| Editor : Abbé Georges de Nantes | N° 87 – December 2009 |
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TO PREPARE VATICAN III
« I first launched the idea of a Vatican III back in 1964. It was not some scatterbrained notion, but the natural conclusion of the age-old logic of the Church. Others then took it up braggingly, like Cardinal Suenens and Fr. Congar, as though it would prove to be their final victory, consolidating the conquests of Vatican II. The CCR takes up the challenge. If they want a Vatican III, well, let them come to it; they will be pulverised. Not by us, non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed Nomini tuo da gloriam. The glory for doing this will fall to the power of God alone acting in His Church – with or without us, it matters little. It will, however, be the most beautiful of miracles when God saves His Church acting through His very Church herself. » (Georges de Nantes, 14 October 1971)
We undertake the systematic preparation for Vatican III, the Council of Catholic Reconciliation (CCR). Month after month, each of its prepared chapters will give rise to a return to the Catholic doctrine from which the reforming Second Vatican Council has distracted us.
« Does this mean that we advocate a simple return to the past? No. To go back to the turning point of 1962, of course, but to find the right direction in order to push ahead and make up for lost time. The questions debated are new, at least in part, and they oblige us to resolve difficulties that were unknown to the Ancients. Our Catholicism, therefore, will have both a theological and institutional progress to make, and there it will find its proper form and character for the twentieth century, but in continuity with previous epochs and generations.
« We have no desire to “return” to Vatican I, nor to the Council of Trent, nor to that of Nicea! We want Vatican III to clarify Vatican II and to isolate and eliminate its poison. We want Vatican III to save Tradition and the majority of the traditions that have stood the Church in good stead throughout the centuries.
« In doing this, however, it will mark a development and will define the forms of today’s Catholicism. The Church will emerge from this formidable trial, as always, stronger, more beautiful, holier and more conquering than ever. » (G. de Nantes, To Prepare Vatican III, CRC n° 51, December 1971, p. 7, or summarised in CCR n° 23, January 1972)
Foreword: the reader who desires to follow closely our project of Catholic reconciliation should refer to the critical examination of the Acts of the Second Vatican Council that was published in the Contre-Réforme catholique, from October 1971 to November 1972 (CRC nos 49-62, available in the French edition or summarised in the English edition in CCR nos 23-32) under the title “To Prepare Vatican III”. The Abbé de Nantes sought out the hidden intentions of those who drafted and imposed them. This study led him to discover all the principles – wrapped up of course! – of a dogmatic upheaval unprecedented in the Church’s history, but comparable in every respect to the Lutheran heresy. Today, this diagnostic is confirmed by the orientation of Benedict XVI’s pontificate, a pontificate that is in continuity with the orientation of the Second Vatican Council, one of the main artisans of which was the young Joseph Ratzinger.
This is not all. In 1996 Mgr Daucourt, Bishop of Troyes, exiled the Abbé de Nantes to Switzerland; while there he re-read, pen in hand, the texts of the Council and undertook their commentary line by line. Written « with a pen soaked in vitriol », this work has been published under the title “Vatican II, auto-da-fe”. The present study constitutes the positive counterproposal of this critique, a critique made without concession and capable of reviving Tradition, from which proceeds every true progress.
Profession of Faith: Until 1962, we were in serene possession of the only true religion. It suffices to procure us eternal salvation and is overabundant with spiritual goods, since it led many of its faithful, be they known or unknown, to holiness. This religion, which is dear to us, is good, very good. It can be developed thoroughly in all areas of interest by one who wants to do so. He can even learn theology and choose freely his spirituality.
« Although few people were aware of it, this religion experienced a considerable development in the course of time, mainly during the latter centuries, thanks to the Council of Trent and the prodigious impetus of the Counter-Reformation. Our religion in 1960 was powerfully marked by the dogmatics, morality, devotions, and discipline of the previous centuries, above all those of the seventeenth century, which marked the triumph of the Catholic Renaissance, and those of the nineteenth century, which flowered extraordinarily with devotions, apostolic and social works, and distant missions. Our contemporary Catholicism, though marked, strongly marked, remained no less open to any other forms from previous centuries: we were not forbidden to study, to admire any of the stages, or even to recuperate them. The Church neither rejected nor despised anything from her past.
« Actually, the reforming Second Vatican Council did not produce an improved or a new-style religious expansion; rather, it produced a revolution, a revolution that it imposed under duress, a radical break with the past and a global rejection of its age-old heritage. The whole of the Catholicism of the past was systematically annihilated and replaced by incessant novelties. These novelties have allegedly been recovered from a more distant and (thus) a more venerable and richer past; at the same time we have been assured that they are more modern and attractive to men of our society “in a period of social and cultural changes”. The result is disastrous. » (CRC n° 51, p. 7)
In order to return beyond the turning point where the Reform had gone astray, the next Council will constitute in the first place an affirmation of the Church, because the Church has been reviled, disparaged and derided by the men of the Church themselves over these forty-five years of Reform – fifty years if we include the years of preparation (1959-1962). An affirmation of the Church as the Spouse of Christ, a faithful, wise and loving Spouse, who to our dazzled eyes reflects, as does no other, the splendour of the countenance – both human and divine – of Jesus Christ.
When the holy Third Vatican Council rejects the venom of the constitution Lumen gentium and its notion of the Church, as a People of gods, it will restore the perfectly harmonious pyramid of divine institution upon its base. In it, all truths, all graces, all leadership descend from the summit, from the Head who is Christ acting through His Vicar, the Sovereign Pontiff, and from the Episcopal body, united to him and wherein each bishop is personally the head of a local Church. Thus, from level to level, divine life descends down to the faithful.
Today, the source of this divine life is forbidden to the mass of the faithful, the infidels, and to everyone’s children, those of practicing Catholics above all. The divine Truth that is expressed in our Creed is in fact comparable to « living water of which Jesus Christ is the historical earthly source and the Apostolic College is its reservoir. Church Tradition, by its worship, its dogmas, its discipline, conveys it and throughout the centuries is its sole and continuous channel. Finally the distribution system is the teaching Church, the infallible Magisterium, from which we ask for nothing other than the water of the Source, and not the fetid or sugared water of their wells nor the wine of their barrels.
« The entire effort of the Innovators consists in attacking the joints of this Tradition, in order to dissociate its elements; then they advocate another marvellous way, the Modernist way, of knowing the Word of God, a different faith! » (G. de Nantes, Letter to My Friends 186, 15 October 1964, p. 4)
The channel of liturgy through which the Catholic Faith came to us with all its mysteries was obstructed for this simple reason: « Vatican II dealt first with the liturgy, when the truths of the Faith for which it is the channel were no longer guaranteed but on the contrary were contested. Thus it was that after being bogged down in the most confused discussions for a month, the Fathers adopted the text proposed by 2,162 votes against 46, quite simply to get it over with! » (La sainte liturgie, CRC n° 53, February 1972, p. 10)
« Vatican III will proceed in order. It will first determine the Faith, the divine Faith of the Church, against the alleged Modernist evangelism and its de facto humanism, which leads to the cult of man substituted for the cult of God. » (ibid.)
« Vatican III will begin by declaring its solidarity with all the Councils and Popes of the past who presented clear and indisputable teaching. Woe to anyone, be he Pope, bishop or priest, who would treat this solemn commitment lightly! Having thus identified itself with this indivisible Magisterium, the Council will declare the Magisterium’s accord with Tradition and Tradition’s accord with Sacred Scripture, thereby preventing people from appealing to one at the expense of the other. In this way everything will be restored in its principles. “He who sees me, this Church will say, sees Christ, and he who sees the Son sees the Father!” No sooner will this identity be affirmed than unity will be restored between the living and the dead, between the present generation and all generations who have gone before us, back even to Christ, back even to God! Here Christians will find the basis of their reconciliation and the correct response to every reform. » (CRC n° 50, p. 11)
Act of Faith
« My God, I believe all the truths that You have revealed and that You teach us through Your Church, I adore, I hope and I love Thee. I beg pardon for those who do not believe, who do not adore, who do not hope, who do not love Thee. »
Principle and foundation
« The first, imprescriptible duty of the Pope, the bishops and our parish priests is to teach the holy doctrine that the Church draws from divine Revelation.
« No one is entitled to substitute for it an alleged “Word of God” of his own invention.
« The faithful must demand such a teaching, and priests cannot neglect it without losing their souls. »
(G. de Nantes, in La Contre-Réforme catholique, t. 4, Préparer Vatican III, The Sources of the Faith, CRC n° 51, décembre 1971, p. 13)
Is there anything better here below than this divine teaching?
« I believe in the Holy Church. »
The mere thought of belonging to the Church is enough to renew the jubilation of our souls, for the Church is Holy like her Bridegroom Jesus Christ from whom she has received such a likeness that there is nothing in this world so beautiful, so wise, so majestic as her face and her whole being. She is our Mother, and I add: she is the unique, incomparable Spouse; she alone is holy, wise, sublime, leaving false religions and philosophies far behind in their delusive darkness. In her is found, united and prosperous, all that is best in the world. The various goods that make up civilisation and culture, prosperity and science, technology and the very arts themselves all come to us from her who created them or at least saved them from the ephemeral societies in which they had first appeared. Wherever I turn, I find nothing but assurance and hope in her. Her two thousand years of glory, her marvellous expansion to the ends of the earth respond to my doubts and calm my uneasiness. There is in her a divine force, but this is to say too little… In this Spouse there lives the Spirit of her Bridegroom, Jesus, « this man commended to us by God by the miracles and portents and signs that He worked among us » (Ac 2:22), a Man the like of whom has never appeared and will never appear on earth again, tender, wise and strong. In everything she does the Church radiates the life, health and splendour of Jesus Christ, and her children never cease returning to her arms, to drink from her breasts swollen with the milk of her doctrine and her charity.
The Church! As soon as we mention her, as soon as we come together to sing God’s praises, we experience the joy of a pure fraternity. Race, colour, status, talents, riches, all these distinctions cease to matter to the extent that we express our faith in her, our worship and our submission to her. Her motherhood allows us to commune with her in the depths of our being and, forming but one heart and one soul, to feel ourselves incorporated in this one selfsame Body of which Jesus is the Head and the Holy Spirit the Life. Thus we all vibrate in unison, with an ineffable harmony, under the gentle touch of this divine August Person. Such is Charity, a love that is spiritual and perfect.
The Church is in every fibre of our heart, for she is what we love most on earth; she is in our memory, on account of the treasure of her dogmas, her liturgies, her hymns, her holy images and her marvellous buildings; in our will, for it is her commandments and her whole age-old discipline, her revered ordinances, that guide us infallibly on the way to Heaven; and finally she is in our intelligence, for the wisdom of her Words inebriates us night and day with their « aromatic wine », making germinate in our being the purity of virgins and the fecundity of mothers, through means of an inner grace that welcomes and vivifies whatever this august Mother gives us from outside.
As long as this holy emotion seizes my whole being like an absolute conviction, a sovereign attachment, a love that passes all understanding, a desire to die if perchance I may one day be a martyr of love for this wonderful Mother, who will deny me this character as a child of the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church? It belongs to me and no one can snatch it away from me! Is there a sacrament, a liturgy, a single one of her maternal gestures that finds me rebellious or merely restive? I weep rather with wonder and rapture at the least of her caresses. Even if she strikes me, she will find me joyful, for she corrects and reproves me for my own good. Is there a single one of her dogmas that is not imprinted on my mind in an irreformable manner, with God’s good grace? Each time I delve into the immense library of my Mother and open a book by one of her doctors and saints, I am captivated and dazzled by these cascades of splendour. My soul is that of a disciple who drinks avidly and without weariness the vitalising waters of her Scriptures. Thus my will consents to every one of her desires; her laws and her virtues are ever before me like learned and demanding teachers whom I love and respect. Ah! that is not to say that I have always followed their advice or even their commands ! All too often – I must humbly confess, my heart overwhelmed with sorrow – all too often I have wounded and spurned by my execrable conduct these servants and these teachers whom my Mother sends me. I deeply regret this. Never, however, have I ever disputed, even in my very worst moments of sin, the appropriateness, the validity and the wisdom of what they teach and prescribe to me in her Name.
It is only the violent love I bear for my Mother that leads me to tear, to snatch from her face and her body magnificently adorned by God Himself, these loathsome rags, these soiled and sacrilegious cloths in which the World and our Times seek to clothe her. Ah! how gladly I suffer and excuse the faults and failings of my brethren as I daily beg God and my brethren themselves to forgive me my own faults that are undoubtedly far worse. The blemishes of her little children, however, do not affect in any way the perfect purity of their mother, and this is not at all the thing from which the Church is suffering. Though her hands never cease to cleanse sinners, yet they remain luminous with a sweet spotlessness. The million and one miserable faults of her billions of sons dispersed throughout time have in no way altered the immense splendour of this Holy Temple of God, while their millions of prayers, good works and penances enhance it in my eyes with new colour and a brilliant sheen. Admirable she has been, is, and always will be, in her poor human members, because the only thing of theirs that she preserves and renders immortal is that element of truth and goodness that God has caused to be born and strengthened in them.
What is not good, what is not right, however, is that her sons have turned away in disgust from their Mother and even speak of exchanging her for another. How could anyone follow them down such a path? To invent novelties that contradict what is ancient and unchangeable, to forge the particular in opposition to the universal, these are acts of impiety. « Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus teneamus » is the ancient principle of Saint Vincent de Lérins that resounds in our hearts, having given light to the Church for fifteen centuries. We hold on to it like a lifeline, just as so many others have throughout the vicissitudes of History, looking to it for their security! « Let us hold on to that which has been believed everywhere, always and by all people! » Anyone who rejects this sacred maxim is a heretic, an innovator or an apostate! He who holds on to it, however, is a Son of the Church. Furthermore, let those who find this “integrism” laughable, outdated, sterile and wearisome know that they have made shipwreck of the faith, for to scorn the Church is to insult Jesus Christ. On the contrary, such fidelity is impregnable, and no one, not even an Angel, can chase out of the Church him who cleaves to her with love.
Over the centuries there have arisen strange teachers and prophets of Lies. Perhaps never so much as in our times have they spread with such noise and grand gestures doctrines, liturgies and new methods that are inspired or imposed by the present Century and the World from which they derive. They describe themselves as the Church, and should anyone fail to believe them, he will see himself declared a schismatic. Sometimes for a certain period and in a certain nation they may hold complete sway. It is then that their propaganda drowns out the murmur arising from the calm waters of the Siloam, the prayers and groans of the saints, and they will stop at nothing. They seek to choose a new spouse for the Lord, a good-looking provocative girl whom they prefer a hundred times to the incomparable Mother whose face reflects the heavenly beauty and ineffable wisdom of her Bridegroom. They have lost all their affection for her. If Jesus wishes to justify Himself before the present generation, He must repudiate His “feudal” and “obscure” Spouse of two millennia, but she whom they have prepared for Him as His new spouse is but a streetwalker, a woman already well known to and maintained by the arrogant men of this satanic World.
I now come to the final part of my appeal. I will plead for my Mother. There are among us far too many small children who cry out and stamp their feet because their Mother has been taken away from them by people who want to throw them into the arms of a prostitute. They are supposed to smile and say “Mummy” to this stepmother who has no love for them, but instead they weep and ask for her who gave life to their souls, who fed them, watched over them, looked after, educated and cherished them. So many people who enter the nuptial chamber with nothing but disdain for the legitimate Spouse, the holy and immaculate Mother, are guilty of mocking Jesus Christ. If He had thought to change His spouse over the course of history, He would have warned us first! Nevertheless judging from the behaviour and remarks of this “new Church” it is only too evident that nothing is to be gained from such a monstrous exchange. It is constantly insulting and disparaging the Virginal and Maternal Church because down the ages, girded with chastity, her only desire, her only pleasure has been for her unique Bridegroom! This new church seeks to have the children of its prostitutions adopted by the Son of God, children obtained from the idols it has chased after… Along with its hangers-on, it knows nothing of the profound, sure and secret love that Christ and the Church, Bridegroom and Spouse, have for each other, nor does it know how happy their children are in their company, children who dream of no greater happiness and who are filled with dread at the merest prospect of seeing the Stranger, the Abductor appear on the scene!