He will return with his immense heart, with his heart of fire, his poor man's soul
and his smile. He will return! And the Immaculate Heart of Mary will triumph!

SIXTY YEARS OF CATHOLIC COUNTER-REFORMATION AND FRENCH COUNTER-REVOLUTION

A SON OF THE CHURCH (5)

THE HUMILIATION OF GOD AND THE PATIENCE OF SAINTS
1983 - 1987

 by Brother Bruno of Jesus

I: Pontifical modernism, the humiliation of God

II: The patience of saints

III. The appeal to God’s judgement

In November 1970, at the height of the complaint made to Pope Paul VI, which was pushed to the point of asking for his dismissal, our Father published an editorial entitled “The patience of saints”, as a remedy to « the terrible disintegration of the Church », to which he assigned three causes. The first was modernism « a doctrine and a party that Saint Pius X denounced and condemned, which today has reappeared, with a shockingly monstrous power that is unmatched in history »; the second one was « the criminal complicity that the Pope and the bishops concede to the modernist sect ». Finally, « the third cause of the ills from which the Church suffers is the lack of holiness in the Christian people that nowhere in the world has led to one of those reactions, one of those acts of opposition that holiness has always provoked in history in the face of heretical sects and the criminal passivity of the Pastors. This is why, after having denounced the modernists’ enterprises and the complicity of the Pope and the bishops, we must put the blame on ourselves, men and women religious, priests and faithful, for not being saints, or for not having merited by our prayers, our works of penance and mercy, our good conduct, that God create a saving reaction among us. » (CCR n^o 10, November 1970)

I. PONTIFICAL MODERNISM, THE HUMILIATION OF GOD

Since the accession of John Paul II, the first two causes of « the terrible disintegration of the Church » are one and the same. The Book of Accusation presented to the Holy See on 13 May 1983 by the Abbé Georges de Nantes and two hundred delegates of the League of Catholic Counter-Reformation, lays out an overwhelming demonstration of this. Addressing himself to the Pope, the Abbé de Nantes declared without any circumlocution:

« You believed, Most Holy Father, that you were doing a great work, doubtless for the greater glory of God and for the good of the Church, but you did it against all the solemn warnings of your most august predecessors. The unremitting labour of your life has been to reconcile modern atheistic humanism and age-old Christianity. In particular it has been to meet Marxism on its own terrain and to push it, sympathetically, to its extreme consequences, in order to convert it rather than to combat and anathematise it endlessly and profitlessly.

« For this reason, you had to accept their criticism of religion and so work firstly to purify religion and consequently to reform it. You could then bring the adversary – who had thus been pacified by means of a closely argued dialectic – to listen to and even share your faith. It would be necessary to accept the humiliation of God, the “death of God”, but it would be justified by the promise of His triumphant return and of His “resurrection” in the midst of the modern world. »

By attentively studying the life of Karol Wojtyla (CCR n^o 155, April 1983), his ideas (CCR n^o 156, May 1983) and his theology (CCR n^o 157, June 1983), our Father demonstrated that throughout his life, he had devoted himself to this intellectual creation of a humanist, Christian dialectic, to its implementation in a revolutionary pastoral approach that earned him his elevation to the sovereign pontificate, from which he teaches his secular humanism, and promotes its realisation in all spheres and at all levels of the Church… for twenty-six years now!

« Now, this theory and practice, our Father then recalled happen to have been denounced, rejected, condemned and outlawed in the Church for three quarters of a century by the major Encyclical of the holiest of popes of modern times as “the synthesis of all the heresies”, inevitably leading to the radical destruction of religion, of the Church, and of human civilisation itself, leaving nothing, absolutely nothing, standing. »

Twenty-five years after this warning, we are able to observe that such has been the fruit of this pontificate.

For John Paul II does not teach « the true religion is that whereby the one, true, living God is gradually united with the whole of mankind in accordance with that incomparable and supernatural body of dogmas, sacraments, rites, laws, and traditions, which are pleasing to God because they were first revealed, imposed, requested, instituted or accepted – since the beginning and in their fullness – by His Son Jesus Christ, Our Lord and King. Such are our faith, such are our prayers and our sacraments, such are our laws, the commandments of both God and the Church. Such is our religion, the principle and foundation, the means and the end of our whole life. » (Book of Accusation II, p. 89)

Pope John Paul II teaches something quite different than « this wonderful interrelationship between divinity and humanity, which begins on this earth and reaches its fullness in Eternal Life. » For the full and exclusive adoration of God, our Creator and our Father, for the adherence of faith and love given to the Word, Son of God made man, our Lord and our Saviour, Pope John Paul II substitutes worship of man. He said so himself in France in 1980. Quoting it is enough to be appalled by it.

« The fundamental dimension capable of revolutionising the systems that provide the structure for all mankind and of freeing human existence, both individual and collective, from the threats hanging over it, is man, man in his wholeness, man whose life partakes of both material and spiritual values. Respect for man’s inalienable rights is at the basis of everything.

« This man is unique, complete and indivisible. In the cultural domain, man is always the primary factor: man is the primordial and fundamental factor of culture... In thinking of all cultures, I wish to say here in Paris, at the seat of UNESCO, with respect and admiration, “Behold the man!” » (Book of Accusation II, p. 89)

These are the words of Pilate presenting Jesus to the crowd after having had Him scourged. Thus in the humanism of John Paul II, man « unique, complete and indivisible » has taken the place of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, according to a philosophy condemned by Saint Pius X in the encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis:

« Read this encyclical; on page after page you will hear the Pope of all time penetrating the thoughts and the works of the Pope of a day, of the Pope of today, denouncing them and commanding the whole Church to fly from such a doctrine and from such works, to separate herself from such an heresiarch in order to remain faithful to Jesus Christ, judge of the living and of the dead. »

For, « the first hydra head of Satan’s that Saint Pius X undertook to vanquish was precisely that of the agnostic philosopher. This is the sort of philosopher who asserts that reason is confined to the phenomenal sphere and who concludes that God is not an historical person, a visible actor, tangible through His works, in either our scientific world or our history.

« Pius X censured this scientific and historical atheism, which is precisely where the Modernist joins the enemy camp, not hesitating to banish God from the human sphere and excluding theology, natural religion, Christian apologetics, and finally divine Revelation itself from the sphere of scientific knowledge. »

Now the philosophy of Karol Wojtyla « is indistinguishable from modern humanist philosophy. ». For John Paul II professes to « meet “man who makes himself God”, not as Paul VI did out of goodness or flattery, but through an intimate identity of philosophical concepts with those of modern atheist thinkers and through approval for their most surprising and audacious dialectic. »

« If faith is indispensable to walk on the waters, declared John Paul II to André Frossard, we must constantly be seeking a form of faith that will measure up to a world that is constantly renewing itself, and does not merely measure up to a past left behind never to return. Besides, it would be difficult for us to identify with this past world, even though we admire it; we would find it difficult to live in a “pre-Copernicus”, a “pre-Einstein”, or even a “pre-Kant” world. »

Before Kant, all European science instinctively obeyed the first principle of scholastic philosophy, according to which man draws all his ideas, and therefore his judgements and his science, from knowledge of the visible universe, i.e., from what I see, what I touch, what I hear, what I « sense »… « Nothing is in the mind that has not first been in the senses. » Our ideas come from things, and in things they are replicas of the ideas of God Who created them.

In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), the metaphysical charter of the French Revolution (1789), Kant reverses the roles by declaring that the science of man is the reflection of his own intelligence and not the reflection of things… and of the intelligence of God Who created them.

Before Kant, bodies imposed themselves on science and yielded to observation: the space they occupy, the time they last. As everyone can observe, they exist in certain places, they change or move during certain lengths of time that are measurable!

With Kant, space and time become so many a priori of human invention; they do not exist and are not qualities inherent to corporeal beings. It is man who frames the “phenomena” in his instruments, space and time, « the a priori categories of sensibility ». Outside of his grasp “phenomena” have no place or dimension, no length of time or date.

What are “phenomena”? They are what “appears” to the senses of the body from the visible world, its moving, vague, shapeless and empty surface. Beyond that, the essence of things, if it exists, is totally imperceptible to us. For this unknown reality, Kant invents the barbaric word of “noumenon”.

What will be the result? From the moment that space and time are nothing more than suppositions of the human mind, useful for the perception of “phenomena” to measure and classify them, scientists will not finish until they have succeeded, by some trick of calculation, to distort space, to “bend” it, to reduce or multiply its dimensions. And likewise, from contracting or expanding time, they reverse it as though it were not of itself, oriented and irreversible. Thus, they end by destructuring the reality that God gave them for them to know and admire. They prefer to take pleasure in their own imaginary reconstructions and mental games.

Up until the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church firmly refused this transferral from the objective world and from the divine Being to man, to this « generalised relativity » by virtue of which the only absolute principle is that everything is relative to man.

The entire second Book of Accusation is a terrifying demonstration that allows no doubt for whoever makes the effort to read about the powerful, the tremendous heresy of John Paul II, « a philosopher Pope », steeped in Kantian philosophy. It is more than a heresy; it is an apostasy in three phases, a diabolical parody of the three historical stages of the mystery of Redemption:

1  A Speculative Good Friday, the fruit of a philosophy that leads to the annihilation of religion. In place of “obsessive” theocentrism, Pope John Paul II continually substitutes a conscious and deliberate anthropocentrism, the very one that is proper to atheists, agnostics, Hegelians and Marxists among whom, according to him, we must live henceforth.

« With no vain regrets and no reservations either, the former religion has been sacrificed to its modern antithesis, humanism. It has certainly not yet been seen in events, at least not too clearly; this "speculative Good Friday" will take years to translate itself into the reform of the Christian life, its customs of piety and ultimately beliefs, a reform that must end in their total dissolution, their natural death. The process was started at the Council and is well advanced. »

This was said in 1983, and it has only worsened since to such an extent that it is apparent to everyone today.

2  A Dialectical Holy Saturday: on the day following this deicidal Good Friday, John Paul II decided to meet the “assassins of the faith” and to go down into Hell there to dialogue with them. This dialectical Holy Saturday has occupied all the thinking of John Paul II: it is the confrontation of atheistic humanism with the Christian religion. Today, man is all; his work in the world absorbs all his energy.

Humanism, atheism and materialism, having dialectically suppressed every other absolute, every other theory, how can a place still be made for God when one is Pope? It is the miracle of the third day, Easter morning, the “miraculous resurrection” of God:

3  An Idealist Pasch, or the emergence of “another transcendence”, is not at all a return to the Old God, the Creator through Whom all things exist, live, and move in the universe. Nor of the historical God of the Old Testament, the God Who is the Saviour, Legislator, and Judge to come of the New Testament. All this “theism” has fallen beneath the blows of the atheism and agnosticism of a “death of God theology”. It will not return.

It is therefore a new God that the “faith” of John Paul II reveals in man as he creates his own singular and sublime history: « A noumenal God for a phenomenal Pope ». The expression is a stroke of genius. It proves that the Abbé de Nantes thoroughly penetrates the thought of John Paul II better than all his adorers and sycophants celebrating « an extraordinary Pope ».

Having rejected the “theist God” – the true God of our Catholic faith, the Legislator and Sovereign Judge of the living and the dead – for the sake of the God of conscience and of the future, who is full of admiration and love for man, the Pope preaches a lifeless, faceless, speechless God bereft of any consistent existence. It is a “noumenon”, according to the expression of Emmanual Kant.

What remains? There remains nothing other than Kant’s morality, “the categorical imperative” of a moralising Pope.

Because John Paul II believes that he alone is the first to have achieved the « synthesis » that must dialectically result from the « contradictions » of the previous stages of the confrontation of Christianity and atheism, he says yes to the modern world and to its atheist philosophy, and at the same time yes to God, to the Church and to Mary! Through the « vital immanence » condemned by Saint Pius X – but what does this matter to him? – he seeks to re-establish and resuscitate in the deepest consciousness and the actual life of every human being, the religion that modernism excludes from historical and physical reality.

« God becomes the object and intimate cause of that sentiment whereby “in some way man is united to God”. This faith is both illumination and revelation at the same time. It is sufficient, therefore, to itself and can today favourably succeed to yesterday’s “theism” with its ecclesiastical teaching, its sacramental and liturgical rites, its moral laws and public discipline. For all must clearly be subject to this religious consciousness, even the supreme authority in its threefold manifestation of doctrine, worship and discipline. » (Book of Accusation II, p. 82)

The scandalous interreligious meeting of Assisi three years later in 1986 would confirm this analysis in an unqualified manner. For those who had perfectly understood the thought of John Paul II, there was nothing surprising in this:

« The reason for this is simple. Such a living, intimate, mystical experience ceaselessly rediscovers and recasts the words and events of Salvation in an inexhaustible intuition of the divine, giving them their true meaning and transfiguring all things in accordance with lights greatly superior to the Church’s blind methods and dogmatic and juridical procedures.

« Splendidly absent from the secular domains of natural philosophy or from sociology, the Modernist faith is, nevertheless, ever present as the spontaneous and universal creation of the deepest human feeling. Thus, it uses the dogmas and rites of the various religions as symbols and instruments of its innermost life, always seeking more perfect forms. » (ibid., p. 83)

II. THE PATIENCE OF SAINTS

Nevertheless, putting our trust in the Immaculate Heart of Mary, we await the resurrection, the true one! We await it after the “speculative” Good Friday and the “dialectical” Holy Saturday that has indeed led the Church to the tomb after the twenty-six years of this pontificate. We await it with “the patience of saints” that the Abbé de Nantes combined with the unrelenting toil that he accomplished with the genius of a doctor of the Church and an unflinching courage for fighting within the Church.

THE GENIUS OF A DOCTOR OF THE CHURCH

The Abbé de Nantes did not content himself with merely criticising and accusing Pope John Paul II of having fallen under the censure of Saint Pius X. He positively renewed scientific apologetics beginning with an all-out refutation of Kantian philosophy and then went through the large spectrum of modern sciences: “To finish with Einstein” in cosmology, with Monod in biology, with Darwin in biogenesis, with Konrad Lorenz, with Teilhard, with Freud, with Marx (CCR n^os 135, 136, 139 and 140, June - November 1981; CCR n^os 142-147 January - June 1982).

Here is the absolutely brilliant conclusion of this series of studies, one of which would have been enough to fill a lifetime: « It is because they are atheists that the science of modern humanists is mad, and necessarily so. »

Let us quote but one example taken from among a thousand: today the entire community of astrophysicists acknowledges that Einstein, before whose time John Paul II « would have found it difficult to live », erred. This admission can be read in a book published in September 2004 by Michel Cassé, an astrophysicist.

Now, in 1980, our Father wrote: « First of all it will be necessary to renounce, which none of the high priests of modern astronomy dare do, at least to my knowledge, the most baleful taboo of modern astrophysics, namely the theory of Relativity. If Science could definitively purge itself thereof, it would recover its freedom and its hypotheses would be more plausible and its observations freer. Einsteinian scholasticism is sterile and maleficent in a way that no other has been in any other time. » (CCR no 136, July 1981, p. 16)

Contrary to this “scholasticism”, our Father presented as « plausible » the hypothesis of “the universe in expansion”, according to which the thermodynamic state of the universe, such as we know it, could be the result of the explosion of a primitive atom that at the origin of time and space concentrated and suddenly set loose all the mass and energy that are today dispersed. This is the famous theory of an original “big-bang”. It only lacks, our Father said, experimental proofs. Well! A few years later, in 1988, two American teams made it their goal to measure with precision the distance of certain astral bodies by using electronic cameras and a specific image processing programme. The process is similar to that of measuring the distance to a lighthouse beacon by the brightness of its light: the further away it is the paler its light is. Ten years later in 1998, the two American teams, to the surprise of everyone, came to the opposite result of what everyone expected: instead of observing a “deceleration”, a slowing of the expansion of the universe, due to the attraction of bodies that the galaxies exert on one another, it had to be acknowledged that the expansion of the universe is accelerating! This is effected by an energy that is therefore superior to universal gravitation!

As a result, the mythology of the scientists, always concerned with doing without the Good God, resumes as well its acceleration! Michel Cassé, of the astrophysics service of the Atomic Energy Commission, imagines a force of repulsion at work in the entire cosmos, a mysterious « dark energy » that gives birth to « a state of grace, of elevation, in which flight prevails over falling, an antigravity! » (Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Ed. Odile Jacob, 2004)

Thanks to this « dark energy », according to this scientist a rational concept of the universe is emerging that is more beautiful than all the theogonies and religious explanations combined.

This remark illustrates quite precisely the conclusion that our Father had already drawn from his study of the state of the question in 1980:

« Knowing how to safeguard reason… is some undertaking! In this task, one soon discovers with immense surprise how much even those scientists who are utterly honest and most rigorous in their observations and calculations can be inclined to the spiritualist dream, to the pantheist myth, as soon as these latter clothe themselves in borrowed scientific concepts.

« In a word, the gullibility of scientists is amazing, and if they are atheists or anticlericals, if they need to satisfy the curiosity of the masses to benefit from State subsidies, then their pseudo-scientific inventions know no bounds. One needs to know that!

« Furthermore, from one science to another they shore each other up in their mystifications, the one confirming the other.

« Yesterday, it was always in the direction of a materialist reduction of complex structures to their simple and inert elements. The greater had to emerge mechanically from the lesser. Today it is the opposite. Mechanics are transfigured into the prebiotic and the biological into the spiritual. Complex structures are invented at whim in order to justify simple phenomena.

« Spirit is placed in the macrocosm and liberty in the microscopic. Yet, today as yesterday, it is to be free of the primary constant and irrefutable certitudes of the philosophy of common sense, defining the great orders of the perfection of beings: material forms, living souls, spirits and God. One feels that Catholic apologetics will have to arm itself with a whip. (CCR n^o 135, June 1981, p. 6)

« No, modern science is not pure, it is not free and it is not honest, much as it gives the appearance of being so. No, it is not science that through its sensational discoveries, its bold theories and Copernican revolutions has dismissed God as a useless notion. It is the negation of God that has violated reason, distorted the observation of phenomena and finally constrained science to abandon the normality of its concepts, to go off course and to set up so many fanciful constructions outside commonsense. Why? In order to do without the invisible. It is God Who is missing in science more than science is missing in God. » (CCR n^o 148, July 1982, p. 10)

For « evidently, all this cannot be done by itself, can it? One only has to look at the sky over one’s roof, so beautiful and so calm, and the moon in its mysterious gravitation, a material body endowed with that energy, to know with certain knowledge that God exists. Even since Newton, it has been evident that heavenly mechanics could not be and are not eternal and that this dynamic system must have had an absolute beginning. God then? God the invisible creator is sufficiently known to us through His visible work. One would need to be senseless to deny it and to stop thinking to ignore it. Yet in order to triumph over God, atheism would have to stop the turning of the spheres, would have to silence the voice of the spiral nebulæ, would have to stifle the crackling of the cosmic ray, residual heat, inviolate witness of the act of birth of Light! » (CCR n^o 136, p. 17)

This shows that Karol Wojtyla has totally gone astray, from a scientific point of view as much as from one of philosophy and of the faith for a reason that is easy to understand:

« Divine revelation, whose depositaries we are, is not based on a scientific theory, nor does it come from any world system. It is of a different order. Certainly, science and religion are in man, in the world and in history, but that is practically their only meeting point. » (CCR n^o 135, p. 6)

THE CHARITY OF A SON OF THE CHURCH

In the editorial quoted at the beginning, after having acknowledged that we have not yet merited « that God create a saving reaction among us », simply forgetting that our Father alone constituted one himself, and the CCR with him, our Father continued:

« It is never too late, and this, moreover, is the only path that Hope keeps open for us. Let us work first towards our personal conversion and we shall be able to see the terrible situation of the Church in a new light. In our pride, we would be annoyed with our Bishops and our Pope – and with very good reason! We would be exasperated against the “assassins of the faith” and their whole retinue – and rightfully so! If, however, we despair of the Church in the belief that we no longer belong to her, we the last of the Just among all the others, this is when we would be guilty and this would be the means whereby we would participate in the universal error. Once we resolve to sanctify ourselves, we find ourselves in the barque, fraternally rowing with all the others, perhaps more than the others, but for our common salvation. Did not Our Lord say to us: “In patience you shall win your souls”? » (CCR n^o 10, p. 2)

There followed a table of resolutions to be taken:

If the modernists continue to corrupt the faith, if the entire hierarchy continues to sleep all the while or to help in the crime, we who belong to the faithful people must convert ourselves from our tepidness, from our lack of concern, from our thousand sins in order to merit the salvation of the entire Body and to assist in doing this according to our personal vocation. If we are monks or nuns, let us add penance to prayers. If we are priests, let us preach as well and sanctify the souls that are entrusted to us. If we are simple members of the faithful, let us keep the faith, frequent the Sacraments and practise the virtues, let us increase them even and help our neighbours to do likewise. Let each act according to the gift of grace, according to his lights and his state. “In silence and hope shall be your strength”. » Today it may be said that our Father applies this programme to the letter, during the days and the nights that God makes.

In 1970, he founded the League of Catholic Counter-Reformation in order to lead his friends and readers along this path. With a prophetic accent, he issued this warning whose truth has been borne out by the thirty-five years that followed:

« Our ordeal is long and hard. I have been warning you for the past year that as the ever-increasing scandal of the men of the Church makes life more and more difficult for the good, they will be tempted to cut themselves off from the entire Church in order to escape the evil, and correlatively to write off as lost those who remain inside in spite of everything. The large mass of Catholics, who were lukewarm or mediocre beforehand, are falling into sin by blindly following the pastors who are corrupting them. A small number are sinning by setting themselves up as perfect instead of staying in the midst of the others and striving to become better themselves. Here we enter a spiritual battlefield where the play of light and shade is ever-changing – where good and evil fight against each other within individual souls who may easily be led astray by the Spirit of Evil disguised as an Angel of Light, tempting them towards a spurious state of greater perfection. That is why we must see things clearly for our salvation and that of a great many may depend on our lucidity.

Our Father then marked out this narrow “crest line” that he himself was entering, inviting the children of the Church to follow him:

« Since October 1969, I have also been denouncing the self-sufficiency [after a certain visit] that has appeared in our own ranks and which threatens within the next two years to assume gigantic proportions: the desertion of the good, scattering themselves in a hundred and one different forms of revolt, whose common characteristic is to reject together with the Reform of the Church, the Church herself.

« What guides me in all this, is neither my whims nor my passions, but the holy Catholic doctrine alone. I would never allow the question to be placed on other grounds and to discuss other things than that. Tactics, success, effectiveness, union, and even charity are odious masks outside of Catholic Truth. One must first of all be in the truth in order to be good and to do good. It is within Catholic discipline alone that unity will be preserved. If that provokes division, war, hatred even right into our families, we must suffer it since Jesus Christ forewarned us about this.

« But even then, our role is only to warn and assist those who listen to us. The Master at His return must still find faith on the earth, and may He find us – through grace! – still praying and keeping watch, faithful to His blessed Church, our lamp illuminated in our hands. »

Our Father was sustained by this long patience and went to Rome three years later with seventy delegates of the League of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, to lodge a “Book of Accusation” against Paul VI, and a second time in 1983 against John Paul II.

Even though his request for an audience addressed to the latter received no reply, our Father did not abandon “the patience of saints”. He wrote once more to the Holy Father without circumlocution.

« I am publicly accusing You of heresy, schism and scandal. How could You, through Your administration, evade an answer, justifying or accusing Yourself before Your people, before Your conscience and even before God?

« The strange popularity You enjoy, as vain as it is transitory, orchestrated and suspect though it be, has persuaded You and Your admirers that you are above all criticism as well as above all law. It is not true.

« There has to be someone to rise up in the holy Assembly to tell You these things. For want of someone more worthy, we are here to serve You. If the cardinals, all clothed in red as a sign of the blood they have sworn to shed, if need be, in defence of and for the conservation of the faith… if the officials of the Curia, whose responsibility it is to watch over the correct doctrine and exact conduct of every member of the Church’s faithful, including those who bear the highest responsibilities… if the Roman clergy who, with Your Holiness, form the Church of Rome, mother and mistress of all the local churches… if the bishops, successors of the Apostles, in communion with You who form the teaching, vivifying and sanctifying Body of God’s Church… finally, if the faithful spread over the face of the earth, forget their orthodoxy, their “sense of correct faith”… if all are content to applaud, to approve, to share or simply to accept on trust and to follow out of obedience Your heresies, schisms and scandals, then it befalls some priest or any member of the faithful, sure of his faith, to rise up and to demand the Truth and Justice against You. » (Letter to John Paul II of 25 March 1983, quoted in CCR n^o 158, pp. 5-8)

Who would have this courage? On Easter Sunday, 3 April 1983, our Father confided in our friends:

« For many years, heavens! almost twenty years, yes, twenty years! I have led this fight against the reform of the Church only in the light of our common faith. I have always replied sincerely to those who were surprised at my self-assurance, at least to those who did not consider it to be a tranquil paranoia, that no apparition, no heavenly revelation played any role in it: faith, faith alone sufficed for all of us as the foundation of this enterprise, to justify this combat, unique, it must be said, in the annals of the Church. Probably this time it is more terrible. Last autumn I was upset, not to use the big words like overwhelmed or crushed. Faith still sufficed, and I asked nothing of the Father to continue this work.

« I do not say that I had some vision or revelation – this is not the way God proceeds with me – but a grace that I cannot consider as being granted to me alone. I must have need it, or it was meant to be a great help to me, but to you as well, my brothers, my sisters, our friends.

« What then is this grace of the Holy Spirit that is active in our hearts? A peace, a joy, a force without human cause, constant, unvarying, impervious to the fluctuations of everyday life, to its complacencies, to its difficulties, to the favour or disfavour of the beings on whom everything hangs in the balance for us. It is also a communication of certainty: by following this line of action, we are doing what God wants. It is a supernatural certainty that exceeds human horizons to such an extent that it leaves the soul indifferent to life and to death even, to success, to glory, of course! or to failure, contempt and hatred, of course. I now know from God that the steps we have taken are useful to the Church, they are part of her history, they are an integral part of the mystery of the growth of the Reign of the Unique and Immaculate Heart of Jesus and Mary in the world, a growth that is becoming rapid in this century, but running counter to what is commonly believed and said about it. Contrary to it!

« Through this divine gift, certain interior improvements have been easy for me, which is a sign for me alone, but above all the work that I direct is distinct from myself and this concerns you. God continues it through you! Through us. He conducts it according to His plans borne of His omnipotence and mercy, while we only have to let ourselves be conducted, led, influenced, our heart henceforth free of all fear, our imagination of all fright, our thought of all doubt, having no other inner occupation than pleasing Him, our soul, one to One with Him, and serving Him as well in our ordinary and insignificant works as in the enterprises that may seem gigantic with good reason, but that, from that moment on, no longer fall within our province but within His » (Letter to his Friends n^o 46, 3 April 1983).

Ever since then, the Abbé de Nantes has never lost this serenity.

Of course, he was not listened to anymore in 1983 than he was in 1973, « but the fact that we were neither heard nor condemned will also testify that the Church, in the silence of her sacred infallibility, recognised in us the witnesses to her indefectible Truth, and later, it will be in this silence and this secret maternal benevolence, that the Church’s unfailing fidelity to her only Spouse and Lord, Jesus Christ, will be recognised. » (Book of Accusation II, p. 174)

The previous year, in 1982, Mgr Re, substitute at the Secretariat of State, had declared to me that the Abbé de Nantes had not committed any theological error. On 13 May 1983, Mgr Hamer said to our Father, while we were in his office at the Holy Office to deliver to him the Book of Accusation against John Paul II:

« Your errors, you know them very well.

– I do not know them. I ask you to show them to me precisely.

– It’s a waste of time. »

I dared to protest:

« Last year, Mgr Re, of the Secretariat of State, declared to me that the Abbé de Nantes had committed no theological error.

– Mgr Re was not at the trial [of 1968]. Now, we know what took place there: not only did the tribunal indicate your errors to you, but you acknowledged and retracted them. Then you came back to them in completely bad faith. »

Our Father stopped him:

« That is absolutely false. It is a lie. »

– Do you realise how disrespectful those words are?! »

Our Father stood up and declared, in the presence of the five witnesses there, and pointing to the large crucifix hanging on the wall behind Mgr Hamer:

« In the name of the Crucified Christ, in the name of my God Who will be our Judge, I say, your Excellency, that you are a liar. »

Then turning towards the secretary:

« Please note, Mgr Jarry: “Your Excellency, you are a liar, a liar!” I have nothing further to add. »

And we left the parlour.

Then at the end of the morning there was an incident with the Italian police at Saint Peter’s square. It was an identity check. Since our Father did not have his passport with him, he was thrown into a police car. It shot off with siren blaring – the utterly ridiculous was achieved.

« I was taken, he related, into the waiting room for thieves, pimps and prostitutes and there at last I met Him whom I had come to Rome to see: the photograph of John Paul II was there blessing the Italian police and the pickpockets without distinction. He is blessing me! With the ridiculous aspect changing sides, they tried to free me quietly, but the friends were all there like a swarm of flies to take the photograph of their life: the Abbé being interrogated concerning his identity in a police van by a commissioner who had the abbé’s photograph in his hand! » (CCR n^o 157, June 1983, p. 21)

III. THE APPEAL TO THE JUDGEMENT OF GOD
OR
DAVID’S THREE STONES AGAINST GOLIATH

Our Father could repeat what he had said about his accusations brought against Paul VI in speaking about those against John Paul II, that they were « justified because they were known to all and published in thousands of copies, had met with no theologian willing to debate them in public, no authority within the Church to make them the object of a dogmatic condemnation, in short no one to defend the Pope! » (CCR n^o 158, June 1838, p. 13)

Thus, foreseeing in 1983 that the authorities would repeat the dereliction of duty they committed in 1973, our Father envisaged as early as the month of April an ultimate recourse.

« If John Paul II refuses to receive our complaint, the immense scandal will rise up to Heaven, to God, of a Vicar of Jesus Christ accused of heresy, schism and scandal, who feigns not to hear, or not wanting to judge… out of charity for us, oh! the obvious lie! sure of his ascendancy over the minds and hearts of all in the Church. »

« So, there remains for us the great, the ultimate means that is to appeal to the Omnipotence of the veritable and eternal Head and Pontiff of the Holy Church, and to invoke against a prevaricating Pope the Name of Jesus Christ, the just Judge of the living and the dead. » (CRC n^o 188, April 1983, p. 14)

Which is what he did in 1986, after a final attempt to obtain a reply from the Pope, on the occasion of his “pilgrimage” to Ars, Annecy, Paray-le-Monial and… Taizé!  « What an astounding place to stop, how abominable to God, to Christ and to His Holy Church, for no Catholic, even if he is the Pope, is allowed to come to a place of schism, heresy and persistence in confusion of tongues »…

Our Father wrote to Cardinal Decourtray, Archbishop of Lyon, Primate of the Gauls, on 25 August 1986, on the twentieth anniversary of his suspension.

« Am I wrong? Are we wrong, all those of us who remain the witnesses of yesterday and of the day before yesterday, against the Church of the Council and of the post Council? Concerning this grave, capital and – in the spiritual sense of the word – mortal error, if your Eminence, your brother bishops, the Sovereign Pontiff himself, are infallibly sure and certain, as we are given to believe, why do you not say so with the full force of the divine authority conferred on you by your high office, in order to end this division and bring us back into the unity of the Roman, Apostolic and Catholic faith? »

« Consequently, Eminence, I ask you, and not confidentially, but crying from the roof tops, if I may say so, as the situation demands of your office and of your solicitude, to persuade Our Holy Father the Pope to intervene in a decisive manner by which I mean an act of his solemn and extraordinary Magisterium.  »

Our Father specified that he was asking the Pope to pronounce the following anathema: « If anyone says that social liberty in matters of religion is a natural human right, let him be anathema! » Then he continued.

« Eminence, after twenty years of incertitude and of confused and contested dogmatic errors, it is high time to define the true religion in our Church that has been rent, whether it be our religion or yours, so that neither you nor we be struck with eternal damnation by Christ our Sovereign Judge. I have done my duty as a member of the faithful and as a simple priest by requesting through your charitable mediation that the holy Catholic hierarchy in the person of its Head give us the truth of the Catholic faith. I do not have to tell you your duty; you know it well enough. Today is the time for the Truth to be declared and lived before the time comes when Justice is heard and suffered. Once again, Eminence, persuade the Most Holy Father to speak as the infallible and invincible Doctor of the Catholic faith and we shall kiss the hands of your Grandeur with feelings of the keenest gratitude. »

Sensitive to « the consideration you express for my person and for my title », the Cardinal replied:

« You hope that the Sovereign Pontiff and the bishops will say “with the full force of the divine authority” whether you are wrong in opposing “the Church of the Council and of the post-Council”. You think that only an “infallibly sure and certain” act could “end this division” and bring you “back into the unity of the Roman, apostolic and Catholic faith.”  »

Who is unable to see the perfidy of such a response, insinuating that the Abbé de Nantes knows himself to be outside of « the unity of the Catholic faith », which is precisely the object of the appeal to the Pope’s judgement!

The Cardinal added:

« I find it hard to believe that such an act would have the expected effect. I shall, however, transmit your letter to the Holy See. »

Did he do so? No one knows. There was total silence from the Vatican.

Then like David, our Father took a second “stone” from his shepherd’s bag and slung it at Mgr Vilnet, the President of the Conference of French Bishops, on 11 October 1986, the anniversary of the opening of the Second Vatican Council:

« If it is You – and it is You – who is in heresy and schism, and for this reason you refuse the infallible sentence that you must pass in this war of religion, we must go further. In the first place, we must appeal to the people of God against its lying pastors. »

« Your Excellency, I therefore invite all of you and challenge you to clear yourselves of our accusations, and if you are able, to confound your accusers, publicly, in a debate with no consideration shown to anyone, having no other intention than the manifestation of the truth. You say that it is in your possession? Show that it is so, prove it!

« I would be willing to hold a debate on national television. I have no friends there. But Your Excellency has access to television, and no doubt a word from you would suffice to open to you the programme “le Jour du Seigneur” because this particular broadcast is also dearly paid for with the money of the faithful. Naturally, such a face-to-face encounter would have to take place without presenter or go-between acting as our arbiter and judge. Only one judge, the people of God! Of course the broadcast would have to be live… to avoid all jiggery-pokery. You will perhaps object that the honour of the Church would be jeopardised if all our internal difficulties and divisions were to be thrown on display before millions of television viewers, Christians or otherwise, indifferent or hostile. Although not usually. This is an objection I would readily admit. So, for want of something better, I would propose to you what I have at my disposal.

« On Saturday, 15 November at the main hall of the Mutualité in Paris we shall hold the annual meeting of La Contre-Réforme Catholique at 9 pm. There are 2000 seats, and I invite you. Or rather I leave it to your disposal in order to hold this debate with me, which will mark a date in the history of our Church of France, as well as that of the world crisis of post-conciliar Catholicism. For the first time since Vatican II, the French episcopate will have agreed to a public meeting with the traditionalist Catholics, their constant adversaries.

« It is plain that the evening will be organised in common agreement, in such a way that, before an attentive and respectful public from both sides, You and I can express ourselves in turn, succeeding each other for equal lengths of time, without any verbal or physical violence, and in accordance with a freedom and equality of expression recognised as the time-honoured rules in spiritual duels of this sort of immense consequence, in which the Holy Spirit has frequently been pleased to give His help and to manifest His invincible power in favour of His elect. »

Mgr Vilnet played dead, but the Bishops of France, on the sly, asked a Jesuit, Fr. Sesboüé, to present them a study on religious freedom (CRC n^o 227, November 1986, p. 4 and n^o 228, p. 14).

Upon learning this, our Father wrote:

« One needs to be born a Jesuit or become one to execute such a command – to draw up a solid dossier for them to study during their assembly at Lourdes, not to answer me, of course, or make any effort to convince me, but to quiet their own consciences on this theme :

« “Is the doctrine of religious liberty contrary to Christian revelation and to the Church’s tradition?” »

« After twenty years of violent and despotic imposition of this new doctrine, denounced a hundred times at the Council as contrary to divine revelation and the entire Catholic tradition, the request for such a work and its very title prove the ignorance, disarray and feeling of culpability on the part of the hierarchy. So plainly is “the doctrine of religious liberty” Masonic in its origins and essence – “contrary to Christian revelation and Catholic tradition” that the Jesuit was only asked to win the bet on a half-lie. At least, let him succeed in proving that it is not contrary and that in itself would be fine. For it was awkward to ask Father Sesboüé to establish that religious liberty derives, as water from the source, from holy Scripture and Tradition. That would be truly impossible! »

There remained the third stone to sling by writing to Cardinal Lustiger on 11 November 1986. In the meantime there had taken place the implementation of the “dogma” of religious freedom, this « black day of this 27 October on which the Pope had assembled the major religions for peace at Assisi! »

« I see that nothing remains to us other than the direct and immediate appeal to God’s judgement […] with you. Yes, your Eminence! With you… » Then he proposed that in the year that run from 8 December 1986 to 8 December 1987, « he who errs be struck by God with death, and that the other be spared. »

With, as champions for the ordeal:

« As upholder of the unchanging Roman Catholic faith, and rejecting its recent Conciliar and pontifical contradiction, I, Georges de Nantes, priest of the holy Church.

« As guarantor of the new doctrine of religious freedom considered as a natural right of man in society, and consequently of all the other novelties of the decrees and declarations of the Council relative to ecumenism, non-Christian religions, openness to the world, Your Eminence, Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger. »

« I do not imagine anyone in your entourage nor you yourself would dare pray for three hundred and sixty-five days that Heaven take my life away so that the edifice from which my entire belief takes its inspiration be torn down. To give it its most exact name, this edifice is the faith of Pius X. Are you going to ask in your pious prayers: “O Christ, O Lord and King of my heart as you are of the Church of Heaven and earth, destroy Saint Pius X?”

« No, of course not! So, I formulate the wish that, pressured by this threat of God’s Judgement, you will enter into yourself, Eminence, that you will abjure your errors and your hatred before the hour of just Truth and true Justice has come for you this year. The consequences of such an abjuration would be considerable and you would then be, much better than I have been able to be during these twenty years [1965-1986] of trouble and diabolical disorientation, the best defender of the Catholic faith.

« Your Eminence, I kiss your pastoral ring, with the most profound and firm hope that you will wish to enter voluntarily into this Judgement of God, which is our last recourse, our sacred recourse, the one that cannot be rejected. It will be heard.

« Your devoted colleague of old and your most humble servant,

« Georges de Nantes »

In return, our Father received no acknowledgement of receipt other than that of the post office… This amounts, for Lustiger’s part, to declaring himself defeated.

Moreover, far from appealing to God, He claimed to be able to pass sentence in a book published three days before the expiration of this “year of the faith”, entitled God’s Choice. It was the Lord’s answer.

« I would never have supposed what I have just learned from a good source: that Cardinal Lustiger was very concerned about my ordeal and took the initiative so as to have the upper hand. He worked hard all year to have ready for publication, substituting himself for the Judge, the Lord’s Answer – yes, yes! – “God’s Choice” just in time for it to burst into the press and on television for the 8 December! I am the one whom God has chosen, he says, and de Nantes is excluded.

« God’s Judgement, issuing from the all-powerful Archbishop of Paris, is claimed to be infallible. And the Pope, who received the first copy, has ratified this Choice of God, giving it his full and total approval.

« How could Lustiger have been so imprudent as to make light, not of us – what merit in that? –but of Christ, the Son of God Himself, insolently taking his place. I am amazed. »

And for good measure, at the Wednesday audience on 9 December Pope John Paul II condemned, with a casual air, the Abbé de Nantes, saying: « Jesus never works a miracle to punish someone, even when guilty; He refuses to do so for His glory or in His own defence. » (CCR n^o 207, February 1988, p. 2)

Certainly Pope John Paul II was “guilty”, since the day before, 8 December, he had affirmed « the inalienable, inviolable right of every man to social liberty in matters of religion » the very error against which our Father appealed to God’s Judgement.

Commenting on this speech of the Pope that condemned him in veiled terms, our Father wondered whether we should understand that John Paul II was condemning « the harshness of St. Peter – or rather God Himself, of Jesus Christ deciding their death! – towards Ananias and Saphira (Ac 5), that of St. Paul towards Elymas the magician (Ac 13) and against the incestuous adulterer of Corinth whom he “delivered to Satan” with the support of the whole assembly of the faithful and “with the power of our Lord Jesus” (1 Co 5), not to mention incessant and countless bodily and not spiritual ordeals and anathemas? »

In this case, « beyond doubt, John Paul II’s allocution of 9 December constitutes either a new revelation concerning the truth of Jesus or the revelation of a new Jesus who is not that of history and of ecclesiastical tradition. In either case, the Catholic faith is violated and adulterated by John Paul II, and for us it is yet another answer from our Lord provoking our adversary to reveal his fundamental anti-Christianity for our great hurt. » (ibid., p. 2)

CONCLUSION: PATIENCE…

« So, nothing is finished. God Himself sends us back to our fight. Once again He has allowed our adversaries to speak, act and triumph. » (Letter to the Phalange, n^o 16, 1 January 1988)

« And since then, it is naked faith. I mean: it is the simple intellectual act whereby each person sees the opposition between the Credo and the new religion that the authorities of the Church substitute for it, which makes us cling to the CRC (…).

« It is therefore absolutely clear to me that God Almighty did not want to respond to my, to our Appeal, because He is already too obviously insulted, blasphemed, and His Holy Mother as well, to feel inclined to give supererogatory signs to this “evil and adulterous generation”.

« The effect of this clear light is to legitimate and legalise in my own eyes and in the eyes of those who have the same certainty, my work in its two constant, major and absolutely principal efforts: the dogmatic and canonical fight against the conciliar and pontifical Reform that I have led publicly and mightily for twenty-five years; and the fight against all the other schismatic traditionalist movements, or of those who have rallied, namely, movements of liberals, moderates, and charismatics, all of whom avoid this defence of the faith that remains utterly essential, in a class by itself, absolutely Catholic, and outside of which there is no salvation, except for people without intelligence. » (hitherto unpublished)

Our Father will continue this fight on all fronts, in a growing isolation when, subsequent to Mgr Lefebvre’s consummation of the crime of schism in 1988, part of the traditionalists rallied to the conciliar reform. We shall see in the next instalment how he will be led to take to Rome a third “Book of Accusation” in 1993 against the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Brother Bruno of Jesus