Rector's letters

Have we gone back to the prehistoric age? The insolent success of modern art leads us to ask this question - a question that appears somewhat strange and certainly insulting in the eyes of our contemporaries! Fascinated by technical advances and the comfort which they generate, many readily consider that we have arrived at a golden age of mankind. We do not subscribe to this judgment. It seems to us more correct to maintain that our century, constantly oscillating between a marked infantilism and an unsuitable arrogance, has returned to adolescence, embracing all the excesses of that age.

Impregnated by the lessons of Rousseau, man is proud to have founded the religion of modernity upon equality. Never was human pride more wrongly placed. Equality is a lure, or rather a trap, favored by jealous hearts at pains to find the least trace of it in nature. But today nobody contemplates nature to draw from it lessons for life. Egalitarianism can calmly continue releasing its poisons and completing its wretched work of destruction of all authority. Undermined by this mortal egalitarian illusion, society is slowly dying.

Our secret indulgence regarding ourselves is truly a poison that surreptitiously con¬taminates us and leads us to the doors of death. Like Narcissus, we like to contemplate ourselves in the reflection of our own excellence, which exerts on us a fascination without equal. This strange contemplation of our qualities leads us to fall into a subtle complafcency that pollutes our purest acts and sterilizes our good desires.

Peace is a sign of the action of God; its absence is evidence of satanic action. God acts witfh measure, calm, order, as the sovereign Master from whom nothing escapes. The devil, blinded by his rebellion and enslaved by his pride, breathes hatred and revenge, and in each one of his interventions intends only to spread his venom.

A brutal detonation tears through the silence of a calm summer day. Driven by the instinct for self-preservation, the sparrows fly away hastily from the branch on which they were perching peacefully until then. It would be difficult to say how many times we have seen this scene, so common in the countryside. But it should be less common in church; unfortunately, it is not! It happens there all the time, and no one seems to be astonished or scandalized by it. Although it is true that the sparrows in church are of a particular kind, since they are, in fact, the parishioners.

The state of the Church, of the world and men's minds cannot be described. Public and private sins cry to Heaven for justice and the arm of the divine Son of Our Lady of La Salette becomes heavier. Ignominy has become the rule, vulgarity reigns as master, perversion is taught officially. Intelligence has become sterile, the will weak, leaders renegades, families disrupted and man is nothing more than an avid consumer of pleasures.

"Accept everything," wrote St. Joan of Arc the day before her torment. "Accept everything: it must be done so. Do not have any concern regarding your martyrdom: you will come finally to the kingdom of Paradise." Such is the beautiful attitude of a soul whose sight goes beyond contingent events to rest only on its ultimate end, making the light of eternity its only criterion of judgment. Such should be the fundamental attitude of a Christian heart. It is summarized in the three words that one of our fellow priests, Fr. Henri La Praz, liked to repeat at the end of his life of suffering: "To accept, to offer and to give thanks."

Here is some news from the Seminary. Four young priests received the priestly unction from His Excellency Bishop Bernard Fellay on June 23rd. As the ordinations took place on a Friday, fifty-nine priests were able to attend the ceremony and have the joy of imposing hands on the newly ordained. They were also able to stay after the ceremony and attend the first masses the following day. Since the number of faithful present did not diminish, next year ordinations will take place, God willing, on Friday, June 22nd, 2007.

"Stop looking at yourself!" Such is the judicious advice that St Augustine gives us. Indeed, a man who looks at himself always betrays a secret and unhealthy complacency regarding himself. If he abandons himself to this pernicious failing, he is slowly poisoned and contracts an incurable disease, a spiritual leukemia that drains the living forces of his soul and leads him to death.

"What should we say to men?" wondered Antoine de Saint Exupéry, as he suffered to see his contemporaries deceived by the fallacious promises of hedonism. It is, indeed, quite difficult to speak to those men who, believing that happiness can be reduced to pleasure, turn the latter into the only reason for their existence. Blinded, they are unable to realize that pleasure is only a means used by our sensitive nature to help us in the pursuit of happiness. Thus, if we seek pleasure for itself, become satisfied with what it gives us, and remain there, we introduce a deadly confusion between end and means. This confusion rapidly provokes a radical incapacity to think and to will.