Tome I. Octobre
1956 à juin 1962.
Lettres 1 à 110
Ce volume comprend des Lettres d'édification spirituelle, des Lettres d'enseignement, des Lettres d'enseignement théologique et de controverse contre le progressisme qui constituent une série sous-titrée: "Le mystère de l'Église et l'Antichrist" (1 à 25).
Tome II. Juillet
1962 à décembre 1964.
Lettres 111 à 192
"Le mystère de l'Église et l'Antichrist" (suite et fin: 26 à 32) – Lettres de morale politique (à propos de l'indépendance de l'Algérie) – Enseignement théologique et controverse contre le réformisme conciliaire et papal
Tome III.
Janvier 1965 à mai 1966.
Lettres 193 à 228
La grande controverse contre le MASDU: "Mouvement d'Animation Spirituelle de la Démocratie Universelle" – 4e session et clôture du Concile Vatican II. Chronique et commentaire – Le voyage du pape Paul VI à l'ONU – Commentaire de notre CREDO catholique.
Tome IV. Juin
1966 à septembre 1967.
Lettres 229 à 252
La supplique au Cardinal Ottaviani – La préhistoire du MASDU: de Lammenais à Paul VI – Alerte au catéchisme! – Étude et critique de l'encyclique Populorum Progressio – L'étrange pèlerinage du Pape à Fatima
Chronological
Summary 1956-1963
from Letter 231 addressed to Cardinal Ottaviani in 1966
Letters of Spirituality, October 1956 - October 1956 (1 to 57)
"I began to write the spiritual letters ... for about fifty people for whom I had agreed to act as director of conscience. The first letter expresses my intentions, which have not varied: to make known the splendours of the divine Love and to help with the sanctification of souls (Letter 1). I undertook this work quietly, keenly aware of my own unworthiness and mediocrity (Letter 31), because it seemed to me to be a priestly duty, regardless of the priest's personal wretchedness. If Your Lordship wishes to know the family and religious tradition from which I came, he will read Letter 165, on the death of my father.
These modest little letters quietly followed one after the other for three years, expressing nothing polemical or political. That should be sufficient to dismiss the many slanderous accusations, which would have one believe that I have placed my priesthood at the service of sectarian bitterness and passion or of political interests. There is no propaganda or controversy to be found in them… No one will dispute that, in this domain, I simply echoed the Doctors of Catholic Mysticism and the great spirituality illustrated by the Saints of the Church. Above all, I commented on Holy Scripture and celebrated the liturgical feasts.
Letters of Theology, October 1959 - May 1963 (58 to 141)
The faith and piety of my friends seemed to me to be gravely imperilled by the sudden and tumultuous rekindling of the old modernist heresy, after the death of His Holiness Pius XII. It is then that I undertook the systematic study of this new naturalist, revolutionary religion in a series entitled "The Mystery of the Church and Antichrist". I think it was from that moment that I defined the essence of this subversion of Christianity from within, or rather its retrograde movement back towards Judaic, carnal and worldly spirituality. For four years, I denounced its various but converging operations, dogmatic, moral, liturgical and pastoral. I did not know that I was describing in advance a certain supposed conciliar aggiornamento. The scandal and disarray of Catholics, faced with this powerful subversion, were such that I was requested on all sides to be sent these Letters, to sustain the shaken faith of many. In the autumn of 1963, the number of my correspondents had reached a thousand.
During all that time, I never received the least criticism of a doctrinal nature nor any call to order. May your Lordship please note the dates. It was before the great conciliar upheaval. Criticism of the Church, destruction and novelty were daily growing more scandalous, but they remained bereft of all authority and legality. It was always the same error, condemned by Pius IX in the Syllabus, by Saint Pius X in Pascendi and the Letter on the Sillon, by Pius XII in Humani Generis. It was still officially "the meeting place of all the heresies" and the contradiction of our faith. It is worthy of note that I said and demonstrated this without receiving any contradiction or refutation from the Magisterium. So it was still very much the Truth in 1963.
3. Letters of Political Morality, May - August 1962 (109 to 116)
In the meanwhile, the atrocious drama of French Algeria had reached its paroxysm of injustice and horror. Your Lordship will note that until then the painful and tragic events of a revolutionary war, in which the best of my friends, soldiers of the French Army, fell amidst general indifference and betrayal, had occupied second place, if not in my heart and mind, at least in my Letters. Only in the Letters for the New Year did I appraise our hopes and our misfortunes, but only from the perspective of the Church’s freedom and sacred interests, the future of our civilisation and the independence and prosperity of our Country. I would not have dealt with this subject in my Letters, were it not for the fact that bishops, priests, journalists, and directors of Catholic works had taken sides – as though in the name of the Church, but in contempt of well established moral principles and against the people of the Right – in favour of the Revolution and the Establishment, monstrously associated against innocent populations doomed to ruin, despair and death.
I could not remain indifferent to the tears and blood of my brothers and fellow countrymen. But, more than anything, I could not stand by in silence and see Christian morality corrupted through the lies provoked by fear and servility. The texts of my Letters of those times remain and they testify to the permanence of a human and Christian morality in the face of political and ecclesiastical authorities gone over to the service of the world Revolution. From this complicity was born a new evangelical morality, which is the negation of all political order and of all human justice. One day, Your Supreme Congregation will have to answer solemnly whether all legitimate defence of the besieged Christian West is to be condemned and whether all revolutionary activity is intrinsically sacred, even in its worst atrocities and legitimate in its barbarity. In the meanwhile, Christ is in agony in the millions of innocent victims of the Revolution and still more in His Gospel and His moral Teaching, shamefully corrupted in His very Church.
4. Letters on the Church, October 1963 - July 1964 (153 to 175)
Having been deprived of all ministry on 15 September 1963, I was able to devote my whole attention to the events of the Council, as they were made public. I commented on them, without any claim to infallibility or any kind of personal magisterium, and without meriting, moreover, the constantly repeated reproach of sectarianism, pessimism or rebellion against the Church. During those crucial years I proved my firm confidence in the Church and even an excessive and naive esteem for the men of the Church. I loved John XXIII (50), I placed great hopes in the Council (92); although I was worried, I still believed a miracle to be possible (118, 120). After Pacem in terris, I left for Rome to calm my anxiety, and returned a year later in an attempt to understand. The Letters written on those occasions (143-146; 173-174) expressed my piety, love and devotion for Rome and for the Vicar of Jesus Christ. I have nothing to retract from those letters. Finally, after abundant warnings – including even a mysterious sign – as to what the new pontificate would be like, I wrote two Letters on this subject in which the truth of the information is accompanied by confidence and docility (148-149).
In the debates of the Council, I wished only to see – and for longer than reason permitted (125-126, 137!) – the typical assaults from men and from the devil that normally precede the great manifestations of the Church’s infallible Wisdom. In total freedom, I confronted the cruel truth of the facts with an ardent faith and an invincible confidence, which is doubtless what drew to me thousands of friends, whose numbers increased in that year from 1,000 to 6,000…
Alas, the moment came when our confidence was all too openly mocked for a sincere man still to be able to nurture his friends on empty illusions.
5. The Letters of Major Controversy, July 1964 - December 1965 (176 to 220)
The new Christianity of Blondel, Maritain and Congar is not ours. But it has become the Church’s Charter according to the new encyclical Ecclesiam suam. Thereafter, I devoted myself to the criticism, in the noble, strong sense of this term, that is to say, to the necessary discernment, in the Acts and Deeds of this new Pastoral, between what was opinion and what remained as teaching, between what was traditional and what was innovatory. I occupied myself with the essential. I demonstrated the absurd dichotomy of Congar’s evolutionist ecclesiology – which You yourself condemned in 1950, I remember (176-178). I analysed the unresolved dualism of the encyclical Ecclesiam suam (180-181). The third session obliged me to warn my friends that suspect or even absurd theories were circulating among the majority and could end by figuring in the Acts of the Council (184-186). I had to recall the fact that a Pope can fail in his duty as Pastor and supreme Doctor, as did Honorius (188), and that likewise a Council can abuse Christians over the authority of its decrees (212). The terrifying progress of error, the all powerful might of a minority of speakers with no respect for the Church and her Tradition, the moral violence flung at the "glorious minority" of Fathers faithful to their Faith, all this topical news led me to raise my tone, to redouble the force of my demonstrations and the violence of my invective. It was necessary to shake the dismal apathy of the faithful and to uphold the resistance of the small number of bishops left without support or echo anywhere in the world (Letters 189-190, 213-219).
I did not lament or fall into a rage: I explained. I went back to the forgotten, falsified history of that already old manoeuvre of subversion in the Church (211). I followed its plot, at the Council itself (195). I defined this polymorphous Progressivism (172) and this world to which it wishes to attach the Church, like a servant ambitious to become mistress (197). Finally I mercilessly challenged these false brethren and laid bare the project they were working so hard to achieve, a Judaeo-Masonic project adopted by their reformism: the constitution of a universal religious organisation, whose whole spiritual energy would be placed in the service of a "New World to be constructed" on the ruins of the other, in accordance with the Socialist-Marxist plan and all for the cult of Man. The MASDU, the ... "Movement for the Spiritual Animation of Universal Democracy" (197-208). It was apostasy and idolatry masquerading as a world religion; it was the ideological replica of the political UNO and the cultural UNESCO; it was the revenge of Lamennais and Sangnier; it was the triumph of Teilhard and Maritain – all proclaimed Urbi et Orbi by "the Church in Council"!
Alas, I was not dreaming. Speeches and documents abounded daily to verify the tragic accuracy of my analyses. It finally became apparent on 7 and 8 December 1965 – the days of the Council’s closure – that a party of Churchmen had prevailed at the Council. It was clear that they intended to launch us into the Babel of a world without Christ, without Grace and without Cross, a secular, libertarian, democratic and socialist world based on a new faith "in Man, in Liberty, in Peace". For the launching of this new pastoral direction, it was a matter of necessity to silence our indignant protests. I learned that, on the last day of this fatal Council, a group of bishops had decided that I was to be reduced to silence by some kind of interdict. But from this ardent controversy the question remains as to whether it is possible to continue to occupy high office in the Church when one has decided to serve two masters, God and the World, Christ and Belial, associating with the Catholic faith a faith in man that is contradictory to it, and whether such innovators have the power to exclude from the society of the faithful all those who refuse to bend the knee before "the Abomination of Desolation set up in the Holy Place".
6. Letters on the Credo, 1966 (221 to 229)
Within the narrow limits of a controlled freedom (220), how could I make myself more useful than to recall the unchangeable certitudes of our faith? I was allowed to comment on the Credo, on condition, however, that the teaching of the eternal truth was not made to appear too obvious a refutation of the errors of this perverse and incredulous generation. At a time when complete licence and power are left to the logically-minded reformists to draw the conclusions from these terrible five years by announcing that the doctrine and practice of the New Church are the negation of the centuries-old Tradition, and to take up arguments against her infallibility and holiness, I for my part wish to live through this New Pentecost, this Second Reformation, exactly as the Church has engendered me and commanded me, by singing our Catholic Credo, always the same, "Semper idem", according to Your Lordship’s own motto.