Open Letter to His Excellency Bishop Marc Aillet

ORDINARY OF BAYONNE, LESCAR AND OLORON

Jésus ! Marie ! Joseph !

Saint-Parres-lès-Vaudes, July 13, 2025
Anniversary of the third apparition of Our Lady at Fatima

Your Excellency,

You deemed it your duty to issue on June 13, last, the anniversary of the second apparition of Our Lady at Fatima, a warning against the Catholic Counter-Reformation founded by Father Georges de Nantes. I succeed him as Superior General of the Order of the Little Brothers and Little Sisters of the Sacred Heart, which he founded on September 15, 1958 at Villemaur-sur-Vannes, with the permission of the Bishop Julien Le Couëdic, of Troyes. It is true that this provisional foundation was never followed by definitive canonical recognition because of the serious doctrinal dispute that pitted Father de Nantes against the entire hierarchy from 1965 onwards. Yet, curiously enough, you pass over this dispute in silence, or nearly so, although one might have expected it to be the ‘centrepiece’ of your file of condemnation of our Father who died on February 15, 2010, in order to justify your general, public, vexatious and infamous measure that you are taking with regard to the handful of his spiritual sons and daughters who live in your diocese. They are all devoted to serving their parishes, but at your behest the faithful and your priests must henceforth regard them as veritable outcasts ensuring, on the one hand, that they do not propagate the alleged errors of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, which you do not specify and, on the other, that they not be entrusted with any liturgical service or pastoral mission.

To justify such a decision, you are taking on board a number of lies. Are you acting with a clear conscience? Are you acting out of weakness? Whatever the case, you are betraying the truth, you are deceiving the entire flock entrusted to you by the Holy Father and you are slandering us, under cover of the authority of the Holy Spirit, like the Pharisees who claimed to apply the Law of Moses in order to judge and condemn Our Lord Jesus Christ. No, Your Excellency, do not make yourself guilty of such injustice. In the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Who will be our Judge, you must withdraw your warning. 

What is this doctrinal dispute of which you are perfectly aware but which you scarcely mention?

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. the Church, might restore unity and peace in the name of the Truth of the Faith.

Although Father de Nantes publicly criticised the orthodoxy of the Acts of the Second Vatican Council and the subsequent Acts of Popes Paul VI and John Paul II, and although he went to Rome three times in 1973, 1983 and 1993 to try to obtain the opening of a trial for heresy, schism and scandal against these two Sovereign Pontiffs, he has never been informed by the Bishop of Troyes, by the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith or by the Supreme Pontiffs themselves, of any doctrinal error whatever in his demonstrations that support his accusations. These have been expounded at great length and published in his Letters to My Friends and in The Catholic Counter-Reformation (their print run and circulation reached a peak of 38,000 copies per month) – so no one can claim to be unaware of them! No doctrinal judgement followed by a canonical sanction has ever been handed down against this priest who dared to speak out against the Acts of the Second Vatican Council and those of Popes Paul VI and John Paul II.

What I write is so true that in 1997 Bishop Gérard Daucourt, then Bishop of Troyes, set himself the task of remedying this anomaly, determined as he was to succeed in doing what everyone else had failed in doing, namely to finally set Father de Nantes’ alleged errors down in black and white in order to impose a canonical sanction of him. This is the famous interdict of July 1, 1997 to which you refer. Yet how is it that the Church, through the Bishop of Troyes, waited until 1997 to sanction a priest who, since 1965, had been publicly accusing the Acts of the Second Vatican Council and of Popes Paul VI and John Paul II of being stained with heresy, schism and scandal? How can the Church’s thirty-two years of inertia be fathomed in the face of such accusations? Hence the need to link this canonical sanction, which was admittedly very long in coming and very shaky, to a initial canonical sanction. This will be the occasion for you, Your Excellency, to substantiate your accusation with a first big lie.

You write: “The faithful should be made aware that Father de Nantes has in fact been condemned to a suspension ‘a divinis’ since 1966 and that this sanction was confirmed by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1969 with the renewal of the demand for retraction which Father de Nantes has always refused to make.”

It is true that Bishop Le Couëdic inflicted on Father de Nantes, his ‘best priest’, the canonical penalty of suspension a divinis. You say that the faithful should be made aware of this sanction, but you are lying by omission, by passing over in silence, because it is derisory, the reason why it was inflicted. Upon his return from Rome in December 1965, after the closing of the Second Vatican Council, Bishop Le Couëdic ordered Father de Nantes to stop criticising the doctrinal innovations adopted by the Fathers by an overwhelming majority. Our Father then proposed that the totality of his Letters to My Friends be subjected to a firm and rigorous doctrinal examination, in the sole light of the faith of the Church, so as to identify any errors they might contain and once demonstrated he could then retract them. Bishop Le Couëdic accepted. By mutual agreement, the matter was to be referred to the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. However, when our Father presented to Bishop Le Couëdic the file consisting of the first 220 Letters to My Friends published since 1956 and containing in particular his entire critical chronicle of the conciliar debates, for transmission through the hierarchical channel, Bishop Le Couëdic refused outright. The reason put forward: the alleged insulting nature for its august recipient of the request, dated July 16, 1966, that was attached to the file, to present it to Cardinal Ottaviani, then Pro-Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Our Father was then rudely invited to transmit his file himself directly, which is what he did. And to make sure it did not get lost in the sands of Rome, he published his request in his Letter to My Friends no. 231, which Bishop Le Couëdic immediately sanctioned by way of reprisal on August 25, 1966, with a suspension a divinis.

So it was for having made public an official request addressed to Cardinal Ottaviani that our Father was subjected, for the rest of his life, to the penalty of a suspension a divinis. Is that all? Yes, nothing more! This is the only grounds, and a ridiculous one at that, for this censure, grounds which you conceal from your readers in order to force them to deduce from the sheer violence of your action that Father de Nantes did indeed commit ‘errors’. They, however, exist only in your mind. And from this first lie you move on to a second.

Indeed you write that “this sanction was confirmed by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1969 with a renewal of the demand for retraction, which Father de Nantes has always refused to make.” This is false. This sanction was neither confirmed nor annulled by the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for the very simple reason that the matter was never raised either directly or indirectly before this Congregation, nor indeed was the doctrinal judgement requested by our Father. Several weeks of closely-argued and loyal discussions took place with three consultors of the Congregation, on the principle of a possible Counter-Reformation at a time when the Church was embarking on the path of a permanent and general reform which, by definition, Catholic and Apostolic Tradition excludes. On July 1, 1968, under the thinly veiled threat of excommunication, our Father was ordered to retract all his criticisms of the Acts of the Second Vatican Council and of Pope Paul VI, but without the slightest indication or demonstration of any doctrinal error in his writings. Our Father refused and that is where the matter stood for a year, after which time, Cardinal Seper repeated this demand for a general retraction, but still without any trace of the slightest error. Our Father again refused with a text that is, at the same time a magnificent profession of faith. And then came the notification of August 9, 1969 published in the press by the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in which errors were falsely alleged against Father de Nantes, but without any being specified. As well he was accused of a general revolt against all authority within the Church herself. These lies allowed the Congregation to deduce conveniently a “disqualification” of Father de Nantes’ entire work, which he himself had brought about. This thus dispensed the Sacred Congregation from searching for those inexistent errors. Is that all? Yes, nothing more!

The judges of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had before their very eyes the analyses of a priest of the Church of France who had not been afraid to make serious accusations, “with total lucidity and prudence, against the reigning Pope and the Second Vatican Council for their so-called pastoral and reforming acts, because after in-depth study, they seemed 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.” The Tribunal of Faith found nothing to refute these analyses and demonstrations and it let our Father leave Rome without imposing on him the slightest canonical sanction.

And in fact, from 1969 on, for twenty-seven years, Father de Nantes waged alone, but with an impressive authority and the sovereign freedom given to him by the law of the Church, an enormous Counter-Reformation battle, firstly by professing in all its fullness the Truth of the Catholic faith to enlighten souls and protect them against the doctrinal errors contained in the Acts of the Second Vatican Council and the subsequent teachings of Popes Paul VI and John Paul II.

But how could he attack this reformation in which “all is really too stupid, distressing, shameless and pernicious,” without running the risk of forsaking the Church and entering into schism? “By ‘attacking’ the very Person of the Pope, since he, and he alone, stands at the crossroads of two worlds, one of order, the other of disorder, one of Tradition, the other of subversion, one the Work of Christ, the other the machinations of Belial.” This would be the thrust of the three approaches he made to Rome in 1973, 1983 and 1993 – which you disdainfully referred to, Your Excellency, as ‘grandstanding’.

Three appeals from the Pope to the Pope, not for us to ‘judge’ them, but to have them judge their own case, they who, among many other examples, allowed the publication of catechisms that corrupted the pure souls of many children and corroded the faith of priests themselves. They also allowed countless sacrileges to be committed in the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, to the point of furthering indifference and contempt for this sacrament in many people. They have allowed sexual obsession to devour the clergy and religious, thus abandoning Christian society to aberrations that are most dangerous for the future of religion and civilisation. They have let politics invade the sanctuary, one that is seditious against the last Catholic States, but servile and even socialising vis-à-vis secular, masonic and even communist States.

Three appeals from the Pope to the Pope, not to ‘condemn’ Paul VI and John Paul II, but to publicly accuse them of heresy, schism and scandal. Paul VI was accused of pursuing the chimera of the construction of a new world in which all men who, deep down are supposedly good, should have the vocation of uniting, because they are all supposedly motivated by a sincere desire for friendship, peace and justice. In this new world, the Church, on an equal footing with all other denominations, would be confined to a mere role of spiritual animation of this project. John Paul II was accused of pursuing this same chimera, but with an intellectual and heretic goal of achieving “the synthesis of the old Religion and of contemporary Atheism,” that is, “their final fulfilment in living Man, rich in possessions and in existence, brought to completion in the feeling of the sacredness of his existence and in the glory of his freedom.”

Three appeals from the Pope to the Pope, not to ‘excommunicate’ them, but to obtain from these Sovereign Pontiffs in person, and from no one else, the supreme exercise of their solemn and infallible Magisterium. Thus Truth will be made manifest and Justice rendered in the light of the Catholic faith alone, on these difficult and controversial matters. In no way can this tear Christ’s unique Church asunder. For a simple priest to ask the Holy Father for a solemn and infallible judgement on his own doctrines is an act of faith in the Church and therefore the very opposite of what you wrongly describe, Your Excellency, as “an attitude hostile to the Magisterium and the Hierarchy”.

You claim that “the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith recalled in 1983 that the Holy See was expecting Father de Nantes to retract his errors and the accusations of heresy levelled against Pope Paul VI and the Second Vatican Council.” Our Father himself replied to John Paul II in an open letter dated May 31, 1983: “How ought I, or could I, retract errors that have never been shown to me and that I have never recognised, since no one has made them known to me? Let me be told what they are, let someone formulate them, let Rome publish and condemn these errors, which everyone speaks of, though no one is willing or able to articulate!”●

You also write: “In the Church, no one can claim to possess the Truth in formal opposition to the authentic Magisterium.” In its theological and canonical imprecision, in its generality, in its absoluteness, which precludes any exception, such a statement is false and even, I dare say, heretical. With this argument of obedience to the ‘authentic’ magisterium, you are, Your Excellency, aiding and abetting the mystification that has persisted within the Church herself since the Second Vatican Council, precisely with regard to the authority of its Acts and all those of the subsequent magisterium of the Supreme Pontiffs. They systematically present any vague desire for discussion that would call into question their orthodoxy as:

• a lack of confidence in the Holy Spirit Who certainly assists the pontiffs in the exercise of their teaching power – but do they really listen to His inspirations?
• an act of disobedience, of division,
• a break in communion,
• an erroneous ecclesial situation.

And what creates the illusion, what brings this mystification to its height, is the overwhelming unanimity that seems to reign within the Hierarchy itself: some accept the Acts of the Council, but insist on confining themselves to the texts interpreted in the light of Tradition, while others demand to move more and more in the direction of reform, but all are united in never calling into question the very principle of this general and permanent reform decreed at the Second Vatican Council, despite the disastrous fruits that resulted immediately after the texts were adopted, as our Father had foreseen and announced at the very moment when these texts were being discussed in the conciliar aula.

This mystification had the effect of conferring on these Acts of the ‘conciliar and post-conciliar magisterium’ a de facto infallibility of which they are nevertheless bereft dogmatically and canonically. “It is well known that the partisans of the reformist group [at the Second Vatican Council] claimed to endow their innovations with a kind of charismatic super infallibility, which they received directly from the Holy Spirit in a New Pentecost,” our Father explained in 1998. “But all these infused doctrines fall, on their own admission, outside the traditional categories of Catholic dogmatics, since they cannot invoke and prove any link between the revealed deposit and their conciliar illuminations. We have therefore continually stated that these novelties and those that followed them (the doctrines of religious freedom, ecumenism, the rights of man, and, generally speaking, all those that are listed in the three Books of Accusation and other major documents wherein I have exposed and denounced them) are not infallible, if one applies to this expression the strict sense that the extraordinary Magisterium of the Church has given it. Not one of these doctrines is endowed with the status of a revealed dogma or a definitive truth, since one cannot find in them the slightest trace of the presence of one or the other of the two forms of the Magisterium which involve infallibility (the Extraordinary Magisterium and the Ordinary and Universal Magisterium).”● Dare I remind you, Your Excellency, that one can only speak of an Ordinary and Universal Magisterium if four conditions sine qua non are met, namely: that the doctrine in question must have been taught always and everywhere, that it have been believed always and everywhere, that it be proposed as divinely revealed or as intimately connected with the deposit of the Faith, and that it be duly proven and manifestly established.

On the basis of this, Your Excellency, and with all due respect, outside these two forms of Magisterium involving infallibility, the teaching of the Pope and the bishops is fallible and it is therefore possible for them to err and to deceive us.

This does not mean, however, that “the faithful are exempt from the duty of following them, almost blindly!” Nevertheless, in such a situation, “leeway is provided, albeit limited, for competent and worthy people to make just remonstration; the hierarchy has always undertaken to examine their criticisms – provided these are serious – and to modify its teachings and its decisions, should this prove necessary.”● And in his Book of Accusation for heresy, schism and scandal, which he filed in Rome on May 13, 1993 against the author of the so-called Catechism of the Catholic Church, our Father formulated these two propositions for dogmatic sentences, by way of conclusion of his accusation of heresy involving an abusive extension of the indefectibility and infallibility of the Church in her head, in her pastors and in her people:

1. “No man, nor assembly – be they Pope, Council, college of bishops or priests, group of theologians or body of lay people, nor even an allegedly universal Church – may impose their doctrinal or moral opinions as though invested with some sort of infallibility, outside of the perfectly defined boundaries of the Solemn or Ordinary Magisterium.”

2. “Every member of the Catholic faithful has the right, if not the duty, to rise up against any new teaching, even though emanating from the ‘authentic’ Magisterium of the Pope and the bishops, and to appeal from this imprecisely bounded Magisterium to the decisions of the infallible Magisterium of these same legitimate authorities.”

This analysis, which I have just summarised to demonstrate the arbitrariness of your warning, was submitted to the control of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, whose decree of interdict, issued on July 1, 1997 by Bishop Gérard Daucourt, constituted a providential and canonical opportunity.

On the subject of this decree, you write: “The Bishop of Troyes, encouraged by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, published a decree of ‘interdict’ on July 1,1997, based on his doctrines, his attitude hostile to the Magisterium and the Hierarchy and ‘the transformation of these erroneous doctrines into unacceptable moral behaviour on the part of a priest’ (Cf. Doctrinal Commission’s warning of the Conference of Bishops of France issued on June 25, 2020, against the doctrine of the Catholic Counter-Reformation).” All your readers will deduce from what you have written that the sentence of interdict imposed on our Father was in particular for the translation of erroneous doctrines into inadmissible immoral behaviour. Your Excellency, what you write is quite simply a lie, because what you are alluding to by slavishly copying the Warning of the Bishops of France published in 2020 was absolutely not mentioned in the penal decree of July 1, 1997.

In order to both renew the suspension a divinis inflicted by Bishop Le Couëdic on August 25, 1966 and forbid our Father access to the sacraments of the Eucharist and Penance, in the diocese of Troyes, Bishop Daucourt reproached our Father for having “provoked the faithful to contestation or hatred against the Apostolic See and the authority of the bishops and has thus caused grave scandal among the faithful, as much by his attitude as by his writings in which he obstinately denounces as tainted stained with heresy certain texts promulgated by Pope Paul VI and the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council, reproaching them for having introduced the religion of man who makes himself God in place of the authentic Catholic faith, and in which he brings accusations of heresy, schism and apostasy against the Council, the Pope and the bishops in communion with him, even lodging books of accusation against Popes Paul VI and John-Paul II.”

Condemned for his opposition to the Second Vatican Council and the subsequent teachings of Popes Paul VI and John Paul II, Father de Nantes decided to appeal to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This constituted the providential and canonical way offered to him by the Church to refer the doctrinal examination of all his criticisms of the Acts of the Second Vatican Council to the Roman Authority. As part of the official communication of the documents of the file, the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was given the three Books of Accusation for heresy, schism and scandal of 1973, 1983 and 1993. It, however, categorically refused to open this doctrinal examination that the canonical sanctions enacted by Bishop Daucourt and especially the grounds he put forward to justify them required it to undertake. Instead, the Sacred Congregation preferred to place Father de Nantes back in the situation where he had been before Bishop Daucourt ‘injudiciously’ meddled in this affair. Nothing more, nothing less! As though nothing had ever happened!

In fact, in a letter dated March 24, 1998, addressed to the Bishop of Troyes, Cardinal Bertone, on behalf of the Roman Dicastery, confirmed “for an indeterminate period of time, the measure of suspension a divinis adopted by you [Bishop Daucourt] with respect to this priest”. Thus the prohibition of access “to the sacrament of the Eucharist and Penance in the diocese of Troyes” had been abandoned.

Furthermore, the very same cardinal substituted quite other motives for those that Bishop Daucourt had adopted to fulminate the canonical sanctions against our Father. It was no longer a question of his opposition to the Second Vatican Council, but: “Recently this Congregation has been informed that Father de Nantes – after having returned to the diocese of Troyes in disobedience to the measures taken by his Ordinary – continues, through his preaching, to spread erroneous doctrines consisting in a sensualist conception of the Eucharist and in the notion of a presumed ‘mystical marriage between Christ and Mary’. Furthermore, he has been accused of having taken the risk of translating such theories into moral conduct that is unacceptable for a priest.” Thus there were no longer our Father’s criticisms of the Acts of the Council and his accusations of heresy, schism and scandal against Popes Paul VI and John Paul II. There was no longer any question of all this. A priest of the Church suspects, affirms, accuses acts of the Magisterium of the Church of being stained with errors to such a serious degree that one cannot embrace them in all conscience, even out of obedience, without altering one’s faith, without which no one can please God or be saved, and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, whose primary competence is precisely the examination of doctrines in the light of the truth of the faith, did not breath a word about this. Indeed, it said absolutely nothing, despite the three Books of Accusation for heresy, schism and scandal against Popes Paul VI and John Paul II that were officially included in the petitioner’s file as part of a regular canonical appeal!

In 1998 as in 1969, it is clear that no decision has been rendered, no doctrinal error identified, no canonical sanction imposed against our Father about his criticisms of the Acts of the Second Vatican Council and his accusations of heresy, schism and scandal against Popes Paul VI and John Paul II. As in 1969, this silence, a sign of the indecision on the part of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, is negative proof of the truth of our Father’s accusations and of the Church’s indefectibility. As for the “rest”, it is nothing more than ‘women’s gossip’ relayed by the [#4#]{{Libération}} newspaper the primary source of information for the French bishops, and the newspaper L’Est-Éclair, another favourite source of information for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. You are free, Your Excellency, to poke your nose into it.

As far as I am concerned, I can think of nothing else to conclude this open letter, which we will publish in the next issue of He is Risen! than to repeat what our Father wrote in 1969 following the notification of August 9, 1969, published by the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and which remains for us and for our friends in your diocese a very topical issue: “The sentence of my judges recognises that I belong to the Church of Jesus Christ: I am neither a heretic nor a schismatic (...). It is certain that the Counter-Reformation is not criminal in the eyes of the Holy Church. It is a doctrine and an action that are not condemned. In all truth as in all justice, we can be in the Church with a clear conscience, we who belong to the Counter-Reformation, and even demonstrating every day that it is the Reformation of the Church that is against the Church! For us, prisoners of Christ but free from all human slavery, we remain in the Church, oppressed, vexed, slandered, there is no doubt about that, but we have saved what is essential to us. We only have to pray to God to shorten our ordeal, accepting it with patience, according to His Holy Will.”

Please accept, Your Excellency, my respectful and devoted wishes. I also assure you that we will unite our prayers with those you have urged to make reparation for the appalling blasphemy committed in one of the churches of your diocese,

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