The Christian Church has never ceased preaching to peoples submission to the authorities whose legitimacy comes from God, even though these be pagan, unjust or cruel. The loyalty of Christians towards the powers that be is so amazing that it has often, after many a persecution, earned them esteem, respect and finally liberty. To the extent that kings began to recognise the Church, so the Church brought them her enlightened assistance, forming with them an ever closer and more fruitful alliance. The Church aided them in their human role of maintaining order and peace, and they co-operated with the Church for the reign of Christ, the defence of the faith and the salvation of souls.
But when it comes to the status of States and their boundaries, to political regimes and the major choices of temporal life, the Church allows herself to be guided by circumstances in an empiricism stamped with supernatural confidence in Christ, the master of the world and human history.
1. The early Church, first centred in Jerusalem, and before long in Rome, freed herself from the imperialist, racist, theocratic conceptions of ancient Judaism, in order to establish herself as a universal, spiritual society, with no political designs, in the heart of the Roman Empire, whose authority she recognised without, however, accepting its idolatry.
The fall of Jerusalem and then the fall of pagan Rome, foretold by the Scriptures, were to free the Church from all politico-religious protection. She would then spread throughout the world, above every race and state.
2. For centuries, however, she would maintain, through force of habit, the idea of a universal Christian Empire whose emperor would be the replica in the temporal sphere of the Roman Catholic pontiff. It would take a thousand years of disappointments before the Church understood from her Lord, through the lesson of events, that the utopia of a hegemonic Holy Roman Empire would have to be abandoned as too dangerous for her freedom and for the freedom of the peoples, and that she would have to exist alone as the unique universal amidst the concert of the empires, nations, peoples and towns of Christendom.
3. And so was established for the future the clear distinction between the two powers – spiritual and temporal, both sovereign – of Church and State. The State however was established by God as the servant of the Church, receiving from her, in return, the recognition of its legitimacy and the spiritual and moral aid it needed to co-operate in the natural and supernatural good of their common subjects. Such, until our day, was "political augustinianism" with its "theory of the two swords".
It is Christendom that formed the nations – the European nations in the first place – by imparting wisdom to kings and morality to peoples.
1. During the centuries of the collapse of the Roman Empire and the barbarian invasions, the religion of Christ spread everywhere and was made available to everyone, Latins and Barbarians alike, without regard for their political or racial allegiance. Kings and war chiefs conquered countries, exchanged peoples, advanced and withdrew in a coming and going, in none of which the Church interfered. Together with the faith and Christian discipline, the Church maintained all the treasures of thought, order and civilisation that the peoples of the Empire had inherited from decadent Rome.
2. Before long, however, the Church recognised the de facto authority of the barbarian kings and consented to the division of the empire’s lands, which they had invaded, into so many kingdoms, more nominal than real, and ceaselessly changing hands, fortune and often religion. It is however from these kingdoms, through understanding and patience, that the Church succeeded in making stable, human communities, organised on the Roman model. These will gradually develop into nations possessing, as their ultimate perfection, one faith, one law, one king, and made capable, as they gained in strength and unity with the passing of the centuries, of self-preservation and prosperity throughout the worst upheavals.
3. Christendom, which was firstly a civilisation with no support other than the Church, was the only civilisation left standing on the ruins of the Empire. Through a slow political maturation, it was transformed into a concert of Christian nations, a rare and incomparable masterpiece of the Church in the temporal field. From a multitude of barbarian peoples endlessly sweeping across Europe, constantly shuffled and jostled, and under the duress of still fierce and pagan chiefs, the Church succeeded in making a mosaic of States won over to the idea of peaceful co-existence, of respect for treaties, and of their Christian union against any threatening external barbarism.
An immense political progress was wrought under the aegis of the Roman Church. The barbarian world was stabilised, civilised, romanised, Christianised. Kingdoms knew internal peace and order. They tempered their quarrels at the Church’s summons and began to experience the unity of the Christian world in the face of external danger. There thus emerged from the patient work of the Gallo-Roman bishops who "passed over to the barbarians" – more exactly, who converted and civilised the barbarians – a wonderfully realistic, coherent and fruitful Christian politics.
National existence is a specific fruit of our Christian civilisation. It is the ideal convergence of the Jewish racial State, the Greek City and the Roman Empire. It is the Church who, through her spiritual strength and civilising genius, has engendered this superior type of human community, the nation.
1. National unity cannot give rise to a Cartesian definition, to an idea distinct and clear. It is not a territory contained within hypothetical natural frontiers, nor a race, nor a language, nor a common tradition, nor even a common interest. The European nations are the fortuitous but admirable result of a slow maturation of spiritual and temporal unity, a unity that is partly innate and partly willed, spontaneous and organised, involving both sentiment and reason. The European nations are a work of necessity but also of power, under the influence of the Church who creates a common soul for them, and under the authority of a political power that is constant and favourable.
In other words, national independence is not decreed nor can it be claimed as a right; it is something merited and won. Its legitimacy is not to be found at the beginning but at the end of a long effort and of a series of happy fortunes or divine blessings.
2. The perfect form of the sovereign and independent national state is not the only desirable type of political community. There exist multiracial and multinational empires and kingdoms, federations or confederations of peoples or states, just as there exist nations parcelled into principalities, towns or republics, bereft of any common political institution as well as any national sentiment.
The unquestionable success of the great colonial empires makes us also regard as a viable political destiny the union of a civilising nation with colonised peoples for the purpose of a reciprocity of services that is capable of leading to a profound spiritual communion and an inviolable community of destiny. No one can say, in principle or in fact, in the name of faith or morality, what will be the future of these imperial unions, the gradual perfecting of which is sufficient to establish their legitimacy.
3. In his Christian faith, the phalangist thinks that it is necessary to accommodate himself to our historical destiny and political order, such as they are, rather than to attempt to overturn them. Nationalism is not a universal rule. It is not a necessity of temporal salvation, still less of eternal salvation, for a people to come to political independence. On the other hand, there is nothing to condemn nations which renounce their nationhood for the sake of forming wider or different political entities.
Even if the future, as seems probable, sees the world divided into nations after the example of Europe, their mother and mistress, it is to be hoped that their nationalism may also imitate Europe's wisdom, both Roman and Christian, without which there is every reason to believe that the nations will devour one another and return to the chaos of barbarian times.
1. Forgetful that they were born of a profound and powerful religious sentiment and breaking with the Christian principles whereby they were constituted, the monarchs of modern times have broken every bond of allegiance, and the nations have rejected all submission to God. They have claimed and asserted their secular independence. Consequently, nations are supposed to have resulted from a fact of nature or the collective human will, or else be creations of law, with kings holding their authority from nobody and having to render account to no one.
The weakening of ecclesiastical influence, the restoration from the 14th century of state-based and individualist Roman law, the continual effort of political powers to emancipate themselves from papal tutelage, and the gaining of secular life over Catholic piety, brought about the advent of a political naturalism, cut off from the religious sources of social life and the domestic virtues.
2. These nations – gradually formed during the thousand years of Christendom, with their monarchies consecrated by the Church – were for long maintained by tradition, then by authority rather than by piety, by force rather than by consent. The era of "enlightened despotism" followed and, since the Revolution of 1789, the European nations have continued to exist through inertia, awaiting the shock that will break them.
We are witnessing the disappearance of the last Christian monarchies and the dissolution of both patriotic sentiment and national unity. The decomposition of the nations who have lost their Christian faith and with it all civic virtue is near, whilst new States emerge, creations of pure adventure without past or future.
3. The Church, which was alive well before the nations that she raised up, baptised, formed and sustained, is certainly not tied to them. It is sometimes said that the Church can go elsewhere. No, she must remain wherever she has been established, wherever there are men to save, and above all Christians to guard. She can survive the chaos that would follow the collapse of the old Christian nations. But she has no business, no justification, no right to let them slip into such chaos!
4. On the contrary, the Church can and must save the nations she has created from the ferment of apostasy, which is their ruin. She alone can save them. Having been born of a common Christian will to live in the security and perfection of a higher political existence, our nations cannot be content with a secular political authority, nor with a common material interest, nor with the force of habit.
Only the Christian renaissance can give them back faith in their superior destiny, in their irreplaceable role at the heart of Christendom, the hope of their restoration and continued worldwide influence, and their self-esteem in the fulfilment of God’s design, for which there is no alternative solution. France must live!
Original sin is a rebellion that produces a flood of others. Similarly the pride of kings of divine right exercising their authority against the Church, as though it were a sovereign, secular right, and the pride of Christian nations throwing off the yoke of Christ, have in their turn incited people of ambition – ignorant and unscrupulous people, without past or virtue – to claim the same rights and to win them by force of violence. The right of peoples to dispose of themselves, in the name of Liberty, has sometimes been invoked to free ancient nations from the unjust oppression of foreign powers, but it has never been more than a cover for a general insurrection of "peoples" against their legitimate authorities and against the traditional framework of their political existence in the concert of nations and the respect of international treaties.
2. Resisting this revolutionary allurement, the phalangist contests the legitimacy of any such right of peoples to free themselves from all tutelage so that they might attain national independence, as though such independence were a primordial and necessary good for the dignity of each people, for their value, their human progress, and even the eternal salvation of their members!
Even though it might appear justified in certain cases of obvious oppression, this principle can never be invoked or accepted, because it is intrinsically perverse, inhuman and antichristian. It claims as an absolute right – regardless of any grace, effort, merit or political guarantees, and without any need for the Church’s blessing or international recognition – what can only be in truth the fruit of the human and Christian effort of a whole people, something that is valiantly prepared for over a lengthy period, merited, asked for, awaited, and at last obtained.
3. In fact this revolutionary principle brought fire and bloodshed upon 19th century Europe and the colonised world of the 20th century. The wars it engenders are massive, interminable and inexpiable; they turn into genocide and result in appalling tyrannies. For this supposed right, the creation of pure reason, presupposes an impossible a priori definition of what constitutes a people. Claimed arbitrarily by men and parties who make of their oppressed "people" a homogeneous and exclusive totality, this right to self-determination necessitates the tracking down and extermination of minorities, an hysterical exaltation of the right to difference, and before long an imperialist claim for this people to conquer whatever seems to belong to it outside its frontiers. A threatening and threatened existence, this national sovereignty born of the Revolution is a mad and dangerous caricature of our old historical nations. How much peaceful legitimacy and strength have they lost by refusing to submit to the will of the Sacred Heart and by refusing to proclaim themselves Christian!
Satan advances by contradictory moves, but his overall game is terrifyingly logical. Having incited the peoples to throw off the yoke of ancient nations and empires – all in the name of the sacred right to autonomy, without which there would supposedly be no happiness or salvation for anyone – he now convinces them to renounce their sovereignty and to place their fate in the hands of gigantic world organisations and to merge themselves into great international entities outside of which, he persuades them, there can be no survival!
1. The phalangist denounces in these successive and contradictory theories the coherent stages of the Revolution conducted by occult powers that aim at world domination. Freemasonry’s fundamental principle is the key to this apparent contradiction: Solve et coagula.
By means of popular uprisings against their age-old institutions and against international treaties, the Revolution – arguing from the master and slave dialectic, the principle of absolute, destructive hatred – aims to overturn the powerful legitimate authorities, the Christian nations, and their harmony. Solve: dissolve the bonds founded on nature and grace which keep out of your grasp the peoples you covet. Then through the renunciation of their sovereignty – as suggested to these peoples newly liberated from despotism in the name of human solidarity and of the world organisation of peace – all the power, wealth and reality of the world will fall into the hands of those who have been preparing for this enslavement over a very long time. Coagula: over this dust of individuals and peoples, orphaned from their God and from their kings, you will make yourself master and you will make of them a Tower consecrated to him by whom you will finally rule the world: Satan!
The phalangist, knowing of the profound logic of this apparent incoherence and its desired ends, will fight this diabolical plan at its root: revolutionary nationalism and its avowed complement, masonic internationalism. And to this end, he will support and defend – with all his Catholic energy and with the aid of grace and of the Roman Church’s traditional wisdom – the established order, the reflection of a divine right, the work of age-old justice and peace, the tranquil de facto state of possession enjoyed by nations and empires, as guaranteed by international treaties and agreements defining peace.
The phalangist will oppose all supposedly religious, moral, juridical or scientific ideology with the good of true peace, which is the fruit of historical rights, of services rendered, and of guaranteed safeguards against the dangers incurred by the community of nations. Such is the peace of the concert of nations, blessed, presided over and guaranteed by the Vicar of Christ, King of kings and Lord of lords.
Regarding his nationalism, the phalangist – depending on the people to whom he belongs and the actual circumstances of his involvement – will need a wise, prudent and realist conviction, freed from all passion and from all unhealthy prejudice, a conviction that is illuminated by his Christian faith. He will examine the political value of his allegiance to a people, to a nation, to an empire which he did not choose, purifying himself of all political pride and from the venom of the revolutionary spirit. Ordinarily he will follow the doctrine and the practice of the Roman Church and will accept the established order, faithful to the traditions of his people and respectful of the laws of his nation and of international treaties.
1. For the French phalangist, his duty is of an admirable simplicity. He belongs to a nation conceived by the Church and created by kings who were chosen, baptised and consecrated by the Church and raised to that glorious sovereignty of "the lieutenants of Christ who is the true King of France" (Joan of Arc). He belongs to a nation guaranteed by so many prophecies and miracles and by so much holiness. There is nothing revolutionary or aggressive, therefore, about French nationalism. It is conservative and creative of order. To strengthen it is to aid the prosperity and the standards of the peoples it unifies; it is to share in the restoration of a peaceful community of nations and in the spreading of human civilisation.
2. French nationalism should not be confounded with the nationalism of any other country, European or even Latin, all very different. It should not lead to an ideological fraternity or to an agreement among nationalists of all peoples and countries. For the essential from which any given nationalism derives its value is not the idea of nationhood, which could just as well be French, German, Russian or Indian. It is the nation. Each nation has its particular rights to existence and its special position in the necessary world equilibrium; each has values which would be greatly wronged were they to be reduced to a common denominator… international at that!
Our nationalism is perfect, with the incomparable perfection of France, eldest daughter of the Church and second home of every civilised man. It dictates our duty of ardent fidelity, love, confidence and devotion in its defence even unto death. It is a daily concern for the common good, the internal order, the alliances, the security, and the worldwide influence of our country.
Thus considered, the historical, civilised nation – a factor of international community, of equilibrium and peace – is part of God’s plan in the world for men’s eternal salvation and their temporal wellbeing. To be anti-France is to be anti-Christian. As a good Christian, therefore, the phalangist will be a good Frenchman!
1. It is an established fact that throughout the centuries of Christendom the Church was a factor of peace and concord among peoples and that her preaching was the most powerful restraint on the passions of men, which cause wars and revolutions. Whoever follows the principles of the Gospel and the morality of the Church, without concession to revolutionary ideas, necessarily participates in the peace and order of the world, not in words and demands, but in wisdom and service. That is how the traditional maxim "Opus justitiae pax" is to be understood. Not in the revolutionary sense, which is now in vogue, whereby the world must go through fire and blood so that "justice" be everywhere established and only then can there be peace. But in the obvious sense that those who observe justice in their own lives are by that very fact already working for the maintenance and restoration of peace.
2. The harmony existing between Catholic states and presided over by the Roman pontiff is, even in today’s world, the surest, most reliable and most powerful basis for international order and the conservation of peace. By means of its diplomacy, its organisation of alliances and military forces, its tribunals of arbitration, and its quest for the most far-reaching equilibrium in the world, Christendom must be more than ever the sanctuary of world peace and therefore of human progress.
3. It will be a matter of justice towards Christ and the Church, but also wise and prudent, to favour the entente and collaboration that exists among Catholic nations and to spend less energy looking for alliances with non-Catholic powers, still less with non-Christian powers. It will be even more necessary to guard against and avoid revolutions and States born of the Revolution, founded on modern antichristian ideologies.
It needs to be recalled that rivalries and wars among Catholic nations and sometimes their appeal for aid from non-Christian powers – the Muslims for example – in order to fight against their own brothers in Jesus Christ, has in the past been the greatest offence against divine charity and the prime cause of their common decadence. And what a scandal to the pagan world are these fratricidal conflicts beneath the enemy’s eye, and even more when the enemy is called in to help and is thus introduced as an authority into the very heart of Christendom! Perhaps there were certain circumstances in the past when the legitimate defence of the country made this step an overriding necessity for their princes. But, may such things never be seen again! And may universal Catholic unity procure peace for the whole world!
The work of civilisation and international concord conducted by the Church has in our days been restricted, hindered or combated by obstacles and oppositions inherited from a distant past.
1. The Great Schism of the East (1054) long ago closed off the Mediterranean to the Church and her direct routes to the evangelisation of Asia and Africa. With Islam supervening, as a consequence of and punishment for our Christian divisions and betrayals, the Middle East remains barred to our civilisation and is a powder keg. If only the Crusades had succeeded! If only they had encountered at Byzantium friendship instead of treachery, assistance instead of treason!
2. Protestantism (1517), even more gravely, set the Christian nations up as the rivals and unyielding enemies of the Catholic nations. This was all the more fatal in that from the 18th century the Protestant states delivered themselves up to judaeo-masonry, the absolute enemy of Christendom. With this break up of the Christian world into irreconcilable aggregates, it was all over with the Crusade, the common defence against the barbarian menace on the frontiers of the civilised world. The barbarian is now installed in Europe, stirring up European civil war, and ever hostile to Rome and the Catholic nations!
3. The French Revolution (1789) gave the third and final blow to the Church’s age-old work of peace, by handing over the Catholic nations themselves to their mortal enemy, the universal judaeo-masonic alliance, through the intermediary of revolutionary governments, imposed through the façade of universal suffrage, and supported by highly organised street demonstrations that are paid for by foreigners. Since then, the Revolution has encroached nearer and nearer, dominating all the Catholic nations, until the Church is its slave and war is everywhere.
Because he knows the Roman Church’s principal and irreplaceable role in our civilisation and in the proper order of nations, the phalangist is convinced that there will be no peace for the world nor any security until the Church is freed from the universal yoke of freemasonry. Let the Church have the courage to raise the standard of the Counter-Reformation and the Counter-Revolution, purging herself of all political error and ridding herself of the masonic gangrene. Then she will freely be able to reconstruct the holy alliance of Catholic nations, to work for the conversion of the Protestant nations, and to incorporate them in Christendom, to face the Infidel and the Barbarian.
1. Following the example of the saints, the phalangist regards the barbarian threat as secondary. It is the herald of an imminent chastisement, a "plague of God" raised from nothingness to punish Christendom for its infidelities, which God picks up and hurls, or which He holds in suspense and finally casts back into its nothingness, once the time of the offence and its expiation has passed. Such is the Soviet menace.
So it is that a simplistic anti-communism cannot be the basis of our Christian politics, nor can we at all share the position of people who call for a united front against communism of all "spiritual values" and all religions pell-mell… under the leadership of white freemasonry! Such a position is an insult to God, a betrayal of the Church, and a falling into the trap of our essential, permanent, and primary enemy. It is therefore an immense political error and a sin.
2. The threat of Soviet aggression, like the danger of any aggressive military power in the hands of a godless state, makes it an urgent duty for Christians to pray, to do penance and be converted, but also to become crusaders for the cause of Christ. For the Crusade consists precisely in the sacred union of all that remains of Christendom under the sovereign direction of the Pope, then its armament, its coalition and its mobilisation for the purpose of halting the barbarian expansion and, if necessary, doing battle against it and vanquishinq it.
Through the most necessary and beneficent revelations of Our Lady of Fatima, the phalangist knows that communism is no more than the Apocalyptic Beast’s latest manifestation, a satanic force pitted against Christ’s kingdom – a force whose only strength lies in the impiety, the incredulity and the immorality of the Christian nations, whence derives their weakness, their cowardice and their fatal compromises with the enemy.
The phalangist distinguishes two communisms: the communist imperialisms such as the Soviet, Chinese and Vietnamese, etc., which must be contained within their frontiers, whose expansion must be stopped and which must be driven back with small, well-aimed blows, until they are overcome and the world freed from them, unless they devour each other first. Then there are the communist parties of our Christian countries, which it is inconceivable to leave standing; they must be outlawed, their leaders and doctrinarians proscribed, their militants excommunicated from the Church and excluded from public life, since they are the partisans and artisans of the most appalling barbarity of all times.
Communism as an ideology is worthless and already dead. Its only strength consists in its barbarity and its connivance with judaeo-masonry, which lies at its origin and which still makes use of it even now to wage war against Christendom. It is Judaeo-masonry, even more than communism, that is the enemy. For Russia will be converted, and there will be a time of peace for the world (Fatima). But freemasonry will not be converted, and who can bring it down otherwise? At the very least the Church and each national State must protect themselves against it.