In the mid-70s, the Abbé de Nantes was encouraged by the hope that the appalling crisis the Church was going through would not last for ever and that it would be followed by an extraordinary renewal of Christianity. This hope made him foresee that the triumph of the Faith would necessarily begin with reconciliation between Catholics. He did not content himself with merely foreseeing, he already wanted to make provisions for this reconciliation by taking advantage of all the opportunities to specify the conditions for it.

RESTORING UNITY

« Since 1962, the Church has been divided into two parts, he wrote in September 1974. The first effect of John XXIII’s address for the opening of the Council, whereby the Pope proposed to reform the Church in her dogmatic and moral formulas, her pastoral activity, her relations with other religions and with the world, was to make official the confrontation between the adherents of tradition and the proponents of change and to aggravate it.

« The closing of the Council gave a total victory to the latter against the former and yet it did not make the division disappear, quite the opposite.

« The fickle mass of the faithful has undoubtedly followed the new order – or disorder – but a large fraction of the faithful has been repelled by it and has tiptoed out of the Church.

« The hard core of integrism was totally supplanted by the Reformers but it lives on, survives, and will never yield.

« This crisis has only one solution left, only one is honourable, worthy to be called Catholic, and ecumenical. This is the solution to which the Church claims to adhere: reconciliation, unity in charity and truth.

« The “open” meetings from which the peace of the Church will emerge by God’s grace must first meet two absolute conditions. They must be official, i.e., they must very openly and officially engage the legitimate Pastors of the Church. Then, they must bring face to face, in true antagonism and loyal controversy representatives of the most opposite forces within the Church, and, if necessary pit them against each other. Finally, the object of their meeting and the instrument of their reconciliation must be an Act of union that is formulated from a common accord, admitted by all the parties, and backed by the hierarchy. » (Refaire l’union, CRC n° 84, September 1974, pp. 1-2)

During the 1975 Holy Year, which Pope Paul VI placed under the sign of “Reconciliation”, our Father set out a programme for it to be « free of sectarianism or laxity, to be as broad as a Catholic act can be, as precise as our divine Faith commands ». He wrote an “Act of Union” that was published in CCR n° 55. It was the masterful and wholly Catholic answer to the act of retraction and of unconditional submission that his judges wanted him to sign five years earlier in Rome.

AN INTELLIGENT AND FRUITFUL TRADITIONALISM

In order to support this goal of achieving unity based on reasoning drawn from experience, our Father decided to study The Church’s Great Crises and to compare them with the present-day crisis. His monthly lectures, which were attended by a large audience, were written up and assembled in Volume 7 of La Contre-Réforme catholique au vingtième siècle (1975) – only three lectures of the series were translated into English in CCR nos 66, 69 and 73. These lectures form a new synthesis characterised by its marvellous wisdom and fruitfulness; it culminates with this question: « Integrism, progressivism: where is the truth? »

The answer flashes out brilliantly: « in an intelligent traditionalism. » (CCR n° 79, October 1976, pp. 2-14)

Our Father began by quoting Sacred Scripture:

« All things have their seasons: a time to kill and a time to heal; a time to destroy and a time to build... a time to love and a time to hate; a time of war and a time of peace. » (Ecclesiastes 3. 3-8)

History, mistress of truth, teaches us that reconciliation and peace are only well prepared in the midst of active warfare, the Abbé de Nantes commented. There is no question of lowering one’s guard and of ceasing to fight error and evil, out of liberalism or of weariness that comes from enduring so much combat. But one must think that some day, when heresiarchs will have been condemned and banished, it will be necessary to gather anew the flock of our brethren in the Faith:

« Once heresy has been vanquished, then the same divine assistance always inspires the saints with gentleness, benevolence, patience and generosity towards those who were misled, the weak and the fallen, in order to recover the lost sheep, raise them up and dress their wounds. The Church has to sew up the rent and lead the greatest possible number of those, whom bad shepherds had led astray into heresy and schism, back to the unity of the one flock and the one Pastor. » (CCR n° 79, p. 3)

How can this time of Catholic restoration be anticipated? The theologian of the Catholic Counter-Reformation warned that it is difficult for two reasons.

The first is of a psychological nature. So many injustices have been suffered that it is hard to become reconciled with yesterday’s persecutors, but our faith in the “one” Church makes it our duty. She is everything, and not we. To forget this truth would be tantamount to forming ourselves into a sect.

The other difficulty is of a doctrinal nature. The defenders of the Faith must remember that they cannot encompass the totality of the Truth by themselves. God’s mystery infinitely surpasses our individual intelligence:

« The Church alone, through her saints and in her infallible Magisterium threads a course between the various parties but above them all, condemning error but refusing fatal alternatives. She must avoid the exclusiveness formulated by even the best of her defenders in order to guard the mystery of Faith, the sacrament of salvation in its totality. » (CCR n° 79, p. 4)

THE EXPERIENCE OF THE AGES

Going beyond traditional distinctions between East and West, or between “men of the past” and “men of the future”, our Father went to the crux of the matter: history shows that the true and more profound distinction is between those who grant primacy to reason and those for whom faith prevails over everything.

« On the one side, faith, mystical (I do not say sentimental) certitude dominates; the sense of the supernatural, of grace and of the Divine prevails. On the other side reason, logic, naturalism, humanism, man’s freedom and concern for the present world prevail. On the one side Heaven attracts the being in a state of ecstasy for an eternal life; on the other side the earth holds back the man who is passionately concerned to make for himself a happy and independent life here below. »

Such are the two “schools of thought” between which the Church and civilisation are torn. In the East, they are divided into two zones: rationalist Antioch and mystical Alexandria, while opposite, in the West, Rome stands stable in her orthodoxy, independent from the emperors. She is the « centre of Catholic unity ».

The attentive study of the great doctrinal crises throughout Christian history shows us that they all unfold in a similar manner, in three well-identified stages and always with the same eternal protagonists.

Heretical innovators

One day, a heresiarch arises. He takes it into his head to preach something new that is to renew religion, free it from all its “myths” and “taboos”, make it accessible to human reason and to the men of his time. They have all said that: Arius in the fourth century, Nestorius in the fifth, Luther in the sixteenth and... the Second Vatican Council’s “reformers” in the twentieth century.

To achieve this “progress” that they believe necessary and decisive « they have no hesitation in disrupting the Church, overturning her traditions, contradicting the authorities and summoning others to revolt, if not to armed combat, against the proscriptions of authority and against those who resist them. »

Now, here is the profound explanation: « In the Church, the innovator, the heretic, is always a rationalist who bends the Faith to the demands of his logic. He is a naturalist who debases the splendours of divine grace to the level of human psychology. » He chooses from among the truths of the Faith, those that he likes and seem to him the more accessible to his audience, and he uses them to build his system, his “gnosis”, which he substitutes for the revealed Mystery.

Take Arius, for example: this priest from Alexandria who was trained in the school of Antioch and imbued with rationalism, claimed one day – it was in 318, Constantine’s edict had recently put an end to persecutions – that Jesus Christ had not always existed. He was an incomparable and certainly unique creature, but inferior to the Father, the work of His will. Thus, He was not God, nor was the Holy Spirit. For God is one.

The mystery of the Holy Trinity, whereby the One is Three and the Three are One was exploded by an abuse of human logic. It was the Church’s first great crisis. Arianism was a revival of Jewish “monotheism”, which denied Christ’s divinity.

In the next century, Nestorius, a priest from Antioch who would become Patriarch of Constantinople, declared that there were two persons in Christ: a human person and a divine person. It could not be said that « God became Man ». The Virgin Mary, the Mother of the Man Jesus could not be the Mother of God, of the Person of the Word, for Divinity could not be engendered in time and in the flesh. This was how he reasoned.

The third great heresy affected the Latin Church at the beginning of the fifth century. Pelagius, whose true name was Morgan, “the man of the sea”, was a monk who came from Great Britain to Rome; he claimed that in order to be saved, to become a saint, to vanquish evil and do good, it sufficed to will to do so...

By an excess of rationalism, which once again came from Antioch, Pelagius and his disciples emphasised what comes from man to the detriment of what is divine. He thereby separated human effort from divine grace, while the revealed Mystery keeps them intimately united.

The Integrist reaction

If the Church wants to protect the Truth, the deposit that God has entrusted to her – « depositum custodi » (1 Tm 6:20) – she must unrelentingly condemn heresy. It is time for the necessary controversy, for the passionate defence of God’s Truth, to which the true mystic is attached more than to his own life.

To profess that there are three Persons in one God, that « God became man for man to become God », that consequently the Virgin Mary is, in all truth, the Mother of God, Theotokos, that grace comes first in the work of our salvation, without detriment to free will, such were the battlefields of the great controversies throughout the first centuries of the Church that followed the persecutions.

Those who fought, i.e., bishops, pastors, and guardians of the flock, were called “hammers of heretics”. Such were St. Athanasius, Archbishop of Alexandria, against Arius and his disciples, and also Osius of Cordoba, who coined the new formula, the new word « consubstantial », the perfect expression of the Catholic Faith at the Council of Nicaea (325). Whoever affirmed that the Son was « consubstantial to the Father » unambiguously confessed the Truth; whoever rejected it thereby showed that he had suffered shipwreck in the Faith.

In the following century, St. Cyril of Alexandria had the Virgin Mary acclaimed Mother of God, Theotokos, at the Council of Ephesus (431). The divine Maternity of the Virgin Mary was « the touchstone of orthodoxy. One only had to invoke Her under this name to belong to the Catholic Communion. » Thus was verified what is said of Her: « The Woman will crush the head of the Serpent » and also: « You alone shall conquer heresies throughout the whole world. » Nestorius was confounded. Then, moved by their enthusiasm, monks and sailors organised a torchlight procession in honour of the Blessed Virgin, the first in history.

A few years earlier, in Hippo, St. Augustine, vehemently found fault with the proud Pelagius.

These bishops were surrounded and accompanied by monks or by humble and unsophisticated lay people: « those in fact, our Father writes, to whom the Kingdom of God is promised and for whom Jesus gave thanks to His Father for having seen fit to choose them as the exclusive beneficiaries of His Revelation (Mt 11:25.) They are not hindered by science or human philosophy. They believe what the Church has always taught; they love and practise what she has always done and commanded to be done.

« It is the sense of scandal and horror at the proud innovation which rouses them against the heretics. They want to protect the most precious gift in the world – the Faith, the deposit of the Faith! And they are right.

« The defender of the Faith acts within his rights, nay his duty. In this respect it is he who is the man of the future. The longer the crisis lasts and the wider the heresy extends its death-dealing empire, the more vigorously will the ancient Faith manifest its inextinguishable vitality and its power of resurrection. Whilst all around is collapsing and dying of exhaustion, the integrist mystically conserves the whole of God’s truth, the light of Heaven and the life of grace. » (CCR n° 79, p. 6)

The wisdom of the Church

Then at last, the third stage came, by grace of the Church, who is Holy and Roman! From the very first major controversies, Rome appeared in fact as the centre of the Church, as the authority to whom one appeals in order to settle conflicts on matters of faith. Then, saints distinguished themselves from “integrists” and appear as true traditionalists.

The Integrists « do not take advantage of the graces of the moment and they cut themselves off excessively from the common life of the Church, sometimes going so far as to separate from her communion. In the heat of the combat they have imperceptibly transformed the dogmas they were defending into a hard and cold ideology, an ideology reduced to their own measure, a kind of frantic contradiction of heresy. From that moment they cease to serve the Church and even end up causing her as much harm as they had hitherto done her good.

The Traditionalists, « act in an increasingly different way and keep their distance from this sect. For them the defence of the Faith comes as a providential opportunity to deepen and enrich their faith, an opportunity that is unexpected but fully accepted. The new elements brought by the controversy make them stay within the Church’s communion, at her most vibrant centre, where they make of these elements the instruments of an admirable reconciliation. That is the position of the saints. » (CCR n° 79, p. 6)

THE EXAMPLE OF THE SAINTS

If afterwards, the Church has settled the disagreement by canonising the heroicity of the saints’ virtues, at the time it was not an easy matter to discern.

Eventually, a principle of action must guide us « in this present crisis – doubtless the worst of all crises by reason of its universality and thoroughness, affecting the whole of religion and all peoples », namely the principle of the imitation of the saints.

« For the very reasons that they possessed supernatural wisdom, the divine instinct of the needs and the good of the Church. They were also loved by God, drawing thereby His blessing on their people and loved by their people whom they led to God. » (CRC n° 89, p. 13) Our Father has the gift for putting us in closer contact with them, to make them our contemporaries :

« St. Basil, the « Archangel of Unity » (cf. CRC no 89, p. 9; Letter to my friends no 198), St. Cyril of Alexandria, through whom « the purest faith triumphed in the Council of Ephesus and in accord with the very word choice proper to the Greeks” (CRC no 90, p. 7), St. Augustine, the “doctor of grace” (CRC no 91, p. 6), and so many others...

« If our doctrine and rules of action can take their place in the great family of saints, if we can immerse ourselves in the Catholic theology as found among the saints throughout the many conflicts of the past, there is every chance that we shall keep the faith and remain in the unity of the Catholic Church. » (CCR n° 79, p. 9)

THE RICHNESS AND SURETY OF TRADITIONALISM

Guiding principles for a Catholic Counter-Reformation, a Counter-Reformation that is promised victory, emerge in the light of the examples and teachings of saints.

Flight from the heresiarchs

Saints have always considered fomenters of heresy as “plagues” and “sons of Satan” before the former defeat the latter by means of a magnificent dogmatic effort backed by the authority of Rome.

The Abbé de Nantes does not confine himself to the first centuries of the Church. After a leap of six hundred years to the mid-twelfth century, he makes us witness « the fruitful but perilous clash between monastic mysticism and the dialectics of the Schools », in the persons of Master Abelard and St. Bernard of Clairvaux! The last of the Fathers of the Church confronts the first of the modern philosophers.

« The Church acted rightly » in condemning Abelard, whose pagan humanism, naturalism and rationalism would irremediably have compromised the renaissance of the twelfth century. Not only was the Faith saved at the Council of Sens (1140) but also dialectics and its richness of intelligence. « In condemning what was false in that progress, the Church saved that very progress. » The happy conclusion to the crisis explains the splendour of the Middle Ages.

Let us deal with modern times. In the sixteenth century, it was not so much the sceptical, neo-Pelagian humanism of Erasmus that troubled minds, as the formidable novelty of Luther, this Saxon Monk who ruined the very foundations of the Faith.

“Free judgement”, a new form of rationalism, brought about « an immense regression for Christianity ». The rebel of Wittenberg was « Hitler’s veritable ancestor and as racist and anti-Semitic as he was »; Luther frenetically exalted the “ego”, individual freedom, and faith. He thereby destroyed any forms of mediation between God and His people, separated the Spirit from the Church, and disincarnated God’s Work. « Revelation, which became individual illumination, lost all its divine credibility, its authority, its unity in these sects and was pathetically handed over to the good pleasure of the prince: Cujus regio, ejus religio. Everyone was obliged to belong to the religion of the prince within whose territory he lived. » (CRC n° 95, p. 3)

Ah! Let us flee from such slavery!

At that moment, Calvin added a democratic constitution to Luther’s subjectivism. According to The Institutes of the Christian Religion, in fact, it was the Consistory of Geneva that was to guarantee “God’s Word”. « Religion became the reflection of the popular will and was no longer the expression of God’s will. The cult of man and the Gospel of Liberty were born of the cold, cruel brain of this sad armchair reformer. »

The result was the abject pragmatism of the Anglo-Saxon world and the inhumanity of liberal capitalism.

Our Father, who like a “detective” pursues the network of « the School of heresy », beseeches us to flee also these « primary, appalling, inhuman dogmatics ».

After Luther, Zwingli and Calvin, the destroyers of Christendom, came new, so-called “mystics”: Molinos, and above all Fenelon and his egerie, Madame Guyon. Why turn our attention to them? Because along with this false mysticism based on Illuminism and Quietism, « the whole of our Religion is at stake », Bossuet used to say, « as well as the peace of the State », Louis XIV added.

These false mystics were basically worldly. « Strangely enough, » the “pure love of God” of which they proclaimed themselves to be the heralds, « let at the same time their faculties free to attend to their interests, ambitions, pastimes, earthly affairs, amusements, to say nothing of their vices » (CRC n° 95, p. 12).

The link with the eighteenth century’s murky “Enlightenment” is easy to establish, since it was Fenelon’s odd personal secretary, the Chevalier de Ramsay, who introduced Freemasonry to Paris in 1717. St. Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort had just died after having prophesied the apostasy of the last times.

In the wake of the satanic Revolution that spread from France throughout Europe, it was the Church’s temporal foundation that was ruined. Under the title “Prelude to apostasy” (CRC n° 96), the Abbé de Nantes showed that since the political power was from then on in the hands of the Powers in league « against the Lord and against His Anointed », the Church had to fight with all her strength in order to fulfil her mission. She was persecuted, deprived of her property, thwarted in her work of saving souls and civilising. She remained not less upright and splendid in her holiness for all that, thanks to the great counter-revolutionary Popes Gregory XVI and Pius IX.

It took traitors to make the Church falter and put her existence in jeopardy. « Partisans of the enemy, sectaries of heresy, servants and friends of the World, Catholic liberals, infiltrated the ranks of the faithful, the clergy, and bishops ».

It was the Trojan horse in the City of God. Their leader, Félicité de Lamennais, a prophet with fiery words (and a Catholic priest), had invented the great heresy of modern times: the marriage of God with Liberty, of the Church with the modern World. His wretched death as an apostate, however, prefigured the fate that was in store for his disciples.

At first, Popes Gregory XVI and Pius IX stood up to so-called Catholic liberalism and condemned it, but things changed dramatically when a liberal Pope, Leo XIII, ascended the throne of St. Peter. It was in fact under his pontificate, which covered the whole end of the nineteenth century, that appeared the two plagues that were to lead to the present apostasy: Modernism – which according to St. Pius X is « the sewer in which all heresies collect » – represented by Duchesne and Loisy, and democratic progressivism, which found its first expression in the Sillon.

From Marc Sangnier to Jacques Maritain, and from the latter to Paul VI and the Second Vatican Council, a genetic relation has been established. Our Father examined closely the life and the career of the future Paul VI, whose father, Giorgio Montini, a very respectable man dedicated to charitable works in Catholic Italy at the beginning of the twentieth century, steered the social Catholicism of Popes Pius IX and Pius X over to Don Sturzo’s democratism. Giovanni Battista Montini, who was very soon engaged in the Secretariat of State, unswervingly forged ahead along this path, and, since he needed a doctrine to support it, he took Jacques Maritain as his master with his Integral Humanism, a new politico-religious creed that tended to turn the Church into a Movement for the Spiritual Animation of Universal Democracy (MASDU ; CCR n° 73).

The Abbé de Nantes shows how St. Pius X was sent by God to protect the Church from this danger of apostasy. What was missing in the work and doctrine of this Saint that it failed to triumph through his Successors?

« At first, that he was not understood. St. Pius X had seen the three scourges of twentieth century religion; he had denounced them with intelligence and fought them with strength; they were liberalism, democratism or progressivism and modernism. No one bothered to understand this and so no one followed him.

« Why? Because of politics. The Saint had seen clearly that so long as political power remains in the hands of those who are hostile to the name Christian, then the Pastors and Princes of the Church will be sorely tempted by liberalism. So long as the form of power remains democratic, then the clergy would be tempted by Progressivism with an electoral base, demanding flattery. It is impossible to be a liberal or a democrat without being in close sympathy and complicity with the Enemy and without allowing oneself to be insensibly won over to Modernism.

« No man can serve two masters. No one can pretend to please both Christ the King and the People-King; both the Church and Freemasonry; both God and the godless. There are times when the choice is simply martyrdom or perjury. What a terrible burden is that of the Papacy in such times! For it is from the Pope that the decisive impulse will come. For want of a lead in the fight against God’s Enemy, the last hundred years since the death of Pius IX, with the exception of St. Pius X’s ten-year reign, has seen the Church invaded and dominated by the Enemy, who will end by placing himself upon the throne of God. » (CCR n° 73, p. 8)

Here is the School of heresy well identified:

« There is no salvation for those who subscribe to this agenda, with their absurd claim to novelty. »

Let us flee from these heresiarchs with all the strength of our faith. « Thus we shall be safe from the formal sin of heresy which, by virtue of its idolatrous cult of man, of his reason, his liberty, his terrestrial and carnal nature, places an absolute block to divine Revelation, the power of grace and the laws of supernatural life. » (CCR n° 79, p. 10)

Liberalism is a sin

Another danger, however, threatens us:

« It can easily be observed how throughout the centuries the great heresiarchs have always had their many protectors and accomplices. Their eternal type is Eusebius of Nicomedia, who gave Arianism its opportunity and almost its victory. »

Soon after the Council of Nicaea in 325, this friend of Arius and of the emperor Constantine used all his influence in the imperial court to have the exiled returned and to give substance to a sort of great liberal party that claimed to be opposed to any excess, namely, the excess of Arius and that of the Fathers of Nicaea who had condemned him!

The result was that thirty years later, supported by the imperial power, heresy in its mitigated version had poisoned the whole Body of the Church to the point of making Pope Liberius, and then the bishops united in Council in Rimini in the West and in Seleucia in the East, deny the Faith of Nicaea (cf. CRC n° 89, pp. 6-7).

Nothing is more redoubtable than « these people, of a sceptical or dilettante mentality, ambitious, unstable and changeable, sometimes generous and utopian, may offer a more presentable appearance than the heresiarchs, but they do immense harm to religion by smoothing the way for them, even in the very heart of the Church. The saints inspire us with a profound horror for this class of men… Little matter if, here again, our separation from them causes us to pass for extreme radicals, wholly uncompromising in our reaction, “integrists”. It is not by accepting liberalism’s culpable complicity with heresy that we shall prove our Catholic spirit. » (CCR n° 79, p. 10)

But integrism is a sin, too!

At the other extreme, we have to beware « of those whose reaction against the Innovators leads them into declared schism. » The most original and freshest lesson to be drawn from the Abbé de Nantes’ study is this discovery of the integrist peril and the recurrence of integrist schism throughout the ages.

It goes back as far as the apostolic Church, where we find the extremists of James’ party in Jerusalem. These Judaeo-Christians were fiercely opposed to the liberating decisions proposed by St. Paul. « It was they who, in their exasperation and jealousy, mercilessly delivered Peter and Paul and thousands of other Christians to Nero’s persecution, if we are to believe Clement of Rome. »

There was Lucifer de Cagliari, who prolonged the Arian crisis. As for the Nestorian crisis, it revealed in Dioscorus, who succeeded St. Cyril in the See of Alexandria, a representative of this line: this proud-minded, jealous man defended the Faith with such blindness that he « dramatically compromised the wonderful development of the theology of the Word Incarnate » that his predecessor, St. Cyril, had clarified. Dioscorus’ integrist fury acted as a foil and prevented Cyrillian “monophysism” from establishing peace and unity in the Church. The “robber council of Ephesus” over which he presided in 449, brought about irremediable divisions in the East that still last today.

« God preserve us from the likes of Dioscorus! »

Fortunately, neither contemporary Pelagian nor Donatist quarrels gave rise to any such integrist monster. There would no doubt be afterwards “those who would follow the pessimistic side of St. Augustine’s preaching” (Dalbiez), who affirm against the Pelagians that man can do nothing, that he is bad from his birth, that all children fall into Hell if they are not baptised, etc., but they would not succeed in unduly disturbing the marvellous Catholic communion that lasted more than a thousand years in the West and was dominated by the Doctor of Hippo’s thought.

However paradoxical it may seem, we once again find the type of the fanatical integrist in Luther, in the sixteenth century. His abusive Augustinianism, backed by a psychiatric obsession that plunged him into unconquerable fits of anxiety, led him to teach a “cacangelical” doctrine as monstrous as his personality, a doctrine according to which man cannot be cured of his corruption – cf. the “tower experience”. He receives his justification only extrinsically, by means of a special, auto-suggested faith. All of this is contrary to the magnificent doctrine of grace that St. Augustine preached.

In the following century, the Jansenists were part of this integrist line. By standing in the way of the rationalism and laxity of the Jesuits, they perhaps saved the austere and supernatural character of the Faith, but with such pride that they were unable to avoid « slipping from integrism to an exaggerated pessimism, to a sectarian mentality, to a revolutionary cabal and finally to a resentment that was detrimental to the whole social order and the entire Church. »

The damage that was caused to the Church and to souls still exists today: each time one recalls the necessity of doing penance or the existence of sin, he is accused of “Jansenism”...

It does not suffice to keep the Faith and to defend it, one must still be found “just” before God that is, maintain supernatural wisdom and love for neighbour, remain in the Communion of the Church, not take himself for a Doctor of the Church, judging everything based on his own lights! All heretics have been appalling rationalists, but the faithful or the cleric who wish to defend the Church must beware of rationalising in turn and of inventing an ideology, a doctrine that would no longer have any life or supernatural sense.

What is, then, left to us?

CATHOLIC TRADITIONALISM

« Neither rationalist nor fideist, neither humanist nor illuminist, neither too broad nor too narrow, neither obsequious nor rebellious, such were the ranks of holy doctors and pontiffs, humble monks and virgins, or simple members of the laity, whose intelligent lucidity during the worst crises of the Church we have admired, as well as their loving indefectible fidelity to the Catholic communion in the midst of the worst dissensions. » Thus it is that we have growing admiration, veneration and enthusiasm as this study progresses, a study that constitutes a marvellous hymn in praise of the Roman Catholic Church! Each of her Doctors, her Saints brightens up her multicolour robe with his particular providential vocation.

We distinguish mystics and humanists among them.

Mystics

In the fourth century, St. Athanasius and St. Hilary were the two great champions of the Faith of Nicaea; in the following century, St. Cyril, the marvellous Doctor of the Incarnate Word, who is indivisibly Son of God and Son of Mary; then, St. Augustine, his contemporary in the West and the true Father of the Latin Church by his doctrine on grace that enriches the City of God in its earthly condition. Half way through the Middle Ages, St. Bernard did not hesitate to leave his dear solitude in Clairvaux in order to throw himself into the fray and onto the roads of Christendom with the zeal of his intrepid faith.

All these Saints were giants, “reactionaries”, in the sense that they stood up to any deviation from the Faith: they showed themselves « intransigent regarding the Truth, wholly intractable where liberalism or any kind of compromise is concerned. Terrible towards heretics, they reserve their infinite gentleness for their private circle and their brethren in the Faith. Such were the truly great ones of the past. »

One must also notice that at a given moment, these Saints experienced « the decisive test of submission to the sovereign Authority of the Pope or of a Council and of fraternal communion in the Church. By their piety, their virtuous moderation, their humble and supple wisdom, they surmounted the trial in a holy fashion.

« When St. Augustine stood up to Pope Zosimus, a Greek, who had decided to uphold Pelagius after his condemnation, the Saint faced the Pope without servility or blind submission but also without exasperation or jealousy and although he certainly made the Pope yield, he never for a moment discussed his authority as Judge and Supreme Infallible Arbitrator. So many others were confronted with dramatic situations! » (CCR n° 79, p. 11)

Therein lies holiness, and only therein. It is not to be found in servile obsequiousness or in dissent.

Humanists

Other Saints, whom we shall call humanists in the best sense of the word « are much more closely associated with the world in which they live, with its researches and even its errors. Sometimes they may themselves have had a long share in these, tirelessly seeking to “baptise”, to correct and to purify them, in order to enrich the Church’s treasury with the elements of truth they contained. »

St. Basil, in the fourth century, understood the terrible misunderstanding that separated Rome from the Orientals concerning questions of vocabulary and brilliantly devoted himself to the great cause of reconciliation (cf. CRC n° 89, p. 9).

All these Saints were really admirable and touch us because they stood together and gave fraternal support to one another. « Bernard’s mystical vehemence and Peter the Venerable’s learned humanism were necessary in the twelfth century in order to prepare the way for the admirable intellectualism of St. Thomas Aquinas a century later. »

What shall we say about Thomas More, the model of the Counter-Reformation holy layman, the greatest Catholic genius of his generation? He belongs to those « Saints of perfect balance and plenitude ».

This is not given to everyone…

« They are so human that they can form friendships with humanists, sometimes the most suspect of them, Erasmus to be specific. More inspired his In Praise of Folly and would go far in his criticism of contemporary Christian society as well as in his Utopia, where he advocates another world, rational, free and fraternal... At the same time they are so spiritual that the Faith lives within them, within him, Thomas More, like a sure and dazzling beacon. From his youth and at the height of his humanist period, his soul had been that of the Carthusian he had desired to be, totally devoted to Jesus, given up to the contemplation of His Passion, exiled from this world and indifferent to its vanities, its affairs and even its delights. It is impossible to find the least trace of integrism in him, yet it was he who will know better than anyone how to defend Tradition in the traditions of the Church which he loved and venerated. »

When he resigned from his office as Chancellor of England, he realised that the time for tolerance, appeasement, and reconciliation had not yet come. He renounced this charge in the face of the rise of Lutheranism in England with a view to saving his people from it. This decision led him to martyrdom... His influence was immense: it was on the model of this consummate man that the humanism of the Renaissance had to mend its ways in order to remain profoundly Christian. On the other hand, the true Catholic mystic of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries thrived on the unshakable basis of Christian tradition and modern humanism.

As for Bossuet, our Father paints an admirable portrait of him:

« He has been portrayed as a rigorous, narrow, naive integrist, defending orthodoxy in a heavy-handed manner. Nothing could be farther from the truth. He was the gentlest of men, open to new ideas, which he tried to understand without always succeeding; he was so sympathetic towards his adversaries that Pastors of the so-called Reformed Religion, like Jurieu, were afraid of the attraction he exercised over their flocks. »

At last, there is the greatest of Popes, the one whom God gave to His Church at the dawn of the twentieth century so that he might warn her of the danger of apostasy that was threatening her: St. Pius X, whose intelligent disciple the Abbé de Nantes has been in the upheaval.

Equally opposed to modernism as he was to integrism, this Saint, who was aware of the results of the most modern sciences, was a great reforming Pope. He took disciplinary actions against those who clung stubbornly to their heresy, while remaining extremely welcoming to those who had been led astray and who, for a time, had failed to keep faith or morals.

Such Saints – whom we are more able to admire than to imitate – are mountains...

« Instead I say, our Father wrote: by loving, admiring and praying to such saints, let us try to imitate their wisdom and their firmness, but also their charity and gentleness, remaining within the Church, loyal to her faith. »

It is the lesson – more pertinent than ever – that emerges from this masterful study of 1975. It was above all the way that our Father has himself outlined and followed in the second half of the twentieth century. He did not want to expound it in a systematic manner because, he said, the Roman Authority has not yet settled the question: Adhuc sub judice lis est. As long as the Judge has not pronounced his sentence, we are allowed to claim freedom and to continue along this path of an « intelligent traditionalism ».

UNDER THE PROTECTION OF THE IMMACULATE...

This combat for the Faith, which must avoid any sectarianism and aim at restoring Catholic Unity, will only succeed thanks to the intervention of the Immaculate Conception, « victorious over all the heresies », and through the grace of Her maternal Heart.

When he ended his retreat on “the three ages of the regular or secular religious life”, in 1987, our Father told us that in order to obtain this supreme grace, it was necessary « that our bosom become sterile, our heart remain virginal, for a miraculous conception to occur. It is from that virginal and miraculous conception of the Church today that we must expect the conquest of the world for the Sacred-Heart of Jesus and Mary! »

In the meantime, whoever turns towards Her, whoever loves Her Heart, is in medio Ecclesiæ and receives all wisdom from the Church.

Her infernal Adversary seems to have gained control of the Church, for « since that wretched Council, the Sovereign Pontiff has not presided over communion but over anarchical disintegration, he is no longer the Doctor, Pastor and Prince of his people but the flatterer, the lackey, the slave of the international mob that vociferates from the rooftops: Nolumus Christum regnare super nos! We have a Pope who declines to act as supreme Pontiff... » (CCR n° 30, August 1972, “Mother of God, have pity on us!”)

It is, alas, still true today!

By what means will Our divine Mother succeed in reminding him of the duty of his essential responsibility and thus reconcile his children?

« Shall it be through great miracles or by way of terrible punishments? Oh! I cannot believe that Your Heart would wish to resort to means that belong to the Old Testament. They are neither fit for Your very lovable humility nor for Your discreet gentleness. You are more admirable in the victories of Your tenderness, and You make the omnipotence of Your weakness more evident. What we look for from You is an intercession that goes unnoticed, an intercession that appeases all anguish and provides salvation, such as in Cana when You wrought the simplest and most moving miracle. May Jesus, at Your prayer, change our hearts as He changed the unwholesome water into the best wine of the wedding feast, and as each morning He changes ordinary wine into His Redeeming Blood. » (ibid.)

... AND THE PATRONAGE OF SAINT JOSEPH

Saint Joseph was made the distributor of these miracles of grace and mercy, as the Holy Church proclaimed it through Blessed Pius IX’s words. Our Father has unceasingly and faithfully spread this devotion to Saint Joseph.

« See what authority St. Joseph had over the Virgin Mary and over Jesus. What once was will last for all time, and in Heaven, St. Joseph continues to sit enthroned with all his past authority because Jesus still loves to obey the Virgin Mary and likewise to obey St. Joseph as He used to obey him.

« Then I went so far as to say that we must pray not only to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary in order for them to have mercy upon the Church, the world and mankind in danger of damnation, but that we must also have the intelligence to invoke St. Joseph. Moreover I also said that St. Joseph, who used to be the King of the house of Nazareth, has remained so to the point that Jesus’ house having become the Church on earth, St. Joseph is Patron of the Universal Church. He is patron and father, which is the same thing and evokes another name for us: King. St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus called her father her “dearly beloved king”. Let us not forget that St. Joseph is the King of the Church, the King of Christianity. » (26 August 1987)

« God will intervene when we have prayed enough to St. Joseph. Everything fits into a divine wisdom that we cannot understand. What we do know is that our prayer to St. Joseph hastens the maturing of the cause of the Church and its solution. »

« Heart so pure, so generous and all-powerful of Saint Joseph, reign over us, govern us, save us! »

The Catholic Counter-Reformation in the 21st century
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