Catholics From France

"The Church, the Family of God in Congo Brazzaville, our mission today, is located clearly between the first evangelization, a parish pastoral of true closeness, and the new evangelization."

"We are looking to be more numerous, to gather more faithful for the Eucharist, to manifest more strongly the Catholic presence in our secularized societies. However, we cannot be satisfied by these quantitative perspectives. We are also called upon to a task of internal renewal of our Christian life."

"30 people in my cathedral is ridiculous and absurd. It is 96 m long and 25 m wide (40m transept) by 30 m high. Total = 2500 m²: with 4 m² per person, we can fit 600 people! You have to learn to count!"

"Igitur infra supradictum millesimum tercio iam fere imminente anno, contigit in uniuerso pene terrarum orbe, precipue tamen in Italia et in Galliis, innouari ecclesiarum basilicas, licet plereque decenter locate minime indiguissent, emulabatur tamen queque gens christicolarum aduersus alteram decentiore frui. Erat enim instar ac si mundus ipse excutiendo semet, reiecta uetustate, passim candidam ecclesiarum uestem indueret."

"It is not a question of lowering the church's moral requirements. When Jesus said that the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of us, he was not advocating prostitution. There are things that offend us, that shock us, that hurt us because they are ambiguous and wrong, but before judging and condemning, we must remember the "synthesis" offered by Thérèse."

"Not being able to read in the book of history, which shows that democracy degenerates everywhere into despotism, it undertook to establish democracy in France . . . thus it dared to fight in every way the two foundations of all societies, authority and inequality; inequality which is the obvious basis of all activity and fecundity in social life; which is at the same time the mother and the daughter of liberty, since equality cannot be imagined outside of tyranny. To be sure, I am not speaking about Christian equality, whose real name is equity; but about this democratic and social equality, which is nothing but the canonization of envy and the chimera of jealous ineptitude. This equality was never anything but a mask which could not become reality without the abolition of all merit and virtue . . . . . . No, property, the last religion of bastard societies, cannot resist alone the onslaught of the levellers. Have we not seen in our days that the privileges even of intellect have been challenged, and that appeals have been made to ignorance in order to save the revolution? It cannot be doubted that the dogma of equality, quite logically, should not respect merit or wealth more than birth."

"There can be no social peace in the Republic, and social reform is impossible without the king."

"The bourgeoisie does not understand the labour question."

"Maurras's nostalgia for his native province had inspired him to learn the Provençal language and eventually to join the Félibres, a tiny group of southern émigrés in Paris who sought to promote the Provençal renaissance inaugurated by the poet Frédéric Mistral. From this provincial, back-to-the-soil milieu emerged the guiding principles of Maurras's peculiar brand of royalism: political decentralization, restoration of the pre-revolutionary provincial boundaries, opposition to statism, official recognition of Provençal. Such doctrines hardly appealed to the cosmopolitan young Parisian who had recently observed the failure of Bavarian separatism and the enviable vitality of the unitary German Empire. In a subsequent letter Bainville declared himself in favor of centralization and accused Maurras of exaggerating the intelligence of France's rural population."

"What are Pavia or Rosbach...compared to Sedan or Waterloo? Revolutions have succeeded revolutions. The state is bankrupt. Three times foreign invaders have occupied Paris. We have had two civil wars. We have witnessed the making of Italian unity and German unity and the enormous expansion of the double Anglo-Saxon empire. Never has political France been so small. And since then she has accomplished her masterpiece of smallness. She has turned herself into a Republic, in other words she has deliberately chosen to be weak and defeated."

"After the Commune, thousands of workers were shot, while the leaders were allowed to escape; a King of France would have punished the leaders mercilessly, but he would have spared the people."

"Official orators have agreed amongst themselves to leave out one essential point: that to undertake the liberation of the fatherland, Joan had to go directly to the Dauphin Charles, acknowledge the right of his royal blood, and have him crowned and acclaimed on the cathedral square of Reims."

"The ultra-nationalist writer Charles Maurras believed there were “two Frances”. The one he loved was the "pays réel", the real country: a rural France of church clocks, traditions and native people fused with their ancestral soil. Maurras loathed the “pays légal”, the legal country: the secular republic, which he thought was run by functionaries conspiring for alien interests."

"Rather than be outraged, we need to understand. I fight all the antisemitic ideas of Maurras, but I find it absurd to say that Maurras must no longer exist."

"Comte put to flight the pernicious and artificial doctrine according to which there is an opposition between the interests of the ruler and the ruled, for the latter derives his greatest benefit from being directed and guided... Renan finally made me aware of the service any élite, when it sincerely concerns itself with the highest considerations, renders and must render to the multitude, even unconsciously."

"This pre-existing capital brings men fortune and honour, equips and refines them from the moment they come into the world, without anything having been done about it by these happy animals... Whatever brings together this beneficent capital is therefore a good thing; whatever dissipates it is less good. Work is good, saving is good... It is in the closely knit and stable circle of the home that production, acquisition, conservation have the greatest chance of success, for the personal instinct is there moderated and regulated by immediate affection, and generosity balanced by healthy egoism. Thus strength, duration and hereditary are related and linked; so are also the constitution of great families, the accumulation of vast possessions, the possibility of education and culture."

"In London and Berlin, at the time when Berlin and London flourished, the government was dynastic; it was so in Paris when Paris flourished. Dynastic succession creates the coherence of all the strength of an empire. Etymology would tell one that, in the absence of history. Not only because dynasty does without the exhausting system of electoral and parliamentary competition, but because it is good and beautiful that the authority of the sovereign authority should not be a force fashioned by human hand, that it should come to us from the most ancient times, and that the centuries should have created it for us and transmitted it to us, named it and imposed it on us ready-made, helped as it were by its legitimacy, that right of the leaders which is based on the fact that they played the major part in the creation of the country."

"Maurras had converted to monarchism during a visit to the eastern Mediterranean in 1896 when he realized how little influence republican France had in comparison to the monarchical empires of Great Britain, Germany and Russia. The Dreyfus Affair convinced him that the Republic had fallen into the hands of the "four confederate states" of Jews, Protestants, freemasons and foreigners, and that only a restored monarchy could bring back a strong state, a united nation and national greatness."

"Maurras was no optimist; human life at best was hard; the wise man accepted this fact and adjusted himself to the world as it was and ever would be, a world in which the race was to the swift and the battle to the strong, in which mere sentimental pity was a weakness and an intellectual crime. Like Nietzsche, Maurras despised Christianity and thought its politically dangerous sentiments of "he hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble" order highly noxious. In his early writings he gave free expression to this hostility, but as a realist, a positivist, he had to admit that France had been profoundly marked by the teaching of the Church; and as a practical politician, he had to face the fact that many of his potential supporters were likely to be alienated by the frank expression of his distaste for Christianity. So whatever regrets he had for the old gods, he had to recognize that they were conquered, that the day of the "laurel, the palms and the paean" was over. He accepted the fact that the French tradition was Christian, but, fortunately, Christian with a Roman and Hellenic superstructure."

"Maurras, like Bannon, was a Catholic nationalist, and he argued in the early 1900s that the Enlightenment had elevated the individual over the nation. (One person who knows Bannon said he has spoken of the coming end of the Enlightenment.) To Maurras, a hero of the modern French right wing, the French Revolution ideals of "liberty, equality and fraternity" were a liberal cosmopolitan corruption of France's authentic identity. Bannon has approvingly cited Maurras' distinction between the "legal country," led by elected officials, and the "real country" of ordinary people, as a frame for the populist revolt underway. Maurras even warned about the nefarious influence of Islam in Europe."

"That France may live, the King must return."

"There are certain conservatives in France who fill us with disgust. Why? Because of their stupidity. What kind of stupidity? Hitlerism. These French "conservatives" crawl on their bellies before Hitler. These former nationalists cringe before him. A few zealots wallow in dirt, in their own dirt, with endless Heils. The wealthier they are, the more they own, the more important it is to make them understand that if Hitler invaded us he would skin them much more thoroughly than Blum, Thorez and Stalin combined. This "conservative" error is suicidal. We must appeal to our friends not to let themselves be befogged. We must tell them: Be on your guard! What is now at stake is not anti-democracy or anti-Semitism. France above all!"

"We are at the end of the Enlightenment. Have you read Charles Maurras?"

"These elements in French society were now to be given a lead by a man of genius whose power of argument, of sophistry, of tenacity, served to give an appearance of life to the dead monarchy and who provided a framework of political doctrine within which nearly all the critics of the Republic on the Right were to work and which was not without its influence on some critics of the Left."

"I thank You, O my God, that You have given me shelter beneath your roof. Abandonment, love, trust—such is my motto."

"Laval stands in a class by himself for frankness and directness and simplicity and he is different from all other Frenchmen with whom I have negotiated in these respects."

"My impression of Laval has steadily risen during this series of conferences from the first time I met him in Paris. He has shown himself to be able, forceful man and I think also a sincere man... His speeches in the conference were always to the point, clear and forceful. In his talks with me he was extremely frank and towards the end of our acquaintance manifested the utmost friendliness."

"He impressed me strongly as a man of directness and solidity of mind with whom it was possible to pursue a subject consecutively in a way which Englishmen understand."

"You have tried to give and to keep. You wanted to have your cake and eat it. You cancelled your words by your deeds and your deeds by your words. You have debased everything by fixing, intrigue and slickness... Not sensitive enough to the importance of great moral issues, you have reduced everything to the level of your petty methods."

"M. Laval believed that world-wide peace hinged on keeping peace in Europe; that European peace hinged on cordial relations between France and Germany; and that France and Germany could work out their differences only if the British would refrain from interfering in European affairs in execution of their traditional balance-of-power policy... He envisioned a future where Europe would be more or less united, Russia would be thrust back into Asia, and the Anglo-Saxon world would lead an autonomous existence with the United States and France serving as the point of contact between the European and Anglo-Saxon world."

"I tried to organize peace in Europe and I thought that the first thing to do was to bring France and Italy together. I thought that this was the first link in a chain which would one day lead us to an agreement with Germany."

"We must organize our continent and Europe will be weak or it will be strong. For it to survive, it must be constructed according to certain principles... The organization of all the countries which comprise our continent must be such that neither the conquerors nor the conquered are ever again tempted to rise up against one another. On the material plane, the countries must help one another and harmonize their economic interests so that the needs of each can be satisfied without recourse to the competition and violence which have too often been the rule of the past. The new Europe will last if the germs of revenge are forever eradicated from it."

"I desire the victory of Germany, for without it, bolshevism would tomorrow install itself everywhere."

"Since parliamentary democracy wished to enter into a struggle with Nazism and fascism and since it lost that struggle, it must disappear. A new régime – one that is bold, authoritarian, social and national – must take its place."

"Whether, in the last resort, Germany wins the war or not, we now have less choice than ever. We must reach an agreement with her... I don't believe in the permanence or even the long life of Nazism. In fifteen or twenty years' time – and that's nothing in history – Europe will have a new thirst for freedom. If the French flame has been kept alight, albeit dimly, it is to her that they will come to rekindle the extinguished torches...for there will be no one else."

"I have always had simple ideas in politics. People take me for a shyster, but they don't know me. What I do is so simple that it looks to those who don't understand like something very complicated."

"Because French-Italian cooperation had been destroyed Germany was in Vienna and in Prague. By turning their backs on his policy the French Governments had, since 1936, compromised the security of France and given to Germany the means, or at least part of the means, to capture the hegemony of Europe. In 1935, without a formal treaty, she had, in fact, become the ally of France. Although the Berlin-Rome Axis might be solid, and relations bad between Paris and Rome, M. Laval, nevertheless, could not finally acquiesce in a situation that was manifestly contrary to the interests of both countries."

"Well, it was unfortunate for us all that he [Ramsay MacDonald] refused to face the unpalatable fact of Abyssinia at Stresa, because Mussolini mistook his silence for agreement instead of imbecility; and his subsequent disillusion threw him into the arms of Germany, with the result that we lost Austria, and with it the whole of central Europe. Now, Mr. Boothby, I want to tell you that I think this war is a great mistake. If we had come to terms with Mussolini, as I wanted to do, we might have held Germany. That is no longer possible. We have given most of Europe to Hitler. Let us try to hold on to what we have got left. I am a peasant from the Auvergne. I want to keep my farm, and I want to keep France. Nothing else matters now... Make peace at once. Those people, have no idea of what they are up against."

"There are two alternatives, either you agree to what we ask and model yourselves on the German and Italian constitutions, or Hitler will force you to do so... France has never had and never will have a more inveterate enemy than Great Britain. Our whole history bears witness to that. We have been nothing but toys in the hands of England, who has exploited us to ensure her own safety. Today we are at the bottom of the abyss where she led us... I see only one way to restore France...to the position which she is entitled: namely, to ally ourselves resolutely with Germany and to confront England together."

"Gamelin is absolutely useless. The troops are all underground in that wretched Maginot Line, and completely demoralized. They should be in armour, but we haven't got any... Their [the French people] heart is not in this war... Quite soon the Germans are going to attack us. They will defeat us in three weeks, and we shall have to surrender. I would like to avoid that. We have already given them central and eastern Europe, and that we cannot undo. If we accept that, they might leave us alone, at least for a time; and ultimately turn east. Meanwhile, if we are to avoid immediate disaster, we have no alternative but to come to terms with them."

"What is going on is abominable. A cry of indignation goes up at such a situation. Today, Germany, who lost the war, has more territory than she had before 1914... I demand that the government should find the solution. But there's one which is impossible and that is to let Germany go on with what she's doing."

"It has been said that I lacked idealism, doubtless because I believed and still do believe that, while politics must not neglect the imponderables, it must be based upon realities, especially in the foreign field. Régimes follow one another and revolutions take place, but geography remains unchanged. We will be neighbours of Germany forever."

"We will always be neighbours of Germany. We face the alternative of reaching an agreement with her or of clashing every twenty years on the battlefield."

"Just as war was originally waged between towns, then between countries and recently between empires, so, in future, it would be waged between continents. He did not believe in a Franco-German conflict...but sooner or later the Russians and the Chinese would launch an attack upon Europe. We had to make ourselves safe against this."

"War means the end of us all. Mankind is morally incapable of enduring another war, the horrors of which will surpass everything that has occurred hitherto. War would mean the end of Christian civilization."

"I consider agreement between Italy and France, that is to say between the Latin countries, including Nationalist Spain as well, as my life's mission."

"Mr Chamberlain is right to refuse to intervene in Spain, just as he is right to re-establish good relations with Italy. I hope that my country will not delay too long in following England's example."

"Our world is questioning our position and that is where we must be strong in belief, following the teaching of the church. Facing the difficult reality, the temptation will be, of course, to take the easy way."

"Up to now I have tried to make my life a gift for him. What is most important is that my life belongs to the Lord. He has often led me to hear him, unexpectedly, and this time he has come to me and I could not say no to what the Lord was asking me."

"Invisibly our Eucharistic celebrations gather a still absent people, one of those who are searching for God in the righteousness of their hearts. For a particular Church, the way of living the Eucharist cannot be separated from its concrete history with the people she was given to by the Lord."