LETTER FROM BROADSTAIRS August 2025
Nova et Vetera (Matthew 13,52)
[In the preceding letter we introduced the erudite Pere Emmanuel’s study on the Drama of the End Times which showed how, according to Holy Scripture, the Church would undergo a true passion before the end of the world, in imitation of Our Blessed Lord Himself. Here follows an abbreviated version of the second article which was published in 1885 in the his bulletin ‘Our Lady of Holy Hope’ in Mesnil-Saint-Loup, France]
Signs of the end times
The question of the end of the world has been broached ever since the beginning of the Church. Saint Paul gave valuable teaching in this regard to the early Christians in Thessalonica who were troubled by various unfounded rumours and predictions. The world will not end before the general apostasy, the disappearance of a providential obstacle (about which the Apostle had instructed the faithful in person), and the appearance of the man of sin, the son of perdition. (See II Epistle to the Thessalonians, 2, 1-6)
The great apostasy of which St Paul speaks, as opposed to a partial defection, is the massive falling away from the Faith by the Christian states which renounce their baptism both socially and civilly. It is the general defection of those very nations which Christ Jesus incorporated into His Church. Only such an apostasy will make possible the manifestation and the domination of the Antichrist.
Our Lord Himself asked if the Son of Man, at His return, would find faith in the world (Luke XVIII, 8). The Divine Master saw that belief would decline with time due to material comfort and a rejection of the Faith as something inconvenient! Turning its back on the Faith the ‘enlightened’ world prefers the shadows and becomes the play-thing of illusions and lies.
Denying Our Blessed Lord the world will necessarily fall into the clutches of Satan, the Prince of Darkness. It cannot be neutral as its apostasy will place it directly under the power of the devil and his minions.
This apostasy began with Luther and Calvin, and it continues under the name of Revolution, the insurrection of man against God. Its slogan is secularism, which is the elimination of God and His Divine Son.
So it is that we see secret societies, invested with public power, aggressively de-Christianising France [and other nations also], by taking away all the supernatural elements which fifteen hundred years of faith had given it. These forces have only one goal, and that is to seal the definitive apostasy and to thereby prepare the way for the person of the Antichrist.
Christians ought to have reacted vigorously against this abominable agenda, both in private life and in public life, but the well established semi-apostasy had already produced semi-Christians unable or unwilling to counter-act the well-laid plans of the enemy, not least by means of secular education.
Saint Paul spoke in veiled terms of an obstacle which would prevent the coming of the man of sin. The earliest Greek and Latin Fathers understood this to mean the Roman Empire. Doubtless the Apostle was alluding to a future converted empire and its Christian nations which would serve to extend the kingdom of Christ Jesus. As long as this state of affairs lasted the Antichrist could not appear, until such time as those same nations and societies would come to loose the faith. Hence Saint Paul, understood broadly, meant that as long as the domination of the world remained in Christian hands of the Latin race, then the personal enemy of Our Lord would not appear.
So it is that Freemasonry is above all opposed to the restoration of the Christian order. If any statesman presents himself as being Christian then every means are used to be rid of him because only a truly Catholic authority is able to scupper the perfidious designs of the masonic sect. [The case of the great Catholic President of Ecuador, Garcia Moreno, assassinated by the Freemasons just ten years previously in 1875, was a striking example of this grim reality]
Also, it is worth noting that the Latin races are destined to exert a Catholic influence in the world or to abdicate. Their political influence is bound up with this mission of spreading the Gospel and hence if they were to renounce this by a complete apostasy then they would be annihilated and the Antichrist, rising out of the orient, would trample them in the dust.
The Pere Andre, who still thought it was possible to counteract the anti-Christian agenda, called upon the faithful to influence public thinking and to make governments return to Christian traditions, without which there could only be decadence for the European nations, especially France…
Next time: the Antichrist