church, claim to act on her authority, citing her conciliar acts, the encyclicals and speeches of the most recent popes.” But the bishops of France intervened to block the appeal of this priest to the Magisterium and impose silence on him who, out of obedience to the Faith, was refusing to submit to this strange new teaching that marked a break with Tradition.

THE AGREEMENT OF DECEMBER 29, 1966.

As early as October 1964, Archbishop Guerry, of the Diocese of Cambrai, had published a virulent warning against “the danger and errors of certain clandestine sheets” whose author was explicitly identified as Father de Nantes in the Informations catholiques internationales (idoc [idoc was a Modernist secret society that was very active during the Council. One of its functions was to help Communism in its penetration of the Church]) which published the communiqué. The prelate repeated his attack on our Father in January 1965.

After Archbishop Guerry and Archbishop Marty, then archbishop of Reims, it was Bishop Le Couëdic’s turn in February 1965 to publish a warning against the Letters to My Friends in the Revue catholique of the diocese of Troyes, which was echoed in the newspaper La Croix. “The virulence of his remarks [those of our Father] weakens their impact all the more. It is our duty to steer our clergy and our faithful away from the path that Father de Nantes is leading them down and on which they can only go astray.” Father Coulomb adds: “The exchange of letters lasted a year, at the end of which the bishop threatened the priest with suspension a divinis if he did not comply with two injunctions: to leave the diocese in accordance with the law and to stop publishing the Letters.” To the best of our knowledge, no exchange of letters took place during 1965 – which is why Father Coulomb gives no reference – until the comminatory letter of December 10, 1965 that Bishop Le Couëdic sent upon his return from Rome after the Council, no doubt under collegial pressure from the bishops of France.

“After an initial refusal and the reiteration of the threat in a second letter, a solution was envisaged: continuation of the Letters, but with ‘a certain moderation of form and a certain restraint which they may have lacked’ ”, writes Father Coulomb, who finally quotes Father de Nantes. This is something quite exceptional in his study, a few words written by Father de Nantes who, for the sake of appeasement, seems to be taking some responsibility for the way he writes. Our canonist continues: “This moderation was guaranteed by the exercise of a priori censorship by the bishop. Father de Nantes thus found himself ‘reduced to spiritual meditations, to expositions of doctrine’, and in the Letters that followed he devoted himself to a study of the Credo – a monument of doctrine, a monument of faith in the Church, a monument of clarity and truth which Father Coulomb thus passes over in total silence (Letters to My Friends nos. 222-230), indicating only that Father de Nantes  – by this agreement – was authorised to stay in the diocese, in the house at Saint-Parres-lès-Vaudes. The question of the irregularity of him residing in the diocese of Troyes was thus settled, and Father de Nantes found himself in a regular canonical situation, albeit without a ministry. He considered himself ‘not only authorised, but urged to continue the work he had begun’, i.e. the writing of the Letters.”

What Father Coulomb is referring to by the expression “after an initial refusal...” is a letter dated December 19, 1965 from our Father to his bishop in response to the suspension a divinis with which he was threatening him. This letter alone is also a monument of clarity and truth that he passes over in silence!

In it, our Father begins by summarising the two points of disagreement between them: the Head of State’s Machiavellian volte-face during the tragedy of the Algerian War and, above all, the reformist movement that prevailed within the Church thanks to a Council whose texts were confused and equivocal, well designed to conceal the intentions of those who inspired them: to bind the faithful and the Church as a whole to the world by speaking of the Kingdom of God and evangelical salvation, to praise the United Nations by celebrating Christ the King, to associate the worship of man who makes himself God with the adoration of the God made man.

“If I were to yield to your order to remain silent and submit to this evolution, this mutation of the Church, if I were to agree to go lucidly along with this mystification that is its protective smoke screen, I would be unable to do so without losing my faith in the Holy Church of Jesus Christ. The scandal would end, but it would be at the cost of an irremediable fall. To be able to accept the current course of events, I would have to equate the Holy Spirit with the cunning of the Modernist faction; the holiness of my Mother the Church with the passion of adultery and the prevarication that is infesting all; the divine government with the sordid diplomacy, the universal demagogy that is raging everywhere. Is that the Church? This is impossible to admit without losing the Faith! I cannot accept that the Church be a den of liars.”

The worst was that, despite these two reasons for their disagreement, there was no real opposition between the bishop and his priest. Bishop Le Couëdic had simply made a conscious decision to place his trust in people and authorities when our Father, in all conscience, could no longer place his trust in them.

“I say we are being mystified. You do not believe a word of this and attribute my criticisms only to a kind of prideful folly and exasperated revolt. For a time you thought that the spur of my complaints would be useful, in its own way, to curb the excesses of the other faction. You still saw the role of the hierarchy as that of an impartial arbiter. But now that I have doubts, and doubts well-founded on a legitimate suspicion, about this very arbitration, you can no longer bear to listen to me.”

Hence thus ‘easy’ solution used by Bishop Le Couëdic: sanction Father de Nantes on simple disciplinary grounds, under pretext of his refusal to leave the diocese of Troyes and to stop writing to his friends, thus freeing himself from an awkward situation without having to rule on the merits, for which he has no serious grievance to formulate in any way whatsoever. Bishop Le Couëdic threatened Father de Nantes with a vindictive penalty that would deprive him of the right to celebrate Mass. Our Father replied that he would comply with this sanction, but he could not give in to his injunctions to leave the diocese of Troyes and stop writing his Letters to My Friends “without appearing to recognise the complete implausibility and criminal falsity of my allegations about the mystification of which we are victims and about the subversive Modernism that is triumphing everywhere. That I cannot do.”

Our Father then pointed out to Bishop Le Couëdic that, once inflicted, the sanction of suspension a divinis would lead to further ones, because “when your censures have placed us prominently in the pillory, there will probably be some free spirits, some ardent hearts to ask what the exact grounds are for this violent and unusual treatment. It will no longer suffice to argue that I refuse to move from the house where I am and to stop writing to my friends. The content of these all-too-famous letters will have to be examined seriously Pride? Rebellion? Blindness? These poor hollow words, these passionate qualifications, can only have force following a demonstration of error; they cannot take its place. I cannot be accused of apostasy or schism: I declare that I adhere to our Roman Catholic Creed, that I recognise Pope Paul VI and the bishops in communion with him in the true Faith as the sole legitimate religious authority. The only other possible reason that remains is heresy. The Magisterium alone can judge heresy and heresy is not dependent on my intentions. I would have to be caught in the act of heresy in order for you to justify yourself first of all before God, before my friends and before the faithful as a whole, concerning the condemnations brought against me.”

So our Father suggested to Bishop Le Couëdic that he should start where all this would finally end up, namely with a doctrinal examination of all the writings being circulated, comparing them with the faith of the Church. Yet who would carry out such an examination? Well, the “acknowledged and resolute promoters of this reform which they have sworn to impose by sheer force on the Church!”

“It falls to them to clarify the antagonism between the new faith and my traditionalism (...). If the subversion wants my head, it would be unfortunate that it should obtain it from you. On the contrary, I, and all the holy people, will have nothing but esteem and gratitude for your Excellency, if you actively demand and obtain the investigation and judgement of this cause by the sovereign and infallible Magisterium of the Church, which we all filially recognise. Condemned or excused, for clear reasons or by explicit and indisputable reprobation, I will rejoice to see on this occasion all the equivocations dispelled, the compromises denounced, to see an end to the mystification by which the spirit of Darkness, in the Church herself and for the despair of holy souls, disguises itself as an Angel of Light.”

In the meantime, our Father’s duty was to cry out and uphold, “above all and against all, even an angel from Heaven, the faith which is the fundamental charter of the Kingdom of God”.

“How many of us will be able to stand firm in this dreadful turmoil?” our Father wondered: “That is God’s secret, but here again I fear you are underestimating the faith and courage of the faithful. Whilst we grieve to see the hierarchy refusing to give us its light, to a point that no one in the world could have imagined, and are ashamed and unhappy at being in the right against the hierarchy, there is nothing more we want than to wait in prayer for its return, which cannot be long. We are not the Faith of the Church, but we are her Fidelity. We have no Intelligence of the Mysteries, but we are their living Memory .Our role, therefore, is only secondary, just as an engine’s force of inertia conserves the impulse it has been given . The light comes from You alone, who are the teaching Church; salvation, the initiative for the conversion of hearts and peace regained can only come from you, the Pastors, and not from us, the flock. We shall wait faithfully, without sedition, without any disorderly movements, but holding firm in our faith, until the Church finds herself again, just as she comes to us from the depths of ages, after these times of dizziness and illusion that are ours.”

Bishop Le Couëdic had nothing to say to our Father other than to remind him, in an authoritarian manner, of his duty of obedience in a letter dated December 26, 1965: “The letter I have received has grievously pained me, for you are seeking to justify yourself by pleading reasons that are not reasons and by eluding that obedience pure and simple which the Church demands of all her priests by virtue of their ordination: reverentiam et obedientiam, respect and obedience.”

In consideration of this, the bishop repeated his “objurgations” under pain of a suspension a divinis and reserved the right to apply canonical sanctions to those whom our Father had gathered around himself and who were collaborating in his work. There was not the slightest response or allusion to the request for a doctrinal examination, which he would nevertheless accept a few days later following the mediation of Msgr. Roserot de Melin, the former vicar general of the diocese of Troyes, nor to a further letter from our Father dated December 28, addressed to Msgr. Marsat, the current vicar general:

“I cannot, however, promise, as they suggested to me [this refers to Msgr. Roserot de Melin and Canon Valton, whom he had visited the same day], to stop writing the Letters to My Friends. If I were to stop writing them in this way, it seems to me that I could not resume them thereafter without some kind of incontestable fault. But all that I can do I will do, and I beg you, therefore, to express to His Excellency my desire to see the matter judged regularly and thoroughly, in the intention of submitting myself to a decisive and legitimately delivered verdict, as I expressed in my letter to him of December 19. It seems to me that whilst awaiting such an examination, we could remain in the status quo which has been ours for two years. I could commit myself, under these conditions, to impose on my writing a certain moderation of form and a certain restraint which may at times have been missing.”

This proposal was accepted by Bishop Le Couëdic the following day. He formalised an agreement with our Father that each of them made public, the former, in a press release in the Revue catholique on January 13, 1966, the latter in the Letter to My Friends no. 220 dated January 6, 1966. Bishop Le Couëdic presented the agreement as a transaction, but our Father, in detailing the three conditions of the agreement, was concerned to explain to his readers the benefit and interest that the Church could gain from it.

The first condition of the agreement was that all the Letters to My Friends written up to January 1966 would be submitted to a doctrinal examination by the competent ecclesiastical courts.

Father Coulomb confirms that “the agreement was only accepted by the priest in anticipation of a trial in Rome. His idea was to obtain from Rome, and even from the Pope himself, a judgement on his theses, in order to prove his orthodoxy and, in consequence, the heterodoxy of the Second Vatican Council and the teachings derived therefrom. The mention of a posteriori oversight by the Roman authority of the Letters already published had appeared in the agreement of December 29, 1965.”

“Our Father wrote: ‘Shielded for a moment from public debate, this bundle of ideas, I dare not say this body of doctrine, contained in my two hundred and twenty Letters, will undergo an examination for orthodoxy, which I do not fear. The examiners will find several irenical expositions of the Church’s pure spiritual teaching drawn from the best sources. If they stand without criticism, we shall regard that as proof that the substance of Christian preaching remains unchanged.

“They will also find descriptions of the present theological movement and pastoral reform. What I have seen of it often seemed to me detestable and contrary to the Church’s deepest Tradition and supernatural good. That is where the judgement of the Holy Office and the decision of the Sovereign Pontiff will be of immense consequence: we shall know whether I am wrong de jure or de facto, whether what I have fought against in the present movement is declared to be bad but imaginary, or, on the contrary, real and good. Is it my theological judgement on the Masdu that will have to be revised, or is it my observation of things, my interpretation of documents that will be declared faulty? Every decision, in this domain, will be a step forward in the Truth and a restoration of Unity on the firm foundations of the Faith.”

The second condition of the agreement was that the drafting of the Letters could continue, but only under the supervision of the ecclesiastical Authority. “I am now brought back to spiritual meditations, to doctrinal expositions, and, in this rich quarry, I am not only authorised but exhorted by the very Authority of the Church to pursue the work undertaken, for the good of your souls. I am happy about this. Submission to hierarchical control, no matter how liberal, excludes a certain form of conflict and forbids all criticism of the Authority. We all agree on that. It cannot mean that from now on my pen is in thrall or constrained, nor that my words cease to exude frankness and to be trustworthy. There is much good to be said, much that is useful for souls and necessary in our times, by being devotedly obedient and carefully docile to superiors’ orders. Nothing will make me happier than to be in perfect communion of heart and mind with my Fathers and brothers in Christ.”

The third condition of the agreement was that our Father and his brothers were authorised to remain in their current situation, at Saint-Parres-lès-Vaudes, without change.

Our Father concluded from this crucial agreement, which took note of the fact that there was obviously no schism, and above all no excommunication: “We can draw a great lesson of faith from this reconciliation. We find ourselves at last freed from a veritable anguish. The fact that we subsist in the community of the Church, that we keep our place there, as traditional Catholics – how good it is to be reassured of that now! We are assured that our unchangeable certitudes, our ancient faith and piety, our works of mercy and our whole manner of living as Christians is neither contested nor condemned… proof that in the concrete facts of the Church’s life, the religion does not change, even though sometimes it seeks to be perfected. All that is of immense consequence for our peace, our fidelity and our perseverance.”

No sooner had Bishop Le Couëdic agreed to obtain a doctrinal judgement on Father de Nantes’ writings, than the first obstacle arose in the person of Cardinal Lefebvre, an assessor of the Holy Office, President of the Plenary Assembly of the Bishops of France and Archbishop of Bourges. Appointed by Cardinal Ottaviani, he had been given the task of finding a peaceful solution to this affair.

Our Father met Cardinal Lefebvre at the Archiepiscopal Palace of Bourges on April 30, 1966 and wrote two reports of the meeting, one confidential to a handful of friends only, the other published in the Letter to My Friends No. 227 dated May 5, 1966, with Cardinal Lefebvre’s consent, but on condition that it be accompanied by a clarification that he had made in a letter dated May 12, 1966.

Father Coulomb barely alludes to these documents, which make it possible to understand precisely both the essential points of the dispute that was developing between our Father on the one hand and the hierarchy as a whole on the other, and the dismissal of his petition without consideration of its merits or, to put it more accurately, the denial of justice that the hierarchy would inflict upon him three years later.

Although impressed by this exhortation to trust in order to obtain unfailing submission, our Father stood firm. He simply yet resolutely recalled that he was requesting a doctrinal examination that would be concluded by a canonical judgement of his writings and was concerned about what procedures to follow to refer his case to the reformed Holy Office. Playing the role of Festus sending Saint Paul to Rome, Cardinal Lefebvre urged him to write a letter to Cardinal Ottaviani asking to be convicted.

Cardinal Lefebvre’s personal responsibility before God is overwhelming. In this very well-considered letter of May 12, 1966, this prelate used all his personal authority to obstruct the doctrinal examination of our Father’s writings. These were obviously free of all error as far as the positive affirmations of the truths of the faith were concerned, yet his writings were irremediably disqualified, in the Cardinal’s own words, in the eyes of everyone because of the criticisms, attacks and anathemas, particularly against the Catholic hierarchy which refrained from teaching them in all their purity. Ultimately, however, this Cardinal, seeing that the conciliation had failed, would at the same time be forced to confirm the terms of the agreement of December 29, 1965.

Our Father had taken the first step in the process that was to lead him to Rome, to appeal to its sovereign and infallible authority. Thus, all he then had to do was to draw up a document instituting the proceedings, which would be the petition of July 16, 1966 addressed to Cardinal Ottaviani. In this document, our Father officially deferred to the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith the two hundred and twenty 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 constituted the substance of the doctrinal examination and, by the same token, they constituted incriminatory documents against the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council and Pope Paul VI.

THE JULY 16, 1966 PETITION.

In the second part of this petition, our Father explained the reason for such a singular approach: “The Council first renounced exercising its divine Authority by refusing to engage in doctrinal work. There was no definition of the Truth, no condemnation of errors, nor any rejection of schisms and heresies. The Church no longer wishes to mark infallibly the boundaries of her territory, which are, in fact, precisely those of salvation; she refuses to clear her threshing-floor and drive the wolves from her sheepfold. Thus the Magisterium of the Faith has effectively rendered itself vacant. From that point on, all pontifical and conciliar activity, marked by this doctrinal liberalism, is nothing more than a human endeavour. Dialogue, ecumenism, ‘openness’ are attitudes, tactics and procedures that are optional and uncertain. When the Magisterium effectively withdraws from its sacred obligations, allowing error to spread and freely exert its appeal among Christian peoples, how can it still expect to be heeded and followed?”

Liberal in the matters of doctrine, the Council demanded obedience from all in matters of pastoral care “not to maintain traditions but to join the movement of reform. The Magisterium also enjoys divine authority in this secondary area of the expression of the faith and moral and religious practice, as we know, but its mission is to the increase holiness and not to break their immemorial course and adapt them to the secular world! Thus is it more through human authoritarianism than through supernatural virtue that theological formulas, methods of apostolate, liturgical rites, and temporal commitments have become the immense field for Vatican II’s demolition work and uniform reconstructions. Where school doctrines and venerable traditions had gradually established themselves, in a pleasant freedom and rich diversity, the formidable authority of a council came and broke everything and reformed it imperatively for the whole world (...). The artificial reconstructions of a reform are never worth the spontaneous creation of the genius of centuries and of the Church’s long-standing holiness. Here the Spirit of God breathes; there appears the proud and vain spirit of men. Before our age, it behoved no one, and no one had ever nurtured the ambition of thus reshaping the familiar countenance of the Church!”

Thus, henceforth two powers coexist within the Church, that of the Pope and the bishops, “which is rooted in Tradition and justified by the supernatural promises of Jesus Christ,” and that of a reformist party, “which infiltrates the Church like a people’s democracy and imposes its revolutionary opinions and methods by force. These are two powers that are intertwined but distinct. One is divine, unchangeable and sovereign; the other is human, sectarian and ever-changing. The precarious survival of an oppressed traditionalist party, of an openly counter-reformist minority, is a sign that no sect is absorbing the Church, and that the human will not supplant the divine 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 on the World,’ the inviolably faithful Bride of Jesus Christ, Son of God. She is the One, the Holy, the Catholic, the Apostolic and I would add – because this word specifies the mainspring of all our hope – the Roman Church.”

On this basis, 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 Churches, and the Pope, that it powerfully and decisively perform a work of discernment “among the various spirits that dispute the Saviour’s blessed heritage.” It must decide between two spirits. On the one hand, there is a spirit in whose service the conciliar Assembly has placed itself. This spirit inspires and enlightens each conscience, brings about a mysterious convergence of ideas and commitments, opposite to and surpassing the ecclesiastical Institution, in order to reach a general reconciliation of all men transcending their divergences of opinion, religion and interests. It, however, instils contempt and hatred for all that has been and still remains today the Roman Catholic Church. On the other hand, there is the Holy Spirit, Whose mission “is a mission of tradition not of evolution, reform or subversion. He inspires penance, conversion, religious instruction and the sanctification of the faithful, not their secularisation, liberation, socialisation or laicisation. This Holy Spirit cannot be separated from Jesus Christ Who, being God and the Word of God, is, with the Father, His Unique Principle. Nor can He detach Himself from the Church who belongs to Him, nor take sides against her since the Church is the very work of His divine power and the form of His holy operations. On the contrary, the Holy Spirit breathes into all men – but particularly into the faithful, and even more so into the shepherds of the flock – an esteem, respect and love for all that is Catholic, and a distrust, contempt and hatred for errors and disorders hostile to the Church. He neither hesitates nor compromises. He is a Spirit of light and truth, Who drives back the darkness and exorcises the world of infernal powers. In short, He is the Holy Spirit.”

Such was this petition that made it possible to define and circumscribe the object of the dispute that the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith would have to settle, a petition drafted in perfect continuity, in both form and substance, with the first two hundred and twenty Letters to My Friends, and which Bishop Le Couëdic was going to attempt to obstruct.

THE SUSPENSION A DIVINIS OF AUGUST 25, 1966.

Our Father gave him a copy of this petition and enjoined him to forward it to “His Eminence Cardinal Ottaviani, Pro-Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, whereby I formulate the request that my writings be submitted to the judgement of this ecclesiastical Tribunal, in accordance with the terms of our agreement of December 29, 1965 and those of Cardinal Lefebvre’s attempt at conciliation on April 30, 1966 in Bourges. I shall bring this petition, in its entirety, to the attention of Our Lords the Bishops of the dioceses of France in the near future. Later on, out of consideration for his Eminence the Cardinal and Our Lord Bishops, I will communicate it to my friends, in accordance with the principles of freedom and publicity that have become the norm in the Church in our days. My readers have a vested interest in being informed, clearly and loyally, of the beginning, the course and the conclusion of this affair.”

However, after reading the contents of the petition, Bishop Le Couëdic flatly refused to forward it on to its addressee.

« The file,” related Father de Nantes, “was returned to me, despite my strong protests. It consequently lost its entire legal, official and secret status. It was in vain that I explained myself, expressed my surprise or indignation; a flabby Vicar General simply made fun of me, handed me back the letter saying: ‘Go and post it yourself, if you attach importance to it!’ Which is what I did, sending it by registered post.” Then our Father published the petition in the Letter to My Friends No. 231 dated July 1966, which was sent to them on August 13, 1966.

Bishop Le Couëdic’s response was not long in coming, with the publication on August 25, 1966 in the Revue catholique of the diocese, of his decision to impose a suspension a divinis on Father de Nantes:

“On December 29, 1965, Father de Nantes committed himself to submitting his Letters to My Friends to the Ordinary for approval, pending the Holy See’s response to the appeal he intended to present to it.

“Now we learn that Father de Nantes has just sent his readers the text of this appeal, even though We had formally forbidden him to do so. We consider that the ideas and terms of this factum are grievously injurious to the Council, the bishops and the Holy Father himself.

“Father de Nantes has thus placed himself in the cases covered under Canon 2344: ‘Whoever gives injury to the Roman Pontiff, a Cardinal (etc.), by public journals, sermons, or pamphlets, whether directly or indirectly, or who excites animosity or odium against their acts, decrees, decisions, or sentences shall be punished by an Ordinary not only at the request of a party but even by office with censures and, in order to accomplish satisfaction, other appropriate penalties and penances for the gravity of the fault and the repair of scandal.’

“Consequently, We order Father de Nantes to leave Our diocese, in which, moreover, he is not incardinated. Furthermore, after an ultimate warning, We have taken the painful decision to impose on Father de Nantes the very serious penalty of suspension a divinis, which prohibits him from exercising any ecclesiastical function, including the celebration of Holy Mass anywhere in Our diocese. This sanction will take effect on Friday August 26, 1966.”

Father Coulomb is well aware that the bishop had violated his own commitments since he ostensibly refrains from commenting on the bishop’s refusal to forward the petition of July 16. His reaction is quite understandable because it is impossible for this servile canonist to justify this clearly abusive refusal. Yet, on the other hand, it is likewise impossible for Coulomb to explicitly prove the bishop wrong about this same refusal without indirectly proving him wrong for having forbidden our Father to publish his petition. In doing so, Father Coulomb would vindicate Father de Nantes for having sent it to his friends, and ultimately call into question the validity of the censorship. Hence Father Coulomb’s determination not to address this essential question of the bishop’s refusal to forward the petition of July 16, 1966, which nonetheless governs the rest of the case.

Hence, it must be concluded that the suspension a divinis imposed on August 25, 1966 is formally invalid. It is equally invalid on its merits in the light of the provisions of Canon 2344 of the 1917 Code to which it refers and which defines and punishes the offence of insult.

Canon 2344 distinguishes between two offenses: giving injury to the highest authorities of the Hierarchy and exciting animosity or odium against their acts. Never ever did either Bishop Le Couëdic or Father Coulomb establish the existence of any of these offences in the eleven pages of the petition of July 16, 1966, and for good reason, they are inexistent.

If injury is characterised by an invective, a manifestation of contempt, with the intention of insulting, wounding or offending the dignity of the Holy Father and the other persons referred to in Canon 2344 of the 1917 Code, then it is quite impossible to find the slightest trace of it in the writings of Father de Nantes. In fact, both the tone and the expressions chosen show great deference both to Cardinal Ottaviani, whom he is addressing, and to all the people he refers to in his request. If Father Coulomb had had a single example to cite, he would not have failed to do so.

If injury, on the other hand, were characterised by the imputation of a fact likely to harm a person’s honour, it would have to be proved that the fact is inaccurate or misinterpreted. For example, when our Father states that the Spirit who breathed at the Council “inspires loathing and contempt for all that was and still remains today of the Roman Catholic Church,” this would be a priori injurious both to the Supreme Pontiff and to the Council Fathers, who unquestionably gave themselves over to this Spirit. But our Father backs up this assertion with facts, with a theological analysis that needed to be examined before pronouncing on the offence of injury.

Hence the imperative need for a preliminary doctrinal examination, which fell within the sole competence of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and which constituted a mandatory prerequisite before any other consideration.

It should be added that the author of a canonical petition intended to expose his just alarms about a gigantic reformation of the Church, like any plaintiff, must enjoy the greatest freedom, in both substance and form, to set out his request and develop his arguments.

This freedom, which necessarily implies a certain degree of immunity, subject, of course, to due limits, is in the interests of good justice.

This freedom was all the more necessary as the petition of July 16 simply summarised the two hundred and twenty Letters to My Friends and drew the logical conclusions from the descriptions, analyses and demonstrations they contained about a reformation of the Church undertaken at the time of the Second Vatican Council in clear breach of Tradition and all its traditions.

III. THE NOTIFICATION OF AUGUST 9, 1969.

With regard to the doctrinal examination of his writings that Father de Nantes succeeded in imposing on the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Father Coulomb emphasises the scarcity of documents at his disposal:

“The only documents we have are the petition for examination made by Father de Nantes, the formula of retraction which was submitted for his signature by the congregation and the notification which it published at the end of its examination.”

He, however, fails to mention the very precise, very detailed account that our Father gave of the hearings of the proceedings of the trial, of the meetings in Rome that followed, of his Profession of Faith addressed to Cardinal Seper in response to the formal notice to submit that was served on him twice.

Yet it is also true that the official documents relating to these proceedings are rare, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith having tried every possible means to hush up this affair. In 1967, Cardinal Ottaviani had Cardinal Lefebvre ask our Father to stop writing “because the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was carrying out a second and detailed examination of his letters.” As the blackmail was a bit obvious, our Father was not fooled and did not take it into account. They let the matter rest.

For two years, nothing filtered through concerning the meticulous study of the voluminous dossier of the two hundred and twenty Letters to my Friends that the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had undertaken.

In April 1968, however, the procedure accelerated: Father de Nantes was summoned to Rome. The first hearing of the investigation took place on April 25, 1968. It was opened by Bishop Paul Philippe, the secretary of the dicastery.

“The difficulty we face is the same as that which no doubt faced the Congregation,” writes Father Coulomb. “This review took place between the abolition of the Index in 1965 and the promulgation of the new doctrinal review procedure in 1971. We are therefore in a period of transition, and the members of the former Holy Office are well aware of this. Recounting a conversation with Cardinal Joseph Charles Lefebvre, Archbishop of Bourges and member of the Congregation, who was seeking conciliation before any procedure, Father de Nantes recounts being told that the new procedure ‘has not yet been laid out’.

“On December 7, 1965, Pope Paul VI published the motu proprio Integræ Servandæ, in which the Holy Office was given the name of ‘Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’. Article 5 of the motu proprio sets out a brief procedure for the examination of doctrines: ‘It shall carefully examine the books brought to its attention and, if necessary, condemn them, but only after hearing the author, giving him the opportunity to defend himself, even in writing, and after notifying his ordinary, as was already provided for in the constitution Sollicita ac provida of our predecessor Benedict XIV, of blessed memory’.”

In fact, at the very last minute, before the Council closed, Paul VI reformed the Holy Office. Until then, it had been governed on his behalf by the great Cardinal Ottaviani in his capacity as Pro-Prefect. The aim of the reform was to destroy the immense prestige and authority of this institution that was feared by the enemies of the Faith. This was diametrically opposed to what our Father himself advocated in June 1964 :

“Contrary to what superficial people might think, it is the Faith that is the creative element, the driving force, the principle of renewal and enrichment in the Church. For the moment, it draws only difficulties and persecutions on those who serve it alone, but at the same time the Faith revives holiness, arouses heroism among the children of the Church, multiplies conversions, and exalts missionary zeal. It is the Holy Office that is the minister of this principle of life!”

Paul VI preferred to listen to Cardinal Frings who, in a speech to all the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council on November 8, 1963, criticised the way in which the Holy Office operated. In his opinion, it was no longer at all suited to the present day and was causing scandal in the world. He even declared: ‘No one should be judged and condemned without having been heard, without knowing what he is accused of and without having the possibility of correcting what he may be accused of.”

But neither Cardinal Frings nor Paul VI imagined that the first theologian to benefit from this new prerogative would be Father de Nantes! He made full use of it in Rome to denounce in person their theological errors, heresies, and intellectual turpitudes that were being imposed on the whole Church under cover of abusive terminology, before the Supreme Tribunal of the Faith, which no longer retained its traditional restrictive meaning of ‘Magisterium’.

As soon as the hearing opened, Bishop Philippe asked our Father to swear an oath of absolute secrecy. It is true that this secrecy was the rule in the inquisitorial procedure of the Holy Office. But had this not been reformed? Like Saint Joan of Arc, our Father refused to take the oath that was asked of him in order to preserve the benefit of a certain publicity, the only guarantee he had of seeing this affair through to its conclusion by the Holy Office. Moreover, having sworn himself to such secrecy, our Father, unless he committed a serious and culpable violation of that sworn oath, would have would have been deprived of every possible legitimate defence, against an order of total, absolute, unconditional, unreserved and unlimited submission to the Magisterium, both that of the Sovereign Pontiff and that of the bishops.

Finally, to break the deadlock and avoid the trap of the oath, our Father proposed to limit the period of secrecy to the duration of the trial, until its conclusion, which was accepted by Bishop Philippe. The text of the oath was amended. That matter being resolved, the discussions could begin.

Father Coulomb insinuates that in the absence of the new procedural rules, which were not adopted until 1971, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith would have been faced with a difficulty. What difficulty could that cause? The Congregation would only have had to continue applying the existent procedural rules. The real difficulty it had was to judge the writings of a priest who was highly critical of the Acts of the Second Vatican Council and of Pope Paul VI. Errors had to be identified in the very solidly structured argumentation of these criticisms. And it emerges from the discussions, of which Father de Nantes published a very detailed account, that the consultors went from a clear difficulty to a definite predicament, and finally ended totally confounded when they had to face the petitioner.

THE PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATION OF THE TRIAL.

Our Father was questioned by three consultors, “learned, well-disposed theologians with no weakness,” he admits, and what is more, experts on the deliberations of the Council. They were Fathers Gagnebet and Duroux, Dominicans, and the enigmatic Jesuit Dhanis, the fierce opponent of Fatima.

The substance of what was to be examined was precise: “The very idea of a ‘Catholic Counter-Reformation in the 20^th century’ had to be arraigned. Since the hierarchy had proclaimed the Reformation of the Church, might one doctrinally uphold a traditionalism that is fiercely in conflict with it and practically oppose its authoritarian implementation? The theorem that formed the substance of my letter to Pope Paul VI: ‘The Pride of the Reformers’, of October 11, 1967, was this: the Catholic and Apostolic Tradition excludes the very principle of a general and permanent Reformation of the Church; it is contradictory to it. That was my doctrine, and on which all the efforts of the consultors were focused.

The debates first dealt with the doctrines upon which our Father had elaborated throughout his Letters to My Friends, and it became apparent that these doctrines were in fact those of the Church of all times. In response 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, conversely, on a certain broad-mindedness that could then have been used to lead him through the breach towards the overtures made by Vatican II.

This first part of the trial therefore ended to the advantage of the defendant. The consultors could then no longer differ 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. The investigation then took a completely unprecedented turn, with a role reversal for each of the actors taking part in this truly grandiose and decisive trial for the Church.

“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,” which resulted from it.

“Controversies became befuddled. They wanted to show me how the aggiornamento was in line with the true Tradition of the Church, which they said I seemed to be unaware of. I was confusing “the” traditions, the dust that had settled over the centuries, with ‘the’ Tradition, which had been marvellously rediscovered, restored, and finally presented to an astonished world in all its magnificence! There were confused discussions about this. We were far from agreement on the meaning of the words and the import of the conciliar and papal slogans: collegiality, the servant Church, religious freedom, openness 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-composedness gave way to impatience and aggressiveness. These learned gentlemen plunged headlong into the mire of the conciliar equivocations, ambiguities, and confusions that one could sense they had not yet dismissed. 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 preceded and followed them. They defended an unreal Council, in conflict with the para- and the post-Council.

“The sort of battlefield through which we were galloping was, in their eyes, the worksite of a new and radiant human City under 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 [in the words of Our Lady of Fatima in Her Third Secret that had not yet been disclosed: “a large city half in ruins”]. If I mentioned a particular act or discourse, they made me taste its sugar and its herbal tea; they did not taste the arsenic that made it poisonous [...]. The madness of the whole world was of little importance for them. They were judging 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, the revolutionary one which, they claimed, it reinforced, causing the greatest detriment to Rome’s authority. I tried to repeat some of my arguments, but to no avail. One cannot clarify in twenty hours what hundreds of cunning theologians have rendered inextricably confused in five years of conciliar Byzantinism [...].

“When I denounced the heresies of Paul VI, Father Gagnebet could only respond with a pathetic but utterly ridiculous: ‘Believe me, Father, Paul VI is not a heretic!’ And why should I have believed him more than the Pope!

“The consultors had nothing more to say to me than their conviction, their human, desperate persuasion of important personalities secretly just as disquieted and disturbed as we are. I recopy their entreaties the way I had jotted them down. They are in fact admissions: ‘Yes, the MASDU does exist, but not in the Council, not in the acts of the Pope, never fear... Take on Cardonnel , no one will say anything, but do not attack the Pope! In the long run, the aberrations, the postconciliar disorders will be resolved, but be confident, the Council is the work of the Holy Spirit! No, there is no heresy in the Council, there cannot by any! Instead of criticising them, you should use all your talent and influence to show that they did not say, that they did not want what some claim they have said or wanted!’

“Poor, admirable, Roman theologians. How I would have liked to share your good faith! Yet when you reached the point of believing that I was being swayed by your example or convinced by your authority, I was only measuring the gulf that separated you from the rest of the Church and even from the Pope himself. I remained pained 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 adherence, and no one will demand anything else from you!’

“This had to be brought to an end. I dictated to the Italian clerk of court: ‘Est, est. Non, non.’ ‘What does that mean?’ the Chief Examiner asked me. ‘It means that what is, is and remains so, regardless of my accusations.’ ‘You persist, therefore, in your criticisms of the Pope and the Council?’ ‘Yes’.”

The canonical proceedings were drawing to a close. Every attempt had been made to convince our Father to abandon his criticisms of the Acts of the Council and of Pope Paul VI. The three consultors gave no consideration to the distinction between Truth and error. Confronted with the demonstrations and criticisms of Father de Nantes, they had been unable to establish the truth of the Acts of the Council and the Pope, nor were they able to establish the presence of his alleged ‘errors’ in either Father’s purely spiritual or polemical writings.

This doctrinal incapacity of these three great and eminent theologians of the Supreme Tribunal of the Faith, despite their careful study of the two hundred and twenty Letters to My Friends and about ten intense days of proceedings, was a striking proof of the rupture, of the contradiction between, on the one hand, Tradition and the Ordinary and Solemn Magisterium of the Church and, on the other hand, this fallible and innovative magisterium arising from the Acts of the Council and the subsequent teachings of Pope Paul VI and his successors. This rendered impossible full and complete fidelity to these two traditions, these two spirits, these two religions that have coexisted and opposed one another other within the same Church since 1965. Hence the need for the authority of a solemn and infallible act of the Magisterium to restore unity through Truth. But pending this act of the Magisterium offering all the guarantees of infallibility and imposing the obedience of Faith, our Father’s very enlightened, very accurate and very profound knowledge of the ambiguities, errors and even heresies made it impossible for him to submit unconditionally to the Magisterium of the Pope and the bishops, even for the sake of an act of heroic obedience. Such submission would be interpreted in the eyes of God and of men as a full, conscious and culpable adherence to these doctrinal errors. Like Saint Joan of Arc, who could not submit without denying her Voices, neither could our Father submit without denying the extraordinary graces he received to uphold the unshakeable Truth of our Roman Catholic Faith.

The applicant was invited to read and countersign the written record drawn up by the tribunal’s ecclesiastical clerk. This man, an Italian, had clearly not understood a word. The judges and plaintiff agreed: this worthless document was inadmissible. What should be done? Who could, in three days, write a precise, accurate and, above all, impartial report on these long hours of subtle theological debate? The judges, deeply embarrassed, entrusted this task to the plaintiff who drafted the record that the consultors approved and countersigned! The case was adjourned to the following July 1, 1968, the date on which the cardinals, members of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith would announce their verdict.

THE ATTEMPTED ABJURATION.

The proceedings initiated by Father de Nantes apparently came to an end with the publication in the August 10, 1969 edition of L’Osservatore Romano of a Notification relayed by various news agencies among which AFP [the French Press Agency]. “Notification concerning Father de Nantes. At the request of Father de Nantes, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith examined his writings and after hearing him on two occasions, July 6, 1968 and May 23, 1969, had judged it its duty right to require him to subscribe to a formula retracting his errors and grave accusations of heresy against Pope Paul VI and the Council. After Father de Nantes refused twice to comply with this demand,  the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith made a final attempt on July 11, 1969, to persuade him to submit to the official decision of the competent Roman Dicastery, to which he had been the first to appeal.

“Father de Nantes replied to this solemn demand by a categorical refusal, dated July 16, 1969. He therein challenged the competence of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to demand of him a submission and he thereby affirmed his previous positions regarding the Council, the Aggiornamento of the Church, the episcopate of his nation, the ‘heresies’ of Paul VI and the appeal addressed to the Roman clergy with a view to Paul VI’s canonical deposition. The Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith cannot but take note of this refusal of its legitimate authority by observing with extreme sadness, that by rebelling in this way against the Magisterium and the Catholic hierarchy, Father de Nantes disqualifies the totality of his writings and activities whereby he claims to be serving the Church whilst setting an example of rebellion against the episcopate of his country and against the Roman Pontiff himself. Gathered in ordinary congregation, the Cardinals of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith have decided, therefore, to make the present notification public, and the Holy Father deigned to approve this decision.”

This Notification, to which Father Coulomb refers by summarising it, but without quoting it, is damning for our Father’s reputation. It mentions errors which, on several occasions, he was allegedly asked to retract, his refusal to submit to the authority of his judges and his general rebellion. What really took place between July 1, 1968 and August 10, 1969?

On July 1, 1968, Father de Nantes was summoned once again to the Palace of the Holy Office. Alas! 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, under the overwhelming threat that his refusal to make general retraction would be penalised by an excommunication.

Our Father, alone before his consultors, was plunged into the depth of perplexity. He had four days to make his decision known, four days during which he experienced the most dramatic alternative before God, his Master and his Judge. He had no one from whom he could ask advice, except Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, at that time Superior General of the Fathers of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit. He went to speak with him, expecting the surest instructions from him:

“I informed my august interlocutor of my firm resolve to sign. He interrupted me sharply: ‘You cannot. You have no right to do so.’ It was clear and formal, and it was immediately justified by most compelling reasons supported by the authority and example of the person I was listening to: ‘We ourselves wrote to the Sovereign Pontiff some time ago that the cause of all the evil lies in the Acts of the Council. Be firm in the truth.’”

Actually, Archbishop Lefebvre recommended to our Father that he do what his own conscience must surely have reproached him for not having done a few years previously, namely to refuse to the bitter end the Acts of the Council that had been submitted for vote by the Fathers. It later transpired that after having courageously led the minority that opposed the Reformation during the conciliar debates, Archbishop Lefebvre capitulated by agreeing to sign everything including the declaration on religious freedom, which constituted a practical act of apostasy. This would subsequently explain many things, beginning with the fact that he refrained from accompanying our Father in order to confront together his judges during the second meeting scheduled for July 5 at the Palace of the Holy Office.

Our Father thus returned to the Holy Office, his soul at peace. He was given a simple formula of recantation, which had been emended and approved by the Holy Father in person.

1. Firstly it required that he declare that he “would abide by all the doctrinal and disciplinary acts of H. H. Pope Paul VI and of the Second Vatican Council.”

2. Secondly, it required that he retract “the grave accusations[…] against the acts of the Sovereign Pontiff and of the Council” and “disavow the accusation of heresy brought against Pope Paul VI and the aberrant conclusion” that he had drawn therefrom “concerning the advisability of his deposition by the Cardinals.”

3. Thirdly, it required him to promise obedience, “in accordance with canonical norms,” to his Bishop and to the Episcopate of his nation. Finally, the fourth and last article required him to undertake “always to speak and write with respect concerning the acts and teachings of the Pope, the Council and the Bishops.”

“I obtained one half-hour to pray in the adjacent chapel. Once there, my duty clearly appeared to me. Although no doctrinal judgement had been handed down concerning my writings, the cardinals led one to believe that that this was the case by imposing on me as a sanction the retraction and submission that should normally follow a condemnation. Consenting to such a parodic magisterium would be tantamount to making me an accomplice, against the Church, of the injustice of men. So I declared that in conscience I could not endorse the first three articles; on the other hand, I could accept the fourth one which concerned respect towards persons and only had to do with the form, disputable, I admit, of my writings.”

Our Father took leave of the consultors who threatened him with excommunication and eternal damnation! Then, changing his mind, he retraced his steps and once again made a written commitment to maintain the strictest secrecy about all these events until their conclusion. Our Father thought of everything and demonstrated his love for the Church, which alone guided him in all the decisions that he would have to make on your own, in this whole affair. Indeed, by maintaining secrecy, he hoped to avert an excommunication that henceforth seemed ineluctable, “not for my sake, nor for the sake of the poor despondent souls of the faithful but for sake of the Church. My excommunication, I thought, would inevitably have the effect of canonising this accursed Council, as well as every word of the Pope’s, with a kind of subsequent infallibility and an irrevocable necessity.”

Thus, for nearly a year, our Father received no further news from Rome. Undoubtedly, the cardinals of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith would have been quite content with this status quo if the French episcopate had not, during the same period, published new catechisms inspired by the Fonds commun obligatoire. Our Father had shown their scandalously heretical nature and had made it his duty to launch a veritable National Crusade in order to denounce them, and he drew full houses everywhere he went.

“This campaign roused public opinion. Our bishops realised that they had been unmasked, and felt that they were doomed. They had to silence me. I hoped that Roman wisdom and prudence would indefinitely defer the sanction. No doubt the French Episcopate would bring strong pressure to bear in order to crush our Crusade. The Pope had to choose between the Episcopate and me, and this is what brought about the ultimatum.”

First, there was the interval of May 23, 1969, to which the Notification of August 10 of the same year alluded. “On that occasion they sent me Cardinal Lefebvre who, in Rome, shows himself to be a man of sound doctrine, but who in France stands surety for every upheaval. He was sent to speak with me of submission but I asked him first whether he persisted in supporting with his authority the New Catechism and the French Pastoral Note. He answered in the affirmative and I therefore challenged him as my judge and the envoy of the Holy See. Really, they were going too far!”

A further ultimatum followed on July 11, from Cardinal Seper. The new Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith summoned Father de Nantes to sign a formula of absolute submission and general recantation within three days. It was the very same one that had been presented to him the previous year. Our Father did not reply with a “categorical refusal” as is stated in the Notification, but with a magnificent Profession of Catholic Faith dated July 16, 1969. It was in the name of this very Faith that it was impossible for him to accept the four articles of the formula that he was being required to sign, unless it was first amended to conform to the Catholic Faith.

The Holy Office no longer differed its reply and it came in the form of this terse press release: the Notification of August 9, 1969 that conveyed “a cascade of obvious lies”, on which its authors may be judged.

LIES AND DIFFAMATION.

1. It contained a lie concerning the alleged errors of Father de Nantes. He had purportedly been demanded to retract them during the hearings of July 5, 1968 and May 23, 1969. Yet the three consultors had found no doctrinal error of which he was culpable, just as Cardinal Joseph Lefebvre had foreseen in 1966 and as is attested by the very text of the formula of recantation that he had been enjoined to sign on four occasions. If this official text of the dicastery, emended and approved by Pope Paul VI in person, required him to recant his “grave accusations[…] against the acts of the Sovereign Pontiff and of the Council[…] and to disavow the accusation of heresy brought against Pope Paul VI, it made no mention of any doctrinal error allegedly committed by Father de Nantes.

2. 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. During the July 5, 1968 hearing, our Father had only formulated a simple refusal: the refusal of a text and not of the Authority that was imposing it on him, disobedience to a specific order, but certainly not a rebellion against every order from on high. As for Cardinal Seper’s July 11, 1969 ultimatum, our Father did not reply with an act of rebellion, but with a profession of Catholic Faith that the Notification deliberately failed to mention and which, on the contrary, manifested his submission and obedience to the Apostolic hierarchy in the immense extent of its powers, but within just limits.

3. Finally, it contained an ecclesiastic defamation of Father de Nantes and his entire work. “This press release brings me to the attention of the entire Church on the strength of vague and unproven accusations […] as a disgraced priest. The collective author of this defamation is at pains, furthermore, to evade responsibility for it. According to what is written, it is not the referee who shoulders responsibility for this strange and unprecedented decision but the player who is its target: this rebellious priest ‘disqualifies himself’ in claiming to serve the Church, whilst being in rebellion […]. The explosive power of this official imputation – be it slander or calumny – is incalculable.

“In former times, the terrible Holy Office used to define the errors of those whom it condemned if they avowed and stood by them. The faith of the people was thereby enlightened and souls remained in peace. The aforesaid Reformed Congregation declares its victim disqualified and defames him before the whole world without quoting his errors. The slander is already strong and its proofs are too weak.”

VATICAN II DISQUALIFIED.

After becoming acquainted with all this analysis, Father Coulomb would elaborate two ideas to justify the notification in his own way, without explicitly citing any of our Father’s arguments, but rather responding to them in an allusive and indirect manner.

So he gives himself a ‘free hand’ to elaborate an argumentation which, totally isolated from the matter at hand, stands on its own.

The reader, unaware of most of the facts and documents in the case, is thus conditioned to follow a structured but artificial line of reasoning, reaching a predefined conclusion in advance without any possibility or freedom to form his own judgement.

First Idea: Father de Nantes’ rebellion against the Magisterium rendered the examination of his criticisms inadmissible. Paraphrasing the text of the Notification of August 9, 1969, Father Coulomb writes :

“The formula submitted for the author’s approval included a reference to the conciliar constitution Lumen Gentium, no. 25, and only then requested a retraction of the accusations of heresy levelled against Paul VI. The primary aim of the retraction is submission to the Magisterium, ‘as required by the nature of these teachings and the intention of the Pope and the Council’. We cannot go into detail here about what the obsequium religiosum owed to the Magisterium of the Church encompasses. Father de Nantes’ refusal of this obsequium is described as a revolt. And this revolt was enough for the Congregation to deduce that all the author’s works were disqualified. In other words, it was necessary for Father de Nantes to accept no. 25 of the constitution Lumen Gentium, so that his other criticisms could be received and examined by the authority of the Church. Since he refuses to subscribe to the formula of retraction, he refuses the obsequium religiosum due to the universal Magisterium, even if it is not definitive. This is why Father de Nantes must be considered to be in a state of revolt, and by his revolt, he himself disqualifies all his works. His revolt prevents him from being able to offer any criticism. In so doing, the authority of the Church is not asking him to renounce all his theses, but simply to make a religious act of obedience (obsequium religiosum), while retaining the possibility of voicing his criticisms to the sacred pastors and the faithful, in accordance with the law. Writings cannot be separated from their author. In the days when the Index was in effect, it happened that not only a book of a given author was condemned, but also his opera omnia. No sooner had the Index been abolished than the Congregation received a request for a review, and not enough time had elapsed for this practice to fall into disuse: upon noting the author’s rebellion, it condemned his writings, not for their intrinsic worth, but because of his state of rebellion. This is how Georges de Nantes’ opera omnia came to be ‘disqualified’ because of the author’s revolt.”

Father Coulomb should first be reminded of the first sentence of the Notification, which he clearly has not read:

“At the request of Father de Nantes, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith having examined his writings and having heard him on two occasions, July 6, 1968 and May 23, 1969, has judged it right to ask that he subscribe to a formula retracting his errors and grave accusations of heresy against Pope Paul VI and the Council.”

The Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith would therefore have clearly identified doctrinal errors that Father de Nantes allegedly refused to retract.

This is false, but that is what it is written in black and white. Would this error be this state of revolt with which it is being confused? It does not seem so, since the text makes a clear distinction between, on the one hand, errors, accusations of heresy, and on the other, a state of revolt. What are these errors? The text mentions none. What is worse is that Father Coulomb conceals from his readers the contradiction between a notification that refers to ‘errors’, but without specifying them, and this formula of retraction that lists absolutely none.

Father Coulomb also claims that in order to be able to voice criticism, Father de Nantes would first have had to make an act of submission, an act of obsequium religiosum.

“What is at issue is the attitude that religious obedience is preceded by a personal judgement on the teachings of the Church’s Magisterium.”

Submission, obedience, but to what?

That is the crux of the matter, and the ideas from the pen of this canonist do not seem very clear, all the more so since it is quite contradictory to give one’s religious assent to a teaching in order to claim the right to criticise it! How is it possible “to perform a religious act (obsequium religiosum), while at the same time retaining the possibility of expressing one’s criticisms to the sacred pastors and other faithful in accordance with the law?” How can this be done? By following the bad example to which Father Coulomb refers, that of Cardinal Ottaviani who, after having vigorously opposed, in the name of certain principles and certain laws, the errors upheld with impunity during the conciliar debates, endorsed them all, out of obedience, as the Acts of the Council were promulgated, on the pretext that the said laws had changed.

Our Father made the following comment in Letter to My Friends No. 216 of November 11, 1965: “In human battles, victory is carried off by the violent. Only divine battles are waged in the name of the all pure Faith, which is stronger than all else. The Faith, however, must find witnesses, ‘witnesses ready to be slaughtered’. All we have heard in the Council has been insolence and blackmail on one side with fear and servility on the other. The two sides were engaged in an unequal battle, but the Faith does not change for all that. The great Ottaviani is dead, but the fight goes on.”

Father Coulomb suggests that our Father was asked to make an act of submission to Number 25 of Lumen Gentium, which deals with the teaching function of bishops. “In other words, it was necessary for Father de Nantes to accept No. 25 of the Lumen Gentium constitution, so that his other criticisms could be received and examined by the authority of the Church”, writes Father Coulomb. The first proposal in the retraction formula did indeed refer to Number 25 of the Constitution on the Church. But the act of submission demanded of our Father went far beyond this conciliar text, since it referred, without distinction, to all the doctrinal and disciplinary acts of Pope Paul VI and the Second Vatican Council, and to unlimited obedience not only to his bishop, but to the entire French episcopate.

A little further on, the canonist affirms that this religious assent, which our Father supposedly lacked, is due “to the universal Magisterium, even if it is not definitive”. But this affirmation, formulated in this way, by its absoluteness, is not Catholic. To claim, without the slightest distinction, without the slightest limit, that every act of the Magisterium, even if it is not definitive, must receive religious assent from all the faithful, is tantamount to denying the possibility, even theoretical, that an act that is not definitive could be stained with error. It is also tantamount both to prohibiting anyone from criticising it, and to conferring on this fallible and reformable act a de facto infallibility, outside the perfectly defined boundaries of the solemn or ordinary Magisterium.

Our Father’s refusal to submit to the retraction formula was therefore well-founded and legitimate, and could neither characterise a revolt on his part nor justify a refusal to examine his writings from a doctrinal point of view.

Second idea: the Notification of August 9, 1969 is not accompanied by any penalty imposed on Father de Nantes, because the Sacred Congregation could not pronounce one. Why is this idea important? Our Father explicitly questioned the orthodoxy of the Acts of the Second Vatican Council and of Pope Paul VI, against whom he was not afraid to make accusations of heresy. Our Father was repeatedly summoned to retract these accusations and to submit to all the Acts of the Second Vatican Council and of Pope Paul VI, on pain of excommunication, which he refused to do. Yet no penalty of excommunication was imposed on him. However, the very person who makes an accusation of heresy against the Pope in such and such a doctrine is himself a heretic if his accusations prove to be unfounded. This presupposes the demonstration of a doctrinal error against the alleged offender.

Here is how Father Coulomb tries to justify the fact that the Sacred Congregation has never imposed any censure on our Father:

“With regard to the term ‘disqualification’ used by the Congregation, it should be remembered that the examination of the writings of Father de Nantes is the first of its kind since the motu proprio Integræ Servandæ and the suppression of the Index. It is therefore not surprising that the Congregation should seek a new vocabulary for condemning books that, from then on, were no longer to be banned. On June 14, 1966, in its notification concerning the suppression of the Index, it declared that ‘the Holy See will make use of its right and duty to reprove such writings, even publicly’. Reprobation here, disqualification there, the Congregation is trying to find its own vocabulary, but it all points to the same reality: the texts in question are considered harmful; the aim is to protect the faithful from them. However, since ‘the Index no longer has the force of ecclesiastical law with the censures attached to it’, this reprobation can no longer take the form of a penal sanction. On September 15, 1966, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published a decree declaring that two canons of the 1917 Code were no longer in force, in particular Canon 2318. The publication and reading of reprobated writings are no longer punishable by ecclesiastical penalties (without prejudice to any latæ sententiæ penalties), even if these writings are designated as such by Church authority. It is therefore in accordance with the law that no sentence has been passed as a result of these proceedings.”

What can we say in answer to this ‘erudite’ demonstration?

Both before and after 1917, when the powers of the Sacred Congregation of the Index were transferred entirely to the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office, the latter has always been responsible for judging books and their authors suspected of one of the offences against the faith, in particular that of heresy. In this respect, the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office did exercise criminal jurisdiction. The motu proprio Integræ Servandæ has changed nothing, since it confirms the new Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in two of its competences: “It carefully examines the books brought to its attention and, if necessary, condemns them, but, after having heard the author, giving him the opportunity to defend himself, even in writing, and after having warned his Ordinary, as was already provided for in the Constitution Sollicita ac provida of Our predecessor Benedict XIV, of happy memory (No. 5)” and “It is for it to judge offences against the Faith, according to ordinary procedure no. 7.”

It is true that the suppression of the Index meant that the provisions of Canon 2318 of the 1917 Code had lapsed. But either Father Coulomb has not read this text or he does not understand it. This canon provided that “publishers of apostate books, heretics and schismatics, who support apostasy, heresy or schism, incur by this very fact an excommunication specially reserved to the Apostolic See, after the publication of the work. The same penalty applies to those who defend these books or other works specifically condemned by apostolic letters, or knowingly read or retain them without the required permission.” This canon was only aimed at publishers or anyone who defended books condemned by name, but not their authors. Does Father Coulomb not know the difference between an author and a publisher?

The Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith therefore did indeed have the canonical competence to impose a censure on our Father. After its attempts to obtain an abjuration had failed, our Father did not fear to write to Cardinal Seper on July 16, 1969: “I cannot in conscience retract the grave accusations that I have made in all lucidity and prudence against the reigning Pope and the Second Vatican Council for their so-called pastoral and reforming acts, because after profound study, they seem to me to be contrary to the Catholic Faith and in practice they are manifestly the cause of the Church’s general disorder and actual ruin. There have been no solid objections to my analyses and demonstrations. To consider my demonstrations as temerarious and calumnious imputations, a priori and without further proof or examination is a facile, ungracious expedient, but worthless.

“The facts that are referred to in my writings are known to all and established beyond question. I am ready to withdraw any point that is found to have been invented or officially disavowed. The interpretation that I place on these facts is the interpretation that is constantly followed and generally declared by their authors and as received by public opinion. What others find praiseworthy precisely by virtue of its being a mutation of the Faith and revolutionary within the Church, I find blameworthy. It is not possible to forbid me, and me alone, to mention these facts and make note of their current interpretations, under the pretext that I deplore and reprobate them, whilst Modernists and Progressivists are everywhere free to profess them and shelter behind them in order to agitate the entire Church and to pervert souls […].

“On July 16, 1966, I requested of Cardinal Ottaviani, in his capacity as Pro Prefect of the Holy Office, a judgement on the conformity of my writings with Catholic dogma and morals and therefore with Divine Revelation. You answer me with an ultimatum, enjoining me to accept every thought and desire of the reigning Pontiff with blind, servile obedience, and every desire of the Bishops without limit or condition. From this I draw the conclusion that a scrupulous examination of my writings did not yield a single doctrinal deviation to your scrutiny. If therefore I am in the truth, apart from misunderstandings that would be easy for you to dispel, then those whom I criticise are in error. To use blackmail, threats and violence to have me side with their Reform is therefore immoral and to no avail. This ultimatum merely shows your incapacity to legitimate and justify the ‘doctrinal and disciplinary acts’ of the new reformers.”

In these circumstances, there is no factual or legal grounds for the suspension a divinis imposed by Bishop Le Couëdic on August 25, 1966. It is the result of an abusive and arbitrary decision to which Father Coulomb is painfully trying to contribute today in order to justify it, but in vain. Nothing can explain this other than a fit of anger against a priest who is faithful to his priesthood and who has done no more than recall, without allowing himself to be diverted by any worldly considerations, the Truth of the Catholic Faith in all its purity and fullness, but who has become, in the eyes of his bishop, a living reproach. He would finally have him reduced to silence and leave the diocese!

“The high priest then questioned Jesus about His disciples and His teaching. Jesus answered him: ‘I have spoken openly to the world; I have always taught in synagogues and in the Temple, where all Jews come together; I have said nothing secretly. Why do you ask Me? Ask those who have heard Me, what I said to them; they know what I said.’ When He had said this, one of the officers standing by struck Jesus with his hand, saying: ‘Is that how You answer the high priest?’ Jesus answered him: ‘If I have spoken wrongly, bear witness to the wrong; but if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike Me?’” (Jn 18:19-23)

Did not this question of Jesus resound in the conscience of Bishop Le Couëdic, who could never justify this burst of anger that led him to relegate our Father to the last place in the Church? He never deigned to release our Father from this unjust, humiliated condition that he had to endure throughout his life, causing him great suffering due to the presumption that he was a bad priest, an excommunicated priest. This raised suspicions concerning his reputation without anyone knowing the real reason for such punishment, more vindictive than medicinal. Not to mention the ban on celebrating Mass implied by the suspension a divinis, which our Father respected with diligence, scrupulousness and a spirit of obedience for more than two years. In his letter to Bishop Le Couëdic dated December 19, 1965, he wrote: “It is a terrible ordeal for a priest to no longer celebrate Mass. But, in the seventeen years that I have been a priest, I have such a sense of my growing unworthiness that I will accept this ‘vindictive’ censure as coming from the very hand of God through you. A sinner such as I am could rightly marvel at being the beneficiary of such power; he cannot revolt at seeing the exercise of it suspended by legitimate authority, even though, on this occasion, it were for unjust reasons.” Our Father would apply to the letter what he wrote eight months earlier by submitting to this groundless censure, for the good of the Church.

This attitude of obedience was all the more imperative in our Father’s eyes since his canonical appeal for the doctrinal examination of his writings, was then before the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, at a time when he was publicly challenging the orthodoxy of the Church’s reform. It seemed appropriate to show exact submission to a disciplinary decision, even an arbitrary one. “I did not make an appeal and I submit precisely to this unjust sanction. For this reason, I abstain from discussing its motives, from contesting its justice and even more from appealing to public opinion. This sentence is disciplinary and not doctrinal: it affects only my person, and only indirectly my friends and our fight. I thus answer the hundreds of letters that are continually reaching me: I thank you for your prayers, for you encouragement, for your offerings that provide for our growing material needs, but leave it at that. Do not let ourselves be diverted, even for the defence of our honour or our most cherished rights, from the essential and sacred action that we have undertaken for the triumph of our holy Faith.”

What were the repercussions of this suspension a divinis inflicted on August 25, 1966? It is safe to say that up to 1997, there were none. In fact, there never ever were any at all. Nevertheless, there were two unexpected consequences of this censure.

The first consequence is that the suspension a divinis – inflicted by the bishop for an indeterminate period of time in place of the doctrinal examination to which he had committed himself – gave our Father the right to suspend for the same indeterminate period of time the fulfilment of his own obligation to communicate his Letters to My Friends to the ordinary for a priori censorship before their distribution.

The second consequence is that the agreement of December 29, remains nonetheless in force, particularly its third point: our Father and his brothers were and still are entitled to remain in their current situation at Saint-Parres-lès-Vaudes.

Brother Bruno of Jesus-Mary 

(To be continued)