JUne 2006

$4.45

“Instaurare omnia in Christo”

1877-1949

A Journal of Roman Catholic Tradition

Peter Maurin:

a Man
to
thaw
our
frozen
charity

W
Ecumenism NEEW

from
to Silent Apostasy
An Analysis Compiled by the Society of Saint Pius X

In 2004, The SSPX sent a letter to all the Cardinals of the Church. This letter was accompanied
by a hard-hitting, but short and concise, analysis of Ecumenism. Recently, the SSPX has sent this
same study to EVERY Catholic bishop in the world. We have put the letter and study together for our
customers in this booklet and included a short interview with Bishop Fellay and two appendices: one,
a not-so-Catholic (to say the least!) speech by Cardinal Kasper on Ecumenism and, two, a pertinent
excerpt from the writings of the great Cardinal Pie (1815-80), “On the Duties of Priests,” which stands
in stark contrast to the ecumenical-babble of Cardinal Kasper!
The Study itself, entitled “From Ecumenism to Silent Apostasy,” is masterful and is divided into
three main parts with the following subdivisions:
Analysis of Ecumenical Thought: The Unity of the Human Race and Interreligious Dialogue
The Church of Christ and Ecumenism The Recomposition of the Visible Unity The Doctrinal
Problems Posed by Ecumenism: The Church of Christ is the Catholic Church Belonging
to the Church by a Triple Unity Outside of the Church There is No Salvation The Pastoral
Problems Posed by Ecumenism: Ecumenism Begets Doctrinal Relativism Ecumenism Turns
Souls Away from the Church

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63pp, softcover, STK# 8171Q $4.95

The Admirable
Heart of Mary
St. John Eudes

THE book on devotion to the Heart
of the Mother of God. St. John Eudes
has been called, by the Holy See, “the
father–the doctor–and the apostle” of
devotion to the Sacred Hearts of Jesus
and Mary. In the Decree of Beatification,
Pope St. Pius X wrote, “His services to the
Church received a vast increase when,
burning with singular love for the most
holy Hearts of Jesus and Mary, he was
the first to think, not without some divine
inspiration, of offering to them liturgical
worship.” This saint first introduced to
the Church, in 1648, the feast of the
Immaculate Heart of Mary by composing
the Mass and the accompanying Office.
Our Lady, through this feast of her Heart, thus prepared the faithful to receive the
Sacred Heart of Jesus. In 1670, St. John Eudes presented the feast of the Sacred
Heart of Jesus to the Church, three years before Our Lord revealed His Heart to
St. Margaret Mary. St. John Eudes also carefully and lovingly gathered together
what had previously been said of the Hearts of Jesus and Mary. Melting all of this
wealth within the furnace of his own heart, he drew forth from there the gold of his
writings on the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary. And so
it was that Our Lord used St. John Eudes as his faithful instrument to lay the solid
theological foundation upon which the popular devotion to the Hearts of Jesus and
Mary has been built.
St. John Eudes here reveals the most pure and maternal of all hearts, both
in its corporal and spiritual dimensions, while demonstrating with a dozen
unforgettable natural and scriptural analogies how this human heart was so
inexhaustibly divinized by God. Indeed, it is the first fruit of His Passion. Grounded
in sound doctrine and overflowing with piety, Eudes avoids the pitfalls of some
writers–dry doctrine and an unfounded devotionalism. He welds them masterly
together, which reminds one of the motto of the French Seminary in Rome under
Fr. LeFloch, the mentor of Archbishop Lefebvre, “pietas cum doctrina, doctrina
cum pietate”–“piety with doctrine, doctrine with piety.”
 Object of the Devotion  The Heart of God the Father  Six Additional
Symbolic Pictures  The Heart of God the Son Mirrored in His Mother  Further
Divine Perfections Mirrored in the Admirable Heart of Mary  The Heart of God
the Holy Ghost in Inspired Texts  Inspired Catholic Tradition  The Excellence
of the Sanctity of the Heart of Mary  Practice of the Devotion  The Canticle of
the Admirable Heart of Mary  Mass and Office of the Admirable Heart of Mary 
Prayers, Litany, etc.  Consecration to the Admirable Heart of Mary

N
OFF EW
ERIN

Rosary Album

A Visual and Scriptural Meditation on the Rosary
Michael C. Buccino

A top favorite of young children and adults! Booklet includes over 200
original black and white illustrations (one for each bead!) by the late Mr.
Michael Buccino. The artist began these drawings to help his children
meditate more easily on the Rosary. “I came up with the idea that if they
had a book with pictures it might keep their minds on meditating while they
were praying and would be better able to concentrate on the Rosary. So I
got started working on the Rosary Album, which took me 18 years to put
together. The book has brought the Rosary to life.” There is a picture and
scripture verse for each bead. The Litany of Our Lady (with illustrations) is
also woven into each mystery. For all ages.
72pp, softcover, STK# 8196Q $9.95

1
with copy F
of T each p REE
h
u
H e Ad rcha
( o f f e a r t o m ir a b s e
er e
x p i r f M ar l e
y
es

G

400pp, hardcover, STK# 8195Q $25.95

Jun

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ERIN

G

e 30

)

“Instaurare omnia in Christo—To restore all things in Christ.”
Motto of Pope St. Pius X

The

ngelus
A Journal of Roman Catholic Tradition

2915 Forest Avenue

“To publish Catholic journals and place them in
the hands of honest men is not enough. It is necessary to
spread them as far as possible that they may be read by
all, and especially by those whom Christian charity
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—Pope St. Pius X

June 2006
Volume XXIX, Number 6

• Kansas City, Missouri 64109

English-language Editor and Publisher
for the International Society of Saint Pius X
Publisher

Fr. John Fullerton
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in the world, not of the
world: Peter maurin  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 2
Fr. James Doran

the transalpine redemptorists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  17
Papa Stronsay, Orkney Islands, Scotland

archbishop lefebvre and rome  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  25
Fr. Emmanuel Du Chalard

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The child in modern civilization . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  28
Fr. Bernard-Marie de Chivré, O.P.

the cluttered soul  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  32
Mrs. Colleen Drippé

suggestions from a mother . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  34
the stages of the contacts
between rome and the sspx  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  36
H.E. Bishop Bernard Fellay

It’s Not About
;
It’
s About
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . part
. . . . . . .VII
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39

Persons
Principles

The State and the Citizen
Amintore Fanfani

The Angelus (ISSN 10735003) is published
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Publication offices are located at
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In the World, Not of t
The first idea which must be accepted is this
notion of the tension that a Catholic has to live
in at all times. When you read the history of
the Church, there’s a continual conflict between
what we call the Church and State, or the
temporal order and the things of God. There
will always be this tension. It’s not because of
either the Church or the State; it’s because of
the reality of the Redemption as such. By the
fact of grace having entered the world, we have
been transformed interiorly and elevated to a
divine level here and now. All the same, we live
in time. We await the Day of Judgment in which
that order of grace will be fulfilled and we will
come to its perfection.
Thus it is that in some places, St. Paul,
especially in writing to the Ephesians, speaks
of the fact that God has raised us up with His
Son and placed us in heavenly places with Him.
This is a reality in which there’s a stability and
a point of perfection which already exists. Our
Divine Lord sits at the right side of the Father.
By grace, we are incorporated into that same
reality.
There are some Scriptural quotations to
keep in mind. The first one I wish to cite is
Ephesians 2:6: “And that God has raised us
up together and has made us to sit together
in heavenly places through Christ Jesus.”
Notice the notion of fulfillment. This is one of
the places where the Baptists get the idea of
“once saved, always saved.” You make your
adherence to the Lord Jesus and that’s it–you
have salvation in the bag. That’s where this
distorted notion comes from.
There is also a quotation from later in
the same chapter : “We are now therefore no
more strangers or foreigners, but are fellow
citizens with the saints and are domestics of
the household of God.”1 “Now”–we are called
citizens now. There is in this reality a part of our
lives which is in some way not here. St. Paul also
says in another place that our conversation is
in heaven,2 not among the things here below.
If we are risen, then we must contemplate the
things that are above and not seek the things
that are below.3
We now wait for the moment in which this
reality of grace will be fully manifested, and
simultaneously we live in time; which is why he
writes to the Philippians (2:12), “With fear and
trembling work out your salvation.” When he
THE ANGELUS • June 2006 www.angeluspress.org

F r .

J a m e s

D o r a n

Peter

Maurin



f the World

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writes for the Romans we are told that “all of creation
longs and awaits for the day of manifestation of the
sons of God” (8:19). Grace is given to us which is in
a sense hidden. St. Paul says that it is a treasure in an
earthen vessel (II Cor. 4:7). We carry this great gift
of the life of Christ within us in a terra-cotta pot, and
these break easily. We live on one hand in the world,
and at the same time we are transformed in Christ in
heavenly places. This tension will always remain in
each of our lives.
What do we do? Too often the point of this
statement is missed. Too often what we do is to
subordinate the things of God to the concerns of the
world because death and judgment are at least, we
assume, a ways off, but the mortgage payment is due
next Monday. Our tendency is to judge things by time
and not to judge the things of time by eternity. Thus,
there is a continual conflict we live on a daily basis.
We live continually each day in judgment because
we are always making choices. We choose this path
or that one, because we are always free. What we
cannot choose is a hundred yards down this path or
a hundred yards down that other path, which is why
judgment has to be exercised very well.
What we see in individuals, we see also in the
history of the Church–this conflict between the things
of God and the things of this world.

The Mystery
of God’s Ways
There was a man who died in 1949 who was
buried from out at the Church of the Transfiguration
down in what used to be Little Italy in New York
City. He was known well enough by the Vatican that
his death was announced by L’Osservatore Romano. He
died on May 15 and was buried on May 18, 1949.
Most people who had seen him thought that he spent
a lot of time in the Bowery. He looked like a beggar,
he looked like he slept in his clothes–and he did.
When he was laid out after his death, the suit that
they got to put on the body was from a box of clothes
that had been donated because he possessed nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
For two days the body lay in state in lower
Manhattan. Hundreds of people came. There were
priests, seminarians, and religious from the different
orders who came from around the country. These
people came to pray, and in many cases to touch
rosaries to the hands of this “beggar.” His body was
buried in St. John’s Cemetery, Queens. As a last

testament to this poverty, he was not even buried in
his own grave, but in the grave which has the family
name on it of “Conway.” This is because a Dominican
priest, Fr. Pierre Conway, donated his part of the
family plot to this man who possessed absolutely
nothing.
This poor man died on the feast day of St. John
Baptist de la Salle. In his early life this man had been
a Christian Brother for seven years as a teacher. He
also died on the anniversary of the promulgation of
the papal encyclicals Rerum Novarum of 1891 (on the
working classes and the industrial question) of Leo
XIII, and the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno of 1931 by
Pius XI. The latter also dealt with the social questions
of the organization of a Christian society and a
Christian social order. These popes had been very
clear on these issues, and their teaching had caused
a tremendous stir at the beginning of the twentieth
century.

Peter Maurin,
a Man of Tradition
The man of whom I wished to speak today was
born as Aristide Pierre Maurin in 1877 in southern
France in the city of Oultet. The language the
people spoke was a direct descendant of Latin, but
was not French. He was born into a family that was
profoundly rooted in tradition, and for this reason I
take this man as an example.
Peter Maurin is considered by some as being
something of a revolutionary, and yet at the same
time to look at his life it can be seen that he is
someone who is profoundly rooted in tradition. He
was born into a peasant family. His mother had five
children, two of whom had died. She herself died
giving birth to the last one. She left three living
children. Peter’s father did not remarry right away,
but waited a number of years before doing so.
When Mr. Maurin was about 30, he married a
young woman who was about 19, and she went on to
give him 19 children. Peter Maurin thus came from a
family of 22 children. There were so many children
that they used to recite the family prayers in choir
back and forth. Peter was born on May 9. The month
of his birth and of his death was the same. His family
had been farming in that same area for 1,500 years; so
almost about the time that St. Augustine was bishop in
North Africa, Peter Maurin’s family had a farm in the
same area of what is now southern France.

www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2006


This continuity with the same terrain gives a
profound sense of tradition. What little we have in
America we smash down every twenty years and try
to build it again bigger and better. The Maurins lived
in the mountains, on a hillside in fact, which was very
rugged and difficult to tend. They lived in a typical
peasant house with animals on the ground floor like a
barn, and the family living on the second floor above;
all 25 of them, because at one point their grandfather
was living with them.
Peter’s grandfather was also a profoundly religious
man and he worked on the farm, in those fields and
on that hillside, until he was 90 years old. The only
reason he stopped working was because he couldn’t
see anymore and the hillside was too steep for him.
He stayed home and wove baskets and made things
that were needed on the farm while saying the rosary
all day long.
This old man taught his children and
grandchildren a profound sense of the Catholic Faith.
The family prayed the daily rosary, they always
had their night prayers together, they studied the
Bible together, and the grandfather also insisted that
they learn Church history. He also required them to
memorize the Sunday Gospels. All the children knew
the Gospels for the whole year by heart. This was
clearly an age different from ours. The family had to
travel two miles to get to church in the village.

A Teaching
Christian Brother
Maurin went to study with, and later join, the
Christian Brothers in Paris. He left his home when he
was about 14 years old and he went north to Paris. At
the age of 16, he was given permission to enter the
novitiate of the Christian Brothers and took the name
of Brother Adorator Charles (a very 19th-century
name). He taught elementary school as a Christian
Brother. He made his vows and he started teaching in
the late 1890’s.
While he was teaching in Paris he came across
the working-class families. He knew peasantry, he
had always been a peasant, and he was also proud of
it because it had provided him with a great sense of
tradition. He came into contact with these working
class families near Paris (around Montmartre). He
came to know well the difficulties that these families
had. Their problems were related to industrialization
and the de-rooting of any kind of sense of people
living in community. Forced to work in the factories,
one becomes disengaged.
Later Br. Adorator Charles was obliged to do
military service. The second time that he had to
do military service, he kept thinking, “Here I am,
a religious, and I’m supposed to be consecrated
to the things of God and I’m being made to serve
this military machinery.” Thus as a young religious
THE ANGELUS • June 2006 www.angeluspress.org

Brother he began to think more on the Church’s
social doctrine.
When he returned from military service he began
studying thoroughly the papal encyclical Rerum
Novarum, and along with this, he began reading
other writings on the topic from the end of the 19th
century. He was studying these questions so much
that the other Brothers were surprised. This was not
really necessary for elementary school teachers. He
remained a Christian Brother for seven years. This
period ended with the dissolution of the religious
orders in France at the beginning of the 20th century
when the anti-Catholic attacks began in earnest. Br.
Adorator Charles did not renew his vows, and so reentered the world.

His Life at the Beginning
of the 20th Century
Peter later worked in a seminary and then with Le
Sillon, an enormous political movement taking place
in France. The Sillon was an extraordinary moment
in history during the first decade of the 20th century.
These things are well worth knowing. Peter Maurin,
however, recognized that the movement itself was
not scholarly, that it was not based upon thinking or
upon principles, but was primarily political. It was
not rooted in any full understanding of historical or
Catholic doctrine, and he left the organization in
1908. It was subsequently condemned in 1910 for
lack of scholarship in history and clarity in Catholic
doctrine. It was a political machine which was simply
supposed to work and develop a society without any
doctrinal integrity in reference to the things of God.
By the time of the condemnation, Peter Maurin
had already left France, and in 1909 he was in
Canada as a homesteader in Alberta. He stayed
there for a couple very difficult years. The man
with whom he homesteaded died in one of the first
winters in Canada. Maurin moved to the States in
1911. Here he began, for the next 17 years or so,
working as a laborer in the mines and factories. He
came into contact with diverse laborers by continually
travelling through Iowa, Minnesota, and Michigan;
in fact throughout all of the central United States. He
eventually wound up in New York.
His biography is difficult because he spoke very
rarely of his life or of himself. Towards the end of
those years in the 1920’s we do know that he was
teaching French–a logical thing to do. About those
days in which he was a laborer he simply said, “I was
not living as a Catholic is supposed to live.” At some
point in the late 1920’s he went through some kind of
conversion.
A true conversion means that we rework the
whole way we think. If we truly convert it does not
mean that we just start going to Mass and everything
else stays the same–our entire life changes. Things just
aren’t going to be the way they were. Anyone who



When Christ
Is King

When the Sermon on the Mount
is the standard of values
then Christ is the Leader.
When Christ is the Leader
the priest is the mediator.
When Christ is the Leader
the educator
trains the minds of the pupils
so that they may understand
the message of the priest.
When Christ is the Leader
the politician
assures law and order
according to the priest’s teachings.
When Christ is the Leader
the technician
devises ways and means
for the economical production
and distribution of goods.
When Christ is the Leader
the administrator administrates
according to the directions
from the technicians.
When Christ is the Leader
we have a functional,
not an acquisitive society.

has ever really tried to live the Gospel realizes that he often loses all
those people that were once called friends, because they don’t think
the way he does, he no longer acts the way they act, and no, he is
no longer concerned about the latest movie or the latest sale in the
shopping mall. Conversion transformed Peter Maurin.
What he began to do was to look at the industrialism and the
materialism of the modern world. These he judged from the optic of
the Faith.
Our Lady at Fatima had said that Russia would spread its errors.
Now, Maurin may not have been aware of Fatima at the time of
his conversion, because it was still too close to the event. Now the
message of Fatima is often portrayed as the Soviet Union dominating
the entire world and we are all going to get eaten up. This she had
not said. She did not say that Russia was going to spread a political
machine; she said that Russia was going to spread its errors, and its
errors are atheism and materialism. Atheistic materialism: to live as
if God did not exist, and to live as if only material things and time
existed. It is the opposite of conversion.
The world has now embraced the whole line of Russia’s thought
as if nothing else existed.
Maurin’s concern for the laborers came from his firsthand
experience of their condition. At one point, he had been denied
his paycheck. And when he went to get paid for all the work he had
done in the mines, they told him that his check was waiting for him
in Chicago. The management made this man who was poor already
try to figure out a way to ride the rails to get to Chicago to get a
check that was due to him already. Experiences such as these made
him aware of the depth of the problem concerning wages and the
uprooting of men from any kind of grounded tradition.
If you keep in mind this background, you can easily see the
dehumanizing aspect. Remember that one of the anniversaries the
day Maurin died was that of the papal encyclical Quadragesimo Anno.
Pius XI had condemned in 1931 the dehumanizing aspect of the
factory system, which took raw materials and ennobled them while
the same process degraded the people who worked in the factory,
reducing them to machines. This was exactly the thought of Peter
Maurin, but his had come from first hand experience.
After he converted, he continued to teach French, but now he
felt that his abilities and his skills were to be a service to others. He
would simply offer his services and tutor. If those who had learned
from him would just pay or give him food, clothing, whatever
they thought fit, he was content by this exchange of assistance, the
communication of goods back and forth, but he was not to hire
himself out for X amount of dollars. This is one manner in which
Peter Maurin began to embrace voluntary poverty as a response to
modern materialism.

A Poverello for
the 20th Century
There is a photo of Peter Maurin from the 1920’s, and he’s quite
dapper, very well dressed. It is probably from the years that he
lived in Chicago. However, by the late twenties he began looking
more like a bum. He had thought to himself, “How many jackets
do I really need?” and “How many trousers do I need? I can only
really wear one.” More fully he embraced poverty, a profound
and a radical poverty in order to answer the materialism and the
selfishness of the modern world. He never said that everyone should
do this, but for him it was an answer to the modern world. When an
www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2006


encyclical was produced on St. Francis of Assisi, which most of us
have probably never read, he was thrilled.
In many ways Peter Maurin did manifest the life of St. Francis,
but in the 20th century this voluntary poverty was not only to follow
Our Lord, it was also an answer to the materialism and the greed
which he saw so easily manifested in the industrial world. In addition,
he was a man who was always reading; he was well educated, and
he used this grounded faith to begin to teach others. He would talk
to anyone–anyone, from professors to street people. He spent lots
of time in the Bowery. Throughout the years he would talk to the
bag ladies on the buses and he would talk to university professors
in Boston. It didn’t make any difference. Everyone is human and
everyone has an intellect and everyone can come to know the things
of God. He spoke with a heavy French accent and was at times hard
to understand, but he talked continually to teach.
He was the man who was the mind, the thinker, behind what
probably many regard as a leftist organization: The Catholic Worker.
Maurin’s desire was to present Catholic doctrine in such a way that
simple people could understand. He would write things in little
phrases so that those who were not educated could still come to
understand Catholic doctrine, especially as it concerned the social
order. They became known as “Easy Essays” because he tried to
make them understandable to the man on the street. They often dealt
with usury or with the Church’s notion of how the State is supposed
to be ordered. They dealt with the encyclicals that came out and
the ideas of many of contemporary Catholic writers. Hundreds and
hundreds of these things were produced over the years.
And he would talk. He talked to the men in the Bowery. And he
prayed. He went to Mass everyday, and would spend each day an
hour before the Blessed Sacrament. There was a prayer life behind
his activity. He was not what one expected in hearing about him. And
so it was with the saints in the history of the Church. Their lives are
unexpected and they stand out.
Peter Maurin lived the true virtue of prudence. This virtue usually
receives a bad rap because in the name of prudence we don’t do a lot
of things that we know we should be doing. “What will others think?”
and so for “prudential reasons” we abstain from things that should
be done. Peter Maurin said there is only God to serve, He must be
served faithfully, and therefore he became itinerant. He began to
wander all over. He spent years in New York wandering the streets,
talking to everybody.

The Catholic Worker Movement
The Catholic Worker Movement is perhaps one of the most
important chapters of the Church in America during the 20th century,
yet it is little (and often incorrectly) understood. As stated earlier,
behind this movement stood Peter Maurin.
Catholics must think radically different from those who live
non-Catholic lives. Why would you expect non-Catholics to live by
principles that are Catholic? That a Catholic should be living a life
that is more or less identical with the non-Catholics who live down
the street would be anathema to Peter Maurin. It would simply be
a sign that one had not assimilated the teaching of the Gospel. The
Gospel principles that we live by are transcendent and are completely
different from those notions of pagan prudence and worldly wisdom.
The movement which he developed was more of an organism than
an organization. The whole Catholic Worker Movement was chaotic
at times. Maurin was a man who spent years just talking, but in the
THE ANGELUS • June 2006 www.angeluspress.org

A Radical Change
The order of the day
is to talk about the social order.
Conservatives would like
to keep it from changing
but they don’t know how.
Liberals try to patch it
and call it a New Deal.
Socialists want a change,
but a gradual change.
Communists want a change,
an immediate change,
but a Socialist change.
Communists in Russia
do not build Communism,
they build Socialism.
Communists want to pass
from capitalism to Socialism
and from Socialism to Communism.
I want a change,
and a radical change.
I want a change
from an acquisitive society
to a functional society,
from a society of go-getters
to a society of go-givers.

e


end, he lost this ability and went senile the last four
or five years of his life. When Dorothy Day, another
one of known reputation, wrote of him, she wrote of
his holiness and of the fact that Peter Maurin was a
talker but he didn’t ramble. He talked and he talked
all night long, but it always had a purpose.
She gave a magnificent tribute of this man
because she said that he had given everything that he
had, and what he had was his education, his sense of
Tradition and the Catholic Faith which was profound.
His way of doing this was almost in the sense of a
Christian Brother, a teacher of the simple–he always
remained one of the teachers who taught the poor
and made things uncomplicated. Read the life of St.
John Baptist de la Salle and his method of teaching
by silence and simplicity, a manner of teaching which
was quite revolutionary in its own day, but by which
St. John Baptist de la Salle transformed education.
Peter Maurin continued that tradition and work.
Dorothy Day brought up the fact that he talked
incessantly; sometimes she had to beg for mercy. He
would stop for ten minutes and then it would go on
again for the rest of the night.
She said that she thought that in the end he
had given everything he had, including his bed.
Oftentimes if someone came in and needed a bed, he
gave his up for them and slept on the floor. But most
profoundly, what he gave was his education and what
he knew of the Catholic Faith. She said what he gave
most precisely was his knowledge, and in the end
God asked him to give even that up. This included his
mind. His silence was a magnificent example those
last four years.
There was a point in 1944 when he had all the
pages of all the essays he had written. He closed the
file and handed it to one of the younger men and said,
“It is time now for the younger ones to do this.” And
at that point he began to realize the things that he was
saying were not what were in his mind, so he stopped
talking. All of his talking had a purpose and when
it no longer worked because of age, he stopped. He
continued those last years in silence, but he still went
to Mass. He would sit in a chair, they would come in
and say, “Mass, Peter.” He would get up and shuffle
out, go down to Mass, breakfast, and back. He had to
give the example of detachment, not just of poverty
where he would take nothing. He had nothing further
to give but the perfect detachment from what he
loved most, his teaching. He remained, in a sense,
imprisoned in that silence knowing that his mind was
not working. He died in 1949.

The Knowledge
of Our Faith
Peter Maurin enjoyed large groups in
conversation, but if someone got up and started
getting blue in the face and getting angry at him he
would simply stop talking and sit down. He would not

argue nor fight back, because truth is not something
that you become blue in the face over. You may
discuss it, you may be convinced of it, but you don’t
become belligerent when you defend a thesis. If you
were standing on the street and a man told you, “This
tree is turquoise,” and you said, “No, I do believe it’s
green,” you would not argue over this, but probably
would walk away at some point and remember this
man in your Rosary because he’s crazy.
Why would we argue over something that is
equally true, the Trinity for example, or the divinity
of the Church, or the Incarnation? Fighting would
indicate the fact that we do not know our Faith very
well. We become angry because someone shows us
the instability of our positions. We are shown that we
do not really grasp these principles well. We grasp the
fact that trees are green–it’s an evident fact and that’s
why we don’t get upset with others who disagree;
we just feel sorry for them. That was Peter Maurin’s
approach. The Triune God exists; the Redemption is a
historical reality and a historical fact. The Church is a
reality here and now. If you get up and start yelling at
me, well, I’m sorry for you, but I am not going to try
to prove my Faith by getting in your face and turning
blue and spitting. That doesn’t prove anything except
the fact that I’m perhaps insecure. Peter Maurin’s
answer would have been “Know your Faith better.”
Know truly that a tree is green and know what
the realities of the Mass, the Incarnation, and the
Church are. When we have that security it makes
us the most compassionate of men, because we then
know how much is lacking to so many, and we begin
to understand the reaction of Our Lord when He
looked upon the crowds and had compassion on them
because they were like sheep without a shepherd and
they didn’t know where they were going.
Walk through the streets of New York like a bum
and look at all the people. How many of these people
really have any idea of the Faith? And if they claim
to know the Faith, then how much do they live the
Faith? They know that they go to a church on Sunday.
For Peter Maurin, that was not sufficient. It is clear
that his entire life was centered upon the reality of
the Church and the sanctification of grace. He was
never beguiled by magnificent brick buildings, central
heating and indoor plumbing. The reality of the
Gospel requires this tremendous change in our lives.
Our standard of judgment must be different from the
world’s. That is what he pointed out even by his life.
Peter gave an example by embracing voluntary
poverty. It was not something that he expected
each to follow, but for him it was an answer to the
materialism and to the deracination of people in
the modern world of industrialization. Our world is
geared for profit, to make money. For this reason it’s
important now to read the things that Peter Maurin
had written and the things that are recorded of what
he said. They’re extraordinary. I will come just short
of saying that the man was a prophet. He saw the way
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the modern world was organized; he would not have
been surprised by our so-called downsizing. Maurin
already in the 1930’s denounced a system which
made people secondary, a system where people were
simply belched out because it made a greater profit
and a greater dividend. Peter Maurin in the 1920’s,
‘30’s, ‘40’s, saw scandals like Enron coming. What he
said then is just as true today. Human nature does not
change, nor does its greed for mammon. The modern
world is still based upon the machinery that desires
profit, and this desire is its primary concern.

You Cannot Serve
God and Mammon
This is the meaning of Our Lord in the Sermon
on the Mount when He says that you cannot serve
God and mammon. Mammon doesn’t mean money,
it means profit. Always more, always bigger, always
remodeled, always newer. Peter Maurin, at the
beginning of the 1920’s, understood the whole
modern spirit of business. Voluntary poverty was his
answer to this materialism. It was also his response
to the poverty that is imposed upon so many workers
by this machinery. Industrialism takes them in, uses
them, and then expels them when they are no longer
profitable. And they remain with no productive
wealth.
Many do not realize that even in the Soviet
Union, you could own your home and car. The notion
of common property is not that everyone just shares
everything; but that you could not own productive
property. You could not own anything that produced.
Everything that produced, every factory, every large
farm, everything that could acquire large profit, had
to be owned by the proletariat, the masses. This is
one of the errors of Russia of 1917 which is very much
the reality that we live in now. Almost no one owns
anything that has any productivity, and even the
homes that we live in are owned by the bank. If you
are good and earn the dividends for the bank over
the next thirty years you can live in your house, and
they’ll even give it to you at the end because you’ve
been so good–now that you’re in your sixties and
have paid for the house two or three times over. You
work for something and it’s not yours, and if at any
time you’re bad and you don’t give them the dividend,
then they’re going to take it back from you.
The people that live today, as Peter Maurin
pointed out, have fewer rights than the serfs on
the land in the Middle Ages. The serfs may have
been attached to the land, but the landlord could
not just throw them off because they belonged to it.
There was a give and take then, and even a form of
mutual responsibility. For Peter Maurin, those who
are in forced poverty–and we can say our society is
generally impoverished in the sense that we have
nothing that has any productivity–must be cared for.
Christian charity must take care of the impoverished,
THE ANGELUS • June 2006 www.angeluspress.org

the sick, and the wayfarers. These places of refuge
came to be known as the Houses of Hospitality.
The origin of these places actually dates from the
Council of Nicea. In the Middle Ages every bishop
was required to have a place or places, depending
upon the size of his diocese, which would take in
pilgrims who were traveling, the orphans, widows, the
poor and the sick, the people who had no place else
to go. This practice continued as an organization and
an institution which used to be called hospitals. And
I purposely say “used to,” because hospitals since the
1950’s have been for profit also. They were the last of
the major Christian institutions in the Western world,
and now they’ve also been destroyed. It is very good
that they now call them “medical centers,” because
they are not hospitals. They no longer operate by any
notion of hospitality.
Peter Maurin said that every family should have
what he called a “Christ room,” some place in the
home that would always be open to those who were
in need. St. Peter had written, “You must not be
afraid with their fear.”4 For this reason Peter Maurin
possessed a great sense of freedom, he shared a
sense of freedom even to those around him. This
freedom was that of St. Francis of Assisi the day he
had stripped off all of his clothes, handed them to
his father and said, “From now on, my Father is in
heaven.” From that point on he was free. The Faith
and Lady Poverty can accomplish such things.
Maurin also sought to remedy the general
ignorance of Catholics through what he called the
“clarification of thought.” To know Church history,
to know doctrine, and to think: these were constant
teaching. We can not do anything unless we think.

A Green Revolution
We come now to the displaced laborers and
uprooted people living in the cities. Historically this
was caused by the huge machinery of industrialism.
The contrary idea tries to get people back to some
kind of productive land. Maurin was part of the back
to the land movement of the 1920’s, ‘30’s, and ‘40’s.
Catholics today do not realize how widespread these
ideas, and individuals, were. G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire
Belloc, Distributism, the National Catholic Rural Life
Conference–who’s ever heard of them? But all the
same, they did tremendous work.
Take the National Catholic Rural Life Conference.
It was founded in 1923, but it would take another
article to go into depth about their history, ideals,
and accomplishments. Suffice it to say that it was a
magnificent attempt to get people into something
which was more normal, and to give them some kind
of productivity. Maurin used to say “Back to the land
and back to Christ.” This was all summed up in what
he called cult, culture, and cultivation: Cult–worship,
the worship of God, which must be the primary
reason, for it is the reason why people were created.


Culture, because one must know something of history and how
the social order is supposed to look. This is to be done from
the vantage point specifically of the popes, but also of Catholic
doctrine in general, and the writings of Catholic theologians. And
lastly cultivation, to live on the land; to be able to understand
the manner in which working the land ends up being something
beneficial, not because it’s a domination or a profit-making
endeavor using the soil, but because it is a cooperation and
collaboration with that which God has created.
Remember that Adam and Eve were created in the Garden
in order to take care of it, so it is from the very beginning part of
our destiny. It doesn’t mean that everyone needs to move from
the cities, but that some people should move on to some kind of
land. This was the last thing that Maurin tried to do.

The Faith Produces Heroes
I’ll leave you with two quotations of Peter Maurin. “The
human heart is not made for mediocrity, it was made for
heroism.” This is one of the reasons why in the 1930’s he
caused a tremendous fire to be cast among the young Catholics.
They would follow him around, handing out pamphlets and
newspapers in Union Square and the streets of Manhattan. He
would enthuse such a group of young people to do something for
doctrine. He did not just enthuse them because he could tell such
great stories, but they did something to try to clarify thought.
Some of these young people followed him their entire lives.
The other noteworthy quote is: “The only true adventures
are in the spiritual order.” Those who look for all of their
enthusiasm, entertainment, amusements or excitement in the
temporal order are wasting their time. The only true adventures
are in the spiritual order.
These two things lay out the whole notion, and the mentality,
behind his work which was accomplished in the thirties and the
forties.

Some Historical Considerations
In the 1940’s when the Catholic Worker developed further,
it added what was called the retreat movement. It can be said
that the 1940’s were the high point of this movement. Many
would argue that its direction changed from a clearly Catholic
foundation to a more naturalistic, personalistic vision later on.
The Catholic Worker Movement was “born” on May 1, 1933.
This day marked the first printing of the newspaper that was
handed out in Union Square. This was, of course, May Day. We
tend to forget that in the 1930’s May Day could rally thousands
in New York, even tens of thousands on some occasions. Most
people aren’t aware of the strength of the Communist movement
in those years. In that year, I believe, it was claimed that there
were 30,000 people all up and down Broadway and Union
Square. Into that crowd they plunged, handing out these papers,
and being ridiculed.
Dorothy Day was 36 at the time. Thus, this relatively
young woman with three young men headed into the middle
of a crowd at a Communist rally handing out newspapers filled
with Catholic doctrine, while Catholic encyclicals were being
ridiculed and mocked. It was so bad, in fact, that two of the
men left because treatment was so horrible. But Dorothy Day

Hospices

We read in the Catholic Encyclopedia
that during the early ages of Christianity
the hospice (or the House of Hospitality)
was a shelter for the sick, the poor,
the orphans, the old, the traveler,
and the needy of every kind.
Originally the hospices (or
Houses of Hospitality)
were under the supervision of the Bishops,
who designated priests
to administer the spiritual
and temporal affairs
of these charitable institutions.
The fourteenth statute
of the so-called Council of Carthage,
held about 436,
enjoins upon the Bishops
to have hospices (or Houses of Hospitality)
in connection with their churches.

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10
continued along with a seventeen-year-old handing
out these papers. The Catholic Worker has been
printed from that day forward.

Mercy and Charity
Are a Harsh
and Dreadful Reality
One of the things chosen because of Peter
Maurin’s position is that the Catholic Worker has
never been a tax-exempt organization. Any donations
given for the last seventy years have been done at no
tax gains. Peter Maurin said very simply that every
corporal work of mercy, and the works of charity,
should be done at a personal sacrifice and not for
financial gain. To this day it remains without tax
exemption status.
Dorothy Day described it with these words: “It’s
not a community of saints, but rather it is a slipshod
group of individuals who are trying to work out
certain principles,” the chief of which was an analysis
of man’s freedom and what it implied–to overcome
hatred with love, to overcome evil by good. It was a
practice in loving, in learning to love, and paying the
cost of love.
Dorothy Day often quoted from The Brothers
Karamazov since she loved Dostoevsky. She would
especially quote the famous Fr. Zossima from The
Brothers Karamazov, a work which some would claim
is the greatest work of Dostoevsky. At one point
in the story a well-bred, well-dressed, aristocratic
woman goes to the monastery to see Fr. Zossima.
Among other pilgrims who are there she exposes her
confusion. She says “How can I know?” Fr. Zossima
asks her in return, “Do you not have faith in God’s
existence?” She replies, “No, it’s not that. It’s the
immortality of the soul. How do I really know it will
continue afterward? How do I know I will do all
these things and then in the end there will be just
flowers on my grave? How do I know that this life
will actually go on?” Father answers her, “You must
go out and you must live the Gospel and you must
show this goodness to the poor and to your neighbor,
and then you will know of God’s existence and of the
immortality of your soul.” To this she answers with
all of her aristocratic finery, “But I love humanity, I
love mankind. But I don’t know what would happen
if I started helping the poor and they began to treat
me with harshness, or if there wasn’t gratitude. I need
to be thanked for what I’m doing.” At least she was
honest! “I need an immediate response; I just can’t do
good and be rejected.”
Dorothy Day at one point was studying nursing,
and there was a poor creature in one of the wings, a
horrible being who hated all the world. The nurses
would try to do things for her in the hospital. At one
point Dorothy Day herself was in there trying to
help this woman change linens or whatever it was,
THE ANGELUS • June 2006 www.angeluspress.org

and the woman whipped a full bed pan at her. This
was the kind of the thing the woman in The Brothers
Karamazov was concerned about: what if we start
helping humanity and they don’t show gratitude. Fr.
Zossima answered by saying that the reality of loving
our neighbor is a very harsh and dreadful thing, not at
all like the love in dreams. All liberals love mankind;
everyone loves the poor of the world. But to be down
in the streets and actually picking a poor man up out
of the gutter–“I don’t know that I can do that.”
The Sermon on the Mount has that famous
conclusion of which we all know the quotation:
“Be ye perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
We know this, but we don’t know the context, or
at least, we don’t usually make reference to it. Just
before this statement, Our Lord gave the example
that God makes the sun to rise upon the good and
the bad. He makes the rain to fall on the fields of the
just and the unjust. If you greet only those who are
your friends, what are you doing different than the
pagans? Therefore be perfect as your heavenly Father
is perfect. In other words, what is the commandment
of the Sermon on the Mount? You must do good to all
regardless of what the response is; and this is the harsh
and dreadful reality which no one is going to say is
easy.
Dorothy Day was often accused of sentimentality
regarding her pacifist stance. “She’s a woman, she just
doesn’t want people to get hurt, and so we shouldn’t
have wars.” She wrote an editorial in reply: “Those
who claim, or those who think that we say these
things because I’m only being sentimental or being a
woman then I challenge them to come and live at the
Worker House as we live, to live with the poor, to live
with the screaming prostitutes fighting over things in
the rooms, to deal with the mentally ill, to deal with
the sick, taking them back and forth to the hospital.
I can assure you that there are ten types of body lice
because you share everything with them, you live
with them.” It was an excellent answer. Can one still
think it’s sentimentality? You see how sentimental it
is living at this level. It was a response that becomes
unanswerable.
Peter Maurin wanted goodness to be shown in the
midst of the huge machinery which is the modernday state. He wished the response to be at a personal
level, because no one else is going to do it for you.
It’s a question of how we respond to this. For this
reason Maurin insisted on the question of personal
freedom. How do we respond to the Gospel that
has been preached to us? The sun rises on the good
and the bad, and the rain falls on the just and the
unjust. God is good to all. If you greet those who are
kind to you, what are you doing different from the
pagans? What reward do you expect different from
the pagans? This is the reality of the Sermon on the
Mount. I highly encourage you to read often the fifth,
sixth, and seventh chapters of St. Matthew. They are
extraordinary because they do demand much of us.

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Here is where we really begin to understand the
austerity of the Gospel. It is hard. It is difficult. It
is the source of the magnificent quotation from Fr.
Zossima “that love in reality is a harsh and a dreadful
thing.” It is very difficult. It is easy to love “humanity”;
it is difficult to love the person working next to you
at the office. Humanity is an abstract–it doesn’t exist.
Of course anyone can love “humanity.” We can feel
all nice and warm and tingly about our compassion
and our generosity and our kindness; but in the end
it doesn’t really mean anything because it doesn’t
do anything. For this reason St. James also said that
faith without works, without the works of charity, is
dead. It’s a very harsh reality. St. John says, “When
you come across the man who’s hungry and cold and
shivering and you say ‘be warm and be of good cheer’
and then walk away,” then what have you done for
that man? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
This is why Our Lord identifies, in a sense, the
two main commandments: love of God and love of
neighbor. The question is how we respond to each
personally. The responsibility of love, of learning to
love, and paying the cost of love, is that by which
we shall be judged. We mentioned earlier that
supernatural charity subordinates all of our love
and all of our affections in this world. It all has to
be subordinated to God; it has to become the single,
vital, sovereign mover of the entire Christian life.
Everything that we do is meant to be motivated by
charity, ultimately. Everything in our life is meant to
be geared towards this goal, towards service in the
love of God and the love of our neighbor. That is
what we mean when we speak about the Faith being
alive or being dead. We speak of it as being animated,
given life by the virtue, by that queen of all the
virtues, charity.

Love Must Be Sovereign
St. Thomas Aquinas writing in the 13th century
identified the two realities so closely that where there
is a Christian life there will be charity, and to the
degree that there is charity there will be the Christian
life. You can’t say someone lives a Christian life but
has almost no possession of this reality. In much
the same way that faith illuminates our minds and
introduces us into the knowledge which is God’s, so it
is with charity. Faith is an illumination of the mind. It
elevates us above this world of time. We transcend by
this illumination, and with charity it is the same. We
are transformed and we are elevated to love God as
God loves, to love with the love which is essentially
God’s.
In passing, I would like to mention to you one
of the great apparitions of St. Margaret Mary of the
Sacred Heart. The example should be helpful. There
were the four great apparitions which are unknown
to most. Of course, all know the twelve promises, i.e.
you can save your tail if you go nine times to Mass,

and that type of a thing (and this we claim is love). If
we judged it correctly, we would rather see ourselves
to be mercenaries. If we pursue that reasoning as a
motivation, whom do we actually love? Ourselves. We
don’t want to go to hell. Do we have any knowledge
of any of the great letters and of the writings of St.
Margaret Mary? “No. We don’t have to. We have the
twelve promises printed out on the card.” Do you
know what is the origin and source of those twelve
promises as they are presented? A business man from
Ohio put them all together on one card. Pope Leo
XIII thought that it was helpful at least to make them
known, and he encouraged its publication. For me,
it’s not too surprising that it came from America. It’s
efficient, and you can just forgo all the other teachings
of St. Margaret Mary. It makes “love” a simple affair,
not at all a harsh and dreadful reality.
Let’s go to the core of this. What’s the real essence
of this message? Ask a fellow Catholic. They will
probably rattle off the requirements. “I’m done with
those nine First Fridays.” I’ve come across numerous
Catholics who don’t go on First Friday because “I’ve
done mine.” This is a horrible thing. That’s what I’m
trying to say in this conference–you must think, what
motivates us? That’s the question that Peter Maurin
was always provoking. He was a man who always
taught by example. As I said, he never got angry at
people. Our whole motivation has to be charity.
What St. Margaret Mary was given in these
apparitions was an understanding of the offenses and
disrespect of mankind against Our Lord. There was
a point in which He appeared before her–and they
were always associated with the Eucharist, either on
a day of exposition, or after Mass, or on the feast of
St. John–and when He appeared to her He gave her
again an understanding of this great love. He said to
Margaret Mary, “You at least return love for love.”
She of course understanding the great chasm between
the ingratitude of men and the greatness of God’s love
said, “I can’t. This is impossible.” As she responded
a light began to shine from Our Lord and penetrated
her, giving her a great knowledge of the love of God,
but at the same time, it penetrated and consumed. She
thought she was going to be destroyed. At the very
point in which she was going to beg that He stop, a
light came from Our Lord’s chest, from His heart. He
said to her, “I will be your strength.” He repeated the
same request, “You must return love for love. But you
can only love worthily with the love which is mine in
fact.”
This makes it very clear that we cannot give. All
we can give is a little, puny human response. It’s
true. What do we have to give? Nothing. However,
we do have a personal response to that grace, and
that’s what Peter Maurin would indicate has a great
importance. How do we respond to this grace, to
this charity? That is the question. In one of the first
apparitions to St. Margaret Mary Our Lord told her
“I choose you as an infinite abyss of ignorance and
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12
unworthiness.” “Thank you.” (We get upset if it’s a hard sermon.
“You don’t have to do all that, Father, that’s excessive!”) Imagine
having Our Lord in front of you saying, “I choose you as an abyss of
ignorance and unworthiness.” Margaret Mary once asked, “How am
I going to acquire recognition and a feast day of this great work of
the Sacred Heart?” His answer in not so many words was, “If I could
have chosen someone more unworthy, more incapable, I would
have.”
I think it is marvelous that in 1949 a man who looked like a bum
inspired, and still inspires. He had a message which provokes us to
at least think. In the analysis of the Catholic Worker I would say
there are many things with which I disagree, but this doesn’t change
the fact that those who were the leaders of it did what they said they
would do. There was certainly an identification of what they taught
and what they did. They practised what they preached.

Works
of Mercy

The best kind of apologetics
is the kind of apologetics
people do not have
to apologize for.
In the first centuries
of Christianity
pagans said about Christians:
“See how they love each other.”
The love for God and neighbor
was the characteristic
of the first Christians.
This love was expressed
through the daily practice
of the Works of Mercy.
To feed the hungry,
to clothe the naked,
to shelter the homeless,
to instruct the ignorant
at a personal sacrifice
was considered
by the first Christians
as the right thing to do.
Surplus goods
were considered
to be superfluous,
and therefore
to be used
to help the needy members
THE ANGELUS • June 2006 www.angeluspress.org
of the Mystical Body.

What Is the Standard of Love?
Charity has to be the response from all of us. It must give a
unity to the conscience. The knowledge of how much we have
failed in charity and not responded to the grace of God makes us
repentant. For this reason it can be said that charity is the principle
of asceticism, penances, and a source of the hatred of sin. We
probably don’t see sin as offensive. We don’t dislike it. It may be
bothersome, we shouldn’t be doing it, but heck, Father, it’s only a
venial sin. St. Margaret Mary was once severely rebuked by Our
Lord. We don’t know what she had done. But after it, she would
never sit in the chapel. Now, this is quite incredible considering that
at the process for her canonization, in the documentation which had
been gathered there were testimonies given by those who knew her,
and even from the priest who had known her, that she had never
in her life committed a grave sin. This gives us something to think
about.
Canonization sets a standard, and we are meant to learn from
these kinds of lessons. God causes us to subordinate all our loves to
Him; when this is done we have gone beyond ourselves. We spend
too much time calculating what’s in it for us. That’s why I gave the
example of the nine First Fridays. St. Thomas Aquinas makes it very
clear that when we begin the spiritual life we’re looking to avoid
hell and get to heaven, and he says quite bluntly that it’s with a love
of what he calls concupiscence that we begin the spiritual life. It is
not God whom we first love. We love rather what we are going to
get from God. It is the love which does not love people, but what
it receives from people. This is unfortunately very common. It is
the man who deals with someone, and his response is: “She has
pretty eyes.” And that’s fine. But what are we choosing? Her? Or is
it the fact that you enjoy looking at her, which is a different thing
altogether? St. Thomas applies this form of selfishness to the whole
notion of the spiritual life.
For this reason Our Lord preached about hell. You have to
begin with the fear of hell and the desire for heaven because,
wishing to avoid hell, I am forced to look into heaven. I first love
God because He’s going to help me get to heaven. At first, love is
basically about “me” because I don’t want to burn in hell. We have
not yet come to the knowledge of the great and infinite goodness
which is God. The spiritual life begins always in selfishness, and this
must be purified.
We must ultimately seek continual reliance upon the reality of
God: “I will be your strength.” Therefore a life that is transformed

13
by grace, a life which is transformed by virtues, is
what the Fathers of the Church and the theologians
call a divinized life, a God-like life. We use terms like
divinization. We desire that our life be divinized by
grace, by sanctification, because in fact it’s the only
way that we can stand before God in any sense of
worthiness; with this we find security.
With grace we are made into the very likeness of
God. He sees in me Himself and His infinite bounty
and goodness, and this is what makes us lovable. It
is not some wretched little creature who’s paying
mortgages every month and trying to keep a job or
trying to buy a new car, scurrying around worried
about this and worried about that.
This is the message in the parable of the great
feast of the king. He goes out to those that are invited.
“Don’t have time now. Bought a new farm, just got
married, thanks for the invitation, sorry, can’t make
it.” They’re very polite about it; they don’t spit in the
king’s face, thus they think they’re okay. We really
have to ask ourselves the question, “What is it that
we love?” Where are our attachments? Recall the
same Sermon on the Mount. “Do not lay up treasures
on earth where the rust and the moth consume and
where thieves can break in and steal.” If you want
to know your loves and affections then look in your
garage at all of those cardboard boxes. All those
things you just had to have and now you don’t even
know what’s in those boxes. How much time, how
much effort, was wasted on those things?
Our Lord says very clearly that there where your
heart is, there will your treasure be also. The things
that we love, the things that we sacrifice ourselves
for, those are our treasures. What do we do when
the Gospel and the grace of God are presented to
us? Learning to love requires that we be detached
from these things. It is not because they are bad, but
because they can get in the way of the service of the
Gospel. All things which limit our loyalty must be
torn away. Our Lord uses these great hyperbolic,
oriental exaggerations: If your eye offends you, tear
it out. If your hand offends you, cut it off. He’s saying
no matter what it is, no matter how close you are
attached to it, and no matter how much you love that
entertainment system, if it stands as an obstacle to the
service of God, smash it.
St. Thomas would say that charity has interior
effects and exterior effects. Interiorly it causes this
love, election, the act of love. It inclines us to an act
of love which is election, and it brings interior order
because our love is first for God, then of self, and
our neighbor as ourself. It also inclines us towards
compassion. It makes us merciful. St. Thomas says
there is an external act and this is beneficence.
Benevolence is to wish well, beneficence is to do
good.
When we understand how drastically love
changes our lives, the example of Peter Maurin then
takes on an air of wisdom. What does it matter now

if Peter Maurin spent twenty years living in absolute
poverty, what does it matter now if he saved his
soul? What does it matter now for all those wealthy
men who were living in the twenties and the thirties
in their fine houses? What does it matter if those
attachments have brought them to perdition?

Other Connections
While I was editing The Angelus [ July 1991September 1992] we came out with the first volume
of a compilation of articles called My Life with
Thomas Aquinas [available from Angelus Press. Price:
$14.95–Ed.]. These works, these articles which many
of you I’m sure are familiar with–if you’re not, then
you should be because they are excellent writings–are
from a journal which was written from 1946-54, about
ten years. It was a magazine called Integrity, and these
articles we’ve compiled into three volumes, My Life
with Thomas Aquinas, Raising Your Children [available
from Angelus Press. Price: $14.95–Ed.], and the third
volume is on Fatherhood [Fatherhood and Family,
available from Angelus Press. Price: $12.95–Ed.]
written by a man by the name of Ed Willock. They’re
excellent. [See also, Ye Gods, by Ed Willock. Available
from Angelus Press. See the inside back cover of this
issue of The Angelus–Ed.].
Ed Willock died in 1960. He had also tried to
work at forming a kind of Catholic community
outside of New York. Integrity attempted to apply
Catholic principles to the modern situation instead of
simply talking about the lives of saints who had lived
in the Middle Ages. Instead, the idea was to translate
the life of the medieval saint into the 20th century and
see what it makes us have to do.
Ed Willock was the co-founder of Integrity
magazine, and, as he wrote in one of his letters to
Dorothy Day, “I count myself as a godchild of you
and Peter.” Integrity Magazine is one of the things
which spun off from the Catholic Worker movement.
Ed Willock was a disciple of Peter Maurin. He
captured the radicalism of Maurin in his writings. The
articles are excellent because they go to the root of
the modern-day malaise. This is radicalism at it finest.
From radical and foundational thought we can begin
to change our lives for the better, and perhaps even
the world around us as a result.
It does no good to be liberals and stand around
just picketing and complaining about everything if we
don’t change the way that we personally see things
and we live. This is the reason that the Angelus Press
began to re-edit the articles from Integrity Magazine;
they cause one to think. When I was at The Angelus
in the early nineties we brought out the first volume.
It was only later that I began to figure out who these
people were. In this conference there is about seven
or eight years worth of reading and research. The
connection found among these 20th-century thinkers
is intriguing.
www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2006

14
Ten years ago, I just simply dismissed these
people, “Oh, the Catholic Worker, they’re just
communist.” That was it; you just simply wrote them
off and went on quite content, wondering how it was
that these pinkos survived and the Church never
condemned them. The great Cardinal Spellman didn’t
do anything. Amazing. The mystery of iniquity! I say
this all to my shame. Then I began to start reading
what they actually wrote. Things kept coming back to
Peter Maurin.

Where Are We Now?
As with many things Catholic today, the Worker
also looks rather different than in the days of Peter
Maurin. Whence does this come? Certainly much
of it is due to the general upheaval that has taken
place within the Church, but the radicalism of the
Worker also lent itself to the anti-establishment crowd
of the late 1950’s and the ‘60’s. The personalism
of Peter Maurin could be easily transformed into
individualism.
How do we get a whole group of young people
who are just simply anti-everything? Sex and drugs
were part of the ‘60’s. At the Catholic Worker it
came to the point that Dorothy Day threw out a
whole group of young people from one of the farms
because of their mischief. She said it was completely
unacceptable. When some argued against her
correction, saying, “Well, you know, you need to
respect their freedom,” she replied, “That’s nonsense.
This is the Catholic Worker, it’s a question of the
Gospel and it’s a question of morality.” She threw
them out. She told them people did not donate money
for this. They did not donate money to the Catholic
Worker to support transients. “You’re doing nothing.”
It was known from that day on as the “Dorothy
stomp.”
Now how did we come to this point? In the 1930’s
there were all those young enthusiasts around Peter
Maurin following him, handing out booklets and
teaching. Young people were working up in Harlem
teaching Catechism to the little black children,
teaching them art, and even teaching them how to
sing the Kyriale. This interracial work was quite
radical for the 1930’s. It was not something which
was normally done. Yet regardless of race they are
all either actually or potentially the children of
God. They too were redeemed by Christ. From this
apostolate to sex and drugs–what was the course?
There had been present already a danger, even
in the early days. Without the Faith, the movement
risked becoming radical pure and simple. This meant
that it could remain a force of example of the works
of mercy and of the Gospel, or it could, without
this supernatural vision, simply degenerate into a
utopian idealism. It is primarily an absence of the
supernatural faith upon which everything that Peter
Maurin taught was based which allowed it to reach a
THE ANGELUS • June 2006 www.angeluspress.org

crisis state. Though it is true that charity is the queen
of all the virtues, the Council of Trent taught that faith
is the foundation and the principle of our justification.
If we don’t have the Faith we cannot see, and charity
is never going to take root. If there is no charity,
then there is no beneficence. What remains behind
becomes all too readily a form of “do-goodism.”
This is what happened in many instances. Without
the Faith, the Worker is no longer Catholic. This was
what Dorothy Day described as sheer nihilism. The
young rebelled against the State, they rebelled against
the war, and they rebelled against the Church.
It became then a question of individualism.
We just simply extol ourselves rather than serving
Christ and the poor, and this changes everything. I
recently had the chance to speak with a woman who
was part of a group that had just opened a Catholic
Worker farm. The reason why I bring this up is
because she was telling me that it was a shame that
you often see in the Worker Houses only a notion of
mere philanthropy and activism. They are just soup
kitchens. And this is simply what it was never meant
to be. They serve in the soup kitchens, yes; they feed
the poor because you serve Christ in the poor. It’s
the radical response to grace and to the charity of the
Gospel that is often missing. As she said, in all this her
great concern was the misplaced activism. Her group
has restored on each Friday night what was called
a round table talk for the “clarification of thought,”
which was part of the vision of Peter Maurin: Catholic
Radicalism and not simply do-goodism.
In activism it is the individual who extols his own
personal freedom. This is precisely what Maurin had
not taught. Our own person was to be subordinated
to our neighbor in the service of Christ; for him
the center of the whole work had always been
the Church, always the community, the divinized
community of Christ. Dorothy Day said in the ‘60’s,
“This selfish disorder is going to bring about contempt
for life.” She described it as a sort of nihilism.
No one has control over other people’s free
will. You cannot change them. You can only change
yourself directly. The liberal, the protester, the
nihilist, the one who just simply condemns everything
for the sake of condemning, gives no answer. They
just simply reject. Even many can easily fall into that
trap and think they’re doing good because they reject
a corrupt system. We justify the reaction. We are like
the aristocratic woman in Fr. Zossima’s story because
we console ourselves with being good because we
oppose the system which dehumanizes people (or
rejects the Faith of Christ) and we love mankind;
but we do nothing for the man next to us. This is
completely opposite of what Peter Maurin taught.
Completely opposite.

15

Clarification of Thought

Institutions
and Corporations
Jean Jacques Rousseau says:
“Man is naturally good,
but institutions make him bad,
so let us
overthrow institutions.”
I say: Man is partly good
and partly bad,
but corporations,
not institutions,
make him worse.
“An institution,” says Emerson,
“is the extension
of the soul of a man.”
Institutions are founded
to foster the welfare
of the masses.
Corporations are organized
to promote wealth
for the few.
So let us found
smaller and better
institutions
and not promote
bigger and better
corporations.

This is why Peter Maurin insisted on clarification of
thought. There are things which he called the Round Table
talks. These were not lectures; he wanted conversation and he
wanted it to become their doctrine. Every Friday evening they
would have a round table talk. One of the founders of Integrity
Magazine, Carol Robinson (at that time she was Carol
Jackson), came and gave one of these round table talks for the
Catholic Worker Movement in Manhattan. This is one more
contact between Integrity and The Catholic Worker.
We must know doctrine and we must know the profound
notion that the Church has a social doctrine. We say it often
at the seminary: we are not conservatives, we are Catholics. We
have our own principles; we have our own notions, papal
teachings, catechisms, the Fathers, the Doctors of the Church.
If some of the ideas of the conservatives jive with ours then
good for the conservatives. Far too many judgments are being
made not by the Gospel, but by some political facade and
some political machinery which gears and governs so much of
what we do. And if it doesn’t gear everything yet, then we just
have to wait a few more years the way things are going.
Judge things according to the papal magisterium, judge
things according to the doctrine of the Church. One of the
things that the Archbishop did in his seminary was to institute
what we called Acts of the Magisterium, a class in the first
year. It just simply teaches some of the great papal encyclicals
of the last 200 years, that’s it. This is what these popes have
told us, these are the notions, these are the doctrines. Live
this and do this. That’s what needs to be done, and that’s
what needs to be discussed at the round table for clarification
of thought. The very first thing that we must do is think
clearly.
I have noticed with great horror these great developments
of little video machines; we have personal video machines
now. It’s great, now you won’t have to talk to anyone or deal
with any other human being as you go through the course of
life. This is appalling. It is absolutely miserable. And this is
only my personal opinion, but walkmans, cell phones, and
this whole notion of continual individual, isolated personal
noise I find demonic because it closes the human being off
from the whole rest of the society. And you will never get
them to understand the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church,
if we are all isolated, electronically geared blocks.
And then at that point the revolution is complete, because
we have already been since the 19th century individual
economic units earning wages, and that’s part of the
fragmentation of your families because now you don’t have
a family which is the basis of society and the basic economic
unit; you have mom, dad, and the children each one of
whom is a basic economic unit. And that’s the dissolution of
the family; it is the major reason why families have broken
down–industrialization. But now you come to actually
physically locking the individual in his own little personal
world, with his own little personal cell phone. I cannot tell
you how many times I have landed on an airplane and people
behind me are immediately calling on their phones to people
who are standing in the terminal. They are on the phone and
think they don’t have to deal with that human being. That’s
why I think it is demonic.
www.angeluspress.org THE ANGELUS • June 2006

16
If you could accomplish a world where no human
being talks to any other human being, then at that
point, you come humanly speaking to an impossibility
of converting anyone. Because they each have their
own self-generated world. The Gospel means nothing,
the Church means nothing, for they are social notions
and you have come to the full goal of the Revolution
which definitively finishes it all.

The Retreat Movement
The notion of a return to the land could be
spoken of at great length; in fact, it’s a result of
the problem of the industrialization of the modern
world. But the last point is the retreats. They started
doing the retreats in 1941-48, and it is considered
by many of the authors to truly be the high point of
the Catholic Worker movement. There were five-day
silent retreats or eight-day silent retreats depending
on circumstances. (That also is a resemblance to the
work that the Society does: the five-day exercises of
St. Ignatius.) In the Catholic Worker retreats one finds
a unification of community and the apostolate. The
retreats demonstrate the great work which had been
done during the forties. Because of the influence of
the retreats upon the movement, it was made very
clear that all social reformation is based upon the
Church.
No politics that we ever will do will do anything
to society because society is composed of human
creatures of God, who are made social beings by
the same God. We were not given our communities
by political machinery, and you’re not going to fix
that reality by political machinery. Therefore, it has
to be primarily by the Gospel; and then there is the
importance of the retreats. It’s a shame that in the
late forties they stopped doing the retreats. It might
have saved them a lot of misery in the late fifties and
sixties, and certainly would have saved them from
apostasy. And so we just leave you with this notion
that the Church essentially teaches.
I think that the life of Peter Maurin is provocative
enough to make us understand the necessity of the
Church as part of any kind of vision of the world
around us. It is a point where time, this linear thing,
the world that we live in, the jobs that we work, and
that moment of grace, that reality which is already
here, that we are seated in heavenly places–the
only place where that juncture comes together is in
the reality of the Church. And when the Church is
not present, for me to ignore the Church and live
timewise, paying my mortgage and keeping my job
and trying to be pious and the other point, there’s
no juncture. It is disunited. The place where heaven
and earth, as it were, are joined is in the reality of the
Church. It is the juncture of grace and of time. And it
is where man and nature are redeemed. That image of
all nature waits for the sons of God, nature itself waits
THE ANGELUS • June 2006 www.angeluspress.org

for this reality from the Church, from the head of the
Mystical Body.
And so our program cannot be naturalistic;
social work will be impossible, any kind of charity
will be impossible. Nor can we have any kind of
religious indifferentism, and we must know our Faith
profoundly. Nor does any kind of mere philanthropy
do us any good. It may be good to some extent,
but it does no good for the formation of the Gospel
ultimately. What we have to work to acquire is a
prophetic vision. The prophets are those who spoke
in the name of God. The prophets are those like
Jeremias. If he had to, in order to indicate to the
people that Jerusalem was going to be destroyed, he
walked through the streets naked. Everything is going
to be gone.
That was a way of getting the message across,
but if that’s what it takes and the equivalent in the
20th century is some man walking around as a bum
through the Bowery talking to bag ladies, talking
to people not because they necessarily understand
but because it’s the Gospel and it must be spoken
and it must be lived, and in the end we will reject
this notion of trying to live by the signs of the times,
which is essentially apostasy. This is why we can
see what has happened to the people of the Church
these days; it’s an apostasy. And we must look then
to the triumph of the Apocalypse, of the Lamb slain
from the foundation of the world–that’s the way He’s
described.
Redemption is eternal, Redemption is timeless,
and you must bring this social setting, you must
bring your families, you must bring your individual
heart, first to this reality of the Lamb slain from the
foundation of the world. If we begin with something
like this, there may be some hope. But if not, then it
is only open for further destruction, and things can
become much worse than they are. They certainly can
do that unless we redevelop this notion of prophetic
vision and understand that it is for us to live in time,
but we are never of it. If we acquire this, then we will
be excellent Catholics and things will arise once again
in this world.
Fr. James Doran was ordained for the Society of Saint Pius X in 1988 and is
currently the prior of St. Francis de Sales Priory in Geneva, Switzerland. He
is the former vice-rector of St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary (Winona, Minnesota) and editor emeritus of Angelus Press. This talk was given in Manhattan
(August 2003), at St. Christopher’s Mission, New York, NY. Photographs are
from the Marquette University Archive (used with permission), courtesy of
curator Mr. Philip Runkel.
In sidebars throughout this article, we have reprinted (with permission) five
of the thousands of phrased paragraphs–his Easy Essays–which he wrote
from which to teach. He believed in repeating, and driving his points home
by constant easy repitition.
1

		Eph. 2:19.
		Phil. 3:20.
3
		Col. 3:2.
4
		I Pet. 3:14.
2

25

Archbishop
Lefebvre
Rome

&
F r .

The Credo Pilgrimage
to Rome (May, 1975) led
by Archbishop Lefebvre
processes through St.
Peter’s Square.

E m m a n u e l

D u

C h a l a r d

Many say that although Archbishop Lefebvre was a man of great faith, he nevertheless lacked
“know-how,” particularly in his relations with Rome. It is an unfortunate error of perspective. If the
Archbishop firmly maintained his convictions on the crisis in the Church, he also had a knowledge of
the Roman Curia and of Vatican diplomacy which few men can claim.
As early as 1947 (not counting his years in the French Seminary), Archbishop Lefebvre frequented
the Roman Curia assiduously. As Archbishop of Dakar, but especially as Apostolic Delegate (1948-59),
every year in October he came “to give an account of his administration.” For whatever concerned the
Apostolic Delegation (a political and diplomatic position), he mainly dealt with the Secretariat of State,
and for other matters of the missionary apostolate, he met with prelates of the Congregation for the
Propagation of the Faith.
Occasionally, for other more particular matters, he also frequented other dicasteries, such as the
Congregation of Religious for the foundation of native religious congregations, for the establishment of
religious communities, and for difficulties between various orders. He also met with the Congregation
for the Eastern Rites on the occasion of the arrival of the Maronites in Africa.
The visit of the Delegate always ended with an audience with the Holy Father, Pope Pius XII.
Archbishop Lefebvre remained very discreet on everything he did for the good of the Church. His
Carmelite Sister, Mother Marie-Christiane, recalled how, in the 1950’s and 1960’s, Marcel knew the
art of changing the topic of conversation whenever she interrogated him on his doings in Africa and in
Rome. But it has come to public knowledge that between the young missionary bishop and the Angelic
Pastor, there was a common view on things and a mutual appreciation.
www.angeluspress.org

THE ANGELUS • June 2006

26

Pope Pius XII’s Man
Thanks to the testimony of Fr. Laurentin and of
many others, we do know that Archbishop Lefebvre
was Pius XII’s man for whatever concerned Africa.
A small but highly significant anecdote: during this
annual audience, Pius XII used to empty his drawers
full of rosaries and medals into the hands of his
Apostolic Delegate, saying “It is for your Africans.”
When he left Africa (1962), he continued to
frequent the Roman Curia. In particular, in his
functions of Superior General of the most important
missionary congregation worldwide, the Holy Ghost
Fathers, he had to have very frequent contacts with the
Congregation of the Religious. Moreover, to execute
the reiterated demands of many General Chapters of
his Congregation, he managed to transfer the mother
house from Paris to Rome, which made him live in the
Eternal City, with new occasions to visit the Curia.

Archbishop Lefebvre
and Pope Pius XII
A particular circumstance allowed him to have
a very deep knowledge of the gears of the Vatican
administration as well as a great number of Church
dignitaries: he was in fact appointed by John XXIII as
a member of the Central Preparatory Commission for
Vatican II, a commission composed of 120 members,
both cardinals and bishops.
To this Roman experience, one can add his
relations with the political, diplomatic, economic,
and cultural authorities of the many countries under
his care, either as Apostolic Delegate or as Superior
General.
Archbishop Lefebvre had the great advantage of
an exceptional experience and an intimate knowledge
of the Roman and universal situation of the Church.
He knew very well religious life, seminaries, the
mechanism of episcopal nominations, the functioning
of episcopal conferences (he himself started many—
although these were not the post-Vatican II bishops’
conferences based on false collegiality–Ed.), diocesan
clergy, religious congregations, etc.
One cannot be surprised, then, at the very active
part he played during the Second Vatican Council, as
the true leader of the minority gathered in the Coetus
Internationalis Patrum and as one of the main moral
authorities arrayed against the Conciliar revolution.

The Letter and the
Spirit of Canon Law
Archbishop Lefebvre, imbued with the soul of
a builder and a powerful organizer (as is proven by
his reputation in Africa, and especially in Dakar),
never saw himself as the founder of a congregation.
When he in fact did lay the foundations of the Priestly
Society of Saint Pius X, he was already 64 years old,
THE ANGELUS • June 2006 www.angeluspress.org

with a magnificent ecclesiastical career behind him.
He started this foundation truly compelled by Divine
Providence. Now, one can say that there was a reason
for the said Divine Providence to have given him, in
the course of his career, such an intimate knowledge
of the gears of the Roman Curia: he would need it
all during the tremendous crisis that was about to
explode.
Archbishop Lefebvre was always careful to get
all the canonical and ecclesiastical authorizations in
the foundation of his work in order to root it deeply
in the Church and to ensure heavenly blessings. The
Statutes of the SSPX, the creation of the seminary of
Ecône, the opening of the first houses of the SSPX, the
incardination of its members–all was done according
to the rules and in the strict observance of Canon Law.
When the Church authorities, in an unjust,
illegal manner contrary to faith, began to destroy
the SSPX, first by withdrawing any previously given
authorization, then in denying any new authorization,
he found himself obliged to by-pass the laws.
Nevertheless, he never believed that the present
situation of crisis entitled him absolute freedom from
Church laws. On the contrary, he endeavored to
follow the letter of Canon Law as much as possible,
and when this was truly impossible, then he followed
the spirit of the law, laying landmarks which would be
necessary for a future regularization.
We still have magnificent lectures on this topic
in which the Prelate explains the spirit of Canon
Law, what is implicit in it, and how theology is the
support of all Church Laws. “Salus animarum suprema
lex–Salvation of souls is the supreme law”—this
traditional axiom has always guided the major
decisions of the Archbishop, though always by
safeguarding the principle of authority, for instance,
by avoiding ordaining priests without incardination in
the Church–“vagi” as these are called, freelance priests,
having each his own personal apostolate. It is clear
that the situation in which the SSPX and its founder
found themselves from 1974 onwards did not facilitate
the relations with Rome. Nevertheless, Archbishop
Lefebvre never lost his Roman spirit or his will to keep
contact with Rome. Proof of this can be found in the
many collections of exchanges and meetings between
Rome and Ecône (Apologia pro Marcel Lefebvre, in three
volumes [available from Angelus Press. Price: $16.95
per volume], and Archbishop Lefebvre and the Vatican,
[available from Angelus Press. Price: $14.95]).

Official Contacts
The Prelate never slammed the door in Rome’s
face. On the contrary, he always went to the limit
of what was possible in dialogue and discussions.
Whenever he saw the slightest possibility of improving
the situation with Rome, he would go there forthwith.
From the beginning of the SSPX, he met more
frequently with the Holy Office in Rome, especially

27
with Cardinals Seper and Ratzinger (the present
Pope). This is a further proof, if needs be, that
the “problem with Ecône” has never been a mere
disciplinary matter, but rather a doctrinal issue, born
of the present crisis in the Church. The only constant
reproach made to him was that he did not accept
the novelties. This is truly to his honor, and one day
the Church will thank him for his heroic resistance
against the disastrous innovations coming from the
highest Roman authorities. Proof of the pudding, one
day Cardinal Oddi had this strange observation: “The
drama with Archbishop Lefebvre is that he has too
much faith”!

Unofficial Contacts
In any case, there was not a single year that did
not see the Archbishop coming to Rome at least once,
but usually more often.
Besides his meetings at the Holy Office (whenever
they were granted him), Archbishop Lefebvre never
hesitated, especially in delicate moments, to consult
Roman personalities, such as Cardinals Palazzini and
Oddi, but also the Salesian Don Dario Composta, the
Conventual Padre Coccia, and others whose names
we must withhold by discretion.
In the first years of John Paul II’s pontificate,
many meetings took place in the Holy Office under
the aegis of Cardinal Seper. Now, behind the scenes,
this Cardinal was about to solve the “Lefebvre
Problem” by a real court case. Once, at that time,
when the Archbishop met Don Francisco Putti,
founder of the well-informed periodical SiSiNoNo,
Don Putti convinced him that a trap was being laid
and that to save the SSPX, he had to cut off the
discussions, refusing to be judged by judges, three of
which had already condemned him. From that day
onward, the Prelate was infinitely thankful to Don
Putti and never missed visiting him each time he
came to Rome.

Audience with Pope Paul VI
On this issue of contacts with Rome, one must
mention the papal audiences. All in all, two audiences
in 21 years! This is not much for this man who had
met the pope so frequently in the course of his
ecclesiastical career, especially when one thinks that
this man was front page news for the media, and
that the said popes, who always spoke of “dialogue,”
“ecumenism,” and “repentance,” received constant
representatives from the Orthodox, Protestants, Jews,
Buddhists, Muslims, Marxists, etc. The first audience
was with Pope Paul VI, in Castel Gandolfo, on
September 11, 1976, at the end of the “hot summer.”
The Archbishop arrived in Albano (the SSPX house
near Rome) on September 9. In order to settle the
last minute details of this unexpected audience, the
next day he went to Rome to discuss the matter at

the Ecclesiastical College of Capranica with Don
Dominico Labellarte, the organizer of this meeting.
To meet in such a place was in fact quite ironic, since
some time earlier, this same College declared itself
favorable to the Italian referendum allowing the
legalization of divorce!
For the details of this audience, as well as for the
next, readers are asked to refer with great profit to the
biography of Archbishop Lefebvre, Marcel Lefebvre, by
Bishop Tissier de Mallerais (available from Angelus
Press. Price: $34.95).

Audience with Pope John Paul II
The second audience was with Pope John Paul II
at the beginning of his pontificate. It was organized by
Cardinal Siri, Archbishop of Genoa, and took place
on November 18, 1978.
The new Pope appeared to have the vague desire
to settle the whole matter rather rapidly, but he
reconsidered the issue and entrusted it to the care of
the Roman Curia, where, again, it got stuck in the
mud.
This was their first and last meeting (not including
their meetings during Vatican II when they did
not know each other). Subsequently, Archbishop
Lefebvre often returned to Rome, always ready to
meet the Pope, but the latter never expressed the
desire of further meetings. As a result, the Founder of
the Society of Saint Pius X departed for his eternity
on March 25, 1991, without having seen his work
rehabilitated nor the crisis of the Church being
stopped.
His first successor (1983-94), Fr. Franz
Schmidberger, was never able to meet Pope John
Paul II. His second successor, Bishop Bernard Fellay
(1994-present) had a brief audience with Pope John
Paul II on December 30, 2000, but nothing concrete
came out of it.
And now, under the pontificate of Benedict XVI,
we continue in the line traced for us by Archbishop
Lefebvre in his November 21, 1974 Declaration, a
real Magna Charta for all those who love the Roman
Church:
We hold firmly with all our heart and with all our mind
to Catholic Rome, Guardian of the Catholic Faith and of
the traditions necessary to the maintenance of this faith, to
the eternal Rome, mistress of wisdom and truth.
We refuse on the other hand, and have always refused,
to follow the Rome of Neo-Modernist and Neo-Protestant
tendencies, which became clearly manifest during the
Second Vatican Council, and after the Council, in all the
reforms which issued from it.
From Fideliter, No. 67, Sept.-Oct. 2005, pp.26-31. Fr. Du Chalard is one of the
most senior priests of the SSPX, ordained by Archbishop Lefebvre in 1976. He
was for many years stationed in the SSPX house in Albano, near Rome; he is
now prior of the Society’s St. Charles Priory at Turin, Italy.

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28

			

Fifteen Minutes

with Fr. de Chivré:

The Child
in Modern

Civilization
In the days of Romulus or in the era of Attila,
children were exactly the same as those who stroll
along Rue Royale or play in the Luxembourg Gardens.
Both were the young of the race of man, endowed
with a nature pre-existing the barbarian or civilized
surroundings which welcomed them as a promise or as
a menace for the tomorrows of which history is written.
The children were integrated into a specific era, destined
to bring to it their share of human initiatives in the
form of progress more or less technical and scientific. In
addition, they disposed of mental qualities responsible
for governing that progress with spiritual values which
were, themselves, the determining factor for civilization
properly so-called.
Civilized does not by any means signify motorized,
electrified, documented; there is such a thing as progress
in the service of barbarity—the atomic bomb proves
it cruelly enough—just as there are stationary lives of
peasants and simple men infinitely more civilized than
the strollers on the Champs-Elysées. You have only to
visit certain Indian tribes to come into contact, wonderstruck, with moral prestige, the delightful welcome of
hospitality, disinterested service, the sense of mystery
and of God, to situate immediately the word civilization
in those regions personal to man without any reference
to fancy cars driven just as well by a boor as by a saint.
Open your dictionary. To civilize: to adapt to society,
to polish manners, to give lessons in urbanity, of politeness;
THE ANGELUS • June 2006 www.angeluspress.org

in a word, the whole life of the spirit, with or without
material progress.
It tells you how much the obsession with the priority
of the temporal—fostered in the very name of that
caricature of virtue called socialism, or even humanism—
focuses the attention of altruists and ideologues on that
element least vital for civilization, albeit the most vital
for progress.
Certainly, civilization, an ensemble of spiritual,
intellectual, and political notions, is strictly bound to a
concrete material context. We all live subject to similar
or analogous concrete material conditions, yet we are
not all civilized men because of it. Progress has proven
to be the most formidable adversary of civilizations. We
have only to turn and look back over the path of time
to identify the most catastrophic moments in history
as composed of two words which ought to be mutually
exclusive: progress and decadence.
The law of progress is to make man lose the sense
of measure and order, thus to compromise an entire
civilization in its respect for the common good, in its
anxiety for a spiritual life qualifying our action, in
its readiness to be content with material sufficiency,
in exchange for a greater liberty of the spirit, in its
conviction that a natural life nourishes thought more
than does an artificial life of neon signs, in its need to
respect and appreciate one’s neighbor not as a well-filled
wallet but as a conscience and as a soul designated to

s

:

29
our conscience and our soul as a traveling companion
placed by God on our path to help us reach our
destination.
To be civilized is to find more in oneself than
around oneself; it is to experience more by oneself
than by progress; it is to touch something infinitely
superior to well-being, wealth, pleasure, snobbery,
and spring, summer, fall, and winter sports: it is to be
obsessed—like Psichari, Péguy, Claudel, Saint-Exupéry,
Foucauld1—with proving the value of man to the
fanatics of the value of things.
This, then, is the heart of the matter. The child
stands before modern life like a little bird in front of a
shiny decoy which moves, glitters, attracts...and kills
little skylarks. Notice where the tragedy begins for the
skylark: the decoy makes him lose his independence
by obsession. Modern life kills the independence of
young people, ironically so intent on demanding it.
We will never change the nature of the child—which,
as a side comment, highlights the foolishness or
the calculated perversion of the campaign for coeducation.
The child is not called a man; he is only the
promise of a man. He therefore has his chances to
acquire a reason, to obtain a character, to consolidate
a conscience, to possess a spirit of decision for the
good, the better and the best—just as he runs the risk,
by the yet amorphous state of his qualities, to vitiate
them, to falsify them, or to kill them. The worst
service we can render a child is to treat him as a man
in possession of a maturity which does not exist, just
as the worst service we can render to men is to treat
them like boys, whether they be choir boys or soldier
boys.
Now, the child’s promise of qualities rightfully
belongs to the civilization of tomorrow, and modern
progress puts all its energy into deteriorating that
promise as completely as possible. The reason is
very simple: while the promise of the civilized adult
remains fragile in a child—as with all things at the
embryonic stage—his instinctive vitality, wide open to
his sensibility in favor of progress, is, on the contrary,
of a violence of expression and manifestation to put
him at the mercy of a life temporally inopportune.
He is beaten before he even begins, because of the
internal discrepancy between his barely conscious
duty as a future civilized adult and his all too
conscious power as a vital profiteer of progress.
Everything pushes him toward it: his gaze, without
interior life, focusing on exterior qualities sometimes
the most instinctive or animal; his heart, without
experience, burns for every type of experience;
his mind, avid for pretensions that far surpass his
capacities, judges without knowing the heart of the
problem.
And, most of all, his adolescent sincerity plunges
head first into the modern circus of progress where his
vitality, glutted to nausea, sends him back to sob alone
in his room like a poor beaten animal caught in the

trap of the fascinations of progress. Still is he blessed
if he weeps in rage; if he does not twist his defeat into
a disdainful mockery of the attitudes which are the
honor of the civilized man.
About ten years ago, in Rome, I came early in the
morning to the Coliseum to honor with a few thoughts
and prayers this sand which had drunk so much
blood, this place which was filled with so many sacred
offertories. I will never forget the wave of nausea and
the sorrowful indignation that passed over me for a
few moments: a group of Parisian students trouped
from one end of the other of the Coliseum, hurling
at the top of their lungs: “I Love Only One Girl.”2
The French tourists, aghast, looked at each other
in disbelief. Vitality, ultra-fashionable outfits: yes.
Civilized: absolutely not.
It was 1944. The war has just ended, railroads
overloaded with passengers. In the town of Argentan,
crowds and chaos. A female amputee, with one
leg, is pushed in spite of herself smack into my
compartment, which contained only young men.
Nobody moved; facing me, a young scout leader with
badges, sat motionless. Embarrassed, he pretended to
sleep. “Madame,” I said very loudly, “when the young
are cowards, it is up to the grey-beards to be generous.
Please take my seat.” The boy flushed red as a berry
and buried himself deeper in his seat. Civilized?
Come, now...
All of these kids, without civilized humanity,
are swept about by the storm of propaganda,
performances, snobberies. Progress invents lovely
things indeed which it offers to men made ugly by
the absence of spirit and soul in their social behavior.
The child is demagnetized from his eternal role. There
really are the progress-disorientated: the sacred no
longer attracts the attention of the young, any more
than the priority of duty over pleasure, the respect of
parents over independence, the priority of sacrifice
over abdication.
Why all this internal upheaval of the elementary
laws of the nature of man? Why destroy the man
by instructing the child? Why is the child closed
off to what goes beyond physics, chemistry, and
mathematics? Why these mothers who weep over
children who laugh? Inventions, we are swimming in
them, but civilized men?
Spontaneously, I turn toward you, the parents, to
suggest the following:
Do not deny modern progress, but give to
your children something better than progress, by
understanding that to perfect a being is above all to
establish him in his interiority as a man, in that secret
world in which the child elaborates that with which he
will approach progress in order to judge it, govern it,
measure it, discipline it. Develop his reflection beyond
the visible. Stimulate his character beyond ease and
easiness.

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THE ANGELUS • June 2006

30
Awaken his conscience beyond egoism. The laws
of being are in the nature of the child much more
and much better than in a program of studies. And
the duty of parents is to aim at molding a complete
adult, according to his nature and according to
grace, according to the divine life, before aiming at a
graduate and a scholar. Our intelligent robots prove to
what extent modern life has succeeded in destroying
man by the instruction of man. This explains the
number of educated men powerless to resolve the
Christian problem of man. Too many of us abandon
to others the care of calling the shots according to
God. To do so is already to redefine ourselves outside
the word civilization: companions of others. We forget,
in this domain, that there exist in each one of us
incommunicable values whose intimate development
determines our civilizing role. Incumbent upon each
one is the formidable duty to resolve his mystery by
living in himself the mystery of God, expressed in
the natural and redemptive law, in order to distribute
civilizing effects all around him. The primary social
action takes form between the two inseparables which
are God and man.
The child is submerged, drowned, in the
phantasmagoria of fleeting images and material
progress which unfolds before his impressionable
imagination and distracts him from the only
worthwhile problem: becoming a complete man.
The Swiss have engraved on their coins: “Dominus
providebit–The Lord will provide.” Such is the
balanced recipe for a Christian education: First, God
and His commandments. First, the natural law of
honor and duty. First, conscience and sacrifice. First,
respect and politeness. First, the complete man.
The rest is all secondary. God will provide for it
directly, providentially, by the parents, by merited
recompenses. Worry about the complete man; as for
the rest, God will see to it. Your first happiness is the
complete man. Without that, the other happinesses are
all adulterated. Your first value is the complete man.
As for success, God will provide in the measure of
your essential value.
You tell me: “First you have to live.” I object:
“First you have to be complete in order to live as
a man.” You must not set your heart on having,
you must set your heart on being, to be a Christian
in a given age that comes to you with materialist
theories, divinized by the scientific mind into the be
all and end all of human value. Contaminated as we
all are with situating the Faith behind science, with
placing morality behind progress, we form a strange
procession, more or less cacophonous, and we dare
call it a civilization.
Whoever would see civilization rise out of
the ruins of a brilliant decadence—whoever would
properly esteem it, with its spiritual effects softening
instincts, polishing manners, imposing honesty in
work, inspiring pity for the poor, and the teaching
of truth for children—has only to glance through
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the pages of history where the great holy bishops
introduced the Spirit of God into human activity. St.
Martin alone still dazzles the history of France with
his brightness. The most beautiful answer we can give
in favor of the Church is to see her leaders, endowed
with a strictly spiritual power, civilizing the temporal
by an education which alone it cannot provide.
We will therefore have to recover the rights
of the Faith if we want to save civilization, for she
alone disposes of that intelligent and strong authority
over progress which releases man from materialistic
subjections ironically decreed to be the expression
of independence from moral exigencies cleverly
identified as servitudes.
For this reason Communism will never be a
civilization because it suppresses the independence of
the soul, the conscience and the spirit, by absorbing
it into the dominant of a strictly material progress. To
play the communist card in the education of children
when one is a Christian, baptized and perhaps
consecrated, is ineluctably to thwart the views of God
on the soul of the children and proclaim the death of
civilization by deifying progress.
From the moment a man no longer reacts
according to natural and supernatural laws but only
acts under the surveillance of positive and police laws,
he confronts civilization to destroy it, all in pretending
to construct it.
In face of modern life, which is what it is—
marvelous and mechanical, fairly miserable in
humanity, insufficient in civilization—we must offer
the child more and better than what he sees. We must
make him understand, by an education at his level,
by an education of his insatiable heart giving him the
thirst for inexhaustible realities, by activities liberating
from materialistic and merely temporal shackles, by a
knowledge of national and religious history confirming
for him, in the eras of nobility and valor, the validity
of the laws of the spirit taking precedence over the
scientistic conditions of materialistic progress.
It is a question of the state of soul of the parents
and of the atmosphere of the home more than the
rigid enumeration of an unbending program; a
question of familial conversations, as well, maintaining
a certain tenor of civilization in one’s thought. The
child listens a great deal and breathes in ideas the
way his lungs breathe in the atmosphere. He decides
right away whether Mama and Daddy react according
to the Catechism or according to the newspaper. He
guesses very quickly whether Mama organizes the
home in view of a purely materialistic success or
according to guidelines in which a spirit of Christian
civilization has something to say. He senses whether
the suffering of the parents draws them to ascend with
nobility into attitudes of moral grandeur, or to bury
themselves in materialistic diversions demoralizing
for his aspirations as a child. The child, not yet able to
be a man, possesses the logic of what he sees, of what
he hears. The home is for him the very first civilized

31
or non-civilized region. We can tell by his selfishness
or by his spirit of generosity towards his first
companions: parents, brothers and sisters, whom God
has given to him to earn his first spurs as a civilized
person. It is in the home that parents determine the
victory or the defeat of the child when his emotions
first stare into the face of that progress of a hundred
faces, of which even one is able to dizzy his heart or
inflict on it irremediable damage.
It is for parents to lead him to his role as a
civilized man, loving the superior life—spiritual,
intellectual, supernatural—happy to concretize it by
respect, politeness, tact, generosity, revealing the
civilized man and the Christian.
It is a long, slow work, like all that is definitive
and great: for 33 years, He prepared the Redemption
with a marvelous divine authority, oscillating between
the utter poverty of the manger and that of the cross
to better affirm the radiance of the spirit—manifested
to its ultimate degree at the Resurrection. Parents
dispose of the first 21 years of the child to provide him
his chances for civilizing affirmations of his being. It
is well worth the tears and the sacrifices, the patience
and the prayers of a Mama and a Daddy, to bestow on
their age, as their direct successor, a man or a woman
infinitely superior to progress and magnificently
situated in the Christian civilization of his country.
Modern life disposes of a profusion of materialistic
propositions touching every sector of social life, every
type of technology, which means that we are all turned
aside from what I call the “internity” of man: his
personal and spiritual life. For the little that the child
notices the extent to which Mama and Daddy are
corrupted by this temporal gangrene at the expense of
the major essential, very quickly he dodges his duty as
a complete man, modeling his attitude on that of his
parents.
The most subtle danger consists in communicating
to technology, to the economy, a sort of consecration
by the importance we give to it. Without knowing it,
without saying it and without meaning to, we have
returned to the worship of idols, the religion of things.
I remember listening to two young men, snobs
and philistines, in an endless discussion about the
most worthy signs of their social rank and their role. I
heard an authentic sermon of materialism, a temporal
homily, and, to myself, I thought of the warnings of
Jesus favorable to the free entry of grace in the free
will of man: “Blessed are the poor in spirit...,” and
I prayed for those two young men so deprived of
spiritual life that they were, without knowing it, inapt
to reveal themselves civilized.
“Durissima verba–These words are too hard,” you
may think. We have so watered down the importance
of the major realities by affective intellectualism,
anxious to please everyone, without denying or
affirming anything, that everything seems hard to us
rather than appearing solid like a rock and comforting
like an island in the middle of the ocean, toward

which it feels good to row with energy. Nothing is
hard for him who wants to love the words of God.
They belong to no specific civilization but they
determine the degree of every civilization, and it is
towards them that we are bound to orient our heart to
spare it the hardness of social catastrophes within the
phantasmagoria of progress.
Like the word of Jesus, the word of the priest is,
above all, eternal. It should not be up to date at the
expense of the eternal. But its eternal riches are always
up to date for the age in which they are expressed.
To make children appreciate the eternal in the
teaching given is to guarantee them a real civilizing
power over their age so turned aside from the eternal,
whether formally by secularism or ideologically by
the priority of the temporal over the spiritual. God is
Spirit and Truth, said Jesus to that poor ultra-temporal
lady, the Samaritan woman.
What are you worried about? said Jesus to the
dear Apostles too anxious for the place of honor and
for success. The Savior never ceased to proclaim the
two great preferences of His Redemption: the major
goods that are not of this earth, and the diverse and
spiritual treasures hidden in the hearts of little children
and in those who resemble them.
I challenge you, parents, to esteem these treasures
in the measure of your faith and in the measure of
your Christian affection for the little children, your
children.
Originally published in Carnets Spirituels: L’Éducation, No. 7, January 2006,
pp.24-33, entitled “L’Enfant Devant la Civilisation Moderne.”
Translated exclusively into English for Angelus Press. Fr. Bernard-Marie de
Chivré, O.P. (say: Sheave-ray´) was ordained in 1930. He was an ardent Thomist,
student of Scripture, retreat master, and friend of Archbishop Lefebvre. He
died in 1984.
1

2

Ernest Psichari (1883-1914), a grandson of French rationalist and rabid anticlerical Ernest Renan (Life of Christ), converted to Catholicism during his
military service in the Sahara; he wrote A Soldier’s Pilgrimage recounting
his conversion. He hoped to enter the Dominican Order but died in the first
battles of World War I. Charles Péguy (1873-1914), French poet and essayist,
left the Church in his youth to become a socialist but returned to the Faith in
early middle age. His poems are profound but simple meditations on Catholic
truth, particularly the reality of the Incarnation. He, too, died in the first days
of the war. Paul Claudel (1868-1955), French author and playwright, was
likewise a prominent adult convert to Catholicism, placing his genius at the
service of the Faith. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900-1944), best known for
his deceptively simple “children’s” book, The Little Prince, never became a
Catholic but wrote novels and autobiographical pieces exploring the human
condition. His reconnaissance plane was shot down during World War II.
Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916), recently beatified by the Church, was
an aristocrat, soldier, adventurer, and finally a priest and desert hermit. He
penetrated the forbidden kingdom of Morocco on a reconnaissance mission
for the French military and produced the first modern European maps of
the region. He led such a scandalous life as a soldier in North Africa that
he was expelled from the army. Ultimately disgusted with his riotous but
empty existence, he converted to Catholicism, joined the Trappists for a
time, and ended his days a lone priest-apostle to the Touareg of the Sahara,
where he was murdered by mercenary Arabs during World War I for his
loyalty to the French government.
“Auprès de Ma Blonde,” translated above by the title of Elvis Presley’s 1966
rendition, is an old French military song with rather bawdy lyrics–literally;
“It feels good to sleep next to my blond girl.”
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The

C o l

l e e

n

D r i

p p é

32

Cluttered
Soul
Few reproaches fall more often on the Western world than that
of overconsumption. We are too rich, too fat, too endlessly diverted
by the world of gadgetry and entertainment. We clutter every
activity, piling detail upon detail until the joy of work is lost, the
refreshment of leisure cancelled out, the very heart of things buried
beneath the fat of overindulgence.
As societies we are said to use up the most resources, eat the
greatest share of the world’s dainties, wear the most, drive the
most, waste the most. Our accusers, whether they belong to the
comparatively impoverished third world or to the concerned
segment of our own, agree on this: that we take more than we need.
We probably do. But what happens when we try to scale back
to a simpler life? Can our children walk 15 miles to school? Can
we bicycle 30 miles to work–when it’s snowing? What about the

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33
sick baby? How can we make a doctor’s appointment
without a telephone? How check the weather without
a radio? Can a mother keep up with laundry for ten
people, washing by hand and hanging things out to
dry whenever the weather is fine? Maybe she can,
but her family’s cleanliness won’t match up to the
standards of the rest of society.
Third world medical care, third world diets, third
world transportation, and a third world hut with third
world lighting and plumbing might do us good. But
how long until the social workers arrive? How long
until the children are taken away?
Are we even meant to give up the so-called
luxuries of our culture? The Church has never ordered
the rich to become poor, but only to share what we
have. Nevertheless, it is plain that something is wrong.
Uneasy lies the head that wears the expensive hairdo.
And overtaxed the brain that must coordinate our rich
and complex daily lives.
And it is true, we often do overconsume. In small
matters mostly, but also sometimes in large, we take
more than our share. We choose a better-looking
car, better food, new clothes when the old are still
adequate. We demand convenient drive-up windows,
fast food. We expect the comfort of air conditioning,
mowed lawns, and wall-to-wall carpets.
We are preoccupied with these things both in their
presence and in their absence. Our day can be ruined
by car trouble or a power outage. Our lives are set on
a routine, a schedule of things we mean to accomplish.
Anything that breaks that routine, anything that
interferes with our expectations, makes us angry or
depressed. It seems plain that a lifestyle so fraught
with disappointments and worries is not good for us.
Caught in this dilemma, we flounder about like
flies caught in a spider’s web. Whatever does God
want with us? How can we balance our lives?
Balance is the operative word here. God created us
and God created the world we inhabit. We, as a race,
may have disarranged it somewhat, but God’s creation
is good. God gave us bodies, and we are expected to
feed and shelter them. He gave us the means to keep
the race going, and we are expected to care for our
children, to teach them and make them happy. But
God did not mean that our possessions should be
our children. Nor did He intend that our houses and
stores, our schools and highways, should be the resting
places of our souls.
We are to touch lightly these things that are less
than God. It is the Hand of the Giver we should kiss,
not the gifts. To live in balance, we must cultivate a
blessed indifference toward the things of this world.
Is there chicken? Then like St. Teresa of Avila, we will
eat chicken for the glory of God. Did we only have
enough money for beans and rice? Then it’s beans and
rice for the equal glory of God. We say thank you.
Poverty is not just a lack of something. There are
levels and levels of physical poverty. Beans are riches
in some countries; rice may mean the difference

between life and death. And those who lack may
either curse or bless. Holy poverty is the liberty that
comes from placing things in perspective. God is
our fortune, sin our poverty. We may labor for the
goods of this world as a duty to our families and our
neighbors. But when our attachment is to the Creator
of these goods, a great weight is taken from our souls.
Did you work to buy a house for your family?
God’s memory of your care and generosity goes with
you to heaven–not the house. Will you drag the car
and the refrigerator, the lawn mower and your son’s
college diploma with you to judgment? You won’t
need them any more than St. Thomas Aquinas needed
a copy of the Summa.
We make use of things but we rise above them.
This is because this world and the things in it are
given to us as tools. That is all they are. As the trees
and fruits of the Garden were ultimately the tools of
obedience, so our worldly goods are no more than the
means by which we practise virtue.
Few of us are advanced enough in the spiritual life
to live on this beautiful but rather austere plane. We
may thank God for the fruit, but we still enjoy eating
it on a quite physical level. Only occasionally do we
have the grace to say with Our Lord, “My food is to
do the Will of my Father.”
It helps, however, to delve a little behind the
surface of our cluttered world. The word, “tool” is
a good one. A car is a tool: something whereby we
move from one place to another. Do we use this
tool to fulfill our obligations? Or do we make of a
car something it is not? A status symbol? A toy? An
escape from duty? Do we deprive others in order to
have a showy and expensive model?
Or what about a freezer? Is it a place to put ice
cream? To keep TV dinners? To procrastinate the
leftovers? Or is it a tool that enables us to buy larger
quantities of things that save us money? To store up
garden produce for the winter?
As we move behind the thing we see, we approach
more nearly to the reality–our own reality. A freezer
has no soul, but its owner does. One day the freezer
will cease to be, but its owner will not.
Usually it is the concrete that catches our attention.
There is no denying that a broken-down car, a burned
batch of cookies, or a leaking washer all speak to
us with more immediacy than the greatest human
suffering far away. This is hardly to our credit. But we
must admit what we are–flesh. As flesh we manipulate
and live by the things of the flesh, and as flesh we must
recognise our humble state, our weakness. To learn
the first steps of indifference, to suffer small things
willingly is at least a first short climb up the mountain
of detachment.
With God’s help we may even inch our way to the
top.
Mrs. Drippé is a free-lance writer and author of several children’s books.
She lives with her family in St. Mary’s, Kansas, and is a former teacher at St.
Mary’s Academy.
www.angeluspress.org

THE ANGELUS • June 2006

34

A helpful mother proposes solutions to
the challenges of raising a large family.

Suggestions
From a Mother
As a mother, it is good, once in a while, to stop
for a short time and imitate the man of the parable
who, before building a tower, sits down, takes the time
to think, to clarify his goal and the means to obtain
it. Because of the constant demands on our time, the
multiple preoccupations that assail us, we run the risk,
in the heat of battle, of losing track of the supreme
goal of our mission: educate our children so that they
become saints! If we are indeed ready to do everything
in our power to insure the physical, moral, and
intellectual development of our children, how much
more enthusiasm must we have to help them become
saints? How can we do it? There are several means.
Some are indispensable, others can vary from one
family to the next, from one situation to another. All
these means, however, rest on a few solid principles:
the importance of good example, family prayer, an
atmosphere of charity and selflessness, the need for
sane distractions. Here are a few means that I put to the
test of experience while raising my children. May they
help other mothers in their noble task of educator.
Good example has an undeniable influence in
matters of education. Our Lord taught by example
prior to teaching by words. Children, especially the
girls, become their mother, and it is only as they
become older that boys imitate their father. Superficial
and vain mothers will beget superficial and vain girls!
What is important as educators is what we are, or at
least are trying to be, rather than what we say. Our
attitudes influence our children more than all our good
words! If we do not give bad examples, and practise
ourselves what we demand of our children, our task as
educators will become a lot easier.
THE ANGELUS • June 2006 www.angeluspress.org

Also, if we want to be obeyed, we must be
consistent in our requirements! First of all, before
anything else, we must know exactly what we want,
then give our orders with the firm intention of having
them carried out. Otherwise, the children will sense
hesitation and will not bother listening to what we are
telling them. To be certain to have been heard and
understood, have the children repeat the order to you;
it will avoid numerous involuntary “disobediences”!
Additionally, it is important to give only reasonable
orders, and explain frequently to our children why we
are either happy or unhappy with their behavior. Be
sure that father and mother are in agreement. There
are too many children that try to play one parent
against the other, and upon being refused something
by one parent, will rush to the other to weasel out
the permission denied and announce with triumph:
“Daddy, or mommy, said yes!” In that regard, let
us not forget that the presence of the father, even in
their infancy, is necessary for the psychological and
emotional, balance of the children.
If we want our children to love prayer, we must
make sure that Jesus becomes their Divine Friend with
whom it is good to talk. To talk to someone, we must
first look at him; thus, before asking our children to
pray, we must put them in the presence of God. We
must also avoid discouraging them by long, unending,
and tiresome prayers that will take away the taste for
prayer. As much as possible, we must stick to evening
family prayers and have the active participation of
all the children according to their age. They may,
for instance, take turns in announcing the intention
of each decade of the rosary, or say the decade, etc.
During Advent, it is important to prepare for Christmas

35
together. They can choose one of the figures of the
Nativity Scene and bring it closer to the Holy Family
every day if they behaved, or other activities of that
nature. During Lent, it is good to help materialize,
one way or another, all the efforts and sacrifices to be
made by family members. Finally, we must not forget
to pray often for vocations, and have your children
think about it: “Jesus may call one of us to follow
Him; could it be me? Would I be ready to answer:
Lord, here I am?”
Charity is the essential virtue of a Christian. We
must insist without pause to the children about this
mark of a true Christian: “By this shall all men know
that you are my disciples, if you have love for one
another” ( Jn. 13:35). We must teach our children the
Christian reflexes of patience, goodness, meekness,
and forgiveness. Let us create an atmosphere of
charity within our homes. Let us teach our children
to do everything out of love, to please others, but
most especially, for the love of Jesus, who will reward
everything that is done for His love. Let us teach them
how to share, the spirit of sacrifice, and how to pay
attention to others. “Do not do to others what you
would not like others to do to you!” Most frequently,
in children it is carelessness that is the deep root of
selfishness. Make them think about those who suffer,
about the sick, about the poor. Children can be very
generous, but if we do not explain to them anything,
they will stagnate in their carelessness and will grow
up perfectly selfish.
When we must scold one of our children, it must
never be out of impatience or anger. The child must
feel, on the contrary, that we punish him regretfully,
because he is doing something either wrong for him,
or for the common good (of the family). For some
children who may be particularly difficult, it may
be useful to tell them stories in which the bad guy is
someone exactly like him, and then ask him what is
there to think about such behavior and what would be
its proper punishment. Some parents will be surprised
to see how severely children judge, and consequently
how they despise weakness. A normal child will accept
severity, but never injustice! Collective punishments
in which the good child pays for the coward must be
avoided. But with the punishment, we must never
forget to manifest our love for them by our gestures
and our words. We must take time to explain that if
we must punish them, it is for their own good and that
one day, God will demand an accounting from the
parents.
Do not forget that the trust you give to your
children helps them grow: “I am believed to be good,
therefore there must be some good in me, therefore
I can be good!” Give them responsibilities tailored
to their ages. In large families, it is good to make
one of the older children responsible for one of the
younger, according to the circumstances. If our older
children understand their role and do not abuse their
authority, their younger siblings will follow them
trustingly. When you pick an older sibling to be the

baptismal sponsor of the latest addition to the family,
[check the age requirement with your parish priest
first—Translator’s note], explain the importance of his
role! The obligation to be a model to the godchild and
to pray for it will be for him a great stimulus!
Discipline is necessary everywhere, but it is
absolutely indispensable in a large family! If we want
a child to do well in school, we have to give him the
means. He must be able to work in peace, away from
the noise and the interruptions of the small ones,
to be able to do his homework. Sleep time must be
programmed according to the age of the children, not
the whim of the moment. Tiredness generates bad
grades and bad moods.
Finally, if we want happy children, they must be
provided’ with agreeable entertainment. When well
chosen, they actually help the child to do his family
or school chores with more courage and enthusiasm.
A child must have time to play and entertain himself.
To teach our children to be helpful does not consist
in transforming them into a maid! But granted, it
is normal that the older children learn to clean and
keep up their room by themselves, and it is certainly
very educational to teach them to iron their clothes,
especially if they are a little vain and like to change
their outfit frequently.
But we must not continually impose on our
children disagreeable chores. It is our duty to give
them times of sane entertainment that will allow them
to relax at the end of a long day of constant efforts. In
that regard, we must be careful with what our children
are reading. Some book deemed “good” could harm
readers who are too young! It is like a steak: good for
a 16-year-old, but not for a toddler! Sometimes, some
parents impose the same entertainment at the same
time for the whole family for fear of creating jealousy.
This is frequently resented by the older children as
an injustice. We must choose pastimes adapted to
the older children as well as pastimes adapted to the
younger ones. Children, through the course of the
years, will move from one type to the other without
any problem. Thus the older children will enjoy
distractions proper to their age, whereas the parents
supervise them all.
Those are some of the lessons I learned from
my own experiences. I do not claim to be a perfect
mother, but I believe I have given a lot of love to my
children, and I think that, by using these principles, I
did help them to become balanced adults with a right
conscience.
It would be unforgivable if I did not add that in
my moments of doubts and difficulties, I always had
recourse to Mary, perfect model of motherhood.
Thanks to her support and her intercession, our duty
becomes easier and more fruitful. May she protect all
our families and make saints out of our children!
Translated for Angelus Press from Pour qu’Il Règne (Jan.-Feb. 2006), the
bi-monthly magazine of the SSPX’s Belgian District. The authoress wishes
to remain anonymous.
www.angeluspress.org

THE ANGELUS • June 2006



The Stages of th
Between Rome a

An exclusive interview with Bishop Bernard Fellay, Superior General
of the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X (April 1, 2006) given to DICI,
the official press agency of the Society of Saint Pius X.
Your Excellency, from the very beginning of your
discussions with Rome, five years ago, you set two
preliminary conditions to any doctrinal discussion. They
were: freedom for every Catholic priest to celebrate
the Latin Mass and the withdrawal of the decree of
excommunication against the bishops of the Society.
What are the reasons for these preliminary conditions?
Aren’t they just a dilatory maneuver which would
enable you to gain time in order to reassure priests and
faithful uneasy about a possible rapprochement? Are
you not thus running the risk of missing an unhoped-for
opportunity of reconciliation?

All such political considerations, I would even say
such politicking calculations, are foreign to the spirit of
the conversations that the SSPX has been having with
Rome ever since Archbishop Lefebvre instigated them.
The preliminary conditions I set have for their purpose
to create a new atmosphere in the official Church.
It would be a first step towards making traditional
Catholic life possible again. The present situation has
pushed the faithful, confronted with the post-conciliar
disasters, to flee their parishes and join the SSPX in
spite of the opprobrium attached to traditional priests.
No Roman sanction, no bishop’s warning, could deter
these families from choosing Tradition. That’s a fact.
So I asked the pope for public acts in favor of Tradition
because our faithful cannot be satisfied with mere words
of encouragement. These acts are namely freedom for
the traditional Mass and withdrawal of the decree of
excommunication. If the news presently rumored in the
papers about the withdrawal of the excommunication
proves to be true, then we will say that the Sovereign
Pontiff took into account one of these two preliminary
conditions.
The ANgelus • June 2006 www.angeluspress.org

Are you not asking Rome to solve the crisis
with Ecône unilaterally, without any
corresponding act on your part?

Not at all. Because the crisis with Ecône does not
come first. It only reveals a deeper crisis in Rome
itself, and the solution to this major crisis is in Rome’s
hands. There is no question for us of trade-union type
negotiations, because we do not have any private
interest, nor any personal advantage to bargain for. We
desire that Rome recover her own Tradition. Ecône
is only safeguarding what is first and foremost the
patrimony of the universal Church. It belongs to Rome
to give back to Tradition its rightful place, full and
whole, so that it can then play its part in the solution of
the crisis in the Church.

But the excommunication is a personal
situation which affects you and your confreres?

We are asking for the withdrawal of a decree of
excommunication to which we never ascribed any
canonical validity; otherwise it is obvious that we would
not have exercised any ministry, neither conferred
priestly ordinations nor confirmations. But we are
very much aware of the practical consequences of this
decree: it efficiently demonizes Tradition, its prevents
traditional priests from doing any good in parishes. If
a family calls upon us for a sacrament in the traditional
rite, the bishop or the parish priest only has to say: “Do
not even think about it, they are excommunicated!”
This is how Tradition is concretely neutralized.
The two preliminary conditions–liberalization of
the use of the St. Pius V missal and withdrawal of the
excommunication–are meant, beyond the traditional
faithful, for the good of the whole Church. It is a
question of allowing Tradition to recover its right of
citizenship in the Church and to prove itself in field
work. In this manner we can help Rome to solve the

he Contacts
and the SSPX

crisis in the Church. These two preliminary conditions
work–according to the theological expression–as a
removen prohibens, they must remove the interdicts which
prevent Tradition from acting practically, pastorally.

Could you clarify your thought?

The traditional Mass being no longer on probation
and the ministry of traditional priests no longer clouded
by the suspicion of excommunication, we will be able
to see the experiment of Tradition at work.
In this experimental phase, which will have to last
as long as is necessary for a right evaluation of the
results, neither Rome nor the Society would commit
themselves in any way. But at the end, Rome will be
able to judge the work accomplished by traditional
priests from the results. And I have said that the SSPX
was ready to receive Roman visitors who could judge its
apostolic work on the spot.



All this is practical and pastoral; now, the crisis in
the Church is mainly doctrinal. What about the root
problems, for instance this religious liberty about which
Archbishop Lefebvre expressed his Dubia, his doubts
communicated to Cardinal Ratzinger? What about
ecumenism to which you devoted a study sent to all the
cardinals two years ago?

[The Dubia was translated and published in
English with the title Religious Liberty Questioned by
Angelus Press. Price: $12.95–Ed.] About the issue of
ecumenism, the silence of the cardinals to whom this
study was sent is very significant. It shows the gap
between us on the doctrinal level. You are quite right to
say that the two preliminary conditions have a practical
reach, and that is why they constitute the first necessary
step before doctrinal issues can be tackled. Indeed,
www.angeluspress.org

The ANgelus • June 2006

38

Is your course of action shared by most of
the priests and faithful attached to Tradition?

discussions on the root problems begun outside or
prior to this pastoral step, seem a priori doomed to
failure.
Here it is important to realize that Rome and
Ecône–to put things in a nutshell–converge on
one point but disagree on another. Today, Roman
authorities are aware of the dramatic situation of
the Church–indeed it was the future Benedict XVI
who said that the Church was like “a boat leaking
at every seam.” On this point we do agree. But we
disagree as to the cause of the crisis. Rome will only
consider as the main culprit the secularized hedonist
and consumerist society, which ignores or combats
the Gospel message. Whereas we affirm that Council
Vatican II when opening up to the spirit of the
modern world let principles contrary to the Gospel
message enter its bosom. Principles such as religious
liberty or ecumenism are responsible for the present
situation. We mean something quite different from a
superprogressist “false interpretation” of the Council.
It is easy to understand that Roman authorities can
think but with difficulty of tracing the cause of the crisis
back to Vatican II, because it would be tantamount
to questioning the council to which they remain very
much attached. And the way things stand, we must
acknowledge that no doctrinal discussion is possible, as
Michael Matt and John Vennari quite rightly said in a
recent joint statement.

Archbishop Lefebvre already used to say that
Roman authorities were more sensitive to the figures
and facts presented by the SSPX than to theological
arguments. Obviously, our founder did not mean to
elude a necessary doctrinal discussion. This is why, in
this second stage, we would like to submit to Rome
the theological arguments supported by the facts of
traditional apostolate, before approaching the third
stage, i.e., the canonical status of the Society.
It is important to see clearly how these stages
in the dialogue follow one upon another in order
to understand that we want to neglect neither the
speculative or doctrinal aspect, nor the practical or
pastoral aspect, any more than we want to ignore
realistic prudence and supernatural spirit.
Those who want to mind only the practical or
canonical aspect, will consider our doctrinal exigency
as a loss of time, and these different stages as dilatory
maneuvers. On the other hand, those who want to
consider only the speculative aspect will find that our
pastoral preliminary conditions are sidestepping the
root issues, and they will say that this dialogue is the
beginning of a compromise with modernism. Both are
right in what they affirm, but wrong in what they deny.
We must both affirm the necessary lesson from the facts
and the indispensable doctrinal discussion.

Can we then surmise that, deep down, you are
not seriously considering a dialogue with Rome?

What then? Is the canonical
agreement to be postponed indefinitely?

I would rather say that this dialogue must be
both doctrinal and practical, with facts to support the
theological arguments. Starting from the point upon
which Rome and we agree–the common observation
of a disastrous crisis–we must attempt to resolve the
disagreement by trying to make Rome admit the
real cause of the crisis. The purpose of the doctrinal
discussion is to obtain that Rome acknowledge this
cause, but given the modernist principles with which
Roman authorities are imbued, this discussion cannot
take place without the help of a lesson given by the
facts themselves. Or more precisely, it cannot be done
without considering the concrete work that Tradition
can accomplish for a solution to the crisis of vocations,
of religious practice…
From our point of view, the results of traditional
apostolate will show a contrario where the cause of the
crisis lies. This is why these preliminary conditions
seems to me to be indispensable for the smooth
development of the doctrinal discussions.
The freedom of action given back to Tradition
would enable it to prove itself and decide between the
two sides, which cannot agree doctrinally on the cause
of the crisis. This lesson given by the facts, which we
ask Rome to please accept, is based first of all on our
faith in the traditional Mass. This Mass itself demands
an integrity of doctrine and of the sacraments which is
the pledge of any spiritual fruitfulness for souls.
THE ANGELUS • June 2006 www.angeluspress.org

There is talk of apostolic administration, personal
prelature, ordinariate….All this seems premature. To
desire an immediate canonical agreement at any cost
would expose us to seeing an immediate resurgence
of the problems opposing us to Rome, and the
agreement would at once become null and void. The
regularization of our canonical status must come last,
as if to seal an agreement previously achieved, at least
in its essentials, on the level of principles, thanks to the
facts observed by Rome.
Besides, let us imagine for a moment that we accept
a canonical structure only to consider the doctrinal
issues afterwards–inside, in the “visible perimeter” of
the dioceses–we would not be able to accomplish our
ministry with all its pastoral efficacy. The practical
conditions would not be there to allow a full and entire
lesson from the facts, i.e., a convincing lesson. As such
is already the case with the Ecclesia Dei communities,
our traditional apostolate would be on probation, and
allowed to show itself parsimoniously here and there,
in dribs and drabs.
The crux of the question is whether the tragic
situation of the Church today–the impressive crisis
of vocations, the drastic drop of religious practice–
allows her to be satisfied with remedies so sparingly
applied.
The interview was translated by DICI, the press agency of the Society of Saint
Pius X. It appeared in issue No.132.

Persons;
Principles
39

It’s Not About
It’s About

(1908-99) Former Prime Minister of Italy
and a professor of Economic History at the
Catholic University of Milan, Italy.

A Catechism
Of Catholic
Social
Teaching

A m i n t o r e

F a n f a n i

Part VII
With another
installment, The
Angelus continues the
serialization of the
book Catechism of
Catholic Social Teaching
by Amintore Fanfani
(translated by Fr.
Henry J. Yannone,
The Newman Press,
1960), which will
run monthly until its
conclusion. He was the
author of articles and
books on economics,
including Catholicism,
Protestantism, and
Capitalism, available
from Angelus Press
for $14.95.

Heading three:
the state and
the citizen

CHAPTER 5. Nature, Ends, and Powers of the State
is “civil society”
or “the State”?
55)What

The State is a society naturally formed, neces­sary to man’s perfection,
possessing all the means useful to the achievement of its end, occupying
a determined area, consisting of a certain group of people, living under
con­tingent forms of organization of the sovereign power.
Pope Leo XIII: Man’s natural instinct moves him to live in civil society.
Isolated he cannot provide himself with the necessary requirements of life, nor
procure the means of developing his mental and moral faculties. (Immortals
Dei, §2)
Pope Pius XI: Civil society is a perfect society, having in itself all the means
for its peculiar end. (Divini Illius Magistri)
www.angeluspress.org

THE ANGELUS • June 2006

40
Pius XII: The State does not contain in itself and does
not mechanically bring together in a given territory a
shapeless mass of individuals. It is, and should in prac­tice
be, the organic and organizing unity of a real people.
(Christmas Message, 1944)

56)

What is the
end of the State?

The State, as a necessary medium at the service of
the human person, must control, help, and regulate
private and individual activities of national life in
order that they may tend har­moniously toward the
common good.
Pope Pius XII: It was the Creator’s will that civil
sovereignty should regulate social life after the dictates
of an order changeless in its universal principles; should
facilitate the attainment in the temporal order, by
individuals, of physical, intellectual, and moral perfection;
and should aid them to reach their supernatural end.
Hence, it is the noble prerogative and function of the
State to con­trol, aid, and direct the private and individual
activities of national life that they converge harmoniously
towards the common good. That good can neither be
defined according to arbitrary ideas nor can it accept for its
standard primarily the material prosperity of society, but
rather it should be defined according to the har­monious
development and the natural perfection of man. It is for
this perfection that society is designed by the Creator as
a means. (Summi Pontificatus, §§58, 59)
Pope Pius XI: Catholic doctrine indicates to the State
the dignity and authority of a vigilant and provident
de­fender of those divine and human rights.... (Divini
Redemptoris, §32)
Pope Pius XII: To consider the State as something
ultimate to which everything else should be subordinated
and directed, cannot fail to harm the true and lasting pros­
perity of nations. (Summi Pontificatus, §60)

57)

What is the common good
to be attained by the State?

The common good to be attained by the State, or
the common temporal good, consists in the peaceful
and safe enjoyment by all citizens of their own
rights, and in the maximum attainable material and
spiritual welfare, in accordance with the times and the
possibilities.
Pope Pius XI: The common welfare in the temporal
order consists in that peace and security in which families
and individual citizens have the free exercise of their
rights, and at the same time enjoy the greatest spiritual
and temporal prosperity possible in this life, by mutual
union and coordination of the work of all. (Divini Illius

Magistri)

THE ANGELUS • June 2006 www.angeluspress.org

58)

Within what limits must the
State operate so that the
common good may be attained?

The State must respect the natural rights of the person
(Cf. Chapter I, art. 1) and those of the other necessary
societies, and integrate, with­out suppressing them, all
other minor societies and private initiatives favoring
the perfecting of the human person. Otherwise, the
common good cannot be attained.
Pope Pius XII: And when it disregards the respect
due to the human person and to the life which is proper
to that person, and gives no thought to it in its organiza­
tion, in legislative and executive activity, then instead of
serving society, it harms it; instead of encouraging and
stimulating social thought, instead of realizing its hopes
and expectations, it strips it of all real value. (Christmas
Message, 1942)
Pope Leo XIII: We have said that the State must not
absorb the individual or the family; both should be
allowed free and untrammeled action as far as is consistent
with the common good and the interests of others. (Rerum
Novarum, §28)
Pope Pius XII: If, in fact, the State lays claim to
and directs private enterprises, these, ruled as they are
by delicate and complicated internal principles which
guarantee and assure the realization of their special aims,
may be damaged to the detriment of the public good, by
being wrenched from their natural surroundings, that is,
from responsible private action. (Summi Pontificatus, §60)
Pope Pius XII: The purpose of the whole of the State’s
ac­tivity, political and economic, is the permanent realiza­
tion of the common good; that is to say, the provision of
those external conditions which are needful to citizens
as a whole for the development of their qualities and the
fulfillment of their duties in every sphere of life, ma­terial,
intellectual, and religious–in the supposition, however,
that the powers and energies of the family and of other
organisms which hold natural precedence over the State
are insufficient, and also subject to the fact that God, in
His will for the salvation of men, has instituted another
universal society, the Church, for the benefit of the
human person and for the realization of his religious ends.
(Christmas Message, 1942)
Pope Pius XII: The citizens must not be compelled
without being heard. (Christmas Message, 1944)
Pope Pius XII: In some countries the modern State is
be­coming a gigantic administrative machine. It extends its
influence over almost every phase of life; it would bring
under its administration the entire gamut of political,
economic, social, and intellectual life from birth to death.
No wonder then if, in this impersonal atmosphere, which
tends to penetrate and pervade all human life, respect for
the common good becomes dormant in the conscience of
individuals and the State loses more and more its primary
character of a community of morally responsible citizens.
(Christmas Message, 1952)

N EW
O FFE
R I NG

The Conquest of New Spain
Bernal Diaz

“Whenever we fired our guns, the Indians gave great shouts
and whistles, and threw up straw and earth so that we could not
see what harm we had done them.”

Vivid, powerful and absorbing, this is a first-person account
of one of the most startling military episodes in history: the
overthrow of Montezuma’s doomed Aztec Empire by the
ruthless Hernan Cortes and his band of adventurers. Bernal
Díaz del Castillo, himself a soldier under Cortes, presents a
fascinatingly detailed description of the Spanish landing in
Mexico in 1520 and their amazement at the city, the exploitation
of the natives for gold and other treasures, the expulsion and
flight of the Spaniards, their regrouping and eventual capture of
the Aztec capital. The Conquest of New Spain has a compelling
immediacy that brings the past and its characters to life and
offers a unique eye-witness view of the conquest of one of the
greatest civilizations in the New World.
J. M. Cohen’s translation is supplemented by an introduction
and maps of the conquered territory.

T
women o read this ep
should are welcome ic,
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fortitud ple of the couein lies
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, and
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for
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Fr. Patr
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416pp, softcover, STK# 8178. $15.00

Ye Gods
Ed Willock

If there’s one thing in the Bible that’s hard for moderns to understand it’s the matter of idolatry. Can you imagine a
bunch of people in our day going out and building a golden calf and then worshipping it? You can’t? Then read Ye Gods
and you’ll be convinced that ours is the world’s most idolatrous generation. There is a point at which simple appreciation
for the things of this world fades into a religion of materialism. Praise suggests a litany, fondness betrays an undue
attachment, admiration becomes worship and criticism is regarded as heresy. The godless desert of modern society is
thick with golden calves. Glamour girls are not just pretty girls, they are mundane saints to whom people are irresistibly
attracted by their very being. Music lovers are finding “the satisfaction of all their religious
feelings” in harmonies which were only meant to provide a pleasing hour or an occasional
uplifting of the spirits. And who does not know those other much-worshipped gods
Security, Speed, Success? Ye Gods does a devastating, and often humorous, dissection
of our new mysticisms. Hardly anyone will emerge from the last page unscathed.
The remarks in this direct attack on modern paganism are aimed at the godless who live in
our land; but there is clearly also a strong thrust at Catholic complacency. If you are looking for
different, thought-provoking reading, this is it.–Dominicana

Ed Willock was born in South Boston in 1916. A football accident kept him laid up for
five years during which time he spent educating himself. Influenced by his friendship
with Peter Maurin and the works of Aquinas and Chesterton, he founded the much
hailed Integrity magazine in the late 1940’s and was a founder of the Catholic community
Marycrest. He died in 1961.
151pp, illustrated by the author, softcover, STK# 8179Q $14.95

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The Relation of Church and State
Very Rev. Bede Jarrett, O.P., M.A., S.T.L.

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Today in America, some people invoke the mythical constitutional principle “separation of Church and State” to inhibit the
free exercise of religion. The tension between the authority of God’s law on earth and the secular authority has a long and
winding history. In this booklet, the Very Rev. Bede Jarrett traces the difficulties in this struggle. While he concentrates on how
the relationship between Church and State developed in the Middle Ages, he does not ignore the attitudes which men have
had toward the State from antiquity and in the early days of Christianity before Constantine.
From St. Thomas Becket to St. Thomas More–even to our own days, this struggle has consumed many great men. By
getting the benefit of this historical perspective–we can gain insight into the upheavals of our own day.
42pp, STK# 8190Q $4.00

The Theology of Martyrdom
Rev. Ronald A. Knox, M.A.

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“[A] most characteristic and delightful study.”–Dom Bede Camm, O.S.B.
We rightly revere the Holy Innocents as martyrs, but those Crusaders who left all and gave their lives with most sincere
desire to restore the right of pilgrims to worship in the Holy Land are not martyrs. Why? In this small treatise, originally
presented at a conference in 1928 on the English Martrys, Fr. Knox explains the criteria for Christian martyrdom with clarity
and with examples. He traces for us the evolution of the word and the ideal of Christian martyrdom. He argues against the
Modernist heresies which deny absolute truths. This little booklet enlightens and entertains–yet all the while reminding us that
some embraced the crown of martyrdom for the cause of Christ!

32pp, softcover, STK# 8191Q $3.50

Witnesses to the Holy Mass
Dom Bede Camm, O.S.B.

Witnesses is an extraordinary book about love and sacrifice for the
Eucharist! Reading it will inspire a greater devotion to the Catholic faith,
especially the Mass. Once I began reading, I couldn’t put it down. Once
I finished, I couldn¹t wait to share it with others….Having read the book, I
feel a greater desire to defend my faith even unto death. Thank you!–Dede
Laugesen, Director, Holy Baby! DVDs and President, The Rosary Project

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The gripping stories recounted will inspire not only a devotion to these
saints, but also a renewed passion for the holy Mass that these holy men
and women shed their blood to preserve.–The Catholic Answer (March/April
2005)

At the dawn of the 20th century, six sermons were preached by a
Benedictine priest in commemoration of men and women who loved
God more than they loved themselves and who paid the ultimate
price for their faithfulness. Now, at the dawn of a new century we can
revisit their sacrifices and examine our own consciences to discover
how much we love the God who gave us His only Son on Calvary and in the Holy Sacrifice of the altar.
Witnesses to the Holy Mass and other sermons was originally preached to inspire the faithful of
England by recalling the sacrifices of the English martyrs who suffered during the reigns of Henry VIII and
Elizabeth I. As England needed conversion in those days, so too do our hearts need conversion today!

96pp, softcover, STK# 8192Q $8.95,

Maxims of Christian Chivalry
Kenelm Digby

Born in Ireland in 1800 of English stock and raised in a strongly
Protestant surrounding, Kenelm Henry Digby entered the Roman
Catholic Church while writing his first great masterpiece, The
Broadstone of Honour, first published in 1822. The Broadstone treats
of the origin, spirit and institutions of Christian Chivalry and the true
practice of the same. It was his deep study of these lofty ideals and
the “Ages of Faith,” which he had been raised to despise, that led him
to his conversion. Maxims of Christian Chivalry was edited by Nicholas
Dillon, O.F.M. in 1924, taking essential bits from The Broadstone and
categorizing them into a book which could well serve as a manual for
the Catholic Knight.
Some headings include:  Definition of Honour  Definition of Chivalry
 Motto of Chivalry  Rules of Chivalry  Extracts from the Book of
Chivalrous Instruction  Religious Orders of Knighthood  Preparation
for Knighthood  List of Famous Knights  Facing Death  The Voice
of Nature  Fruits of Solitude  Reverence for True Womanhood  The
Divine Office  Church Music  All Things in Christ  And much more!
150pp, softcover, STK# 8193Q $21.95

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Saint
George
Anthony Cooney

Anthony Cooney has re-examined the historical sources for the life
of St. George, and has forged these into a stirring and original historical
novel. Here we rediscover St. George as Giorgios Theognosta, the
Roman cavalry officer from Lydda in Palestine, a Christian during the
last days of the pagan Empire, a brave man who stands up for his faith
during the final wave of persecution. Giorgios’s integrity and military skill,
inherited from his murdered father, bring him success in his career, but
this success brings him the envy of a powerful enemy, one whom he will
ultimately have to confront.
In Giorgios’s company we journey to the corners of an Empire striving
to hold its borders against those who reject Roman rule–from Germania
to North Africa, from Persia to Britannia–encountering along the way a
throng of historical characters: Aurelian, Diocletian, Galerius, Zenobia, a
British king named Coel, and Giorgios’s great friend, a promising young
officer of the imperial family named Constantine.

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Saint George, Knight of Lydda is first-rate: a most evocative picture of Christianity in the third century, also
of Roman life in general, and the first stages of the Empire’s decline. The story line is compelling, and the
reconstruction of what St. George’s upbringing and life would have been like is most imaginative. The descriptions
of military life are excellent too.–Philip Trower, author of Turmoil and Truth
313pp, softcover, STK# 8153Q $14.95

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A Book of the Love of Jesus
A Collection of Ancient English
Devotions in Prose and Verse
Edited by Robert Hugh Benson

A collection of English prayers and devotions
from the Middle Ages, long only in the hands of
scholars, compiled and edited with great care by
Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson to be put back into
devotional use.
And it will be found, I believe, that these
exquisite verses and meditations will especially
afford fruitful material and inspiration for mental
prayer, as well as forms for vocal communion with
God–Msgr. Benson.
241pp, softcover, STK# 8194Q $23.95

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