There is a great difference and a mortal opposition between the Church and the world considered as a stranger or a rebel to the Gospel, subject to the "Prince of this World", Satan – this world which has not yet been conquered by love and vanquished by the power of its eschatological Lord and King, Jesus Christ. But what would the Church be if she were not implanted in the world ? if she did not have to be so implanted ? if she were to be a purely spiritual community, a religious bond without any material support or any social institution ? But it is normal and necessary – and indeed ordained by Jesus Christ – that the Church assume all the realities of earthly life, families, peoples and kingdoms.
The world of the Gospel, freed from Satan’s tutelage and entirely governed by Christ’s law, is "Christendom".
1. The phalangist rejects the disincarnation or the disengagement of the Church. For him Church and Christendom are the same land, the same cities, the same peoples – at one moment considered under the aspect of their temporal communities, necessities, traditions, activities and aims, and at another moment under the aspect of their religious organisations, life and destiny. Without the Church, Christendom cannot for long be maintained in its order, virtue and beauty – as we see today where it has been cruelly abandoned by her – for it is the Church that provides its supernatural dimension, its soul, its vigour and its framework. Without Christendom – as in times of persecution and in the current period of liberalism and anarchy – the Church is in a state of affliction, and despite miracles of continual heroism, she is exposed to consumption and death.
2. The phalangist will not allow himself to desire a Christian world lacking submission and devotion to the Church which inspires, nourishes, and even exercises a necessary authority over it. Nor will he dream of a purely spiritual "informal" Church without any communication, concord or concordat with temporal society, its authorities and laws, since such fantasies only serve to expose both the Church and secular society to ruin.
3. The phalangist keeps a reasoned and strong attachment to Christendom, to its idea, its past glory, its present reality, and its entire global agenda. He will not tolerate any perfidious criticisms of it: that it is, for example, a ghetto, closed in on itself and jealous of its own spiritual and temporal goods. He knows that the Christendom he loves derives its legitimacy, its life and its future only through the mysterious sap of divine grace, of which the Roman Catholic Church is the sole dispenser: a Church of order, to be sure! But the Church could not be the inspirer and animator of all human order, were she to cease to be primarily the Church of grace, the Church of eternal salvation, whose heart is elsewhere, far above the things of this world, in Heaven with her Spouse, Jesus Christ, to Whom she ceaselessly raises and leads her children.
"The Church is Jesus Christ spread and communicated" (Bossuet). She is, therefore, in every epoch the realisation of what God, in His foreknowledge and predestination, had fixed in accordance with the mysterious design of His wisdom. From her foundations down to our day, in her highs and her lows, in the merits and the crimes of her members, in her saints and her sinners, she is in the final analysis what God has willed her to be. Over and above His "signified will", the absolute norm revealed through His commandments, she is what was decreed from all time by "the will of His good pleasure", revealed in the actual course of events. Thus the Church is the visible manifestation of the glory of Christ in the world.
1. Despite this inseparable mixture of the divine wishes and the human acts of history, a mixture of good and evil, the Church – through the infallible "biological" assistance of the Holy Spirit – operates a perfect and instinctive discernment. By the steady refinement of her own experiences, she rejects what were human sins and errors, whilst retaining and canonising the gifts of the Holy Spirit that enriched her treasure and directed her tradition. Because of her constant association with truth and error, good and evil, saints and sinners, the Church can only survive and progress throughout the centuries by purifying herself of every stain and evil, and by recognising as gifts of the Holy Spirit – through a divination peculiarly her own – the beauty, goodness, and truth which make of her traditions and her Tradition – for they are all one – an exemplary norm for the present and for the centuries to come.
2. Consequently, the phalangist experiences a veneration and a jealous attachment for the past centuries of the Church and of Christendom, in which he sees, unlike all the frenzied revolutionaries and reformists, the very work of God, fashioned by His "two tireless hands", Christ and the Spirit, each a Paraclete. And he conceives of the future as the development of this ancient religion and civilisation, a development marked not only with the imprint of his wise and holy forebears, but with the imprint of God.
And so any theory of a necessary mutation of the Church or of a surpassing of Christendom leaves him cold, for he is convinced that such impatience and rebellion are inspired by the pride of Satan rather than by the Spirit of Christ.
Impatience, foolish dreams, revolutionary prophecy, then the kind of disappointment which leads implacably to apostasy – all find in Lamennais their matchless illustration. It was easy to foresee straightaway where his progressivism would lead him. For once it is admitted that Jesus, right down to our own days, has obtained and achieved nothing glorious in His Church through the power of His Spirit, then the necessary conclusion is that He is not God and that every effort inspired by Him is equally vain. Unless, that is, one judges oneself to be greater than Jesus Christ, and a true saviour and messiah!
1. To the progressivists afflicted by this revolutionary contagion, the holiness and apostolicity of the ancient, mediaeval, and classical Church appear all too imperfect to correspond to the divine mind and will. Arguing from the imperfections, the slowness, and the disorders of centuries past, and concluding that the Church has been radically unfaithful to the Spirit of Christ and to the inspiration of the early Christians, they reject the Church’s ancient institutions and her entire tradition. They then prophesy another future, a new age; they demand and prepare for a global reform of all institutions, a mystical revolution of the peoples roused by the Spirit, which will open the millennium, the age of the Holy Spirit, the new Pentecost, new heavens and a new earth.
2. But the substitution of these fantastical visions for the reality of tradition is the work of human minds and innovators who are more subject to error than anyone, discontents who are stubborn and ambitious. Following their own unchecked inspirations, they dare to decide what is essential and what is ancillary, what is good and what is bad, what is divine and what is human, what is obsolete and what is permanent! And in doing so, they cut into the very quick of a body and soul, the actual body and soul of the Church and Christendom! A dangerous surgery. And then in the free space left after so many excisions, the visionaries arrange their ideal creations, one more inhuman and arbitrary than the other, as they vie with each other to make them as foreign and as contrary as possible to everything seen and done in a detested past.
3. That which is done in disregard of tradition or against it, is done in disregard of the Spirit of God and against Him. It can only be something wretched. And so it is that the progressivists, who are so good at destroying the works of God and all their great past, turn out to be incapable of building any holy or lasting works. If one honours them, they end up living as parasites on a Christendom which they have worked to destroy. If, on the other hand, one thwarts them and prevents from causing harm, then they will go away like Lamennais, despairing of the Church, to end their days in the despair and darkness of apostasy.
It is a lamentable story, this Christian progressivism. As is the drama of so many priestly souls who have been led astray and ruined by it. It is this same progressivism which is the main driving force behind the conciliar and postconciliar upheaval of Vatican II!
Impatience with the world’s religious divisions and with the Church’s too narrow confines, produces damaging effects that are comparable to the progressivists’ impatience with the slowness of history and the Church’s longstanding imperfections.
1. To certain large-hearted moderns, of whom Jacques Maritain is typical, the unity and catholicity of mediaeval and classical Christendom – still as yet obscured and damaged by the Protestant Reformation – appeared too narrow, too intolerant, and ultimately unworthy of the Holy Spirit, who cannot be confined to such a ghetto nor stopped by any barrier! They therefore advocated "a new Christendom", one which would have greater breadth, openness, and universality by not being "sacral" but "profane". Instead of being the King of kings and the Lord of glory, Jesus Christ would be the servant of the world, and that incognito. Instead of presiding over the world as its "mother and mistress", the Church would merely be its servant, offering her Gospel as a discreet leaven, anonymous and invisible, in the dough of a pagan world.
2. This immense mutation – willed by the Spirit, announced by the signs of the times, and demanded by the modern world – would be accomplished by a "quiet revolution". Instead of being founded on faith in God and subject to the Roman Church, this new Christendom would be founded on faith in man, the basis of modern civilisation, and governed by a world democratic assembly. Christ’s Gospel, transposed into neutral terms, would correspond to the common denominator of all the ideologies and beliefs, formerly in competition but now convergent: the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Declericalised and secularised, Christendom would become the universal organisation of peoples, yesterday’s League of Nations and today’s United Nations Organisation, galvanising the peoples’ energies and their feeling of solidarity through the ideal of a world democracy, respectful of the dignity, liberty and equality of all men.
3. The phalangist rejects this fantasy straightaway. He smells the blasphemy in it. He sees a very thinly disguised apostasy in this bold substitution of the cult of man for the cult of God at the centre and summit of this so-called new Christendom. The Church is dragged down by the dethronement of her Spouse. As the soul of sacred Christendom, we behold her violently despoiled of her social historical body and prostituted to new masters, amongst whom international judaeo-freemasonry can be recognised in the front line.
Maritain’s Integral Humanism is a truly dark and satanic adventure which, together with Father Congar’s reformism, has become the second driving force of the conciliar and postconciliar subversion of Pope Paul VI and the Second Vatican Council.
From the beginning Satan has roused the pride of depraved men against God, against Christ and against His Church. Under his influence these rebels form "counter churches", which have the same structure, insofar as this is possible, but a contrary spirit. In our day these "counter churches" comprise plutocratic freemasonry, totalitarian racism, and atheistic communism. "Two loves have built two cities: love of God, to the contempt of self, and love of self to the contempt of God." (Saint Augustine)
1. In our apocalyptic times, truly perverse minds have claimed to consider as identical these two contradictions and have made the cult of Jesus Christ the basis for the cult of Man and the rights of God the justification for the rights of Man who makes himself God! That is the logical conclusion of the dreams of Lamennais, Sangnier and Maritain.
A prodigious reform of the Church is to lead her to enter the service of world revolution, whose goal is the advent of a universal democracy of justice and peace, founded on liberty, equality and fraternity.
2. The ideal pursued by the new Church is universal democracy and the liberation of peoples from all alienation for the reign of man. The means thereto is the spiritual animation of the masses through religions and cultural societies, which will inculcate this integral humanism into them. Each clerical body, each party according to its own cultural trappings and particular religious symbols, will join forces to form in everyone the same faith in man and so aid the coming of universal democracy.
3. The Christian Church, "the churches", will continue to exist – they have been promised a place of honour – thanks to their discreet but efficacious service in the cause of man and the conquest of the earth.
Accepting this new mission and filled with this new spirit for the building of this new kingdom of man, our misguided pastors wish to make of the Roman Catholic Church the most important and most powerful MOVEMENT FOR THE SPIRITUAL ANIMATION – by the transposition of Christian religious preaching into profane humanist terms – OF UNIVERSAL DEMOCRACY, where peace, justice and progress will guarantee the material and cultural well-being of each and every man. Pure religion, moreover, will still keep its sublime place – including even Eucharistic devotion, devotion to Our Lady, and Christic (or Buddhist) contemplation – but as an individual and cultural value!
This MASDU is the object of the accusation of heresy, schism, and scandal brought by us against Paul VI. It was the constant thought and essential work of that Pope and his Second Vatican Council.
1. This diabolical plan, whereby all religions, beginning with the Catholic Church, are united in the Movement for the Spiritual Animation of Universal Democracy, is the coming together of three perfidies, too long endured by the Church: Latin Progressivism, Anglo-Saxon Liberalism, and Germanic Modernism. In the modernist climate God and Christ lose Their objective reality and Their sovereign majesty. Under the influence of liberalism, the Church is opened to every religious conception, and the Holy Spirit, losing all personality, becomes a universal and multiform principle of illumination. Finally, under the impulse of reformist and revolutionary progressivism, the destiny of mankind passes from kings and princes, popes and bishops, to the people, the insurgents and the militants, and the joys and hopes of mankind fall away from the divine mysteries and turn to the coming of a new humanity on earth.
2. The reform of the Church in support of the world revolution is the prostitution of the Bride of Christ to the world of Satan. Such is the utopia at work beneath our eyes, like a cancer in the womb of the Church, a fatal bullet in the heart of Christendom, which must be extracted in order that life may return and that there may be a future.
3. The phalangist opposes this infernal MASDU with a twofold profession of faith, that of the Catholic Counter-Reformation and that of the French Counter-Revolution. He studies the currents of ideas which have led to this apostasy. He unmasks and denounces those responsible for this madness: philosophers and visionaries, politicians and demagogues, princes and pastors of the Church. He reveals their collusion with antichrist and anticlerical factions and with all the forces that hate Christendom. He notes the fruits of death brought about by this great mutation of the Church, the general retreat of Christendom betrayed under the blows of barbarians, the decadence of civilisation, the auto-destruction of the Church, the falling birth-rate, the death of the spirit, and the "white plague" of the West. He demands that justice and the full truth be brought to bear on this drama.
4. Hastening to rebuild and repopulate the City of God, he closes the parenthesis on this sinister epoch and consigns the MASDU to hell. He preserves his Christian faith, hope and charity, and he remains a devoted child of the Church, dedicated to maintaining her traditions. He fights on behalf of the Christendom which alone has made this world habitable, which has succeeded in making life happy and procures men’s eternal salvation throughout the vicissitudes of this temporal existence.
In the words of Our Lord, "Seek first the Kingdom of God and His justice, and the rest will be added unto you." The rest, namely, civilisation, order and peace, justice and prosperity.
The Church is everything that is divine in the world. All that is found to be divine in the world comes invisibly from her and already belongs to her. Christendom, which is the temporal extension of the Church, is God’s holy work in history. The incomparable past of Christian feats is the miraculous sign of the universal and eternal Covenant sealed by Christ with His Father on behalf of men for the world’s salvation. Anything that claims to supplement this is useless and uncertain or, more probably, satanic.
The phalangist, having shaken off the errors of our times, finds in the Church and in Christendom the happiness of paradise lost and regained, a foretaste of eternal life; it is the beginning of the Kingdom of God, whose completion is in Heaven.
1. Christendom's past serves us as a model and a rule. For it is there that God has done what He willed and what the future cannot substantially change, but only try to perfect. Whoever fails to see its beauty, goodness and truth scorns God, ignores Jesus Christ, cuts himself off from the Church and betrays Christendom. It is there that the phalangist finds his roots; he is moved by its long history and its great labours; he gathers up its teachings and loves to save its least traces.
2. Its present shows us men, peoples, cultures, traditions and values, all very diverse, which the phalangist appreciates according to the supreme criterion of their fidelity to the divine-human heritage of Christ and the Church, and according to the degree of their Christian impregnation and vitality. He loves them and helps them that much more if God, Christ and His Blessed Mother are honoured among them, better evidenced, more generously served and closely imitated.
3. The future must derive from this cult of the past and these present affinities. There is no question for the phalangist but to continue with this divine action, even if it means deploring the errors and weaknesses of men who have obscured the holiness and slowed down the growth of Christendom. On the other hand, he will not be troubled or scandalised by the humiliations, betrayals and persecutions which God has permitted throughout history in order that the Church and her saints may be configured to the sorrowful mysteries of Christ and His Blessed Mother.
In the same vein, faithful to the traditions, the phalangist hopes nevertheless to see with his own eyes the wonders foretold by so many prophecies: the universal triumph of the Church, the extension of Christendom to every nation, and the reign of Christ on earth.