God, Holy Mother Church and our Country – let us keep in our souls these high affections as the leading lights that will guide us in life, allowing us to be faithful to Christian nobility, which constitutes the most sacred part of our heritage.
Dear friends and benefactors,
God, Holy Mother Church and our Country – let us keep in our souls these high affections as the leading lights that will guide us in life, allowing us to be faithful to Christian nobility, which constitutes the most sacred part of our heritage.
Nobility is today universally despised. The major reason of this relentless hatred is easy to understand: the destruction of nobility is an absolute necessity for those who have vowed to destroy the Church. Soil in which grace is incarnated, nobility is a vital force for Catholicism.
We must be faithful to the virtues of our ancestors in the faith, and like them we must boldly undertake this battle in defense of the honor of God. Will we die? Perhaps! But it doesn’t matter! Our enthusiasm remains intact. The honor of God, of the Church and of our Country comes first, we are only their servants.
Servants! Nobility is precisely this absolute gift of ourselves to Christ, so that He may reign in souls and in society. The noble man is he who does not belong to himself any more, but lives only to serve, his only ambition being to put himself entirely at the service of the King of Kings, without seeking any benefit for himself – happy to know that he has already received his reward, since he has the privilege to serve.
To serve. To dedicate oneself. To give oneself. To devote oneself. To forget oneself. Not to count one’s efforts. “Never retreat!” To this we are invited by the proud devise of the family of Bl. Charles de Foucauld. Never yield to the fashionable demands of the day. To have a high regard for the honor of God. To incline towards our brothers, to lend them the assistance of our strength. How far these ideas are from the common, mistaken notion of nobility! Let us be proud of our nobility; let us respect it. It is the sure path that allows us to follow in the footsteps of God, in a world that dances to the tune of the devil.
To keep this fidelity to nobility is to live in a state of war. Let us fight courageously! Man is great only when down on his knees before God, when he becomes a knight in His service. From now on, he will have to respect this engagement to the contempt of any human consideration. Our existence is a sacred service and our whole life, even to its least details, must be the shining proof of it. The splendor of nobility is nothing more than the reflection of grace reigning sovereign within the soul.
The splendor of the presence of God in our souls, nobility is a gift. Let us remember the words of St. Paul: “What do you have that you did not receive? And if you received it, why do you glory in it?” Nobility is a school of humility, in spite of what its detractors say. The humility of truth! We are proud, indeed, of this gift offered to us without any merit on our part. We have a duty to preserve this privilege and we want, by grace, to keep our place. Better to die than to fail. Nobility is thus a transmission, a filiation.
A divine filiation in the first place, since the most beautiful title we can claim for ourselves is that of children of God through the Blood shed by Christ. Our inheritance is His own Blood! What a dignity, but also what a responsibility! True nobility is not simply a name. The humble farmer reciting his rosary with devotion is a prince of the Church! Such noble souls do exist, full of the gifts of grace, living in very simple conditions, but whose whole life radiates an infinite interior nobility – the only nobility that has value in the eyes of God. In a Catholic social order, nobility comes down from Christ to the humblest men, passing through intermediate social bodies. The whole of society is thus elevated. Today, on the contrary, vulgarity spreads and the whole of society is degraded.
It is a human filiation also, by virtue of the principle of Incarnation. We are children of a country, of which we must be proud. We must understand that this filiation is not only a source of pride, it also requires a great fidelity. Nobility is, indeed, a charge that imposes great demands, and if we are not faithful, we will suffer the consequences. More will be asked from he who has been given more....
These few words are insufficient to deal with such a subject, and we know it. But we intend to return to this question of nobility so that, by exploring it more deeply and developing its consequences and obligations, we may assimilate it to the point that it becomes our best part, protecting us from the surrounding vulgarity.
In Christo Sacerdote et Maria,
Fr. Yves le Roux