| Editor : Abbé Georges de Nantes | N° 74 – November 2008 |
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AUTO-DA-FE
The text that we have begun to read in issues 70 and 71 of July and August 2008 is the integral version of the pastoral Constitution Gaudium et spes. It is accompanied by a critical gloss composed of the common-sense thoughts that this document inspired in the Abbé de Nantes during his reclusion in the Cistercian Monastery of Hauterive in 1996. This squaring off gives us, as it were, a physical impression of two wrestlers grappling with one another in an epic, apocalyptic combat. « I shall refuse to accept affected admiration and shall suppose that my reader will follow me in this non-conformism », he wrote in his preface.
« Then, he continued, I shall search for the fierce biases, the hammered-out, outrageous blunders, the mainsprings of the demonstration that is imposed on us. My reader will follow me or not; one would have to be either a kind of Communist or Christian Democrat parliamentarian to utter or to swallow such monstrous errors. It is outrageous; it is grotesque.
« The grandiloquence of the reformers of the years 1962-1965 is like those trains of the Far West that I saw in cowboy films in my youth: the wagons fell in turn from the bridge into the river. What a fall, Your Eminences! but alas! if you are no longer with us to see it, we pick ourselves up out of this entanglement of bloody scrap, badly shaken for the rest of our lives, in a Church from which everyone… or almost everyone has fled.
« No one more than we has risen up so openly, repeatedly, and learnedly against this monstrous heap of the worst heresies of our times. The Holy Church no longer shows anything but the leprosy in her upper limbs and in her visible periphery, the skin and the extremities. Where are the holiness of the Church and her indefectible profession of the true Catholic Faith?
« It is impossible according to reason, since to date no objection has been raised to our demonstration; in all wisdom it is impossible – that error lie with us and that truth lie with the head and the members, since the dereliction of duty is continuous and universal. Would God be willing the great trial of the last times, and thus would He be abandoning His last faithful in virtue of His “will of good pleasure”, which is inaccessible and incomprehensible to everyone! This is how it has been seen in several circumstances, among which are Josiah’s death at Megiddo in 609 B.C. and the even more miserable death of Gedaliah, in 587 (Jeremiah 40).
« Perhaps we will all have to be crushed, but never will we be renegades! We do not claim to be useful to God! But not only through our sheer existence and our unchanged Catholic Counter-Reformation Faith, which is unchangeable by reason of its divine perfection, but also through our prophetical certitude we must affirm that divine Truth, divine grace, the virtues of divine holiness still exist and will exist until the end. They merit and draw down the apocalyptic assistance of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Jesus, who will grant the « apostles of the last times » to be Holy Church saving herself. »