"Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age." Faithful to Christ’s order and impelled by the Holy Spirit, the Church must proclaim the Gospel to the whole world; she must baptise all nations, teaching them to observe the commandments and counsels of the Lord. She thus has a sovereign right and an absolute duty to make herself known everywhere and thereby extend Christendom to the whole world, making of all nations the kingdom of God. The following represent the three great works, concerted and convergent, which liberals and revolutionaries have horribly set in opposition to each other, and which they have calumniated and in the end cynically betrayed.
1. The mission of preaching the Gospel has always been and must remain the function and charism of an elite body in the Church, admired and cherished by all good Christians, aided by their prayers and financial aid, and trained for this dangerous apostolic task that is constantly dominated by the thought of martyrdom: the missionaries. The Saviour’s charity for souls still lying in darkness urges them on, just as it animates the Pope and bishops who send them to distant lands, giving them every power to save souls and win nations for Christ.
2. Christian colonisation is the normal consequence, in the temporal order, of evangelisation. Under whatever form it takes, colonisation is unavoidable and incontestably providential. It is necessitated and called for by the immense needs of the pagans as they start living in Christendom, even more than it is desired by those Christians who have come from afar to establish themselves among them or to rule them. This is a constant fact of history and quite contrary to the chimeras of a false, egalitarian and subversive charity, whose most obvious effect has been the destruction of the new areas of Christendom and the annihilation of the missions, the real target behind their hatred of colonisation.
Spiritual zeal has always been preceded, accompanied and followed by a temporal, personal and collective charity, which establishes political and economic ties and institutions that are stamped with the Christian spirit and are to this extent happy and blessed by God.
3. The crusade protects and secures both mission and colonisation. It is a defence for established Christendom, a threat to tyrants who would oppose the Gospel and persecute the missionaries and their new Christians. It is sometimes decreed in order to destroy persecuting and enslaving powers who prohibit the preaching of the Gospel and the peaceful establishment of Christian morals by exerting a sanguinary terror over defenceless peoples.
The Christian crusade is a sacred right, a right of war over which the Sovereign Pontiff is master.
The phalangist considers that the time is not far off when Antichrist’s power will fail definitively and when his rationalist and revolutionary Counter-Church will fall. Amid what catastrophes and at what price will this gigantic collapse take place? Only God knows. The disciple of Christ has learned from Him that he is not to trouble himself over this as he awaits the advent of a new Christendom, or rather the advent of a new epoch of Christendom finally universal and victorious over all her enemies.
1. After the capture of Jewish Jerusalem (70) and the fall of pagan Rome (476), a first form of Christendom was gradually constructed in both East and West, which lasted a thousand years. This was "mediaeval" Christendom, the brilliant triumph of the evangelical Christian faith, order, and civilisation over every barbarous power. After the defection of the schismatic East and the fall of Constantinople (1453), and then the appalling break of the Protestant Reformation (1517), the Church of the Renaissance and of the Counter-Reformation maintained and extended to the whole world the Catholic faith and the Church’s discipline, using force against Christ’s raging enemies, and exercising an incomparable charm over the pagan nations irresistibly drawn to her light.
2. The Mystery of iniquity of the modern age is unfolding, paradoxically and scandalously, in the centre of Christendom at the very moment of her most marvellous growth. It is from her most faithful and most dynamic centre, from the Latin world this time, that heresy, discord, and revolution against the Catholic faith and against all human order are rearing their heads.
The Church is at the mercy of those of her sons who have emancipated themselves from her divine authority, and they themselves are engaged in fratricidal conflict. On the one side naturalist optimism and on the other side inhuman pessimism have seized the last stronghold of free Christendom, which they argue over and ransack. Catholics are delivered up to their two enemies, to two barbaric powers, to two current scourges, engaged in a world war: pragmatic materialism inspired by Calvin in the West and dialectical materialism inspired by Luther in the East, both subversive, both enemies of Christendom and drawn up against God! What fearful explosions we are about to witness!
3. The collapse of these ideologies and practices – inhuman, catastrophic and aberrant – will come about through their own fault, through their total lack of wisdom, goodness and beauty. Then the billions of human beings who inhabit the earth – going beyond the myths and customs of a collapsed paganism and disillusioned with the false dogmas of an atheistic materialist humanism, both Eastern and Western – will turn their eyes towards Christ.
The Latin Church is incontestably the place of the most universal Christian life and faith, as much for its doctrine and multiform holiness as for its application to temporal realities and its extension to the entire world.
1. The first stage in a Christian renaissance and expansion is only conceivable through a "reform in the head and the members" of the Roman Church, now infested with the demons of the Reformation and of the Revolution. The men of the Church must first reform themselves according to the Holy Spirit of the Church. They must desist from reforming the Holy Church in accordance with their own spirit, which is wholly infected with modernism and progressivism. It is from Rome that the signal for this conversion must come. And it is in France, the eldest daughter of the Church, whose place has never been taken by any other people, that this appeal must first be heard, so that from France it may pass to the Latin European Catholic nations, whose colonial and civilising expansion was the great instrument of Christ the King in the world.
The Catholic Counter-Reformation in the 20th century has been working at this renaissance of truth and holiness for twenty years. Already it has defined the dogmatic requirements and envisaged the canonical means for this renaissance. It is necessary and sufficient "that God give us a good Catholic pope" in the spirit of the holy Popes Pius IX and Pius X. But it would be good that this return be made in solemnity and with the extraordinary infallibility of another Council, a Vatican III of reparation, so that the enormity of error and anarchy now prevailing are answered by the immense splendour of the holy unity and apostolic catholicity of Rome, at last proclaimed and restored.
Then the Latin Church will spontaneously generate – as she has done all through the centuries of her long history – a multitude of saints, scholars and heroes. Immense regions of the earth, currently pagan or Muslim, in Asia, Africa or Latin America, will thereby be powerfully drawn to the light of the Gospel.
2. The second stage will be the return to Roman unity of the Eastern schismatics through their full and sincere recognition of the primacy of the Pope and by their reconciliation with their Arab, Greek and Slav brethren who have valiantly remained united to the See of Peter. The beautiful and rich tradition of the East, paralysed for almost a thousand years as a result of Constantinople’s unfortunate separation from the universal Church, will return to the Common Mother, enriching her with the mystical, liturgical and monastic splendours of "the Church of John", which in turn will rediscover her apostolic life and radiance in "the Church of Peter and Paul".
The Eastern Church will recover her true place in the concert of Rome’s universal government and will resume her missionary work of conquering the East, according to the promises of Our Lady of Fatima, after "the conversion of Russia".
1. The conversion of the Germanic and Nordic peoples from their Lutheranism, and of the Anglo-Saxon peoples from their Puritan, Anglican Calvinism etc., will present considerable difficulties to Catholicism. Their original private judgement has given up its place to two intellectual attitudes that are absolutely alien and contrary to the Catholic faith: liberal subjectivism, generally resulting in a pragmatism without dogma or morality, and totalitarian idealism, which invents a series of fanatical ideologies and inhuman collectivisms.
The conversion of the Protestant nations to the Catholic Creed and to Roman order, and their re-integration in Christendom, will therefore be very difficult. On the other hand the effect of their conversion will be decisive if one thinks of the unparalleled earthly power of these Western nations. "Churches of Paul", as they have been called, lands of the Gentiles to be more exact, their renunciation of the various errors of Protestantism and their reunion with the Churches of Peter and of John will bring about a sudden explosion of life and missionary activity, heralding the expansion of Christendom to the entire world.
However, the place occupied in the Anglo-Saxon world by Judaism and its governmental instrument, freemasonry, means that the conversion of these countries will be subordinate to the conversion of the Jewish people to Christ, their Messiah and eternal King – a much more mysterious conversion.
2. For the principal and most profound drama, running through our whole history, remains that of Jewish unbelief. This unbelief is an effect of hatred and of blindness, which has given birth to all the heretical and schismatic Counter-Churches, but it is also a mystery of election awaiting its final fulfilment (Rom 11.15).
It is doubly certain that the conversion of the Jewish people to Christ will herald the worldwide triumph of the Cross, and doubtless this will be at the time of the general apostasy of the nations – but we are in that time now –, because the most resistant and best organised nation will have ceased its opposition and because the Jewish people will necessarily give Christ the strongest testimony, coming as it does from the most authoritative adversary, the only one to have been the depositary of the true word of God which, in their perfidy, they claim as their glory, whilst refusing to listen to it.
3. The phalangist will therefore wisely and uncompromisingly fight talmudic Judaism, a religion that is antichrist in its essence, and the Jewish racial power, the sworn enemy of Christendom. He will do this without thereby denying biblical Judaism, the original source and indisputable guarantee of our religion. Nor will he reject the Jewish people, the bearers of an immense hope for our own salvation and for that of the entire world, when they are finally converted, as the Scriptures have foretold.
They are a people not to be annihilated but converted, not to be hated or despised but loved and untiringly called to Christ’s Church, the mother of all men for their salvation.
In the fullness of his faith, the phalangist knows, adores and loves our heavenly Father through Jesus Christ in the worship that the one true Church offers Him in the Holy Spirit. The phalangist is already in the way of eternal life, to which he was introduced through baptism and of which the Eucharist is the food of holiness and immortality.
1. This religion is the essential of his thoughts and of his activity: it is a theocentrism, a theandry, a theocracy, a mystical aesthetic, summed up in the words of the Apostle, "Our conversation is in Heaven"; yes, his behaviour is heavenly. His essential quest is that wisdom whose wonderful fruit he savours, the beauty of a religion lived fully and of cosmic breadth, the only true salvation hoped for. "Beauty will save the world", said Dostoyevsky; and indeed it is the outpouring of God’s glory into His mystical Body that is the ultimate beauty of the world, the praise of glory, the reason for the Christian’s joy and thanksgiving. For, in the words of Saint Irenaeus, "The glory of God is living man, and the life of man is the vision of God."
2. To admire this glory in all its ecclesial, social, human and cosmic perfection, to protect it and enrich it with new beauties, such is the work of hallowing the divine Name. It is the combined mysterious fruit of God’s gracious power and of man’s virtue, a miraculous poem in which our heavenly Father is well pleased.
It is here that the phalangist receives his first and principal vocation, both earthly and immortal, overflowing with joy and fruitfulness. All his other activities and thoughts flow from this Unum Necessarium and they all lead back to it, finally coming to rest in the fullness of the seventh temporal day and the seventh eternal day in the heart of God. Then all will be sacred art, the divine harmony of restored creation, in which every vocation will find its true meaning and worth, beyond faith and hope, beyond truth and goodness, in the hyperbolic beauty of Love.
1. The phalangist finds in his mystical faith and in his aesthetic contemplation the reason for his hope. Sustained by this hope, he adheres to and participates in the immense divine drama which, in its epic of a redeemed world, unfolds the action of an intense tragedy carried out by the incarnate Wisdom, Jesus Christ crucified, and endlessly pursued until the full gestation of this work of grace and until the full accomplishment of the redemptive plan in His mystical Body, the Church. Through his confirmation, through the sacraments of Order or marriage, through vows and various Christian commitments, which constitute so many sacramentals, each phalangist is aware of having received, in this continued creation of Christ’s kingdom, a mission, a function, a gift. Final Heaven is promised to Christ’s disciple, glory to God’s Church, and a future for Christendom, but still the heritage is to be taken possession of through perseverance. In order that His Kingdom may come, the monk becomes a missionary, the baptised Christian becomes a confirmed militant, and sometimes the priest, the leader, or the humblest phalangist finds himself an isolated soldier in God’s cause amid the general fray.
2. The phalangist hopes for – that is, he confidently proclaims, discerns and prepares for – the Lord’s triumph, the coming of the Kingdom of Christ the King in the world. The wonders of God are so superior to anything that man can accomplish without God that mankind’s universal, axial progress is to be found nowhere else but in the coming of Christ’s Kingdom, which will render all our Towers of Babel obsolete and powerless. Nothing good, true or beautiful can be done elsewhere to ruin our hope in Christ’s kingdom; on the other hand, every success leads to it. Whatever rises against this hope will perish – empires, religions, gnoses, aestheticisms. This hope alone remains and spreads, announcing the eternal kingdom.
3. Moreover, seeing that Christ the Pantocrator is directing history, the phalangist feels protected, oriented and supported. Having been thrown into the heat of the battle, into the strongest part of the current, he feels called upon to witness magnificently to Christ the Conqueror.
The Phalange to which he belongs, animated by such a hope, will not waste time lamenting the present period and regretting that the past is no longer, but it will keep its eye on the future, its plans for civilisation to hand. It must implore the Holy Spirit for an ever more certain knowledge of what He inspires in the Church for her glorious advancement. And then it must set to work with joy.
The phalangist finds in his keen faith and hope the light and the strength of his fraternal charity, the resources to cope with his harsh temporal existence, and the first fruits of his eternal happiness. For love alone remains.
1. And so the goal of his daily life is the perfection of the Christian virtues, the effect of divine grace ceaselessly renewed, given and increased through the sacraments of Penance and the Eucharist, through the sacramentals, through prayer and the works of mercy. His constant ideal is to progress in the love of God, faithful to the Church, dedicated to his brothers, in peace with all, whether he himself be rich or poor, in sickness or in health, surrounded by friends or cruelly isolated, in tranquillity or trials, honoured or outlawed, all according to the will of God. At the hour willed by God, he will finally die in Christ, as a son of the Church, fortified by the sacrament of extreme unction for eternal life.
Philosophy and the sciences, politics and economics, technology, culture, the arts and leisure are all ordained to this charity. It alone suffices.
2. Mysteriously, his abandonment to the will of God takes him even further. It pushes him to go out and meet what is most contrary to his immediate and apparent good – what is most against his earthly joy – and to have a greater desire for poverty, sickness, failures, tribulations, separations, persecutions for the sake of justice, and martyrdom for Christ!
The glory of God and the victory of the Lord Jesus, far from suffering by such reverses, appear on the contrary to invite them. "Was it not necessary that Christ should suffer these things and so to enter into His Glory?" The phalangist attains the supreme wisdom of Love by accepting the kind of future and death that God wills for him and even now to die each day, so that it is no longer he who lives, but Christ who lives in him. From his youth, the phalangist will accept the sacrifice of his life, if God so wills, for Christ, the Church, and Christendom, and for his country, his king, and indeed the least of his human brethren.
3. The Queen of the Phalange, for this reason, is the Blessed Virgin Mary, of the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart, who in Her life wonderfully joined the humility of a perfect virginity to the glory of the most eminent maternity, and who kept in Her heart all the joys of the love of God, Her Spouse and her Son, unto the apex of grief, the summit of Calvary. Having become the co-redemptrix of the human race, the universal mediatrix of all graces, She is the mother and model of Christian souls, the Woman of the Apocalypse, who announces Paradise.