THE LEAGUE

WITH HIS BACK TO THE WALL

     Our eyes and hearts now turn towards Fatima, the object of John Paul II's next pilgrimage. Sister Lucy will be there, and the Portuguese will perhaps ask for the third Secret to be revealed, the focus of all their thoughts, as a reading of their newspapers shows. I do not write this to stimulate curiosity, but simply to recall that we are living through exceptional moments. We must not fall asleep during this time. Our hopes tell us that we are nearer to salvation than we have ever been, as Saint Paul says. We must simply persevere to the end, in prayer and penance.

THIRTY YEARS AGO...

     Unlike the papal pilgrimage last March to the “three sanctuaries” of Jerusalem, the pilgrimage to Fatima this May is not without precedent. It takes us back thirty-three years, to 13 May 1967, when hope, «a fervent hope of peace and of religious joy swept through the immense crowd of pilgrims at Fatima», as I wrote at the time. «To the sound of all the church bells in Portugal, exactly fifty years to the day (and even to the hour) after the Apparition of the Virgin of the Rosary to the three children, there appeared on 13 May at midday, dressed in white and red, the frail and radiant figure of the Holy Father in the Cova da Iria.» (Letter to my friends n^o 246, 13 May 1967)

     As a result, I am gripped by a sense of  “déjà vu”. Paul VI had announced a «rapid pilgrimage». That of John Paul II will also be brief. And tomorrow Heaven and earth will hang suspended at that poignant moment, just as happened yesterday. We know not what God will do. But as we wait in fervent expectation, it is enough for us to recall the dramatic confrontation between the holy Carmelite and the Pope, a confrontation which will once again set the Pope with his back to the wall, the true “wall”, that of the clearly expressed will of God!

     For the crowd of pilgrims who are expected to be at Fatima next 13 May there will be renewed the «immense joy of seeing her who, with her own eyes, contemplated the Virgin Mary! And yet it is a moment full of pathos. Lucy, always humble and silent, asked to come to Fatima; not, as one might think, out of curiosity or vanity, but undoubtedly charged with a mission, a message from Heaven. At that instant, pressed on all sides, Lucy asks the Holy Father whether she might speak to him for a moment in secret. He refuses in icy terms. Before the television lenses and a hundred snapping cameras, before the eyes of all, she weeps. She does not weep for herself, but for us, and – let us be quite certain about this – Heaven weeps alongside the rejected confidante of the Virgin Mary as she is ushered away.» (Letter to my friends, n^o 246, 13 May 1967, p. 3)

     Next 13 May a meeting is planned at 9 o'clock in the basilica. But it is important to pray for the Pope, so that this day may mark his «return», as announced in the vision of Saint John Bosco. «At that moment [of maximum anguish], two angels could be seen bearing a standard and going towards the Pope to present it to him with these words: “Receive the red flag from Him who fights and scatters the most powerful armies on earth. Your enemies have fled, and your sons are imploring you with tears and supplications to return.” By fixing one's gaze on the standard, one could make out on one side the inscription: “REGINA SINE LABE CONCEPTA”, and on the other side: “AUXILIUM CHRISTIANORUM”.»

     As I wrote at the time, in December 1993, in my commentary on this extraordinary vision which recounts the «exit from the Vatican» of «a crowd of men, women, children and old men, monks, nuns and priests, and at their head the Sovereign Pontiff»:

     «At that instant [of the vision], the Pope had reached the end of his tether, but he had still not come to the end of that path to perdition which will plunge yet further and deeper into darkness and bog. At the sight of so many dead, so many pitifully wounded, so many strays, and also so many of his own sons and close advisers who are increasingly disconcerted, he is seized by the need to return whence he came.» (The hour of our deliverance draws near! English CRC n^o 263, p. 9)

     For forty years now we have been waiting for the words of the Blessed Virgin to be revealed. Will the Pope evade the issue once again? We must pray... Today, the whole world is singing the praises of Pope John Paul II. But who remembers Jacinta's entreaties: «It is necessary to pray much for the Pope!» Peace will come, not through the “pardon” that the Pope is asking from “other religions”, but through the blood of the martyrs whom these religions are persecuting in Indonesia and the Sudan, Catholics and Protestants alike, all persecuted out of hatred for the faith, just as Catholics and the Orthodox are in the Balkans. This is the true ecumenism, the sobornost, which will allow the unity of Orthodoxy to be rediscovered, from one pole to the other.

     Since 1917, the whole “strategy” of the Blessed Virgin may have seemed incoherent to men of little faith, as none of it seems to have succeeded. But behold, in this least year of the century, the veil begins to rise on a marvellous spectacle, that of the great signs which Heaven has been bestowing on us these last one hundred and fifty years: from La Salette till Fatima. For the prophecy is certain, real, extraordinary, and perfectly consistent with Fatima: «Rome will lose the faith, and will become the seat of the Antichrist.» Rome is the Holy See: there is not room for the both of them!

     So, we will soon see the triumph of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which commenced at the rue du Bac. The countdown has started, our deliverance is nigh. It is a time to stand firm, in obedience to the wishes of Our Lord and the requests of Our Lady of Fatima.

     I love Maximin, «the little one of the Blessed Virgin», who was faithful to the message he received from Her, right up till his death. I would love to see all our phalangists resemble him... for want of anything better, for as regards the sublime Francisco of Fatima, who will be beatified on 13 May, he is something else! But as for Melanie, «the Black», this poor child lost in her fabrications, «more worthy of pity than of blame» as one author writes, someone who was, through divine permission, so misled as to want to forget the message of the Immaculate Conception at Lourdes, may our young girls hold her in horror and take the delightful little Jacinta as their model instead. Does not Lucy affirm that she owes the preservation of her innocence to her cousin's influence?

Brother Georges of Jesus Mary    

     «Is Jesus still among us?» one reads on the walls in Paris. Yes! and more than ever before, through his Shroud. Special edition to follow next month:

THE HOLY SHROUD IS THE SAME AGE
AS THE RESURRECTED JESUS !

FOUR “AMBASSADORS” TO LA SALETTE,
ON THAT TRAGIC 12 MARCH 2000

     We have seen how our Father was seized with growing anguish as the Roman day of repentance on 12 March approached. It was a kind of agony: he was deeply hurt by the offence and the humiliation that our Mother, the Holy Church, was going to undergo. His alarm was all the greater in that no one in Rome seemed prepared to stand up and oppose this: not one person among the whole college of cardinals! To our knowledge, an Italian archbishop was the only one to publicly express any reservations about this act of John Paul II: the Archbishop of Bologna, Mgr Giacomo Biffi, «saw in it “a source of spiritual sickness, especially for the more simple of the faithful”, and he suggested “waiting for the last judgement to judge the matter”»  (Valeurs actuelles for 17 to 23 March 2000, p. 43).

     The day before this scandalous ceremony, thanks to a happy combination of circumstances, our Father was able to send two brothers on pilgrimage to La Salette to entrust his heavy cares to the Queen of the Apostles. Before they left, he reminded them in a homily of the terrible prediction which stands out in the great Secret published in 1879, a phrase that we take to be authentic: «Rome will lose the faith and become the seat of the Antichrist.»

     Moreover, Melanie’s disastrous slide is an extraordinary figurative: we may consider the pitiful seer as «the figure of Eve pursuing her original revolt; the figure of the Jewish people, constantly rebelling against Yahweh and Moses, and then rejecting their Messiah, Jesus Christ; the figure of nineteenth century France, orphaned of its King, pulled in all directions, and finally rebelling against the warnings of the Virgin of La Salette and of Our Lady of Lourdes; ultimately, a figure of the apostate twentieth century with its conciliar Church, turning its back on the religion of Jesus Christ to found another according to its own taste, “its eye fixed on a chimera”.» (English CRC n^o 287, July-August 1996, p. 24)

     So let us join our brother pilgrims, meditating on this message so mysterious, hidden, prophetic and... current! Here is the account that Brother Scubilion would address a few days later to his former Parish Priest and spiritual Father.

My beloved Father,

     After four hours of problem-free motorway driving, we arrived at Chônas L'Amballan, and that was a pilgrimage in its own right. My parents were successful in locating the childhood haunts of our Father, which are so well described in the Mémoires et Récits. On the next day we took the road to La Salette. At Corps, we did not follow the track taken by the brave pilgrims of times past, but continued by the road hewn through the rock.

     We arrived with my parents in time for Mass in the new chapel, behind the basilica. Despite the modernity of the chancel, a pleasant surprise awaited us: we found ourselves facing two picture windows through which there was a dazzling view of the mountains still covered in snow. The Mass was reverent thanks to a pilgrimage being made by some good people from Guadeloupe and Martinique: they carried rosaries in their hands or around their necks, the children were well-behaved, and there was an absence of any human respect. We were happy to be with them. Furthermore, no one talked about the repentance desired by the Pope (ouf!). The rector's sermon was about the temptation of Jesus in the desert, the temptation of wanting to cause a sensation by showing His divinity, a temptation to which man today succumbs by taking himself for a god. We were surprised and delighted to listen to such a talk. So would the words of the Pope on repentance find any echo in these mountains? Clearly they jarred too greatly with the message of Our Lady of La Salette:

     «If My people are not willing to submit themselves, I am forced to let go of My Son’s arm. It is so heavy and weighs Me down so much that I can no longer hold it back. How long have I suffered for you! If I want My Son not to abandon you, I must take it upon Myself to pray for you continually; and you others, you think nothing of this!»

     At Fatima also, Our Lady announced on 13 July that She would come to ask for the reparatory devotion to Her Immaculate Heart. So is the Pope going to make an act of repentance for having “thought nothing” of the requests of the Blessed Virgin?

     Unfortunately, in the course of their celebration, the La Salette Fathers did not speak once, it seems to me, about Our Lady of La Salette. Taking advantage of the arrival of a priest in the confessional, we fulfilled the requirements of the Jubilee. This good Father then left as if he had only come for our sakes. In the chancel of the basilica, on the Gospel side, we venerated the heart of the good Maximin, this boy without an education, but with a genuine humility which makes him so engaging, so loveable, and so deserving and exemplary.

     The stations of the way of the Cross, which ascends right up to the sculptured group representing the last phase of the apparition, were still buried under a metre of snow, and the solitude aided our meditation along the way of the Cross of Marie-Marthe Chambon, to the noise of the water flowing from its miraculous source.

     Then we ascended Gargas, climbing the slope that lay directly ahead of us. Once we had reached the summit, at 2600 metres, we clung to the Cross to avoid experiencing vertigo. All around us extended, as far as the eye could see, snow-capped summits under an azure blue sky, and a topograph, probably made by the La Salette Fathers, allowed us  to identify the different summits and indicated the various missions of the Fathers throughout the world. We came racing back down at a gallop.

     Down below, a lady from Guadeloupe called out to Brother Joseph: «I would like to ask you something: tell Jesus from me that I love Him!» Which was something we would not fail to do as we said our Rosary for these pilgrims. But our principal intention remained for the Church, our Holy Church, that the Holy Father would make an act of repentance for a century of indifference to the Immaculate Heart of the Virgin Mary. We knelt before the Virgin in tears, reciting the joyful mysteries, and a priest who was saying his rosary also knelt down and joined us.

     Certainly, reading the account of these apparitions, one does not discover the exquisite delicacy or the virtue of the seers of Fatima, nor the same queenly bearing of the Blessed Virgin.

     «Do you say your prayers, my children?
     – Not very much, Madame.»

     The throne of Our Lady consists of a pile of stones arranged by the children. Nevertheless, the bronze statues seemed very beautiful under such a blue sky, and we contemplated our Mother in tears, hoping to console Her for the ingratitude and contempt shown towards Her Immaculate Heart.

     We continued our journey, after we had taken a few photographs. En route, we caught sight of the chapel of the Canadians who had come to Rome in 1950 to celebrate the day on which the dogma of the Assumption was proclaimed. They had died in this very place, their aeroplane having crashed on their return home. It was as if they had been taken up to Heaven by Her whom they had come to honour.

     As we headed towards Grenoble, we passed by La Mure, the birthplace of Saint Pierre-Julien Eymard. We made a pilgrimage to the church in which his baptism and his funeral had both been held, a beautiful Romanesque church which would have been destroyed if the villagers had not intervened to save it.

     On the next day we visited the Trappist Abbey of Our Lady of Chambarand in order to make a pilgrimage to Brother Gabriel Mossier, whom our Father has given one of our brothers in Canada as his patron. I do not know whether you have heard of him. This soldier of the 1870 war had fought at Gravelotte with the greatest bravery and was very attached to military honours! But the Blessed Virgin drew him by an interior voice, and he entered the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of Chambarand.

     There he set himself to overcome his bad character by «taking the bull by the horns», but as the months passed his fight was unsuccessful. One day, when he was feeling the deepest darkness closing in on him, he heard the Lord saying to him: «Love Mary!» His love of the Blessed Virgin immediately revealed itself in his life as a solitary monk. «With the Blessed Virgin, he would say, life became a pleasure train to Heaven.» By “pleasure” train he was referring to trains dedicated to tourism. With the Blessed Virgin, life became a train of chaste pleasure! «If people had experienced what the love of Mary really is, there would be no more sin, no more hell! The Child Jesus is so beautiful, the Virgin is so beautiful! These two splendours enhance each other through their mutual reflection. Mary is the living ostensory of Jesus, His divine monstrance. The arms of Mary are the throne from which the King of Heaven receives His very first homage.» He wanted to die in order to see Her: «When will I be allowed to enjoy Thee, O Lord, and to see with mine own eyes without obstacle, without enigma... the most gracious Queen of Heaven and of the universe, Mary Immaculate, the ravishing ravisher of souls, the sovereign of my heart.»

     Today, in this monastery inhabited by about sixty Trappist monks, we could no longer find any memento of Dom Gabriel. «What a great pity», as the Curé of Ars would have said with sadness. And in fact, after we had made a pilgrimage to Notre-Dame de Fourvière and had taken lunch with some CRC friends, Ars was our next stop, and far from being the least. But I will tell you about this another time. There we prayed specially for you, that the Blessed Virgin may come to help you in the difficulties of your parish ministry.

Brother Scubilion of the Queen of Heaven     

Letter of the PHALANGIST COMMUNION

TO GAIN THE JUBILEE, FOR THE CHURCH !

     Echoing the preaching of our Father, Brother Bruno wrote in the Letter to the Phalange of 17 January 2000: «We must make the resolution, as Roman Catholics of the Counter-Reform, not only to avoid deriding this Jubilee, but to fulfil all its acceptable prescriptions: confession, communion, prayer and penance, specially for the Holy Father, and pilgrimages.»

     Deeply disturbed by the ceremony which opened the jubilee in Rome, an esoteric ceremony (cf. CRC n^o 326, January 2000, p. 4), our Father applied himself this winter 2000 to rediscovering the spirit and the fervour with which the saints used to preach and fulfil the practices of the Jubilee, such as Saint Vincent de Paul. Let us quote what this apostle of charity said to his spiritual daughters in his talk on 14 December 1656:

     «This word jubilee means joy and jubilation, and a year of jubilee means a year of rejoicing. Now, this jubilee, my dear sisters, can be understood in two different ways: that of the old law and that of the new. The jubilee of the old law was a year of rejoicing and of rest for everyone; nothing was done in that year; even the animals were not made to work, and the land neither; and so everyone was at peace. Those who had borrowed money had their debts cancelled, and goods which had been sold were returned to the people to whom they belonged, in the way that God Himself had prescribed; slaves were set free; in a word everything was liberated. So there was every reason to rejoice. It was a great source of consolation this year of jubilee.

     «The jubilee of the new law of Our Lord Jesus Christ has the same effects as the first, and it is a great source of consolation for every Christian, but not of temporal consolation, as was that of the old law which only took the body into account. It now takes the soul into account. The same consolations that the jubilee brought temporally, we now receive in this year of jubilee spiritually. How is that? It is because those who were debtors of their passions, those who were in the service of the evil one for having obeyed his temptations, will, after having gained the jubilee, be delivered from all these things. And just as slaves were set free, in the same way those who are the slaves of the devil will be set free through the grace they will receive and will be returned to the freedom of the children of God. And so, my dear sisters, it is a great source of consolation to recover the goods of the soul that one had lost, to be restored to the grace of God and to see oneself recognised as His child; for the jubilee does all this, through the merits of the blood of the Son of God, which are applied to us and by means of which we recover our rights as children of God and possess His kingdom, in such wise that He regards us with love and treats us as His children and as His beloved.»

     To gain the plenary indulgence, personally or for one who is dead, such might spontaneously be our first aim in fulfilling the prescriptions of the Jubilee. Here again, it is useful to seek out the exhortations of Saint Vincent and to become permeated with his spirit. On learning of the holy intentions of Pope Alexander VII, he recommended that the Jubilee exercises be practised with a truly apostolic spirit. Let us listen to him again:

     «The Jubilee is not so much for us as for the Church. The Pope, taking into account that the Church is composed of many members, which do but make one body, and that, among the faithful, there are so many bad priests who dishonour her and so many bad Christians who behave so wickedly… the Pope considered it necessary for the whole people to betake themselves to prayer and to ask God to convert all sinners, to sanctify Holy Church and to purge her of the many heresies which have afflicted her for thirteen hundred years. And may God grant that what we are seeing today may be more than just the beginning! This is what we must ask God: that everyone should acquit himself of the duties of his state of life, that priests should behave in a holy way, that the parish priests should carry their responsibilities out well, and that every community should live in the perfection God that demands of it.»

     In times past, the «intentions of the Pope», for which one prayed in order to gain the plenary indulgence, included the exaltation of Holy Church, the propagation of the faith, the extirpation of heresy and schism, the conversion of sinners, peace and concord between Christian princes, and all the other needs of Christendom. Today, in our times of apostasy, after “the act of repentance” on 12 March, we wish to work and pray above all for the glorification of Holy Church. And it is this intention which our friends confided to the tender Heart of the Immaculate Virgin during our recent pilgrimages to Pontmain, Moure, Fatima, La Salette and Paris.