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!

A CONFERENCE BY BROTHER BRUNO OF JESUS
at Maison Saint-Joseph –  Sunday, 28 September 2008

THE END OF “GLOBALISM”

In public opinion, the Abbé de Nantes’ work is oblivionised. Yet, it exists! It is even well-known. Rémi Fontaine’s review of Martin Peltier’s book Nicolas Sarkozy, the Republic and Religions is proof of this. This review was published in L’Homme nouveau last 30 August. In it Rémi Fontaine explains that the « new honour that » the President of the Republic « does to the Catholic religion alongside Islam and Judaism », is similar to the “arrangement” that liberal pagans proposed to the first Christians and that open Freemasons propose to Christians today: « By means of a new secularist pact, to make Jesus enter into a Pantheon no longer of gods but of (monotheist) religions, it evokes the Abbé de Nantes’ famous Masdu (Movement for the Spiritual Animation of Universal Democracy) »

Solzhenitsyn is also oblivionised. His death on 4 August went unnoticed. The reason for the “exclusion” of both of them is that they have a “Christian politics”.

Our Father calls Solzhenitsyn « the third spiritual guide of the Russian people », after Soloviev and Dostoevsky.

Soloviev announced Russia’s conversion after the horrors of the future Bolshevik revolution, which his friend, Dostoevsky, described in advance: « But when healed by faith, Russia will bow before her Saviour. »

« The idea animating Soloviev in this immense effort of renovation, the Abbé de Nantes wrote, is that of the reawakening of the Slav peoples which will follow their return to the Roman fold and the unique Shepherd. And if it is certain that “Russia will be converted”, as Our Lady of Fatima prophesied, then Soloviev’s almost dreamlike ideas will appear to be of an extraordinary supernatural realism. »

How will this conversion come about, in fact? Through the consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary pronounced by the Pope and all the bishops in communion with him. The very word “consecration”, and even more its reality, are the negation of the secularism that has been inherited from the Catholic liberalism of the nineteenth century. This “consecration”, which was demanded by Heaven, approaches Dostoevsky’s mysticism, and is the contrary of the false mysticism that Tolstoy advocated: flight from effort and contempt for the real demands of social justice and political order.

The consecration of Russia leads, « by virtue of Christ’s Cross, to sacrifice accepted out of charity, in which climate all the economists’ and politicians’ reasonable solutions can be practicable and fruitful » (Georges de Nantes, CCR n^o 115, p. 14).

RUSSIAN NATIONALISM

This is why Solzhenitsyn paid tribute to Vladimir Putin’s politics last year:

« He inherited a country that had been plundered, that was on its knees with a majority of its population demoralised and destitute. He began his rebuilding slowly. » How did he go about it?

In May 2000, when Vladimir Putin became President, he found an economy that had been cornered by fifteen oligarchs after the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Thanks to the privatisations in 1992, they bought for next to nothing the petroleum, aluminium, and nickel monopolies and the banking industry. « The new tsar devoted himself to give its riches back to the Russian people and to reduce the influence of these boyars, some of whom, in particular Mr. Khodorkovsky, did not hesitate to rely on the support of “the American enemy”. » (Aymeric Chauprade, La Géopolitique de la Russie, a remarkable article, La nouvelle revue d’histoire, Sept. 2008)

Putin applied himself to developing an energy strategy using two powerful levers: Gazprom for gas and Rosneft for petroleum. With 30 % of the world’s proven oil reserves and 6 % of the world’s proven petroleum reserves, but on an immense territory that is widely unexplored, Russia constitutes an energy reserve for the world: Europe, Japan, China, but also the United States!

Thus it is that « Russia and the European Union are linked by a solid dependence that makes calling their relations into question difficult », La Croix unwillingly writes (2 September 2008)…

According to the International Energy Agency, European demand for gas should increase by 50 % between now and the year 2020. Russia’s share will rise by 70 %.

Thus Moscow sells the majority of her energy exports to Europe, without any real alternative. To reduce her trade with Europe would mean limiting her incoming currency. In other words, we and Russia are in this together, whether we like it or not… It is one thing to condemn the Russian military intervention in Georgia, quite another to impose “sanctions”. « The Europeans are giving themselves until the European Union - Russia summit that is planned for mid November to take any action », La Croix announces. What good news! Above all, let us not be hasty!

Furthermore, « unlike petroleum, gas supplies impose lasting relations. Suppliers and consumers are in fact linked by gas lines ».

Germany: 30 % of the gas that Germany consumes comes from Russia. This energy source is all the more important inasmuch as public opinion remains opposed to nuclear energy. In order to improve the security of Russian supplies, Berlin developed the North Stream gas pipeline project that links Germany to Russia under the Baltic Sea, avoiding central Europe. This bypass project, which should be operational in 2010, was justified by the tensions of the winter of 2006 between Russia and the Ukraine, through which 80 % of Russian gas passes. Gazprom – which is majority owned by the State – is one of the mainsprings of this project, for which it hired Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor.

Italy. In 2007, Gazprom concluded an agreement with the Italian eni for building a gas pipeline under the Black Sea – South Stream – which will link Russia to Southern Europe, a competitor of the Nabucco project that is supported by the European Union, which avoids Russian territory for transporting gas from the Caspian Sea.

Gas is not Russia’s only geopolitical asset! It is only the instrument of a return to nationalism against the American globalism that was preparing to get its hands on Russian riches with the complicity of the “oligarchs”. Putin eliminated them after forcing them to give back ill-gotten gains, but those who understood his new national politics conserved their riches and a leading role. The principle and foundation of the Russian recovery is that she must conserve her independence in order to maintain equilibrium between the great powers by establishing bilateral relations with them. She sets the Moscow - Erevan - Teheran axis against the Turco-American axis in the Caucasus. She is drawing closer to China in the Shanghai group and is strengthening her relations with Germany and India…

After having experienced an unprecedented decline of influence at the time of the reunification of Germany and the fall of the USSR, little by little, Russia is once again becoming one of the great actors of the planet, capable of foiling the strategy of the Americans who are seeking to stifle her. For example, in Georgia, where the conflict that broke out in South Ossetia demonstrated Moscow’s capacity for carrying out military operations and imposing herself upon the Georgian troops who were trained by American instructors.

Let us point out that Russia is threatening no one. She is only showing that she is ready to use strong-arm methods to defend her interests. For the first time, the United States and nato are unable to do anything about it other than to send Dick Cheney to Georgia, the Ukraine, and Azerbaijan. We are very far from the bombardment of Serbia in the time of Milosevic in the 90s. Dick Cheney’s trip is only proof, if such is needed, of American meddling in these countries:

• In Georgia, a strategic corridor allows the hydrocarbons extracted in Azerbaijan, on the coast of the Caspian Sea, to be sent to Europe.

• In the Ukraine, Russia’s opening to the Black Sea, thus to the Mediterranean, the Americans’ objective is to « make (the Russians) leave » and to thus bring the Black Sea under nato influence. Last May, President Yushchenko, who is pro-American, as is Sakashvili, the President of Georgia, signed a decree demanding the government to prepare a law that would bring to an end in 2017 the international agreements that make Sebastopol the Russian navy’s home port in the Black Sea for two hundred and twenty-five years. Russia reacted by affirming that she will remain there beyond 2017, even if it means supporting a proclamation of Crimean independence as she did for that of South Ossetia? (…)

« We warned you: you Westerners played with fire by recognising the independence of Kosovo without taking into account our warnings. These are the first consequences », the Russian President Dmitri Medvedev said to President Sarkozy. What could be said in reply? The United States and their allies opened a Panora’s box by agreeing to detach Kosovo from Serbia. This precedent now justifies all demands for independence in Europe: why refuse to the South Ossetians – Slavs who have never been Georgians and who, since 1922, have contested their incorporation into Georgia – what was so willingly granted to the Albanian Kosovars?

RUSSIA WILL EVANGELISE THE WORLD

But Russia’s geopolitical recovery is not only based on control of energy, military effort, and thwarting the attempts to bring her neighbours into nato. It is not based on refusing that the antimissile shield be set up in Poland and Czechoslovakia, on the restoration of strategic counterbalancing axes in China, India, Iran and Latin America… On what else then?

Solzhenitsyn answers with his programme of « national and religious renaissance », that is expounded under the title “On Repentance and Moderation as Categories for the Life of Nations” (Seuil 1974). In other words, Russia is in expectation of her consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, which will put an end to the evil that was inherited from the “stupid nineteenth century”, that was passed on to the twentieth century in an even worse form, which makes religion a clerical matter or a matter of conscience, but never a social or political matter.

« If religion is not all, if it does not govern the whole of life, then it is nothing, it governs nothing, and everything far from it is inevitably in jeopardy », the Abbé de Nantes teaches. That is the meaning of the « consecration of Russia » that Our Lady demands. « Take a map of Europe, “from the Atlantic to the Urals”. Draw a line from Fatima to Moscow, via Prague and Warsaw, to end at Ekaterinburg, which is at the entrance to Siberia and which will one day be a great pilgrimage centre to the shrine of the holy innocents who suffered the Passion there, the holy Czar Nicholas II, the holy Czarina Alexandra, the four most pure czarevnas, the czarevitch, child of sorrows, and their faithful servants, an expiatory holocaust of Holy Russia. Fatima - Ekaterinburg, the new European axis, what a symbol! » (Russia Before and After 1983, CCR n^o 153, p. 49 Dec. 1982 – Jan. Fev. 1983)

In 1982, there was no shortage of scoffers. “A pilgrimage to Ekaterinburg? You are dreaming!” A quarter of a century later, we have witnessed the accomplishment of this pilgrimage. In the night from last 16 to 17 July, for the ninetieth anniversary of the massacre of the imperial family that took place during the night from 16 to 17 July 1918, there were thousands of the faithful who pressed to attend a nocturnal office in the church of the shed blood, which was built in Ekaterinburg in 2003, and then in a long procession twenty thousand faithful walked the eighteen kilometres that lead to Ganina Yama, an abandoned mine into which the bodies of the czar, his wife, and his children were thrown and then sprayed with acid.

Tomorrow there will be millions of them for the sudden harvest of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, whose instruments we wish to be now, capable of reanimating and filling with enthusiasm lukewarm souls or those who are lost, while awaiting to be given a Pontiff after the Heart of God in the image and likeness of John Paul I, the martyr Pope, the thirtieth anniversary of whose birth into Heaven we are celebrating.

This anniversary enlightens current events on two accounts. First, concerning the lesson to be drawn from the financial crisis. Then concerning the Pope’s trip to France.

POVERTY WILL SAVE THE WORLD

In 1984, the Abbé de Nantes wrote at the end of his investigation into the death of John Paul I: « I shall no longer say with Dostoevsky: Beauty will save the world. Nor will I say with Maurras: Monarchy will save the world. Nor shall I even say, as I have myself so often thought and repeated: Faith will save the world. Now I see in the sweet light of the first martyr pope of the modern capitalist era: it is through Poverty that a purified Roman Church will save the world. » (Justice Will Be Heard, August 1984, published in CCR n^o 172, October 1984, p. 18)

We have just witnessed a financial crisis that is comparable to a tidal wave, a “tsunami”. No one knows where and when it will end. It began in the real estate market in the United States, affected derivatives, and gradually the entire banking system, which had been weakened by a lack of liquid assets. The shockwave has reached the field of insurance and threatened the large food companies…

At each phase, there are spectacular bankruptcies that come to tens of billions of dollars. These billions of dollars were the property of banks, companies, States, pension funds, etc., which suddenly no longer had sufficient liquid assets to be able to meet their obligations. These institutions and persons therefore turned to the wealth that they had invested in presently prosperous industries or commercial companies, depriving them of necessary investment and forcing them in turn to meet new financial obligations.

At each phase of the crisis there are two possibilities: either the institutions or persons concerned were able to meet their obligations or they went bankrupt, putting their creditors in difficulty, who in turn are deprived of the revenue of their accounts receivable, and so forth.

CONSEQUENCES.

In the presence of this tornado, all traditional attitudes, all “ideologies” are out of date, obsolete. « Economical science », which the Abbé de Nantes showed was « not innocent » (Point 113), is nonplussed, and the crisis has brought to light more than ever « the imprudence of liberal capitalism » (Point 114).

For example, the United States presently have a Republican government, reputed to be « right-wing », that is to say, favourable to private enterprise. On 7 September, the American government announced the mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were being put into the hands of trustees. For 200 billion dollars, Washington nationalised the two groups de facto in order to avoid their bankruptcy and a domino effect that would drag along world markets. On the 8^th, Lehman Brothers’ American merchant bank promised “strategic initiatives” within ten days to reinsure the markets that were concerned about its solvency. By way of initiatives, it announced on the 15^th that it was going into voluntary liquidation.

After the bankruptcy of these large banks and the weakening of the financial system, the main insurer of the country, American International Group (aig), with 74 million clients, 116,000 direct jobs, 1,000 billions of dollars of assets, and branches throughout the whole world, is in its turn threatened with bankruptcy. If its activities cease, all of its clients will be deprived of guarantees, and among them there are large enterprises in which other people have invested with confidence. When they learned of the bankruptcy of the insurer, they hastened to pull out, threatening with bankruptcy countless numbers of enterprises.

In the face of this colossal risk, the American government, albeit “Republican”, chose to “nationalise” the insurance company so that it might continue its activities. The cost of the operation was 85 billion dollars drawn from the American Federal Reserve! The American state became a 79.9 % shareholder of this group.

85 billion added to the other billions granted to save other banks, and the hundreds of billions for the war in Iraq! This intervention of the State is absolutely contrary to its principles; in the short term, it saves the economy, on condition that confidence is regained. But if rates do not recover… In any case, some comment on the operation with these simple words: « Welcome to the Union of Socialist Soviet America! » (ussa) In reality, the measure consists in « remedying by state control, which adds incompetence and negligence to injustice. » (Point 120)!

The rescue operation is far from gaining unanimous approval in the usa. At the height of the electoral campaign, the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama laughs scornfully to see the Republican candidate, John McCain, defending interventionism that he condemned the previous day!

The system holds out as long as the central banks are able to intervene to pump more liquid assets into it (yesterday: 180 billion, to be shared among the American Federal Reserve and European banks!). But confidence has to return soon. For this to come about, it is necessary to fight effectively against speculators who in the meantime continue with impunity their work of demolition through fraudulent operations such as short-selling of shares. Our governments do not have effective instruments for the moment because speculation remains, until further notice, the motor of the economy! Laissez faire, laissez faire… freedom will settle everything, resolve everything automatically! This is the current doctrine.

So, all eyes are turned towards the American President George W. Bush. His administration has finalised a financial “Marshall plan”: between seven hundred billion and a thousand billion dollars are being offered.

At any rate, even if the system is saved, colossal losses have to be absorbed: 4,800 billions of dollars vanished into thin air, which will necessarily have indirect consequences, the worst of which is the bankruptcy of many enterprises, with resulting unemployment. The whole effort in economics will thus consist, in the months and even in the years to come, in closing the gap and attempting to recuperate the billions that have been lost. This will cause growth in the region of zero, if it is not negative. We must therefore expect an increase in unemployment, and the return of inflation.

Because people are over-indebted, we will also have an increase in personal bankruptcies, thus an increase of houses for sale, but also difficulty in selling new housing… which are financed with credit.

In the final analysis, the increasing bankruptcies make a great many decent people unable to reimburse what they purchased on credit. This produces new personal bankruptcies that weaken the banks even more, etc.

CONCLUSION.

The situation is extraordinarily complex. No one masters it enough to be able to say what is going to happen. God alone knows. He has perhaps decided to convert the world by means of poverty rather than by war or Communism… Whether the financial crisis is overcome or not, the situation is already dramatic for many.

After the last great crisis in 1992, our Father had denounced the perverse effects of the means that were implemented to boost the economy. The present crisis confirms this sombre prognostic, since it is a direct consequence of the liberalisation of credit that the governments agreed to in 1992. It suddenly became very easy to borrow money… people took advantage of this… even to speculate.

In reality, it is the system that is faulty because it encourages speculation and put enterprises under the tyranny of maximum profits.

To be continued… Come to the Pentecost 2009 session, where we will need to re-read the 150 Points.

« As long as free exchanges and contracts were effected within natural living communities, they remained civilised, empirically moderated by ecological prudence, moral justice and Christian charity. The measure of value, laws of exchange, mechanisms of competition and conditions for maximising profits remained almost unknown, such a study being of no interest other than theoretical. On the other hand, since liberalism has isolated the market and deprived it of every external rule, its free play has become the object of a deceitful science called “economics”. »

In reality, this science of market mechanisms is only useful for « anonymous and vagabond » finance, which alone has the effective freedom to enter or not into the market interplay and to orient business to its liking. While the consumer, the merchant, the worker, the farmer, and even the person of private means arrive on the free market as demanders who are forced out of necessity and bound to the particular character of their contribution, the financier is not forced by any necessity of time, or bound by any form of employment. He reigns over the market, and knowledge of its mechanisms allows him to win every time. At least, this is what he believes:

« Capitalism’s unpardonable imprudence lies in its blind obstinacy in destroying every force other than that of money and in crushing, exploiting and devouring every weakness that it believes it controls. The great crises that will block the system and bring about the collapse of the capitalist world will come from external causes, from “exogenous shocks”, which will be unforeseen because unprovided for: the revenge of slaves against Money. » ( Point 114)

Today there are three sources of “exogenous shocks”: Islam, in Afghanistan and in our suburbs; Communism, in China and South America; the masses in our western countries who will, in one stroke, lose their present « benefits » and who are not ready for it, accustomed as they are to demanding. To face these threats, a national union is required, not Europe or globalisation.

One man alone has everything in hand to be able to save us as he knows what God wants and demands for taking mercy on us: the consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary by the Holy Father and all the bishops of the world in communion with him.

BENEDICT XVI, SARKOZY, SAME COMBAT

During the ten days of this crisis, the Church was conspicuous by her silence; her so-called “Social Doctrine” was quite incapable of providing solutions.

The announced encyclical on “globalisation”, which was to have been published at the beginning of the year finds itself in advance out of date, obsolete before its publication. The aforesaid globalisation turns out to be the cause for the unprecedented scale of the present crisis. So much is this so that it is rather a question of turning to nationalism to be able to cope with the world-wide crisis. The Pope should revise his copy in the light of real events…

In the meanwhile, Benedict XVI carried off an operation in France that is capable of seducing the elect themselves. He provided our President with the opportunity to rally once and for all to the secular Republic – that is to say apostate – all the died-in-the-wool Catholics that France still has despite a hundred years of virulent anticlericalism, which the gatherings at Paris and Lourdes have allowed us to count: about five hundred thousand.

Recalling « Christianity’s contribution to the history of the world, and particularly of France », adding that « we accept our Christian roots », Sarkozy, who was sure that he would agree with the Holy Father’s thoughts, opened the « new way, which he demanded at Lourdes, in order to interpret and live in everyday life the fundamental values on which the identity of France was built ».

By quoting Christian de Chergé, the prior of Thiberine, not a martyr of the Catholic Faith but of the “dialogue” that Paul VI had established between Christians and Muslims since the encyclical Ecclesiam Suam (6 August 1964), Sarkozy proved himself to be a good conciliar Catholic.

« The rest of the speech sounded rather false », Fromentoux affirmed. Not to the ears of Benedict XVI in any case! “Positive” secularism, « the kind that gathers, dialogues, and not a secularism that excludes and denounces », can but meet Benedict XVI’s approval, even and above all when Sarkozy adds to religions « all philosophical traditions », thus also those of the “Enlightenment”, to which the Pope does not cease to refer, following his « beloved » predecessors, John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II.

Sarkozy even had the cleverness to denounce « relativism », faithfully echoing a great many pontifical speeches:

« Democracy cannot merely content itself with resting on the arithmetical addition of votes, nor on passionate movements of individuals; it must also proceed from argument and reasoning. »

This is only too true! The Pope paternally approved, visibly happy to engage a « serene and positive dialogue » with the Republic. He was also in agreement on the « inalienable rights of the human person »; the 1948 Declaration which the President had just evoked. By adding « from conception to natural death », the Sovereign Pontiff acted as though he was condemning abortion and euthanasia, but in reality, he never condemns anyone.

Worse yet, by asking « God », by way of peroration, to grant to our « beautiful country », « peace and prosperity, liberty and unity, equality and fraternity », and by entrusting these wishes to « the maternal intercession of the Virgin Mary, principal patron of France », the Pope no longer seems to distinguish between the gifts of the Holy Spirit and the claims of Satan! This is what St. Pius X called « blasphemous comparisons »… to condemn the Christian democracy to which Pope Benedict XVI is won over unreservedly.

A MODERNIST POPE

We can apply to the speech that the Holy Father delivered at the Collège des Bernardins, what our Father wrote in the past about one that John Paul II addressed to a similar learned assembly: “John Paul II, Vicar of Nothingness, Successor of No One” (CRC n^o 243, Nov. 1991, pp. 7-8).

At first appearance, these speeches have nothing in common. In John Paul II’s speech, « we find not a word of Our Lord’s, no text from Holy Scripture, no teaching from the Fathers of the Church or of any saint. » The same cannot be said about Benedict XVI’s speech, and yet!

When we read and re-read this difficult text, we seek in vain a profession of our holy Catholic Faith and religion by the Vicar of Jesus Christ, successor of St. Peter. The Pope only speaks about « Christianity » that « perceives in [human] words the Word, the Logos itself, which spreads its mystery through this multiplicity and the reality of a human history ».

Now, just what is « Christianity » according to Pope Benedict XVI? Here is the surprising answer:

« The novelty of Christian proclamation does not consist in a thought, but in a deed: God has revealed Himself. Yet this is no blind deed, but one which is itself Logos – the presence of eternal Reason in our flesh. Verbum caro factum est (Jn 1.14): just so, amid what is made there is now Logos, Logos is among us.  Creation (factum) is rational. »

This is a surprising rationalism! Benedict XVI, an inveterate Modernist, does not want to recognise that the mystery of the Incarnation is a historical fact.

He just said so clearly:

« This means again that the divine element in the word and in the words is not self-evident. To say this in a modern way: the unity of the biblical books and the divine character of their words cannot be grasped by purely historical methods. »

With all due respect, this « way » of speaking is not « modern », but Modernist. St. Pius X clearly expounded and condemned it in his encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis on 8 September 1907:

« They double the parts of rationalist and Catholic, the holy Pope used to say about Modernists, and this so craftily that they easily lead the unwary into error. » (n^o 3)

According to them, « agnosticism tells us that history, like every other science, deals entirely with phenomena, and the consequence is that God, and every intervention of God in human affairs, is to be relegated to the domain of faith as belonging to it alone. In things where a double element, the divine and the human, mingles, in Jesus Christ, for example, or the Church, or the Sacraments, or the many other objects of the same kind, a division must be made and the human element assigned to history while the divine will go to faith. » (n^o 40)

Benedict XVI did not have to make this distinction in his speech, because he did not speak of Jesus Christ, the Church, or the Sacraments.

Because the goal that he sets himself is to lead the numerous agnostics and atheists « from the world of culture » who were listening to him to experience the « Logos among us » (cf. Pascendi n^o 48), the Pope does not speak about the divine Revelation that was made to the Patriarchs, nor about the Covenant that Yahweh concluded with the sons of Abraham, but about lectio divina, the reading of Holy Scripture by monks as « philosophers » in order to « seek God » in it, quaerere Deum, that is « to make an effort to find what was perennially valid and lasting, to find Life itself ». Holy Scripture contains « the Word that opens the path of this search for God and that is itself the path ». God walks along it as much as man: « In the biblical word God comes towards us and we towards Him. » We thus need to learn to hear Him by « the formation of reason – eruditio – through which man learns to perceive, in the midst of words, the Word itself. »

In fact, « the Word of God only comes to us through the human word and through human words, that God only speaks to us through the humanity of human agents, through their words and their history. »

Is not Jesus Christ the very Word of God incarnate, that is to say, the Word made flesh in order to make Himself heard by our ears, after having announced Himself throughout the centuries of the Old Testament by miracles and prophecies? This, in any case, is the Apostles’ testimony: « What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we looked upon and touched with our hands concerns the Word of life; for the life was made visible; we have seen it and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was made visible to us – what we have seen and heard we proclaim now to you, so that you too may be in communion with us. » (1 Jn 1.1-3)

Well, no! It is true that « we as Christians link the New Testament writings as, so to speak, a hermeneutical key with the Bible of Israel, and so understand the latter as the journey towards Christ », but this is our interpretation. In other words: « Scripture requires exegesis, and it requires the context of the community in which it came to birth and in which it is lived [the Synagogue as well as the Church or the Blue Mosque]. This is where its unity is to be found, and here too its unifying meaning is opened up. To put it yet another way: there are dimensions of meaning in the word and in words which only come to light within the living community of this history-generating Word. »

If only the Pope specified that the place of this communion is the Catholic Church. Not only does Benedict XVI refrain from saying it, but he adds that the « words » that are contained in the Bible do not present this unity from a « purely historical and literary perspective ».

Thus, their interpretation is « a constantly new challenge to every generation. It excludes by its nature everything that today is known as “fundamentalism”. In effect, the word of God can never simply be equated with the letter of the text. [It is true: « The letter brings death, but the Spirit gives life. » (2 Co 3.6)] To attain to it involves a transcending and a process of understanding, led by the inner movement of the whole and hence it also has to become a process of living. » This is not what St. Paul meant. He was speaking about the Holy Spirit...

At the risk of being accused of “fundamentalism” ourselves, we must note that this presentation is purely and simply Modernist. I write it without trembling because Cardinal Ratzinger himself admitted it on one page of his “A New Song for the Lord”, with the subtitle: “Faith in Christ and the Liturgy today” (Desclée - Mame, 1996).

We could read there on pp. 173-174:

« We are manifestly witnessing today a profound change of paradigm (to use this fashionable expression). An abyss cuts the Church’s history into two irreconcilable worlds: the preconciliar world and the post-conciliar world. In fact, for many, there could be no severer a verdict than to consider themselves justified to call a decision of the Church, a liturgical order, or a person “preconciliar”. Did Catholic Christianity thus find itself in an absolutely alarming state before 1965? »

« But already, he withdraws », our Father observes. That is to say that he replies neither yes nor no. Further on, on the same page, he evokes « Pius X’s specific liturgical knowledge and experience », but in order to take the liberty of writing without too great a risk: « In Germany, Pius X is scarcely considered more than an antimodernist pope. »

Commenting on this page in his prison in Hauterive, our Father wrote in his diary:

« My status as a victim of exclusion allows me to think, speak, and write in my apparently perpetual reclusion, all that I want without prevaricating. Well, the cardinal thinks exactly what he says, but in a dialectic that the reader does not imagine. Here is my hermeneutic of his precious words: there is incompatibility between the Christian thought of the years 1900-1914, in particular the thought of Pius X, and the present thinking of the cardinal and his friends who, in fact, like to think about themselves as Modernists, and so they truly are. But this incompatibility is interesting, suggestive, edifying, if we show the continuity of the living tradition in which the profound identity of “life” appears: Pius X’s thought responded to the aspirations and the demands of the beginning of the century as Cardinal Ratzinger’s thinking responds to those at our end of the century on the way to a renaissance for the century to come.

« So, are we satisfied? He is, totally, on condition of drawing the inferences that are hidden in the premises: St. Pius X’s antimodernist Catholicism is rigorously impossible to tolerate today. Since it is incompatible with the modern spirit, it must be destroyed and its upholders reduced to powerlessness », on account of their “fundamentalism”.

« A question of principle », he replied to friends who asked him why he never answered the Abbé de Nantes. This is still the reason why I never received a reply to my letter on the occasion of his joyful accession. The letter had, nevertheless, been suggested and transmitted by the nuncio in Paris…

« As for us, our Father continues, we were initially pleased to be in agreement with the cardinal; he at last is coming round to our analysis: between his faith and ours, that of the whole Church before the crisis of 1962-1965, there is incompatibility… Now, in the absolute of the Tradition that does not evolve but remains in the unchanging truth of the deposit of the apostolic Revelation, it is Pius X’s anteconciliar faith that is divine, and its incompatible caricature can only be carnal, worldly, and thus Satanic. This is what must be rejected in order to bring the Roman Church back to the religion of St. Pius X, St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus, and our venerable Father Charles de Foucauld. »

Brother Bruno of Jesus.