A Study of Dom Prosper Gueranger's Detailed Defense of The Mystical City of God, part two

As explained in part one of this study about Dom Prosper Gueranger’s twenty-eight articles published in L’Univers from May 23, 1858, to November 7, 1859, as translated into English and published under the title of Mary of Agreda and The Mystical City of God: 28 Articles by Dom Prosper Gueranger, OSB, Abbot of Solesmes, theologian, liturgist, historian, and author of the Liturgical Year, the illicit actions taken at the Sorbonne against Venerable Mary of Jesus of Agreda and The Mystical City of God that she wrote under obedience to her confessor before being told by a substitute confessor to destroy the manuscript and then commanded by her regular confessor to write it again, which she did with in identical form save for a few minor emendations was the work of Jansenists who hated private revelations and believed that devotions to Our Lady, the August Queen of Heaven and the very Mother of God herself, detracted from the adoration due to her Divine Son alone.

The driving force behind the attacks upon the sublime privileges of the Blessed Virgin Mary was Dr. Adrien Baillet, a librarian and author whose book Lives of the Saints was proscribed by Rome in 1709 and again in 1714 and whose popularization of Monita salutaria in his De la dévotion à la Sainte Vierge et du culte qui lui est dû, which was censured by Rome in 1695 and again in 1701 as containing poisons that were injurious to the Faith, was the lightning rod that inflamed the anti-Marian doctors of the Sorbonne to undertake their unremitting and intellectually dishonest crusade against The Mystical City of God. By that time, Dom Prosper Gueranger explained, Gallicanism (the heresy that French bishops can decide for themselves which papal decrees and injunctions to accept or reject and to adopt liturgies particular to France without regard for universal norms) and Jansenism had taken such a strong hold in many French intellectual circles that the censures of the Index meant nothing to them unless, of course, it suited their own anti-Marian purposes.

For the sake of clarity in part two of this study, therefore, I think that it is useful to summarize some of the basic facts to help readers understand the actions taken by the Jansenist claque at the Sorbonne were predetermined and rendered only after the suppression of dissenting voices before an irregular vote was taken:

1. The action taken at the Sorbonne was illicit as the only competent judge of a book written by a Catholic whose cause for beatification has been introduced is the Sacred Congregation for the Causes of the Saints. Those determined to take action against The Mystical City of God had no ecclesiastical authority to do what they had undertaken to accomplish.
2. The action taken at the Sorbonne was based upon a hastily prepared French translation of The Mystical City of God that, despite the cooling of Marian fervor caused by Adrien Baillet’s De la dévotion à la Sainte Vierge et du culte qui lui est dû, was received enthusiastically by many of the faithful in France. Apart from the fact that the Sorbonne had no ecclesiastical authority and thus lacked competence to undertake any action against The Mystical City of God, a review of a document written by a Catholic whose cause for beatification has been introduced is based on the language in which the document was written, not a translation.
3. The proceedings at the Sorbonne were undertaken by a cabal to achieve their predetermined results. Opposition voices, belonging mostly to older priests and scholars who were committed to uphold the oath that made to defend the Sorbonne’s statement of belief in the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, were silenced, and at least one was not only thrown out of the proceedings but exiled from Paris altogether.
4. The Bishop of Meux, France, made sure that all copies of the  translated edition of The Mystical City of God from Spanish into French by Father Thomas Croset, were taken off the shelves of booksellers to prevent undecided members of the Sorbonne faculty from being able to judge the book for themselves during the proceedings that Bossuet to prevent any possibility of their predetermined outcome from being thwarted. Undecided members of the faculty were thus being asked to vote without having seen the text of a document that the Sorbonne had no authority to review at a time when it was being considered in the Holy See itself.
5. Scholasticism and its Master, Saint Thomas Aquinas, came under fierce attack at the Sorbonne as the Venerable Maria de Jesus de Agreda’s The Mystical City of God was seen as a work of Scholasticism, which the Jansenists believed had “corrupted” the “true” meaning of Sacred Scripture and Church Fathers, thus scandalizing Protestants. This is, of course, exactly what was believed by the late Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI and expressed explicitly in his misnamed Principles of Catholic Theology:
   
   1. Nevertheless, a fact is emerging from these reflections that can guide us in our search for an answer. For we must admit, on the one hand, that, even for Catholic theology, the so-called Fathers of the Church have, for a long time, been "Fathers" only in an indirect sense, whereas the real "Father" of the form that ultimately dominated nineteenth century theology was Thomas Aquinas, with his classic systematization of the thirteenth century doctrina media, which, it must be added, was in its turn based on the "authority" of the Fathers. (Joseph Alois “Cardinal” Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 1982, p. 142.)
   2. On the other hand, it is evident that Protestant theology is also not without its "Fathers", insofar as the leaders of the Reformation have, for it, a position comparable to the role of the Fathers of the Church, The perspective from which Scripture is studied and the point of departure for ecclesial life bear their mark and are inconceivable without them. Indeed, we must go a step farther and say that the division in the Church is revealed above all in the fact that the Fathers of one side are not the Fathers of the other. And the ever more observable inability of the one side to understand the other even in language and mode of thought stems from the fact that each has learned to think and speak at the knees of totally different Fathers. The differences among the sects do not have their source in the New Testament. They arise from the fact that the New Testament is read under the tutelage of different Fathers. (Joseph Alois “Cardinal” Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 1982, p. 143)

Well, no, actually, you see, we must insist that Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition are viewed under the direction of the magisterium of the Catholic Church. This, though, is at the essence of Ratzinger's attempt forge a synthesis: the Catholic Church cannot lay exclusive claim to the interpretation of Scripture. She is "divided" and we must, therefore, meet our "partners" in ecumenical dialogue half-way in order to see if a "common understanding" of the "essential" can be arrived at as the basis of a mutual respect and recognition in the search for "truth" and "unity." The Catholic Church's dogmatic pronouncements must be put aside, obviously.

Ratzinger went on to state:

Here, from a quite unexpected angle, we have stumbled upon the immense significance the Fathers have for the Church, even though we are not speaking, in the narrower sense, of the so-called "Fathers of the Church". But does this not force us to a further thought? Who would deny that Thomas Aquinas and Luther are each Father of only one part of Christianity? Granted, under very different circumstances and in such a way that neither of the two sides can comfortably mention both of them in one breath. But even if we give full weight to this difference in evaluation and legitimacy, what we have just said is still valid. Certainly, if Christians of both traditions are not indifferent to each other, neither will they be indifferent toward those whom the other regards as Fathers. They will attempt to understand them in order to understand each other. But even this understanding will not make the Fathers of one group the Fathers of the other. And so the question remains: If these Fathers can be Fathers for only a part of Christianity, must we not turn our attention to those who were once the Fathers of all? (Joseph Alois “Cardinal” Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 1982, p. 142).

Let me raise my hand here at this juncture.

Would deny that Luther is a "Father" of any part of Christianity?

Me, thank you.

Martin Luther was a loathsome, prideful heretic who set Western civilization on the course that it has been on for the past half-millennium, a man who specifically and categorically rejected the Social Reign of Christ the King, just as his admirer, Joseph Ratzinger, rejected Our Lord's reign over nations. Protestantism is not, as mentioned before, just another "part" of Christianity. Protestantism is from the devil, who has used it to distort God's Revelation and to snatch countless numbers of souls from the maternal bosom of the Catholic Church. Catholics must view Divine Revelation and the work of the Fathers as the Church herself has taught over the centuries. Those outside of her fold must come accept the patrimony of the Catholic Church, not expect that Catholics will seek to forge a "synthesis of faith" to their liking.

Consider how Scholasticism was treated by the Bishop of Meaux, France, Jacques-Benigne Lignel Bossuet in a pamphlet he wrote against The Mystical City of God as described by Dom Prosper Gueranger in Article 19 of his series in L’Univers, May 15, 1859, which described how the plot against the book was conceived and the plans laid to carry it out to the point of “censure”:

In the same letter Bossuet, speaking of Fr. Cloche, General of the Dominicans, with whom his nephew had to deal during his stay in Rome, said in a tone of voice that was not very kind to anyone who did not feel inclined towards Thomism: “The Father General of the Dominicans is too clever and too sensible not to find the book of the Mother of Ágreda ridiculous, even if she did not make God a Scotist.” That is called knowing how to take advantage of everything. The attraction of Bossuet was not for the school of Scotus; but if, by chance, this school, so profound, sometimes met with truth, one does not see why in this case God, who is Truth, should forbid Himself, when He reveals, to do so in a way favorable to the Scotists. Now, that the school of Scotus was sometimes right is what it is impossible for any Catholic to doubt today, after the Bull defining the Immaculate Conception. Scotus had said voluit, decuit, fecit; Pius IX pronounced, in the midst of the outpouring of the whole of Catholicity, that this is what Scotus had thought, and how God had revealed it. One can therefore no longer throw at the head of someone, as an insult, the epithet of Scotist; this is as much to the credit of the Spanish holy woman, who in addition, as I said, is far from having always followed the principles of the school of Scotus.

    11. In his pamphlet on the Mystical City, Bossuet develops this same sarcasm: “From the third chapter to the eighth,” he says, “it is nothing other than a refined scholasticism, according to the principles of Scotus. God himself gives lessons and declares himself a Scotist, even though the nun remains in agreement that the party she has embraced is the least accepted in the School. But what! God has decided it, and we must believe Him.” There is something more to be said on this subject. First of all, it can be said that if Duns Scotus, who was undoubtedly a great doctor, could have made a mistake, other doctors are no more assured of infallibility than he was. It is good to be a Thomist, when one has the taste for it; but all the Thomists in the world could not take away from God either the faculty of knowing, or that of revealing what it is in its essence regarding the problems disputed in the School. Mary of Ágreda does not pose as a university doctor who comes to impose her conclusions. She simply says that God has revealed this and that to her, and she does even better: She submits everything she says to the correction of the Holy Church, the only judge of the value of private revelations. Do we think we have finished everything by saying and repeating that she makes God a Scotist? This could have ended the question in Paris, in 1696; yet we will soon declare how the Franciscan school was treated in the Sorbonne. But then, on December 8, 1854, the Catholic world saw this school place at the feet of Pius IX, who had just proclaimed the great word, the silver lily, symbol of Mary immaculate and triumphant; and since then it seems to us that Mary of Ágreda could henceforth wear the epithet of Scotist without blushing, even if it were inflicted on her by Bossuet himself. (Mr. Timothy A. Duff, Editor’s Preface, Mary of Agreda and The Mystical City of God: 28 Articles by Dom Prosper Gueranger, OSB, Abbot of Solesmes, theological, liturgist, historian, and author of the Liturgical Year. Originally published in L’Univers, Paris, 1858-1859. Translated from the original French using Deepl.com by Timothy A. Duff, M.S. Ed., Editor of The New English Edition of The Mystical City of God. © 2024 HOMBOL Publications, 8711 St. Michael’s Road, Spokane, Washington, pp. 272-274. Future citations to the text of Mary of Agreda and The Mystical City of God  in this part two will made by listing only page numbers and not the full title, translator, or publisher as in this initial citation.)

As I had done in part one of this study, it is important to demonstrate that those who “warn” Catholics against The Mystical City of God because an illicit censure rendered irregularly and in a predetermined manner by a cabal at only one university out of the whole world were forerunners of the spirit of conciliarism, both theologically and liturgically, and as shown just above, had the same contempt for Scholasticism as the mythical “restorer of tradition” himself, Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI himself.

These are the “doctors” that one wishes to cite as “authorities” to cast aspersions on The Mystical City of God or to call it “no good”?

Really?

Thus, it is good to rely upon the detail Dom Prosper Gueranger provided in Article 19 of his L’Univers series to describe some of the ways in which the determined Bishop of Meaux, Jacques-Benigne Lignel Bossuet, sought to disparage and then have censured The Mystical City of God:

We begin today the account of the events which prepared and accompanied the Censure of the Mystical City by the Sorbonne. This story is long and of great interest; nothing makes us better aware of the state of mind in France at the end of the 17th century, and the changes that opinion had undergone in the previous thirty years regarding the way of understanding certain points of revealed doctrine. I will not return to the details with which we have indicated these three great facts: The innovation introduced into the theological method, the abandonment of the great theories on the mystery of the Incarnation, and the direct attacks against the veneration and the prerogatives of the Mother of God. I recall here only for the record that the Mystical City, first prohibited in Rome by the Holy Office, had been almost immediately delivered from this blight by the intervention of Innocent XI; that subsequent Pontiffs permitted its reading; that the Spanish Inquisition, after fourteen years of the most severe examination, declared it free from all doctrinal error; that the Faculty of Theology of Toulouse, in 1694, approved all its principles; that persons of the greatest piety and of unquestionable elevation of spirit, such as the illustrious Mother Mechtilde of the Blessed Sacrament, spoke of it only with admiration; that before the publication of the book, men profound in mystical theology and in the contemplation of the mystery of the Incarnation, such as M. Olier, had sensed and even expressed the principal and fundamental views of the author of the Mystical City; that Sister Mary of Ágreda, considered separately from her book, is recognized as a person of the most eminent sanctity, favored with the most marvelous and at the same time the most assured ecstasies; that the writing and publication of this book were not inspired in the Sister by the desire to make a name for herself since, far from willingly taking on this work, she resisted ten whole years before undertaking it, and that after having completed it, she threw the manuscript into the fire at the first request of her confessor; that finally such a Pope as Benedict XIV, who knew better than anyone all that had been done and said in France against Mary of Ágreda and against her book, had no trouble saying, in a Brief on this very book, that he professed the most tender veneration for the author.

    2. The sources from which we draw the details which follow are: The file of the cause of the Sister before the Sacred Congregation of Rites; five letters addressed from Paris to Rome by a doctor of the Sorbonne, at the height of the discussion, the object of which is to give an account of it, dated July 16 and 26, August 6, September 17 and October 1, 1696; a very detailed dispatch from the Apostolic Nuncio in Paris, Mgr. Delfini, Archbishop of Damascus, to Cardinal Spada, Secretary [of State] under Innocent XII; the vigorous protest of two doctors of Sorbonne, the Monsieurs Duflos and Dumas, appealing to the Parliament of Paris the violation of all the rules as an abuse, by means of which a bold party extorted the Censure from the Faculty, surprised and deprived of its freedom; the correspondence of Bossuet and the diary of the abbot Le Dieu, his secretary; finally, a historical writing published in Cologne, in 1697, under the title of: Censura Censuræ, quæ sub ementito Facultatis theologiæ Parisiensis nomine vulgata est. I leave aside Fr. d’Avrigny, who on this question uses that flippant tone which his readers know and which is not always appropriate. The impertinences he allows himself on the very person of the Venerable Servant of God are regrettable, and contrast with the conduct of his Society in this whole affair, according to the testimony of Abbé Le Dieu and the information provided in the dossier of the Cause.

    3. If we are to believe Bossuet’s secretary in his diary (June 1, 1700), this Prelate would have been “the sole promoter” of the Censure which the Sorbonne brought against the Mystical City. I do not think that one can admit this assertion in its entirety. There is no doubt that the Bishop of Meaux had a great influence on the Faculty in this meeting; however, the first impulse did not come from him. Bossuet, in these years, exercised on the Church of France a kind of theological dictatorship; it was impossible to attempt anything in the matter of doctrine without immediately feeling the necessity of obtaining his endorsement and even his assistance. The men who were preparing an attack on the Mystical City found themselves obliged early on to sense the opinion of such a great doctor on the project upon which they had resolved. In their intention, which they were certainly careful not to admit, the censorship of the book of Mary of Ágreda was to be the revenge of the censure which Rome had just made regarding the book of Baillet. Moreover, the judgment which the Sorbonne would pass, unless it could be brought to its senses, would be from another point of view a way of defying the authority of the Holy See; for it was known that, at that very moment, a commission appointed by the Pope was examining the book of the Sister. It was to be expected that the Nuncio would go to the King with his complaints about this lack of respect for the Apostolic See; but the King could be warned in time, and what Prelate was better able than Bossuet to take the lead with Louis XIV, who had in him unlimited confidence in all that had to do with religious matters?

An Injection:

In other words, the Jansenist cabal at the Sorbonne was so committed to defending Adrien Baillet’s book that had been condemned by Rome that their “censure” of The Mystical City of God, which was under review by Rome at that very tire, was meant to be an act of defiance against the authority of Holy Father himself, Blessed Pope Innocent XI.

Ah, the French, so good when they are faithful and so arrogant by fallen nature when they set their course against the authority of Holy Mother Church, which is, by the way, exactly what the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre had decided to so to defend Tradition against the authority of the man he accepted as a true and legitimate Successor of Saint Peter, Giovanni Battista Enrico Antono Mario Montini/Paul VI, without being able to admit that there would never be any need to defend Tradition against one is in fact a true pope. Gallicanism is alive and well, and it is the basis of the entire resist-while-recognize movement.

I return now to Dom Prosper Gueranger’s description of Bishop Bossuet’s pamphlet against The Mystical City of God:

    4. The great Bishop of Meaux was then in his decline; he was touching that period of decay which Abbé Le Dieu has so sadly described, day by day, in a manuscript from which Bossuet’s eloquent and skilful historiographer had the good taste to borrow only selected passages, but which has now, by its complete publication, fallen into the public domain. However, the energy of the noble old man was far from being extinguished. One was able to notice it in this same year 1696, which saw the beginning of the fight between him and the Archbishop of Cambrai; yet at the same time the prelate had retained, and age had increased in him, this facility of character which more skilful people had too often exploited in the past. His leniency toward Jansenism still continued, and one finds him, in the diary of Le Dieu, obsessed by people who should not have had access to a man like him. We saw him corresponding in a tone of the most intimate confidence with Jean de Neercassel, bishop of Castorie, whose book he praised, but which was condemned by the Holy See; and Baillet, after the censure of his book in Rome, presented himself as a visitor to Germigny and was welcomed with benevolence. Fr. Bossuet, who belonged to the party, governed his uncle at will, and dragged him into steps which distressed Madame de Maintenon and embarrassed Louis XIV. . . .

Did he not give proof of a quite juvenile impatience, and perhaps a little too freedom from restraint, when, in order to hasten the Apostolic judgment, which was too long in coming, he had the idea of renewing in the Sorbonne the scene which had taken place against the book of Mary of Ágreda, and succeeded again this time in intimidating a great number of doctors? In the affair of the Memoirs of China, did we not see him push for the censorship of this work, which its defenders supported by alleging obvious passages of the Discourse on Universal History? The Assembly of the clergy of 1700, of which he was the soul, and which Count de Maistre has so seriously studied and characterized, testified still better to the vivacity of the impressions felt by this ardent nature, and to his fidelity to the ideas which prevailed in the entire second part of his life. . . .

Bossuet has left a four-page pamphlet on the Mystical City, which we shall speak of at our leisure; yet in the meantime, we must agree that nothing could be harsher, more contemptuous, or more violent. The author caught fire at the thought that this book, if it was not shot down, would pass for a Fifth Gospel in the eyes of the people; this is what Abbé Le Dieu tells us, and the aged doctor was revived to stop such a great scandal. It is thus not the passion which is lacking in the attack; one is astonished only that the learned Bishop does not pay any attention to the imposing number of doctors who had judged the book before him, and had approved and admired it. It is easy to foresee that, pursued with such outrage, the book could well succumb where the influence of a man who speaks so loudly and so firmly reigns; but if one supposes a return to the ideas which reigned in France, as elsewhere, fifty years earlier, it is easy to foresee one of those appeasements which restore freedom of judgment, and make one hardly realize the excesses which preoccupation had produced. Bossuet and the Sorbonne of 1696 would have condemned Catherine Emmerich, as they condemned Mary of Ágreda. Who would think of censuring Catherine Emmerich today? And would anyone dare to accuse the countless readers and admirers of the revelations of the German ecstatic of wanting to turn them into a Fifth Gospel? The Catholic people have more sense; we have established above that private revelations are one of the means God uses to maintain the supernatural sense; men will not change this plan. They may, to a certain extent and for a certain time, intercept the light which the goodness of God has prepared; this is a tragedy and a responsibility, yet divine mercy may return to the charge, and it is then that we are able to see how short the wisdom of man is, and how capable of error, even when, as the Savior says, he flatters himself with the idea he has done God a service (Jn. 16:2). (pp. 264-266.)

Another Interjection:

Bishop Bossuet did not even attempt to address the fact that, as Dom Prosper Gueranger noted, many distinguished and doctors had read the book approved The Mystical City of God with admiration. One who is intellectually honest must always deal with various viewpoints before coming to conclusions on a subject. To avoid doing is what is called “special pleading,” a device to convince the uninformed that there is only view that is acceptable, that of the author’s, and that no other views are worth considering or can be admitted existing, no less to discuss them.

How anyone who claims to have done research about The Mystical City of God and not know the details provided by Dom Prosper Gueranger when they have been available all along in the French language is unfathomable.

Back to the Abbot Solesmes’s narrative in Article 19 of his L’Univers series:

    7. Bossuet, as I said at the outset, was entirely uninvolved in the first maneuvers of the supporters of Baillet against the Mystical City. The cabal did not think of reclaiming the weight of his authority and influence until it had finally decided on its plan to attempt a coup. It was as early as October 1695 that the plot was formed to attack the veneration of the Blessed Virgin again on the occasion of the [new French translation of the] Mystical City, the first volume of which, translated from Spanish by Fr. Croset, had just arrived in Paris. Dr. Hideux and his coterie quickly felt that such a book was likely to impassion the readers for or against the ideas it expressed, and that the principles of the Monita salutaria and of book of Baillet could suffer either failure or advancement, depending on the manner in which the affair was conducted. To let circulate a Spanish work composed by a holy woman, a work which assaults at the same time the spirit, the heart, and the imagination, was to expose itself to see reviving more alive than ever among the faithful of France this enthusiasm for the Mother of God, which one had worked so much to attenuate; it was to clear the way for the reaction which Bourdaloue, from the height of the pulpit, had shown to be urgent. On the contrary, to persecute the book, to cover it with ridicule, to make it odious, as filled with things opposed to true doctrine and true piety; to take advantage of the occasion to give to understand that those who endeavor to raise the greatness of the holy Virgin are prone to fall into the most deplorable excesses; to censure as illusory and contrary to reason the ways of the mystical life; there was enough there to tempt the rebellious and unorthodox spirit of this party solidly established within the Sorbonne, and which was to provide, so few years later, the forty signatories of the Case of Conscience. This other consideration, that the Pope had just established a special Congregation for the doctrinal examination of the Mystical City, was not likely to stop them; they were too intent, as I have already said, and as will become clear, on avenging their friend Baillet, who had been mistreated by the Roman Index.

    8. The end of the year 1695 and the first two months of the following year were spent in preparations. The news was spread among the public that a book had come from Spain which was the height of scandal, a book which elevated the Blessed Virgin to almost divine honors, a book which had to be destroyed at all costs if one did not want to lose all the fruit which the revocation of the Edict of Nantes had brought about for the conversion of Protestants. Finally, in the month of March, they thought they were in a position to make a first overture within the Faculty on a project of censorship. As it was usual that the Sorbonne never proceeded to a judgment of this nature without having obtained the consent of the civil authority and of the influential members of the episcopate, the doctors succeeded in having the first president de Harlay, the chancellor Boucherat, and Louis-Antoine de Noailles, who had just ascended to the archiepiscopal see of the capital, warned against Mary of Ágreda and her book. Bossuet must have been forewarned at an early stage; however, the first mention of this affair in his correspondence is in a letter to his nephew, then in Italy, dated May 26. “The good people and the true scholars,” says the prelate, “are terribly provoked.” One sees that the cabal had not lost its time, having been able to operate in a few months this terrible uprising. Could we not say that the enemy was at the gates of Paris, or that the Koran had just been promulgated in this capital, with the danger of seeing the entire population pass under the yoke of Mohammed? And yet it was only the book of a poor nun favored with the gift of miracles, and who had died in the odor of sanctity, thirty years ago. It is against this extraordinary book, which contains as much as one could want, though certainly inoffensive, that these good people and these true scholars rose up, who two years before had accepted the odious book of Baillet which had been censured by the Holy See! (pp. 268-271.)

Yes, the French spirit of pride and arrogance was such that their diabolically drive effort to condemn The Mystical City of God while it was then under review by a special commission appointed by Pope Blessed Innocent XI was to avenge the discipline imposed upon Dr. Adrien Baillet, not exactly a noble and disinterested search for truth.

Indeed, the plot against The Mystical City of God was so predetermined that Bishop Bossuet drew up a plan of attack made to look like a legitimate inquiry. As will be demonstrated, shortly, however, this “inquiry” had no toleration of dissenting voices.

Let me direct your attention to some of these details as provided by Dom Prosper Gueranger in Article 20 of his L’Univers series, May 29, 1859:

  1. The four commissioners charged to draw up the project of censorship in the assembly of the Sorbonne of May 2 were unable to deliver their work until the following July 2. In a letter of June 30, 1696, Bossuet speaks thus about the business: “Monday, the commissioners will make their report on Mother Ágreda. They must qualify ten or twelve propositions, and deal with the rest in bulk. The Faculty will not have time to deliberate at the Prima mensis: I do not know any more.” The prelate was at this moment at Germigny, but he returned to Paris a few days later, as we shall soon see. The commissioners had taken their time; two whole months had been used by them to draw up the plan of attack, and they were going to launch their factum in a session which, according to the customs of the Sorbonne, tolerated no deliberations. It was a skilful way of taking possession of the opinion, in the middle of a body of which one part of the members was already ill-informed, and the other part had not yet declared itself.

    2. The assembly of the Prima mensis was held on the appointed day. The work of the commission was read there. The censure was divided into fourteen articles, and noted sixty propositions of the Mystical City, with the most severe qualifications. Against the customs of the Faculty, this report had been printed as if it had been a judgment in form, and not the preparatory work of a simple commission, even whose formation had been marred by irregularity. But that was not all: The doctors agreed to meet on the 14th of this month, the day on which the deliberations would begin. In vain many of them complained about the shortness of the time allowed for examining a doctrinal censure that dealt with so many proposals; in vain they represented that the commissioners had taken two whole months to prepare their work, and that it was contrary to all propriety to grant the judges only thirteen days to hear the case and prepare their sentence; in vain they demanded the very moderate term of one month to study the book; yet the cabal prevailed, and the day of the discussion was maintained at July 14. This was the second time in this strange affair that the desire of the majority yielded to the pressure exerted by the minority. (pp. 275-276.)

A Brief Comment:

The cabal was able to present the fourteen articles of the censure against The Mystical City of God as a fait’accompli. However, a serious protest was made by a doctor of the Order of Saint Francis, Father Merou, as discussed by Dom Prosper Gueranger:

    3. There was, however, at this first session a protest which led to serious consequences, at least for the one who had the courage to make it. A doctor of the Order of St. Francis, Fr. Mérou, took the floor to raise a preliminary question on which it seemed to him that the Faculty had passed too easily. He said that the reigning Pope, Innocent XII, having appointed a Congregation in Rome specially charged with the examination of the Mystical City, the respect due to the Apostolic See demanded that the judgment of this Congregation be awaited, all the more so since it involved matters of extreme delicacy, revelations, and mystical ways. The speaker recalled that since the faculties of theology had no jurisdiction, but merely the right to make advisory judgments of purely arbitrary authority, their duty was to show the greatest reserve in such difficult matters; that the decrees of Leo X, of the Fifth Lateran Council, and of Urban VIII, expressly stated that when the Apostolic See had in its hand a cause of this nature, it was henceforth forbidden for the Ordinaries themselves to know about it; that, moreover, prudence did not permit in a matter as serious as that which was intended to be referred to the Faculty to proceed without having studied the book in its original language, even if it meant going back to the autograph manuscript; that otherwise one was exposing oneself to unjustly burdening an author with the faults of her inept translator; that in order to be in a position to pass a serious judgment on the Mystical City, it was necessary to take note of the character of its author, to know her life, the graces with which the Sister had been favored, the opinion which the persons who had followed and directed her had of her, and to apply in the examination of this cause the rules for the discernment of spirits, which are traced out by Gerson; that this was the manner of proceeding of the Holy See in cases of this nature. Finally, Fr. Mérou concluded that the Faculty had only one thing to do at this time, which was to leave to the Apostolic judgment this cause which was already before it.

    4. These courageous words caused a violent uproar in the assembly; as is most often the case in deliberative meetings, the minority tried to intimidate the majority by their clamor. In the midst of the noise which resounded in the room, Fr. Mérou managed to make his voice heard loud enough for it to be understood that he was appealing this question to the tribunal of the Sovereign Pontiff. At these words the cries increased, and it seemed, says one of the reports recorded in the Roman collection of the cause, that a blasphemy had been uttered. The tumult having finally subsided, a doctor of great reputation for knowledge and virtue, Fr. de Rubec, rose and took up the proposal of Fr. Mérou. He had the courage to say to these misguided men that the assembly should show the same deference to the Holy See as it knew how to show to the Archbishop of Paris on occasion. He recalled that the Faculty, which had recently begun censoring the library of Dr. Ellies du Pin, stopped immediately upon learning that the prelate of the diocese was preparing a judgment against this work. Fr. de Rubec concluded that the Sorbonne, whose doctors receive their title only from the authority of the Apostolic See, should show on this occasion their respect for this sacred authority, the only source of their dignity and honors.

    5. The energetic step of this secular doctor, who was not afraid to come to the aid of the poor Franciscan, whose motion had almost been stifled under the irritated protests of the cabal, made several other members of the Faculty take heart, whose names have unfortunately not been collected in the relations contained in the dossier of the cause of Mary of Ágreda. Continuing to insist on the preliminary question, these doctors complained that the group of complainants wanted to drag the Faculty to censure a book which had no other crime than to raise the glory of the holy Virgin as high as human intelligence can itself rise when it comes to the Mother of God, while this same Faculty let pass every day without complaint a crowd of books infected with Socinian, Photian, and Jansenist tendencies, and while the books indicated by the Roman Index circulated freely, without the Faculty taking the trouble to stop their flow. There were even doctors who took to task the book of Baillet on devotion to the Blessed Virgin, asking why the Sorbonne, after this book had been condemned in Rome, had not undertaken its censorship, which would be much more appropriate than that of the book by the Spanish nun. Some pushed even harder, and recalling the past of the Sorbonne, cited various censures which it had rendered in the past against the detractors of the veneration and the greatness of Mary, and remarked that it had never been seen to prosecute either a book or even a proposition which were to the glory of the Mother of God. They asked if by chance the Sorbonne, on this occasion, wanted to provide a fact in support of the word that Cardinal DuPerron had pronounced at the States of Blois, when he had said that this Faculty changed its principles every twenty-five years according to the ideas of its patrons. It was seen, they added, professing the infallibility of the Pope at the time of Cardinals Richelieu and Mazarin, and now it repels this doctrine. Under the Archbishop de Harlay the Faculty pursued the Jansenists, today it spares them; should we be surprised that, once zealous for the honor of the Blessed Virgin, it now welcomes tendencies jealous of the honor to which this Queen of Heaven is entitled?

    6. Such claims were too vigorous a renewal of the effort made by Fr. Mérou not to exasperate the adversaries of the Mystical City. They began to shout again, and with such insistence that the majority accepted, out of sheer exhaustion, the meeting for the 14th, which was again called. Before the session closed, several doctors asked for copies of the book to be handed out, so that everyone could check whether the propositions noted had been faithfully extracted, and whether the commissioners had correctly understood the meaning of the author. Unheard of! the request was rejected. It was insisted that at least two copies be deposited in the Faculty registry; this claim was similarly rejected. It became clear then that the leaders of this whole affair had resolved to lead the Faculty to an act of violence, not to enlighten its religious views. A mysterious and all-powerful influence was hovering over the Sorbonne, and this influence found only too many members in this society willing to accept it and push things to excess. The doctors for whom honor and conscience forbade to opine in an uninstructed cause, and who were reluctant to vote against a book which they would have known only by a few sentences extracted by an arrogant and passionate commission, did not believe themselves relieved of the obligation to examine for themselves the question on which they would have to pronounce. Contrary to all previous practices, they were refused the evidence; they resolved to obtain it by another means. They therefore went to the booksellers and asked for the Mystical City. The booksellers answered that all the copies had been removed from their stores by public authority, and the doctors were reduced to doing without. This strange and significant fact, which we read in the reports sent to Rome, is naively confirmed by Fr. Le Dieu in his diary, on June 1, 1700: “[Bossuet],” he says, “as soon as he was aware of this book, made me look for it in Paris, that is to say the same one printed in Marseilles and translated into French, and he also wanted to have the Spanish original, which was printed in three folio volumes. He immediately spoke about it to M. Boucherat, chancellor, who wanted to read it in Spanish, and who was eager to understand what [Bossuet] had reported to him about it.” I omit here, for convenience, a rude comment of the chancellor about the Sister. Le Dieu continues thus: “Finally, M. Boucherat had the tome suppressed, which had started to be sold in Paris, and withdrew the privilege, with a prohibition to print the sequel.”

    7. But it was not enough to make the book inaccessible to those from whom a judgment against it was requested; it was a question of taking revenge on these two independent doctors who had dared to recall the laws of honor and conscience to a body of which one part of the members was more than convinced, and the other intimidated to excess. The first president de Harlay sent Fr. Mérou to the Parliament, and after a very harsh warning, he sentenced him to exile in Noyon. This was a curious way of encouraging free votes in the cause that had been opened. The loyal Franciscan left for the place of his exile, and it is there that he composed a booklet of which I will speak later, but from which I did not want to borrow anything in this account in order not to infringe upon complete impartiality which such a delicate subject demands. Fr. de Rubec was also summoned by the first president of the Parliament. This doctor was highly regarded within the Faculty because of his talent, his piety, and his birth; it was thus important to get rid of his influence as soon as possible. De Harlay did not dare to address the same reproaches to him as to Fr. Mérou, but he expressly forbade him to appear again at the Sorbonne assemblies. Le Dieu here again confirms our records regarding this fact, which would be sufficient in itself to put the reader in a position to appreciate the value of the censure which was brought against the Mystical City. He tells us at the same date: “M. the president de Harlay summoned Fr. de Rubec, and forbade him to enter the assemblies of the Sorbonne, because of the excessively intense speeches which he had made there.” Fr. le Dieu gives us these details as the summary that Bossuet made in his presence, on June 11, 1700, in the afternoon, on all that had happened in the affair of the book of Mary of Ágreda. (pp. 275-282.)

An Interjection:

No one with a shred of intellectual honesty can contend that cabal at the Sorbonne was interested in anything other than a condemnation of The Mystical City of God.

Then again, perhaps that are even some in fully traditional circles who would be sent into a figurative exile or dismissed from a particular camp over some matter that had predetermined in correctly.

To exile a Franciscan doctor for rising to the defense of The Mystical City of God and for pointing out that the rump proceedings at the Sorbonne had been undertaken in violation of the rights of the Holy See and that the Sorbonne, which had once condemned Jansenism, was now infected by it and using its false anti-Marian theologian to work against a book that simply praised Our Lady as the fairest, most pure creature of God’s creative handiwork.

Dom Prosper Gueranger pointed out Article 21 of his L’Univers series, June 15, 1859, that the cabal at the Sorbonne did not expect that their proceedings would take very long to conclude. However, their exile of Father Meron and the refusal to let Father de Rubec attend any further sessions actually strengthened the resolve of the defenders of The Mystical City of God on the faculty of the Sorbonne to continue to raise objections. The fact that they did so exasperated and infuriated Bishop Jacques Beninge Lignel Bossuet no end, and resulted in the expulsion of more faculty members from the proceedings and a decree that no Franciscan could speak out the subject at any time upon peril of the entire order being expelled from Paris:

The opponents of the Mystical City had flattered themselves that they would achieve the censorship of the book by storm; they were mistaken. The printing of the report of the commission, the exile of Fr. Mérou, the prohibition forbidding the abbot de Rubec to reappear in the Sorbonne, the threats and the caresses lavished on the doctors whose independence was feared, the care taken to sequester the copies of the book by the authority of the chancellor, the refusal of the Sorbonne to provide the book to the judges who were to pronounce on its orthodoxy, in a word, all this entourage of violence and partiality did not prevent the discussion of the cause from dragging on. We read in one of the documents contained in the Roman file that a good number of doctors who had attended the session of the prima mensis, and had been witnesses of the impassioned maneuvers utilized by the falsifiers in the report, were taken with such disgust that they abstained from setting foot in the Sorbonne as long as the discussion of the cause lasted. Nevertheless, the defenders of the prerogatives of Mary were still found in such large numbers among the members of the Faculty present that it was only after thirty-four sessions that the discussion was finally closed, willingly or not. The leaders had not counted on such opposition, and we will see soon by what means they were able to triumph over it.

    2. While waiting for the conclusion, Bossuet wrote to his nephew, under the date of July 23, 1696: “The deliberation continues in the Sorbonne on the Mother of Ágreda; the opinions are strongly divided on the manner of censuring it. Those who favor the book drag on their opinions.” One finds in one of the letters sent to Rome during these stormy days, on July 26, the names of three of the doctors who from the beginning energetically supported the perfect orthodoxy of the book; they are doctors Carron, parish priest of St.-Pierre-aux-Bœufs; Fromageau, the same one who left very esteemed resolutions of the Case of Conscience; and Chevillier, librarian of the Sorbonne, a man of knowledge as extensive as varied. These three courageous men were not afraid to say they knew persecutions could be the price of their zeal, but were resolved to obey God rather than men. These doctors could certainly not be reproached for being sons of St. Francis, since they were secular priests; but we can see from a letter of August 6, which can be read in the dossier, that in the days that followed they had the satisfaction of seeing several of their colleagues, enlightened by the discussion, abandon the cowardly impressions given to them by the report, and side with the defenders of Mary of Ágreda without human respect. New violence ensued; several of these doctors were ordered not to appear again at the sessions. As for the Franciscans, they were told collectively, by the civil authority, to henceforth refrain from opening their mouths on the question. They had to be grateful to M. the Premier for not having expelled them from Paris, as Fr. Mérou had been. (pp. 289-290.)

The proceedings at the Sorbonne can be seen as a foreshadowing of the show trials that were held during the first years of the French Revolution when juries reached predetermined outcomes and witnesses who contradicted prosecutors’ charges were either discounted or sent to the guillotine themselves as counterrevolutionaries. The removal of additional opponents from the proceedings demonstrates yet again that the cabal working against The Mystical City of God were willing to use all manner of coercion to guarantee that their outcome would receive the approval of a majority of those who they could manipulated into agreeing with their conclusions.

Poor Bishop Bossuet became so irrational that he attacked Saint Francis of Assisi, whom he had once praised with eloquence and conviction in latter he wrote to his nephew, and several of the leaders of the cabal at the Sorbonne went so far in open proceedings to declare the visions of Saint Teresa of Jesus, Saint Catharine of Siena, and Saint Bridget of Sweden to be fictitious inventions while Saint John Damascene, who fought the very iconoclasm that John Calvin and Cornelius Janssens revived and had found favor amongst those who hated The Mystical City of God, was nothing other than a “hothead” who had “corrupted theology”:

In a letter to his nephew, dated August 6, Bossuet gives from his own point of view a statement of the situation. He says: “The deliberations of Mary of Ágreda continue on the same footing. The Mendians [sic] and their supporters occupy the time with vain and bad speeches, hoping that authority will be used to hasten the deliberations; nothing will be done. This rabble is enraged against me, because they want to believe that I act more than I do and want to do in this matter.” It was only after this letter that the religious mendicants were forbidden to speak; yet it is easy to see how their complaints annoyed the prelate. It must even be admitted that he goes beyond all measure here, and that it is difficult to recognize in the expressions he uses the young and eloquent Fr. Bossuet who, thirty or forty years earlier, celebrated with so much enthusiasm in his beautiful panegyric on St. Francis the sublime love of the Seraphic Patriarch for poverty. Today the sons of this desperate lover of perfect poverty are, in the eyes of the old man, nothing but a rabble, and an enraged one at that, and this because they dare to defend the orthodoxy of a book that so many doctors admire, and the honor of a Servant of God, whose heroic virtues have already earned her the title of Venerable. Their speeches are also vain and bad, as well as those of the doctors who have the courage to protest against the unheard of and unjust pressure on the Faculty and regarding support of the prerogatives of the Mother of God, which are here in question even more than the book of the Sister. Moreover, Bossuet defends himself from being the main driving force in this deplorable affair; we must believe him. The leaders dragged him along by their flattery; they wanted to cover themselves with his respected name; he gave them pledges, no doubt; his sympathies are for them; but it is obvious, by this confidential letter, that if he rendered services to the party, notably by his intervention with the chancellor, it would not be fair to put all the responsibility on him, which he had no reason to disclaim in this letter. This is what leads us to admit, only with the reservation I have made, the assertion of Le Dieu, in his Journal, where he claims that Bossuet had said, on June 1, 1700, “that he was grateful to have been the only promoter of the censure of Mary of Ágreda.” It seems that the part that the illustrious bishop took in this affair is already great enough, since it results from direct information, so one need not accept to the letter the statements of the secretary. . . .   

    5. Here then is the plan of defense of the censure as it emerges from the speeches of these doctors. The syndic Le Fèvre, Dr. Rolland, and grand vicar Le Tellier, Archbishop of Reims, were of the five the most daring in their language. They said first of all that all the private revelations which have been published in the Church are pure inventions, beginning with those of St. Bridget, St. Catherine of Siena, and St. Teresa; then, going further into the matter, they affirmed that the ancient Fathers who spoke enthusiastically of the greatness of Mary were only poor Greek writers (miserabiles græculi); that St John Damascene was nothing but a hotheaded corrupter of theology (delirus theologiæ deturpator); St. Anselm, St. Bernard, St. Bonaventure, St. Thomas, Abbot Rupert, [St.] Albert the Great, are bearable on dogma, superstitious in ascetic and devotional matters, but condemnable when they speak of the Blessed Virgin, because of the excesses in which they indulge in order to honor her (tolerabiliter ubi dogmatice; ubi vero ascetice et devote scripserunt, superstitiose; et præsertim de Deipara virgine, damnabiliter, propter excessus honoris. ) I hardly need to add that all these beautiful things were said in Latin, the only language admitted for the speeches and motions which were made at the sessions of the Faculty. One recognizes in these desolate manifestations the strange deviation whose causes we have already recognized, and which led us to point out the last period of the 17^th century as the time when the Catholic sense suffered most deeply in France. Thus, the time had arrived when mystical theology was no longer regarded as a serious science, and the revelations of canonized Saints were no longer considered to be anything but reveries. St. Andrew of Crete and St. Proclus of Constantinople were no more than miserable enhancers in their panegyrics of Mary; and yet what are their praises of the Mother of God when one compares them with those which are much more bold, numerous and eloquent, those of St. Ephrem and St. Cyril of Alexandria, those great and voluminous doctors, before whom every Faculty of Theology must bow? And St. John Damascene, the father of the theological method: Why was he pursued if not because his didactic allure condemned the supposed progress that was being made in the School? St. Anselm found no favor either; his motto, faith seeking understanding, was no longer applicable, as long as Cartesianism had established in principle the divorce of philosophy and theology, the latter remaining queen in its domain, it is true, but on he condition of limiting itself henceforth to collecting and comparing texts. As for St. Bernard, all that he had been able to advance on the prerogatives of the Holy Virgin had to be suspect. And those poor scholastics, St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure, we were willing to admit they were bearable as far as dogma was concerned; but their Marian conceptions, their general views on the mystery of the Incarnation (for, in the end, it was a question of the consequences and applications of this divine dogma), all that was only superstition and theories worthy of condemnation. It was necessary, said our doctors, to accustom the people to confine themselves to the terms of the Gospel when it is a question of forming an idea of the holy Virgin; now, they added, she is called in the Gospel Woman and Mother of Jesus; this must be enough. Thus, by the means we have indicated, the theology of these men was freed from both Tradition and scholasticism, which are so admirably united in the elucidation of the sublime role of Mary. (pp. 291-292; 293-294.)

An Interjection:

How can anyone who loves the Catholic Faith agree with what the leaders of the cabal against The Mystical City of God at the Sorbonne said about the praises of Our Lady as sung by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux,

The records on file at the Holy See and reviewed by Dom Prosper Gueranger shows that the leaders at the Sorbonne against The Mystical City of God despised Our Lady, who they referred to as the “Mother of Jesus” even though the Council of Ephesus declared against Nestorius that Our Lady is also the Mother of God. Protestants do not believe this, and neither do many Modernists.

Indeed, the insistence that only Scriptural references and not Sacred Tradition be the basis of “the idea of the Holy Virgin” was itself, as the Abbot Solesmes a declaration of independence from Catholic teaching on Our Lady and from Tradition as one of the twin sources of Divine Revelation, an “independence” that aped Protestantism and prophesied the rise of Modernism two centuries later.

Dom Prosper Gueranger noted that the cabal at the Sorbonne, in order to accomplish their goal of censuring The Mystical City of God, had to redefine and, is said today, deconstruct the institution’s centuries-old oath to uphold the truth of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. When confronted by defenders of Our Lady at the Sorbonne of this fact, the members of the cabal reacted with complete arrogance and even went to so far as to say that phrases about Our Lady in the Roman liturgy, which Catholics know is composed under the guidance of the Third Person of the Most Blessed Trinity, God the Holy Ghost, were filled with lies. How was this not the work of the devil himself'?

    6. However, an obstacle stood in the way: The centuries-old tradition of the Sorbonne regarding the Immaculate Conception, and the oath taken by each of its members to uphold this truth. The defenders of the Mystical City had appealed to duty, and shown the help that a book whose theory of the Immaculate Conception was the entire foundation of the School of Paris brought to its doctrine, and the scandal that this school would give if it dared to censor this book. These doctors crossed the barrier, and the old Masters of the Sorbonne heard them with indignation advance that the doctrine which they had sworn to defend, before receiving the bonnet, was a doctrine which was dubious, changing, and entirely useless (dubiam, mutantem, ac prorsus inutilem), and that it was enough to say that Mary had been sanctified, without one being able to know at what moment. We shall see that later this boldness of language caused some embarrassment, and how the cabal went about compensating for the indiscretions which had escaped its leaders on such a delicate point.

    7. It is common for those who devalue the prerogatives of the Holy Virgin to show at the same time little respect for the authority of the Church, as we have seen in this circumstance. The defenders of the book had relied on the authority of the liturgy, which is, as Bossuet himself taught, “the principal instrument of the Tradition of the Church”; they had pointed to the testimonies contained in the Roman liturgy on the greatness and prerogatives of Mary, and held them up against their opponents as a shield which effectively protected a large part of the assertions in the book. Our doctors were not deterred by the feeling of respect and deference which every Catholic feels in the presence of the highest teaching of the Holy Church: They said, without being moved, that the Roman Breviary and the prayers consecrated by the use of the Church, which were alleged in favor of the ideas of the Sister, were miserable and full of lies (Miseriis et mendacii scatere). t is easy to understand that it is not a question here of historical legends for the composition of which the Church did not receive the privilege of infallibility, but rather a question of the formulas expressing the belief. The revolution was thus declared, and the doctors, it must be said, did nothing but translate into brutal words the spirit of the liturgical reform of the Parisian books carried out by François de Harlay, while waiting for that much more radical edition of 1736. (pp. 295-297.)

Thus stood the Venerable Mother Mary of Jesus of Agreda condemned for inventing as "lies" which is said about Our Lady in the Sacred Liturgy. Rank brutality against the Mother of God and her chosen soul were all that the cabal at the Sorbonne had at heir disposal, and this used this brutality incessantly during their proceedings. Then again, violence is what those who disparage praises sung in honor of the August Queen is Heaven is all that minions of the adversary have at their disposal when they wage war against the beautiful perfections and refulgent radiance against she who has crushed the head of all heresies.

Dom Prosper Gueranger explained that one of those who documented the proceedings saw that the leaders of the plot against The Mystical City of God were ratonalists who hated the supernatural:

    8. The Parisian correspondent, doctor of the Sorbonne, who sends to Rome all these details, insisted upon the depth of the wound they denote. In his eyes this abhorrence of the supernatural, which was already driving so many men of this time to reject all that rose above the letter, harbored the fatal seeds of a separate philosophy which, on the destined day, would raise its head and reveal a new France, the France of the 18th century. He does not fear to say that, from then on, the Sorbonne contained more than one Socinian, and that Jansenism was a mask under which many concealed their deism. This reminds us of what Bossuet said somewhere about doctor Launoy, that several years before he held certain meetings in Paris whose members already professed Socinian ideas. Our correspondent, wanting to summarize the final goal of the tendencies that arose in the trial of the book of Mary of Ágreda, makes no difficulty in saying that the promoters of the censorship had the goal of reducing religion to rationalism and naturalism (quorum omnium scopus est ad rationis normam atque naturæ legem revocare religionem). But let us return to the story.

    9. The syndic of the Faculty and the four deputies were succeeded by Dr. Feu, parish priest of St.-Gervais. He surpassed all bounds by his violence and appeared worthy of his name, says one of our narrators (ignitus totus re et nomine). He began with insults to the Sister so crude that the pen refuses to transcribe them. We will speak later about the pretext that the adversaries took to hurl insolent remarks about the author of the Mystical City. The Chancellor competed in impropriety, as we have seen, with Doctor Feu. This one, at least, spoke Latin. To the insinuations against the morality of the Servant of God he added, without blushing, accusations of idolatry, Pelagianism, Lutheranism; in short, impiety, and concluded that Mary of Ágreda was worthy of the fire as well as her book. It must be admitted that these doctoral orgies are rather reminiscent of those which took place in Rouen during the trial of Joan of Arc.

    10. Yet these excesses did not dampen the courage of the defenders of the Servant of God. They rose in numbers to face the attack. The first to speak was Dr. Février; he protested against the indignities that had just been heard, and compared the situation of the Sister, so cowardly outraged in an assembly of doctors, to that of the Savior himself, delivered as a prey to the Sanhedrin, and hearing Himself charged with accusations that He did not deserve. He compared to Herod, who toyed with Christ without taking the trouble to know Him, those who attacked the book and had not seriously studied it, and to Pilate those who wanted above all to be seen as the friend of Caesar in this affair. By Caesar, our correspondent tells us, Dr. Février meant M. of Reims and M. of Meaux, before whom many trembled. This speech, full of verve and passionate indignation, infuriated those whom he was singling out so severely; they often interrupted him with their clamors and, basing their claim on past excesses, had the doctor served, without fulfilling the ordinary formalities, with a ban on appearing again at the Sorbonne assemblies. Dr. Mortier then took the floor and moved the issue to another level. His motion could be summarized as follows: Since the book of the Sister is presented as a collection of revelations, it belongs to the Holy See to judge its value; and in fact, Rome has already taken notice of it; its doctrine is sound and orthodox; the project of censorship of the deputies is scandalous and injurious to the Faculty. The cabal, irritated more and more against the two doctors, looked for ways to make them repent of their opposition and frighten those who thought the same way. The syndic Le Fèvre lodged a complaint in Parliament against Drs. Février and Mortier, and it would have resulted in some inconvenience to them if Louis XIV had not made it known to the first president de Harlay that his express wish was that he would henceforth abstain from any intervention in this sad affair. Public opinion in the capital was moved by a dispute between doctors that had lasted so long. The faction had even gone so far as to publish several defamatory pamphlets against Mary of Ágreda and her defenders, and the scandal, as it spread, awakened in many people the ancient respect for the prerogatives of the Mother of God; the King himself, who had not deemed it appropriate to defer to the claims which the Apostolic Nuncio had indirectly transmitted to him, felt the need to refrain from lending the support of his Parliament in a cause in which he was beginning to glimpse certain aspects which could be injurious to religion. But if the members of the judiciary, who at the beginning of the affair had not spared arbitrary measures, found themselves stopped in the execution of their desires, the chancellor remained faithful to the impressions which Bossuet had given him from the beginning. The defenders of the Mystical City had prepared several replies to the pamphlets launched in the public against this book; the permission to print was refused to them, and we will see later that when one thought of finally enlightening the public opinion on the unworthy maneuvers of which the Sorbonne had been the venue, one was obliged to have recourse to foreign presses. (pp. 297-300.)

There was no fairness or impartiality in these proceedings at all. Opposition voices were silenced and then attacks launched against a consecrated religious, a mother superior, who had already been elevated as a Servant of God and thus titled Venerable. All efforts to publish refutations contained the pamphlets against Mother Maria de Jesus de Agreda and/or The Mystical City of God were denied.

Anyone who relies upon the work of Sorbonne in its illicit censure of The Mystical City of God is relying upon the work of the devil himself.

As Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B., recounted in Article 22 of his L’Univers series, July 18, 1859, the vote of censure took place on September 17, 1696, the Feast of the Impression of the Stigmata on Saint Francis of Assisi. How appropriate this was as the cabal imposed a crown of thorns upon Venerable Maria de Jesus de Agreda, a true daughter of the Seraphic Doctor himself, because of and a chosen soul to make known that which was hidden from the learned and the clever.

Of particular interest in the proceedings of September 17, 1696, which, as noted in part one of this was exactly one hundred fifty years before the apparition of Our Lady to Maximin Giraud and Melanie Calvet in La Salette, France, was the irregularities of the vote-taking process, yet another violation of due process and fairness:

On September 17, 1696, Bossuet wrote from Paris to his nephew: “The Agréda affair is due to finish today, and should pass magno numero to the opinion of the deputies.” It was indeed this day that, with the help of audacious maneuvers, the cabal finally won the triumph towards which it had been tending for several months. One hundred and fifty-two doctors were present at this memorable session. One heard at first the opinions of some members of the Faculty who had not yet opined; yet no sooner had the last one finished expressing his opinion than the syndic Le Fèvre, without having submitted to the Faculty the project of censorship amended according to the claims of so many doctors in fulfillment of the promise he had solemnly made in the session of August 6, gave the order to count the votes right away, with the aim of arriving by surprise at the conclusion so desired by the faction. I quickly pass over the details which the reader will find later in a notarized protest which was drawn up the same day, of which a certified copy is in the Roman file, with the letters and other documents which form the basis for our written report. It suffices to say, for the moment, that the doctors had not been summoned, as was customary for the concluding sessions; that those who were present and who were not in the conspiracy had gone to the Sorbonne only to hear opine those members of the Faculty who had not yet spoken; that the verification of the votes was formally refused, in spite of the strongest complaints of the majority; and finally that the sentence which condemned the Mystical City was declared and consummated only by the mouthpiece of the syndic, who said aloud in the room: “There are one hundred and fifty-two votes; of these, eighty-five are in favor of the censure;” and by the assent of the dean, who added: “To which I conclude with you.” After these words, the dean declared the session adjourned; complaints arose on all sides; the tumult was at its height; yet, valid or not, the censure had been carried; the influences of the outside, joined to the intrigues of the inside, had triumphed; and the Faculty was about to enter on its registers a judgment worthy of appearing beside so many others which, like this one, were the result of the malevolent passions which we have so often seen, since the 13^th century, agitate and prevail in its bosom. (pp. 305-306.)

Dom Prosper Guranger explained that only the censure itself and not the machinations and arbitrariness of the Jansenists who engineered is contained in various historical commentaries, dictionaries, and the Universal Biography as the “judgment of the Sorbonne, to which the great name of Bossuet is united with much pomp, becomes for them the equivalent of a sentence being caried by an ecumenical council; and it does not even occur to them that it could well be that other Faculties of theology which were as good as that of Paris might well have passed diametrically opposite judgments of the book and its author. We shall soon give proof that this was the case.”

The Abbot of Solesmes described the indignation with which the sixty-seven doctors in the minority left the adjourned session as the regulations of the Sorbonne had been violated and “the most basic requirements of probity de to the refusal to verify the votes”:

    3. However, there were two doctors whom human fears did not stop. May their names remain in honor, because they braved, for the glory of the Mother of God which was being outraged, the consequences of a brilliant step whose first effect was to show in broad daylight all the ignominy of a cabal, and all the shame of an oppression, both of which remind us all too much, albeit in abbreviated form, of what happened at Ephesus at the time of John of Antioch. These two intrepid men were Amable Duflos and Hilaire Dumas. At the end of the session, they went to the Castle of Paris, and had the following protest written by a notary, which we give at length because of its great importance.

    4. “Today, the seventeenth day of September, one thousand six hundred and ninety-six, at two o’clock in the afternoon, appeared before the King’s counselors notaries at the Castle of Paris, undersigned, M. Amable Duflos, priest, doctor of theology of the Faculty of Paris, house and society of Navarre, residing on rue des Singes, parish of Saint-Paul; and M. Hilaire Dumas, priest and doctor of theology of the aforementioned Faculty, house and society of Sorbonne, and formerly adviser in the Court of the Parliament, residing on rue Françoise, parish of Saint-Médard: Saying that, in the ordinary assembly of the said Faculty of the second day of last May, M. Le Fèvre proposed to said Faculty the examination of a book entitled the Mystical City of God, etc., composed in Spanish by Sister Mary of Jesus, and translated into French. The said book having been received by the assembly to be examined, four deputies were appointed by the dean and syndic to confer among themselves on the said book, in order to extract from it the propositions which they judged deserving of censure, and then to make their report to the said Faculty. This having been done, the aforementioned deputies made their report to the ordinary general assembly of the first day of July also last, and revealed there that they had extracted from the aforementioned book the principal propositions which deserved censure, and that they had noted in them the qualifications which suited them; and the syndic required that the propositions, as well as the qualifications which formed the opinion of the deputies, be printed, to be distributed to each doctor.

    5. “When the matter was discussed, many doctors were of the opinion that only the propositions extracted from the aforementioned book should be printed, and not the qualifications, in order not to prejudice the opinions of the doctors of the aforementioned Faculty, and not to do anything against the custom observed at all times in such a meeting; the other opinion, however, did not let it pass, and this was done with great haste. The assembly was postponed to the fourteenth in the following month. A document was distributed to all the doctors, entitled: Sententia Dominorum deputatorum, etc., Opinion of the Lord Deputies, which writing contains more than sixty propositions, at the bottom of each of which are the qualifications of each. On this day the deputies began to explain their opinion; and in the following assemblies, which have continued to this day to the number of more than thirty, the doctors who attended the proposal of this examination all stated their opinion, each one according to his rank of seniority; in which all the doctors opining were divided in a great number of different opinions; some wanted the book to be censured only by notes and general qualifications; others wanted particular proposals condemned, and differed in the choice of proposals and their qualifications. The last doctor having finished opining today around ten o’clock in the morning, and being concerned with the recognition of the votes and the counting of them, and a great number of those who had previously opined being absent from the assembly, it was desirable that another assembly be designated so all those absent could be present, and in which all the different votes would be received aloud and recognized by each one, to see what he wanted to add or to subtract from it; that we could at least agree on two principal opinions, or that we were divided into so many different opinions that we could not unanimously agree on the same opinion, which was all the more necessary since it was easy to get confused in the collection of opinions, and some had recognized that their opinions had been badly written, the clerk of the Faculty not having enough experience or skill to be able to do it exactly. The Society had made recent use of this practice in the last Censure it made, in 1683, of the proposal presented to it by our lords of the Parliament, as testified to by several doctors who were present, principally M. Pirot, chancellor of the University of Paris, who was then syndic.

    6. “However, the aforementioned M. Le Fèvre, present syndic, not only did not request that another Assembly be designated to reread, review and count the votes, but without saying anything, having risen from his place, he went to stand beside the clerk to read the votes, and when it was pointed out to him that he should be assisted in this function by the two registrants of the Society, chosen to be witnesses of what is done by the syndic in his functions, he insisted that he was fit and able to perform this function alone, even though they persisted in protesting to the contrary. After which, several doctors having requested several and various times that he at least read aloud the votes, so each could recognize if his had been faithfully written, and see whether he wished to persist or switch to another opinion, the abovementioned syndic, having disregarded all these requests, after a few moments spent turning over the sheets upon which the clerk had written these opinions, without having read aloud any of the said opinions, nor named any of the opinants, nor having been able himself, in so little time, to read the votes, nor count them, which would have required more than two hours, he rose and said aloud: ‘Sunt 152 suffragia, ex quibus sunt 85 pro sententia deputatorum. There are 152 votes, of which 85 are for the opinion of the deputies.’ And immediately the dean said with haste: ‘Ita vobiscum concludo. To which I conclude with you,’ and immediately adjourned the Assembly, even though the aforementioned participants represented to him that this conclusion was null, the opinions having been neither read nor counted, as they should have been, especially after the instantaneous request which had been made, and that the plurality was not for the opinion of the deputies, such as they had printed it, that there were not half who would have agreed entirely and who would not have made some exceptions and modifications to it. This was so evident, that after approximately half of the opinants had stated their opinion, the aforementioned syndic said aloud in full assembly, and repeated it several times in several assemblies, that the deputies, taking advantage of the enlightenment of all those who had opined, would reform and change their opinion in such a way that it would please all, that all would be satisfied. After this declaration by the syndic, several agreed with the opinion of the deputies under this condition promised by the syndic, indicating that they would find several things to criticize in this opinion, such as it was printed; which condition was to be carried out before the conclusion. This condition was not fulfilled, since the syndic concluded the meeting in favor of the opinion of the deputies, without changing or reforming it.

    7. “And whereas this endeavor of said dean and the syndic is of a perilous consequence, and tends to ruin the discipline of the Society and to render contemptible its decrees and censures, which would depend only on these two persons, said testifiers were persuaded that it was a matter of the honor of the Faculty of which they are members, and of their conscience, to petition for justice regarding such an undertaking, to manifest the nullity of said conclusion pronounced this day by said lord dean, and to appeal against it to our lords of the Parliament as an abuse; of all which said declarations, requests and protests, they have asked the undersigned notaries to take note of them, who have issued them the present document to serve them as they see fit; and furthermore the aforementioned testifiers have given to one of them power of attorney on behalf of the other to serve the present act of protest on the aforementioned dean and syndic, and on the aforementioned clerk, and that they protest the nullity of the aforementioned conclusion for the reasons set out above, to posit opposition in their own hands to it being passed to the prejudice of the aforementioned protest against the confirmation of the said alleged conclusion; and that in the event that this occurs they may appeal such an abuse to our lords of the Parliament, and thus they shall advise. Done and passed in Paris, in the study of Prieur the elder, one of the aforementioned notaries, and signed, the day and year above declared, the minute of the present, which remained with the aforementioned notary. Signed: Robillard. Prior.”

    8. The two doctors waited until September 28 to serve to the dean and the syndic of the Faculty the protest that we have just read. They had hoped they would not overlook a censure extorted by such deplorable means; but having learned that the cabal had resolved to take advantage of the approaching session of the Prima mensis to publish its triumph, Duflos and Dumas had their act of opposition deposited with the two principal members of the Sorbonne. Here is the signification of the text, such as we find it following the protest, in the Roman file of the Cause, where these two parts, as well as all those we have used in this part of our account, are certified, regarding the fidelity of the transcription, by an apostolic notary accredited in the court of Rome. Here, then, is the signification of the text:

    9. “In the year one thousand six hundred and ninety-six, on the twenty-eighth day of September, at the request of the said sirs Amable Duflos and Hilaire Dumas, who have each taken up residence in their own house, where they reside as above designated, was shown and served the aforesaid act of protest and thence delivered to and left in the presence of M. Guiscard, dean of the said Faculty of Theology, at his domicile of the college of Navarre....and to M. Le Fèvre, syndic of the said Faculty, by me René Pallu, bailiff of the Mint Court, residing on the island of Notre-Dame, street and parish of Saint-Louis, undersigned, insofar as they are not unaware of it, further declaring to them that the said sirs Duflos and Dumas are opponents, as they hereby object in their own hands to the confirmation of the aforementioned alleged conclusion, protesting in the event that, to the prejudice of the aforementioned protest, it would be overruled, to appeal as a matter of abuse before our lords of the Parliament, or as they see fit, of which act, etc. Signed: Duflos, Dumas, Pallu.

    10. We thought that the very text of the protest which we have here published would interest the reader. It is easy to notice the extreme reserve maintained by the two doctors: Not a single word betrays their personal opinion regarding the book in question; if they protest, it is in the name of the violated laws of probity, of Sorbonne regulations trampled underfoot. There would not have been a chance of success for an appeal to the Parliament in favor of the Spanish Venerable; nevertheless, they say enough to fully confirm the other accounts. Pending the details of the Prima mensis of October, when the botched Censure per fas et nefas was published on September 17, we are able to draw various conclusions that are not without historical significance. (pp. 307-314.)

This is a primary source, not speculation, not a subjective judgment.

Dom Prosper Gueranger relied upon the actual notarized statement concerning the irregularities of the vote at the Sorbonne on September 17, 1686, and the violation of the laws of probity, noting that the opponents of the censure had not defended Mother Mary of Jesus of Agreda or The Mystical City of God in their notarized statement but stuck to the violations of the Sorbonne’s own regulations.

Dom Prosper Gueranger explained that it was remarkable that “the book of the Sister to have obtained, under such circumstances, sixty-seven more approvers.” Indeed, the Abbot of Solesmes explained that:

    The correspondence inserted in the Roman dossier, in explaining the strange conduct of the syndic who refused to read and check the alleged eighty-five votes in favor of the project of censorship, tells us that of this number there were votes on which only four or six proposals were disapproved; others in which the notes of the proposals were softened; others which contained protective reservations for the honor of such an illustrious Servant of God; others in which it was agreed that the book, not having been produced in the original, the censure made on the translation was null and void. It was known that only twenty doctors had accepted the project of the deputies, and that among these twenty there was no lack of doctors who boasted of not having read a single line of the incriminated work.  Hence we are entitled to conclude, and the conduct of the syndic sufficiently proves it, that there were not eighty-five votes in favor of condemnation.

    13. Finally, since the regulations of the Sorbonne were scandalously and brutally violated in the counting of the votes, the nullity of the judgment follows, and it can be said in all truth that, whatever the competence or incompetence of the Faculty in a cause which the Holy See had reserved to itself, the censure being null because of the lack of the essential formalities, it is inaccurate to say that the Mystical City of Mary of Ágreda was condemned by the Sorbonne. (p. 315.)

Yes, it is indeed inaccurate to “say that the Mystical City of Mary of Agreda was condemned by the Sorbonne” solely on the basis of how the “regulations” of the institution were scandalously and brutally violated in the counting of the votes” even if one disregards whether the faculty of the Sorbonne had any competence in a case “which the Holy See had reserved to itself.”

Faced with the revelations provided in the notarized statement delivered to the Castle by Drs. Duflos and Dumas and with the possibility of a public demand for accounting of the irregularities, the leaders of the cabal started to revise the censure without calling the faculty back into session, including adding a prologue at the suggestion of the Archbishop of Paris, Louis-Antoine de Noailles, that was at no time discussed during the proceedings up and to including the rump vote on September 17, 1686, and then released this deception to the astonishment of those who attended the proceedings from beginning to the end.

As shall be seen below in an excerpt from Dom Prosper Gueranger’s Article 23 in L’Univers, August 7, 1859, intimidation was used even after the illicit censure was passed in an attempt to silence the voices of those who opposed it:

    3. In any case, the Archbishop was worked on and persuaded to adopt the censure as it had been carried, with the extracted propositions and the violent qualifications contained therein; he demanded only that it be preceded by a sort of prologue in which the Faculty would express its profound respect for the Blessed Virgin and profess its attachment to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception and the bodily Assumption of the Mother of God. This prologue was, in fact, written, and one cannot help but remember the one placed at the head of the Declaration of 1682, in which the dignity of the Apostolic See is elevated in such beautiful language. In both of these pieces, in fact, the portico is of a grand style and seems destined for a completely different building than the one to which it gives entry. As for the Censure of Mary of Ágreda, the nuncio Delfini, in his dispatch of October 1 to Cardinal Spada, cleverly said: “There is an exordium in honor of the Virgin; but I don’t know whether she is crowned with roses or thorns. Non so se più di rose, o di spine.” This, however, was the only compensation Noailles asked for in order to put himself at the service of the cabal. Henceforth, the cause was all his own. Dr. Dumas was summoned to the Archbishopric, and the prelate forbade him to appear at the Prima mensis. Duflos appeared in his turn; but, firmer than his colleague, he supported his protest, and declared that he would go to the Sorbonne. Among the doctors opposed to the censorship, several were in the dependence of the Archbishopric for the posts they held; he managed to intimidate them, and obtain from them the promise of a discreet silence at the session which was going to be held.

    4. All the artillery was in place when October 1 arrived. The syndic read the act of censure before the assembly. The prologue, which spoke with honor of the Mother of God, astonished the doctors in favor of the Mystical City, who had heard such different language during the deliberations; they also noted that the censure had undergone certain modifications, and that new proposals and notes had been inserted which had neither been communicated nor submitted to the deliberations of the Faculty. Duflos indignantly renewed his protest. The syndic replied that he was not bothered; he ordered the secretary to write the censure on the registers of the Faculty and, without having taken the advice of the assembly, he moved on to the order of the day, according to the style of our deliberative assemblies, and opened the proposal on another matter. This audacity provoked a movement of discontent on the part of a certain number of doctors whom they had not succeeded in chaining; they demanded discussion on the prologue and on the lines stealthily added to the censure. The syndic withdrew into a restrained silence; his position was becoming difficult. Yet suddenly the leaders of the cabal rose with a commotion from their benches and announced their intention to withdraw; he took advantage of this unofficial movement to declare the session closed. This was the final act of this great drama which had lasted seven months.

    5. The reader is now in a position to appreciate the value of a famous act which certainly bears no trace of the spirit of wisdom, moderation and justice one would expect to find in the doctrinal judgment of a theological faculty. If we ask ourselves who profited by this censure, wrested by intrigue and violence from a body which rejected it, it will be easy to answer. First of all, the enemies of the veneration of the Blessed Virgin, whose activities I have made known, must have counted this as a new success; their disgraceful language sufficiently demonstrated, in the course of the sessions, their professed distaste for the devotion of the Church to the Mother of God. Doctor Hideux and his accomplices had wanted to avenge their friend Baillet, as well as the Monita salutaria censured in Rome; they succeeded by the means they had chosen. In the second place, a new insult was directed at the Apostolic See, whose essential rights were being infringed by the Parisian censorship. In the third place the Faculty, now under the influence of a Jansenist and even somewhat Socinian minority, and soon to be rid of its former doctors who were aging and disappearing in their turn, was emboldened after such a coup in the path of new ideas, and prepared the opposition it dared to make twenty years later to a dogmatic constitution received by the universal Church. Finally, by its brutality (that is the proper word) towards the Venerable Servant of God Mary of Ágreda, the Sorbonne disparaged as much as it could the mystical ways, which are, it is true, hardly bearable to rationalism, but whose disregard and soon oblivion prepared the Church in France, under the aspect of sanctity, for a sterility of which our annals bear no trace anywhere else. What is not less sad, perhaps, in the midst of this fatal diminution of truths which is the hallmark of the last forty years of the 17^th century, is to see the Sorbonne faction in 1696 supported from the outside by influential people so highly placed in the Church. It is thus easy to understand what the Nuncio Delfini meant in the above-mentioned dispatch, when he ended his account with these significant words: “It would be a disgrace for the one who wanted to support this venture to recount all the disorders and all the intrigues which were utilized to achieve this result. Sarebbe, indecoroso, per che hà voluto sostenere tale impegno il dirsi tutti i disordini, tutte le manifatture, che per giungere a tal fine si sono fatte.” Ágreda. (pp. 321-322.)

The proceedings at the Sorbonne prior to, on, and after September 17, 1696, were nothing other than a show trial. Indeed, those proceedings bear a very strong resemblance to the futility of opposing voice at the “Second” Vatican Council and to the predetermined outcomes of Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s “synods” on the family, Amazonia, and on “synodality. The outcomes of those “synods” were predetermined; the proceedings themthselves provided the same kind of window-dressing as had the ones that took place three hundred twenty-nine years ago at the Sorbonne.

After recounting the publication of a number of tracts against The Mystical City of God in France and those supporting it and defining its author, a Servant of God, Dom Prosper Gueranger discussed

Such is, for France, the literary history of this great debate, by joining together the passages which we quoted from the correspondence of Bossuet, the diary of Le Dieu, and the documents contained in the Roman file. It is easy to understand that if the defenders of the Mystical City had been given the freedom to speak and write in broad daylight, opinion would not have been distorted as it has been since 1696 in all French books, except for the clandestine pamphlets which we have just listed, most of which are undated and all of which without the name of the author. (pp. 324.)

The rump proceedings of the Sorbonne show trial did not go unnoticed in Spain, and it was in Mother Maria de Jesus de Agreda’s native land that learned Spanish doctors rose to the defense of Our Lady and her chosen soul. The first defense came from Father Gabriel de Noboa of the University of Salamanaca:

 A solid, detailed rebuttal became necessary; it was not long in coming, and it was the first of the Spanish universities, the one whose theological science was esteemed throughout the world, the University of Salamanca, which wanted to give itself the honor of producing it. It appeared in 1698, under the title: Palestra Mariana, in which the Censor published under the false name of the sacred faculty of theology of Paris, propositions extracted from the first volume of the Life of the most holy Mother of God published in the Spanish language, by the Venerable Mother Mary of Jesus, Abbess of the convent of the Immaculate Conception of the Town of Agréda, is vindicated. The author was Fr. Gabriel de Noboa, a Franciscan of the Observance and doctor in the University of Salamanca.

    9. But such a book could not be considered the work of a simple private individual. It is known that the city of Salamanca contained a college of doctors for each of the religious orders dwelling on Spanish soil, and in which were educated, under their particular observance, the subjects that these orders sent to study and take degrees at the University. Nothing was more imposing than the votes of these numerous colleges uniting to approve or disapprove a doctrine. The book of Fr. Gabriel de Noboa was put to the test, and he emerged victorious. The University of Salamanca, through its various colleges, where all the religious orders of such diverse genius were represented, endorsed the book, showered it with praise, and protested most energetically against the censure published under the name of the Sorbonne.

    10. Nothing is more interesting than the compilation of these approvals of the various colleges, long, detailed, full of life and enthusiasm for the book so unjustly attacked. The doctors put aside the severity of scholastic language; they try their hand at the oratorical genre, and call upon all their classical memories to adorn their long and solemn sentences with verses borrowed from ancient inspiration. The fervor of orthodoxy, the gentility of the old Castilian customs, with the professorial tone, all combine to form an ensemble as rare as it is endearing. We find ourselves suddenly transported to the bosom of that illustrious theological tribunal, whose rulings are still so highly regarded in the School today; we live with those men of yesteryear, so serious and so sincere, whom we knew in our clerical youth under the generic name of Salmanticenses; and frankly, when we come to recall the ignoble scenes at the Sorbonne in September 1696, we cannot help but feel a pang of sorrow. The two Schools succumbed in succession under the blow of revolutions, but only one could sum up its entire past in these words of the Apostle: I fought the good fight, I kept the faith. Only one has accomplished, immaculately, its long and glorious course.

    11. In 1700 the collection of approvals given by the various colleges of the university was printed in Salamanca itself, under this truly Spanish title, which I will translate in order not to give the reader the trouble of going through half a column of Latin. It reads: “Defense of the Mystical City of God, or collection of the judgments passed on the doctrine of this book by all or almost all the colleges of religious of the University of Salamanca, famous throughout the world, in the approval of the Palæstra Mariana apologetica, published against the printed Censure under the real or supposed name of the Sacred Faculty of Theology of Paris, which condemns various propositions of the first volume of the Mystical City of God, translated into French by the Reverend Fr. Thomas Croset, Recollect minor, in which Defense the Censure of Paris finds itself very seriously and very justly struck by the Censure of Salamanca, at the same time as the Royal Convent of Saint Francis of Salamanca presents this same censure to the University of Paris, so the latter, taking the interests of its honor, which has remained intact in past centuries, may disengage itself from the imputation made to it of a judgment apt to defame it, and proceed against the authors of the alleged Censure.” The epigraph reads, “Judge not, that you may not be judged.” Finally, the bottom of the title contains this analysis: “In a public session of Doctors and Masters, both regular and secular, the University of Salamanca declares the Censure published under the name of the Sacred Faculty of Theology of Paris to be entirely unjust, entirely null, invincibly refuted in the Palæstra Mariana apologetica, and finally manifestly convicted; and the propositions of the Mystical City of God noted in Paris to be sure and exact, liable of falling under the divine revelation; in as a result of which the university of Salamanca praises and recommends the entire doctrine (totam doctrinam) of the revelations of the Mystical City of God.”

    12. We then find in the collection the letters of the Catholic King which charge the University to examine the Palæstra Mariana and to render its judgment on the book, together with the favorable response rendered by this Body. Then begins the series of approvals given to the book of Fr. Gabriel de Noboa by the various colleges of the Religious Orders: The Dominicans come first, followed by the Augustinians, the Benedictines, the Jesuits, the Cistercians, the Mercedarians, the Carmelites, the Trinitarians, the Clerics Regular Minor, the Minims, the Basilians, the Hieronimites, the Premonstratensians, the Reformed Augustinians, the Discalced Mercedarians, the Theatines, and the Discalced Trinitarians. The Doctors of Salamanca who were not religious complete this imposing list. I regret that lack of space does not allow me to give a fuller account of this truly national monument of Catholic Spain. Here, then, are two Universities: One, driven by a factious minority which openly violates laws and regulations, and reduces the majority to helplessness; the other, which proceeds with the calm and dignity of yesteryear. The same book occupies the attention of two Universities: That of Paris, or rather the people who speak in its name, declares that the book in question is abominable; that of Salamanca modestly refers the judgment of the fact of the revelations to the Holy See, and declares that the doctrine expressed in these same revelations is pure. To which of the two Universities shall we adhere? To the one that has been free, or to the one that has had an act imposed upon it that it rejected? The answer is easy, it seems to me. (pp. 326-329.)

Why does any Catholic today still attempt to use a decision rendered by Jansenists whose hatred of Scholasticism, Mariology, mystical theology, and any expressions of praise in honor of the Mother of God not found in Sacred Scripture as the basis to “warn” Catholics that The Mystical City of God has been condemned or is not “good” to read when the testimony provided by Dom Prosper Gueranger and, moreover, when there were other schools, the University of Salamanca in Spain and the University of Louvain in Belgium, who defended it?

As Dom Prosper Gueranger asked, “To which of the two Universities shall we adhere?”

Yes, the answer is very clear.

The cabal at the Sorbonne became even more inflamed as their censure began to be criticized by genuine scholars who believed in Catholic theology, something that Dom Prosper Gueranger explained in Articles 24, August 22, 1859, and 25, September 18, 1859, that will not be detailed in this study as I think that the hatred of these men has been proved quite satisfactorily as found in the material covered here thus far.

As noted just above University of Salamanca was not the only body of scholars to write a defense of The Mystical City of God.  The doctors of the University of Louvain did so as well, as Dom Prosper Gueranger discussed in Article 26 of his L’Univers series, which was published on October 9, 1859:

Let us return to the history of the book to which we have devoted this long study which is now drawing to a close. On the eve of the day when the Sorbonne, which had wanted to stigmatize the Mystical City, was preparing to desolate the Church by the saddest and most shameful defection, the book obtained an authentic testimony of esteem and admiration within another University, whose decisions had long captured the interest of the theological world. In 1715 a new edition of the Mystical City was to be published in Augsburg, and in order to do so with greater certainty it was decided to obtain the approval of the University of Louvain. Two doctors and professors were commissioned to give a reasoned opinion on the work; they were Herman Damen, president of the Arras College and censor of books, and Antoine Parmentier, president of the Great College of Theologians. It should be noted that they wrote eighteen years after the censure of the Sorbonne, and that nothing obliged them to give such a lengthy reasoned opinion; hence they had the express intention of responding to the unjust attacks of which the book was subjected, and of defying human respect on a question where it exercised its empire so widely. Here is the text of this important approval:

    8. “Salutary regulations founded in reason warn against new revelations; yet at the same time we are obliged to recognize that, even in these last times, God is at liberty to produce them; for his arm is not shortened. However, such revelations cannot be considered infallible and coming from God, unless our holy mother the Church proposes them to us to believe in this way; for God has willed that our faith in the Gospels themselves should be based on the proposal made to us by the true Church concerning them.

    9. “But while waiting for the Church to approve or reject those presented to us under the title of the Mystical City of God, after a serious and attentive reading of this work, we declare that, according to our opinion, the faithful can read it without any danger to the integrity of the Faith, nor to the purity of morals, and that nothing will be found in it which tends to laxity, nor which leads to indiscreet rigor. On the contrary, we think this book will be very useful in increasing the piety of the faithful, the veneration of the Blessed Mother of God, and the respect due to the Mysteries of our holy Faith. The strong and the weak, the learned and the ignorant, will be able to gather happy fruits from its reading; for everything that is most sublime which theology teaches is treated therein with so much ease, and expressed in a way so new, so simple, and so clear, that we can say that only sound judgment is needed to arrive by the reading of this work at the understanding of the highest mysteries. Furthermore, this simplicity is accompanied by so many reasons, such luminous proofs, that one would scarcely find anything similar elsewhere. More than a thousand texts of Holy Scriptures are explained in an equally natural and sublime way. We encounter throughout the work beauties unknown until today, and which, hidden under the letter, are found developed, and are thus brought to light. In short, it is nothing more than a fabric of the words and sentences of the Holy Books, but so happily woven, that although these words and sentences belong to the various Books of Scripture, it seems they were prepared to be united in this book, and to serve the use that the Venerable Mother of Ágreda makes of them.

  10. “The instructions which the Blessed Queen of Heaven gives at the end of each chapter contain the most refined moral doctrine; while instructing the reader, they persuade him and lead him, by a gentle force, to the love of virtue and hatred of vice, which are portrayed in the most vivid colors; and not only do they contain the spirit, but they are filled with a singular unction which inflames the souls with a sacred fire. In meditating on them, one experiences a special grace not found in the reading of ordinary books; the more one reads this one, the more one encounters taste and pleasure in it. Indeed, such is the attraction that this book carries in itself, that someone who has once begun to read it finds it difficult to stop.

    11. “The novelty and diversity of the subjects which are there pressed together entirely seize the reader, yet in a pleasant way, so no fatigue is felt. He remains convinced that if the hidden life and actions of Christ and his holy Mother have not been known until now under the features by which they are described in the book, not only could they have been such, but it is even appropriate if they were as there described. Everything in this work is worthy of the divine majesty and of the abasements to which it subjected itself; everything corresponds perfectly to the holiness of the most pure Virgin, and to the dignity of the Mother of God, such that we can find nothing there that is not in perfect harmony.”

    12. “Nevertheless, we are not surprised that this work has encountered opponents who have criticized it and treated it severely. What book appears today that is not subjected to the critical spirit of the time in which we live? Has not God himself allowed the sacred books which contain his divine word to be attacked by the learned of this century? The pagan philosophers called them insane, just as the crucified Christ himself was labeled, and the audacious children of this world do the same today. We even grant that this book contains some passages about which difficulties can easily be raised. There are some that have embarrassed us and still do.

    13. “Yet when we consider what we have just said about the beauty and usefulness of the work, we think these few places should not prevent us from giving it the praise it deserves, especially since we ourselves can be mistaken. This approach seems to us all the more reasonable since in this work everything leads us to believe there is something more than human. We could not without levity attribute to vain imagination a book so exquisite, so sublime, and so consistent. It is impossible to be persuaded that an impostor could have conducted a work of such scope, in which the author walks with equal step through so many of the most difficult and disparate matters, without ever straying or contradicting herself, though she enters into innumerable details of facts and circumstances.”

    14. “One encounters in this divine history things so elevated, so apt to delight the heart, so perfectly linked, that we could well understand it could only be a work of genius. On the other hand, one cannot attribute to the devil a work which, beginning to end, breathes and inspires only humility, patience, and love of suffering; and since it has been demonstrated that the Venerable Mother who transcribed this book is at the same time its author, so it is impossible that she composed it without particular help from God. We therefore conclude, from the point of view of the public good, that it is fitting that the Mystical City of God should be made publicly available, because of the immense usefulness which must result from it.

    15. “This is our opinion and our critique, which we submit entirely to the supreme judgment of the Apostolic See, which alone has the right to pronounce on such matters. Louvain, July 20, 1715.

    16. As we can see, the calm and dignified tone which reigns in this piece, which we have faithfully translated from the Latin, is a far cry from the violent invectives of the doctors of the Sorbonne; and if we join this reasoned testimony of the University of Louvain to those of the Faculty of Theology of Toulouse and the University of Salamanca, we cannot help but conclude that the Mystical City, so dear to the learned Cardinal d’Aguirre, has gathered around itself a large enough number of theologians not to fear the passionate attacks of a few others. (pp. 350-356.)

The dispassionate dignity conveyed by the doctors at the Louvain nineteen years after the fury unleased at the Sorbonne against Mother Maria de Jesus de Agreda and against canonized saints and doctors who praised Our Lady as befits the August Queen of Heaven demonstrates where truth resided all along. The tone of the Louvain statement is measured and restrained. There is nothing measured or restrained in the manner of the proceedings at the Sorbonne in 1696 and there was nothing dignified about the way in which many defenders of The Mystical City of God were exiled or excluded from any further participation in a trial whose outcome had been predetermined.

The decrees issued by the cabal at the Sorbonne on September 17, 1696, were examined by Dom Prosper Gueranger in last article, Article 28, of his L’Univers series, November 9, 1859, stressing, in contrast with the cabal at the Sorbonne who hated “excessive” praise of Our Lady, that Saint Cyril of Alexandria praised Our Lady at the Council of Ephesus against the heresies of Nestorius. It has always been such with Catholics who understand that there would have been no Incarnation without Our Lady’s perfect fiat to the will of God the Father as announced to her by Saint Gabriel the Archangel, and it was for that very purpose that God had destined Our Lady to be the New Eve, the new Mother of the living, whose perfect, docile, and humble obedience untied the knot of the first Eve’s prideful disobedience.

Let us now go through the Censure of the Sorbonne, and consider the points of the doctrine of Mary of Ágreda upon which this judgment was based. The Sister had emphasized the importance of the divine manifestations contained in her book, giving us to understand, on behalf of God, that the publication of this book was a new favor which God granted to men following the mystery of the Incarnation; that in this age, the most unfortunate which had happened since the coming of Jesus Christ, He had resolved to manifest his love for men with more plenitude by revealing to them the hidden marvels He had worked in Mary, in order to bring them back more effectively to the worship of his divine majesty. The Censure charged these assertions with ‘scandal’ and ‘impiety’, taking them in the sense that the Sister wanted to say that her book was a benefit of greater importance than that of the Incarnation. It is clear that the Sorbonne would have been right to describe the proposition with this severity if it had presented such a scandalous meaning; the fact is that the text does not present this meaning at all. The French translator had used too strong an expression, it is true, by employing a superlative belied by the context and by the whole book, in which the Sister does not cease to exalt the mystery of the Incarnation as the supreme effort of the goodness and power of God towards men. The sole purpose of her book is to give the faithful a better appreciation of this mystery by giving them a more complete idea of the mission and excellences of the Mother of God. As for the inaccurate translation of the Spanish word, it was rectified in the course of the deliberations of the Faculty by the supporters of the book; but the explanations remained null and void, and the Sister had to personally bear the penalty for the error that had escaped her translator. One remembers that d’Aguirre protested, in a letter to Bossuet, against this not very delicate procedure.

    2. What was the thought of the doctors who wrote or supported the Censure? One saw it clearly enough by the detailed account of their meetings, which we gave above. Having lost sight, through the weakening of the Christian sense of what the Apostle calls the breadth and length, the height and depth of the sublime mystery which is the unique key to God’s plan for the human race, they professed, it is true, the doctrine of the Incarnation of the Word; but, under the pretext of reserving their homage for the God-man, they reduced the mission of Mary to the fact of the Divine Maternity, and rejected any idea tending to develop such a vast role that the admirable creature fills in the economy of the world, who shares with the eternal Father the right to say “my Son” in addressing the divine Word. That one can have a notion of the mystery of the Incarnation without embracing all this we do not dispute; but no one will ever have a complete view of this masterpiece of divine power and goodness if he does not penetrate the personal greatness and action of Mary. The records of Christian theology attest that as the dogma of the Incarnation is illuminated through the centuries with all the rays of knowledge, the prerogatives of the Mother of God develop and expand in proportion. The learned essay given to the public by Fr. Passaglia on the Immaculate Conception shows enough what the Fathers expressed on this subject, either by learned induction or by the intuition of their genius. At Ephesus the dogma of the unity of the Person [of Christ] did not triumph without carrying with it, in the same movement of ascent, that of the Divine Maternity; and Saint Cyril of Alexandria, in his address to the Council, enunciated on the prerogatives and the action of the Mother of God theories of which the Mystical City hardly offers more than the application and the development. Following the Fathers came the scholastic doctors, who scrutinized, with the help of dialectic, the acquired notions and facts which Tradition had transmitted to them; they thus drew out the Marian synthesis, and this was to the glory of the divine mystery of the Incarnation, which is the sole cause and source of the greatness of Mary. The first half of the 17^th century, as we have said, still understood it in this way; in 1696, it was different. Without really suspecting it, the ideas of the reformers of the 16^th century were insensibly being adopted. They did not deny that the Word, taking on human nature, needed a mother, but they were stubbornly zealous in attenuating the idea of the importance that could be attached to the person of Mary, and this, they said, in order not to deprive the Man-God of the tributes to which He is entitled. Nothing could be more ill-advised except blasphemy; for it is sufficient to reflect for only a moment to understand that the prerogatives of Mary being only the consequence of the mystery of the Incarnation, the more theological science extends them, the more the mystery itself is glorified. But theology having accepted the divorce which philosophy proposed to it at that time, at the same time as politics isolated itself from Christian law, these conclusions ceased to be considered for anything. Our doctors, in love with their so-called Positive, had contempt for the Scholastics, and no longer even wanted to look at a proposition which they did not find in express terms or absolutely equivalent in the Fathers; deduction no longer existed for them. Still, if they had read the Fathers well, it is to be believed that they would have recognized in these writings of antiquity many elements which would have revealed to them the point of contact which obviously unites the results of true Positive to those of the learned scholasticism of the 13th and 14th centuries. The book of Fr. Passaglia proves this abundantly with regard to the great Marian thesis which it is intended to clarify.

    3. In any case, French theology at the beginning of the 18th century presented itself to the attacks of the enemies of revelation with a lessened idea of the Mother of God; and the piety of the faithful not being so abundantly nourished on this point, as it is easy to realize by comparing the books published at that time with those of the first half of the 17th century, and by noting the modifications which the liturgy had already undergone, the piety of the faithful was, let us say, lukewarm. Now it was precisely this moment that the Sorbonne chose to proscribe a book full of life, where the ancient sap of faith and love circulates with superabundance, where the richest conceptions of the mind unite with the depth of feeling and all the magnificence of the highest poetry. They do not understand that the Man-God, wanting to raise the world which is collapsing, has judged it appropriate to revive respect for his Mother; rather, it seems to these doctors that Mary is too insignificant for God to have made her, better known, the instrument of the regeneration of a Christian nation which is dissolving. In conjunction with the secular power, they stop the circulation of such an idea as contrary to the respect due to our mysteries. The new century began, and we know how it ended. Unbelief and the depravity of morals reached their peak, and not only Mary, but Jesus Christ was dethroned, driven out of the law in the name of progress, and the little faith that remained took refuge in the depths of private conscience. Would it not have been better in 1696 to go back upstream in the already rapid current? But one could hardly think of it then. In an assembly gathered in the name of the King, the rights of the Vicar of Jesus Christ had been clarified and formulated on paper, without asking whether a particular nation had the authority to decide on a point which interested all the others just as much, and without seeming to suspect that here too it was a question of one of the most serious consequences of the mystery of the Incarnation: Christ represented in Peter with a fullness that men have no more right to limit than they had the right to create. Let us repeat: At its beginning, the 17th century had a higher idea of the Mother of God and the Pope than it had at its end; therefore, it had at its beginning a deeper understanding of the God-Man than that which it had at its decline. But let us return to the Censure and go through its various articles. (pp. 384-389.)

The rationalism that is at the heart of any kind of Protestantism had infected the precincts of the eldest daughter of the Church, the King of France. As Protestantism rejects Sacred Tradition as one of the two sources of Divine Revelation after having rejected the existence of a hierarchical church created by Christ the King Himself to teach infallibly in His Holy Name and replaces what God created with an egalitarian spirit and assurance of “salvation” by professing belief in Our Lord Jesus Christ on one’s lips and in one’s heart, it was only natural that the fervor of “believers” would wane as they contented themselves with being “saved” without any the mediatory help of a priest and without the intercessory help of Our Lady, the Queen of All Saints. Jansenism is little more than Calvinism, and Calvinism is little more than Judaism with a slight Christian gloss.

Returning now to the review of the articles of censure as found in Article 28:

The second article concerns private revelations in general. The Sister had applied to them these words of the Savior at the Last Supper: “I yet have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.” This passage of the Gospel is generally applied to private revelations by all theologians who have treated of them, up to and including Benedict XIV; but this does not prevent the doctors from using in this connection the qualifiers of ‘false proposition’, ‘rash’, ‘scandalous’, etc. And because Mary of Ágreda, reporting these words of God which she claims she has heard, expresses that these words contain an infallible truth, which could not be otherwise if God really spoke, the doctors accuse her of derogating from the authority of the Church, as if she demanded for her book an adhesion of divine faith, and as if she had not expressly and in several places submitted it to the correction of the Church.

    5. In the third article, the Sister is again called ‘scandalous’ for having used the term “adoration” in expressing the honors paid to Mary by the holy angels. They agree, however, that in the Scriptures and in the Fathers, this term is used with regard to mere creatures. Undoubtedly, in a few isolated lines where this term is used without explanation, its legitimate use could be contested; but in the Mystical City, where one hears the Blessed Virgin confessing her nothingness in the presence of God on almost every page, it would not occur to anyone to take this biblical expression in the sense of a divine homage. In the fourth article, the Sister is characterized as ‘evil-sounding’ and ‘insulting’ to the divinity of the Word for having said that the Son of God interceded on behalf of humanity before the throne of the Divinity. It is clear that if Mary of Ágreda had wanted to say that the second Person of the Holy Trinity would have professed an inferiority with regard to the other two, she would be seriously reprehensible; but it is enough to see the context to remain convinced that it is only a question here of the disposition of the divine Word to assume a human nature in order to save man, and of the love which He deigned to profess eternally in the bosom of his Father for our race, to which He had to dedicate Himself in time under a created and mortal nature.

    6. The fifth article censures, without detailing them, five passages of the book as ‘offensive to pious ears’. We have already spoken of the sensitivities which arose in France concerning one of the chapters of the book. The Mystical City is in no way a book intended for children; the loftiness of the ideas, the gravity of the tone, the rigor of the moral teaching, would quickly put off those who would try to read it. This book, from which everyone can read, is suitable in itself only for people of a mature mind, and the details it contains can offer them no danger. There are no sensual descriptions or free expressions; everything is serious and grave. Innumerable judgments have been made on the book since its publication; the most learned and commendable characters have praised and admired it, and until the French critics of 1696 it had not occurred to anyone to point out that it was immoral. But everything had to be used to cast away a book which was unfortunately rejected by the instincts and prejudices of the time and the country.

    7. The sixth censured proposition expresses that God gave the Blessed Virgin “all that He willed, and willed to give her all that He could, and could give her all that was not the very being of God.” This is noted as ‘false’, ‘reckless’, and ‘contrary to the Gospel’!!! We have seen that Amort himself, the fiery opponent of the Mystical City, defends this proposition against the Sorbonne. There is nothing in it that is not found in [the works of] scholastic theologians who have examined the importance of the mission of the Mother of God; but one wonders in what way the Gospel especially can be contrary to it.

    8. The spirit of our doctors continues to show itself in their seventh article. There they censure the Sister for having said that all the prerogatives of Mary derive from the fact that she was conceived immaculate, and that “without this benefit all of them would appear imperfect and defective, or like a sumptuous edifice without a solid and proportionate foundation.” These propositions are noted as ‘false’, ‘rash’, and ‘contrary to the integrity of the faith’; whereas, say the censors, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, professed by the Sorbonne, does not belong to the Catholic faith. We have seen above what the private sentiment was of the authors of the Censure on this point, and how forty of them declared themselves in the matter of the Case of Conscience. As for the substance, Mary of Ágreda, writing according to divine revelation (for it is from this point of view that one must place oneself in order to judge her doctrine), could say that such and such a truth, not yet authentically defined, is in reality the basis of such and such another which has been the object of a solemn definition. It was enough that she did not require divine faith for the first of these two truths. Since that time the Church, in defining the dogma, toppled the Censure; but, putting ourselves in the point of view of the Sister, her assertion was perfectly tenable as early as 1696. Amort, who is not suspect [on this point], understood this himself, and rebuked the Censure. (pp. 389-393.)

An Interjection:

This is a very important point as even though the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception had not defined solemnly and would not be so defined for about fifty-eight years after the iniquitous censure passed illicitly and irregularly at the Sorbonne to say that the doctrine did not belong to the Catholic Church in 1696 was intellectually dishonest, a point that Eusebius Amort, a virulent opponent of The Mystical City of God whose opposition has not been discussed in this study but is found in Dom Prosper’s Article 26, understood well enough himself.

The eighth article of the Sorbonne censure accused Mother Maria de Jesus de Agreda of erroneous doctrine for stating that Our Lady exercised a role in the government of the Church after Pentecost Sunday, a belief held and defending by numerous Catholic doctors:

    9. What the Sister says about the government of the holy Church which the Blessed Virgin is said to have exercised from Pentecost until her Assumption earns her, in the eighth article, the charges of ‘false’, ‘rash’ and ‘erroneous doctrine’. This censure falls on an immense number of Catholic doctors who thought that God did not leave Mary on earth after the Ascension of her Son, so that she remained there inactive and without any action on the faithful and on the Apostles. The outpouring of the Holy Ghost on the Mother of God in the Cenacle was undoubtedly intended to make her fit for the new mission reserved for her here below; and far from finding it strange that Mary, whose power is above all creatures, would have exercised over the Church an authority that was both sovereign and maternal, one should rather find it astonishing that it would have been otherwise. The accounts of Mary of Ágreda reconcile in an admirable way the submission of the Blessed Virgin to the authorities established by Christ for the government of the Church militant, with the dependence which St. Peter and the other Apostles professed and had to profess towards the highest of all creatures. Yet as we have said, in 1696 the consequences of the mystery of the Incarnation were no longer being investigated so deeply. (pp. 393-394.)

An Interjection:

The late Dr. John A. Gueguen, Jr., who was a colleague of mine at Illinois State University when I taught there from 1977 to 1979 and again from 1986-1987 said at a conference on Modernity held in Washington, District of Columbia, in 1980 that “the problem with Modernity is the failure to accept the Incarnation.”

Indeed, as has been noted on this site so many hundreds upon hundreds of times, the modern civil state is anti-Incarnational, and from there the path is hewn clean to atheism, whether practical or actual, and actual anti-Theism. Such is the world in which we live, and such was the attitude of the cabal at the Sorbonne, who, wittingly or not, helped to clear the path for Francois Arouet’s (Voltaire’s) mockery of the entirety of Catholicism, which itself was a direct impetus of the anti-Theism of the French Revolution. It is not for nothing that “Voltaire” was the progenitor of Freemasonry in France.

Returning now to Dom Prosper Gueranger’s analysis of the Sorbonne’s articles of censure of The Mystical City of God:

    10. The ninth article shows to what aberrations the innovators of the time were led. The Sister had applied to the Mother of God, at the same time as to the incarnate Word, Chapter VIII of the book of Proverbs; this earned her the charges of ‘falsity’ and ‘temerity’. The reason given by the doctors is that the unanimous interpretation of the Fathers attributes this famous passage exclusively to the divine Word. One could have asked the censors first of all to point out a single one of the Fathers who, in interpreting the eighth chapter of Proverbs, declared that the mysterious passage in question excludes the Mother of God. Then they would have been asked to answer this question: Does the Liturgy, which Bossuet calls the principal instrument of the Tradition of the Church, understand this passage in the sense in which Mary of Ágreda understood it? If indeed this is the case, it follows that the notes of ‘falsity’ and ‘temerity’ will apply not only to the Spanish Seer, but to the Church itself. And it is a fact that since the greatest antiquity the Latin liturgy and those of the East have applied to Mary the eighth chapter of Proverbs. What can we conclude from this other than the Sister of Ágreda was in good company under the censure of the doctors of Paris? In France it was possible to erase from the Missals and Breviaries all the Epistles, Antiphons and Responses which had expressed up to then the mysterious interpretation in question; but France is not the whole Catholic Church, nor did she have the right to renounce of her own accord one of the most sacred and ancient forms of Marian doctrine. And finally, by the mercy of God, the day was to come when, by returning to the Roman Liturgy, she would regain possession of this same form which had been taken from her only for a time. (pp. 394-395.)

An Interjection:

Yes, France is not the whole Catholic Church, and the whole Catholic Church is not a society founded by a well-meaning but nevertheless Gallicanism-influenced archbishop who believed that he had the authority to disobey a man he believed to be a true pope on matters of Catholic Faith, Worship, and Morals.

Just an observation:

    11. Mary of Ágreda relates that the Blessed Virgin in the course of her mortal life was several times taken up to heaven by the ministry of the holy angels; for God willed, because of his immense love for her, to give her a foretaste of the beatific vision. These assertions in the tenth article are described as ‘false’, ‘rash’, and ‘contrary to the word of God’. The reason given by the critics is that heaven was only opened to men by Jesus Christ in his glorious Ascension. It was easy to reply that the mode of redemption applied to Mary being quite special, as we see in the fact of the Immaculate Conception, there is no reason to be surprised that various favors were granted to her which could not be granted to other members of the human race. The doctors attack, in the eleventh article, and similarly qualify as ‘false’, ‘rash’, and ‘contrary to the word of God’, the doctrine of the Sister who teaches that St. Anne, after having given birth to the Mother of God, was not strictly bound to submit to the purifications which the law of Moses imposed on women who became mothers. The question is whether this law had any other reason than to confess the humiliation which the conception of each individual of the human race brings with it, because of the original sin which it contracts. If this is so (and who could doubt it?), it clearly follows that the daughter of Anne having been conceived without the original stain, the mother was not included in the prescription of the law, and consequently, by submitting to it, she was fulfilling an act to which she was not strictly bound.

    12. The Sister had said that Mary was “in all things the Mother of Mercy and the Mediatrix of Grace, without losing any occasion, time or activity by which She could gain grace for Herself and for us.” Would anyone believe today that this proposition is censured by the doctors, in the twelfth article, as ‘false’, ‘erroneous’, and ‘injurious to Jesus Christ’, the only Mediator and the only Savior? Amort himself blamed this part of the Censure, which seems to have been dictated by Baillet or by the author of the Monita salutaria. It is by such means that one imagined to convert the Protestants after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. It was all too easy for them to reply to the Parisian doctors that the Sacred Faculty was indeed making commendable progress, but that it was to be feared that the Catholic Church was not always in agreement with it. In fact the Church, without deigning to pay attention to the censure of 1696, has not ceased to present Mary to us as being in every way, according to all our needs, the Mother of Mercy and the Mediatrix of Grace; and this, without believing that she derogates from the character of Redeemer and divine Mediator which is in Christ, since delegated power, far from absorbing the power from which it emanates, on the contrary attests to it in the most noticeable way. As for what the Sister says, that Mary merited for us at the same time as she merited for herself, who does not see that this is pure Catholic doctrine on the Treasury of the Church, into which the superabundance of the merits of the saints, made fruitful through the blood of Christ, comes to form a common resource in favor of the Church militant and the Church suffering? It must be admitted, however, according to the doctrine not only of the Sister, but of the most profound scholastic doctors, that the association of Mary with all the meritorious works of Christ was incomparably closer and at the same time more extensive in its effects than that of all the elect together; so the mediation of Mary must be regarded as universal and inexhaustible because of the character of the Mother of God, whose scope extends far beyond the needs of all men together. (pp. 395-397.)

An Interjection:

Well, well, well, to quote Jed Clampett.

Who gets himself into this article of censure, albeit through the back door and indirectly, but the great enemy of Marian devotion himself, Dr. Adrien Baillet, for whom the cabal worked hard to avenge Baillet’s humiliation when his own work was censured by the Holy See by imposing their own such censure on a truth of the Catholic Faith that has been expressed and explained by many of our popes, including by Pope Leo XIII in Iucnda Semper Expectatione, September 8, 1894:

The recourse we have to Mary in prayer follows upon the office she continuously fills by the side of the throne of God as Mediatrix of Divine grace; being by worthiness and by merit most acceptable to Him, and, therefore, surpassing in power all the angels and saints in Heaven. Now, this merciful office of hers, perhaps, appears in no other form of prayer so manifestly as it does in the Rosary. For in the Rosary all the part that Mary took as our co-Redemptress comes to us, as it were, set forth, and in such wise as though the facts were even then taking place; and this with much profit to our piety, whether in the contemplation of the succeeding sacred mysteries, or in the prayers which we speak and repeat with the lips. First come the Joyful Mysteries. The Eternal Son of God stoops to mankind, putting on its nature; but with the assent of Mary, who conceives Him by the Holy Ghost. Then St. John the Baptist, by a singular privilege, is sanctified in his mother's womb and favored with special graces that he might prepare the way of the Lord; and this comes to pass by the greeting of Mary who had been inspired to visit her cousin. At last the expected of nations comes to light, Christ the Savior. The Virgin bears Him. And when the Shepherds and the wise men, first-fruits of the Christian faith, come with longing to His cradle, they find there the young Child, with Mary, His Mother. Then, that He might before men offer Himself as a victim to His Heavenly Father, He desires to be taken to the Temple; and by the hands of Mary He is there presented to the Lord. It is Mary who, in the mysterious losing of her Son, seeks Him sorrowing, and finds Him again with joy. And the same truth is told again in the sorrowful mysteries.

In the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus is in an agony; in the judgment-hall, where He is scourged, crowned with thorns, condemned to death, not there do we find Mary. But she knew beforehand all these agonies; she knew and saw them. When she professed herself the handmaid of the Lord for the mother's office, and when, at the foot of the altar, she offered up her whole self with her Child Jesus -- then and thereafter she took her part in the laborious expiation made by her Son for the sins of the world. It is certain, therefore, that she suffered in the very depths of her soul with His most bitter sufferings and with His torments. Moreover, it was before the eyes of Mary that was to be finished the Divine Sacrifice for which she had borne and brought up the Victim. As we contemplate Him in the last and most piteous of those Mysteries, there stood by the Cross of Jesus His Mother, who, in a miracle of charity, so that she might receive us as her sons, offered generously to Divine Justice her own Son, and died in her heart with Him, stabbed with the sword of sorrow. (Pope Leo XII, Iucnda Semper Expectatione, September 8, 1894.)

Perhaps even more to the point is the fact that a man who was born in Italy on September 27, 1696, just ten days after the illicit passage of the censure against The Mystical City of God by the cabal the Sorbonne, Alphonsus-Marie de Liguori, grew up to be a great defender and explicator of Mariology, including the fact of Our Lady’s role as the Mediatrix of All Graces, which he summarized by providing examples from the writings of the saints themselves. The passage  below from Saint Alphonus de Liguori’s Glories of Mary condemns who those who praise the Blessed Virgin Mary “excessively” as having “little devotion” to the Mother of God, and perhaps he had in mind the work of the Sorbonne when he wrote the following:

This then is the sentiment in which so many theologians and holy fathers concur, of whom we cannot with justice say, as the author quoted above has asserted, that to exalt Mary they have uttered hyperboles, and that excessive exaggerations have fallen from their lips. To exaggerate and utter hyperboles, is to exceed the limits of truth, which cannot be said of the saints who have spoken, enlightened by the Spirit of God, who is the Spirit of truth. And here, if I may make a brief digression, let me express a sentiment of mine, namely: when an opinion is in any way honorable to the most holy Virgin, and has some foundation, and is not repugnant to the faith and the decrees of the Church, and to the truth; the rejection of it, and opposition to it, because the contrary may also be true, indicates little devotion to the mother of God. I would not be one of the number of these, nor would I see you, my reader, one of them, but rather of the number of those who fully and firmly believe all that can be believed, without error, concerning the greatness of Mary, as the Abbot Rupert says, who places among the offerings of devotion most pleasing to this mother, that of a firm belief in her great privileges. If no one else, St. Augustine at least might remove from us all fear of exaggeration in the praise of Mary, who asserts that all we may say in her praise is little in comparison with what she merits on account of her dignity as mother of God. The holy Church also, in the Mass of the blessed Virgin, requires these words to be read: “For thou art happy, oh sacred Virgin Mary, and most worthy of all praise.”

But let us return to our subject, and hear what the saints say of the opinion in question. St. Bernard says that God has bestowed all graces on Mary, that men, through her as through a channel, may receive whatever good is in store for them. Moreover, the saint here makes an important reflection, and says that before the birth of the most holy Virgin there flowed no such current of grace for all, since this desired channel did not yet exist. But for this end, he adds, Mary has been given to the world, that through this channel the divine graces might continually flow down upon us.

As Holofernes, in order to gain the city of Bethulia, directed the aqueducts to be broken, so the devil makes every effort to deprive souls of their devotion to the mother of God; for, if this channel of grace were closed, he could easily succeed in gaining them to himself. The same holy father continues, and says: Observe, then, oh souls, with what affection and devotion the Lord would have us honor this our queen, by always seeking and confiding in her protection; for in her he has placed the fulness of all good, that henceforth we may recognize as coming from Mary whatever of hope, grace, or salvation we receive. St. Antoninus says the same thing: All the mercies ever bestowed upon men have all come through Mary.

For this reason she is called the moon, because, as St. Bonaventure remarks, as the moon is between the sun and the earth, and reflects upon the latter what she receives from the former, so Mary receives the celestial influences of grace from the divine Son, to transfuse them into us who are upon the earth.

For this reason, too, she is called the gate of heaven by the holy Church: “Felix cœli porta;” because, St. Bernard again observes, as every rescript of grace sent by the king comes through the palace gate, so it is given to Mary, that through her thou shouldst receive whatever thou hast. St. Bonaventure, moreover, says that Mary is called the gate of heaven, because no one can enter heaven if he does not pass through Mary, who is the door of it.

St. Jerome confirms us in the same sentiment (or, as some persons think, another ancient author of a sermon upon the Assumption, which is inserted among the works of St. Jerome), when he says, that in Jesus Christ was the fulness of grace as in the head, whence descend to the members, which we are, all the vital spirits, that is, the divine aids for attaining eternal salvation; in Mary likewise was fulness as in the neck, through which those vital spirits pass to the members. This is confirmed by St. Bernardine of Sienna, who more clearly unfolded this thought, saying that through Mary are transmitted to the faithful, who are the mystic body of Jesus Christ, all the graces of the spiritual life, which descend upon them from Jesus their head.

St. Bonaventure also attempts to assign the reason for this when he says: God being pleased to dwell in the womb of this holy Virgin, she has acquired thereby, in a certain sense, a kind of jurisdiction over all graces; since Jesus came from her sacred womb, together with him proceed from her, as from a celestial ocean, all the streams of divine gifts. St. Bernardine of Sienna expresses this in even clearer terms. From the time, he asserts, that this mother conceived in her womb the Divine Word, she acquired, if we may thus express it, a special right to the gifts which proceed to us from the Holy Spirit, so that no creature has received any grace from God except by the intervention and hand of Mary. (Saint Alphonsus de Liguori, The Glories of Mary, Edward Dunigan and Brother, 1852, pp. 175-178.)

It was just forty-three years after the death of the Bishop of Saint’Agata de Goti that Our Lady appeared to Saint Catherine Laboure on the Rue de Bac to reveal to her Heaven’s desire to have her promote the Miraculous Medal of Grace.

So much for the twelfth censure issued by the Sorbonne against Venerable Mother Mary of Jesus of Agreda, and so much of any Catholic today, no matter what his state in life, who uses these “censures” to “warn” Catholics about a book which Pope Leo XIII ordered to be printed own the Vatican printing office itself and which Pope Pius XI recommended in the strongest terms. 

Were these popes misled, or had they, who took the time to read The Mystical City of God and to meditate upon its contents, seen the work for itself and knew that it was not only “not dangerous” but an instrument to feed the faith, encourage the resolve of Catholics to grow in deeper in their understanding of the Sacred Mysteries and increase their fervor for Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and His Most Blessed Mother.

    13. The thirteenth article pursues the Sister with the charge of ‘falsity’, ‘scandal’ and ‘sacrilege’, for having said that the light which is in Mary would be sufficient to enlighten all men and to lead them along the sure paths of a blessed eternity.  According to our doctors, this is attributing to a creature what only the Word can do. But if she begins by telling us that Mary was drawn from nothingness like the other creatures, and that each and every one of her prerogatives were granted to her by the gratuitous goodness of the Creator, how can we not recognize, with her also, that She who is the Seat of uncreated Wisdom, the Mirror on which eternal Justice is reflected, could, if need be, serve as a torch for men to whom she would transmit the light she has received?  Shall we stop saying that the sun illuminates us here below because there is no other light in it than that which the Creator has placed there? And in the supernatural order, when St. John, speaking of the heavenly Jerusalem, the type of both the Church and Mary, tells us that “the nations will walk in her light,” shall we accuse this Apostle of blaspheming Christ, who called Himself the Light of the world?

An Interjection:

It stands to reason that that the cabal at the Sorbonne, having rejected even the possibility of Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception and censuring Venerable Mother Mary of Agreda of Jesus, who had been raised up as a Servant of God just ten years after her death in 1665 at the age of sixty-three, would reject the concept of the light of the Light of the World Himself shining through such a perfect vessel of election out of whose own Immaculate Heart was formed the fountain of mercy that is her Divine Son’s Most Sacred Heart.

What these pitiable Jansenists could not grasp as they permitted themselves to be held captive to the darkness of rationalism one of the reasons that the saints are represented in artistic renderings and statues with halos over their heads is that those who knew them in life attested to the way in which they transmitted in a reflective manner the refulgent light of the Divine Redeemer Himself. How much more, then, should this be the case in the case of the New Eve who was privileged to conceive by the power of God the Holy Ghost the very Logos through Whom all things were made and provided Him with an immaculate sanctuary in her virginal womb?

Should it not be the case that she is who is honored in the Litany of Loretta as our Spiritual Vessel, Vessel of Honor, and Singular Vessel of Devotion be able to shine forth the light of the Light of the World of Whom she is the Blessed Mother with a refulgence and radiance far beyond that of even the most highly honored and revered canonized saints?

This is what the august Jansenists of the Sorbonne saw fit to censure?

All right, we turn now to Dom Prosper Gueranger’s analysis of the fourteenth and final censure issued by the cabal at the Sorbonne on September 17, 1696:

    14. Thirty-six passages gathered from the Mystical City form the material of the fourteenth and last article and are features borrowed from the narratives of the Sister. They are qualified collectively as ‘reckless’ and ‘contrary to the reserve imposed by the rules of the Church’; they are accused of reproducing the fables of the apocryphal Gospels, and of exposing religion to the contempt of heretics. We would be afraid of tiring the reader by reproducing here these numerous passages which scandalized the doctors; here are only a few samples. The cabal of the Sorbonne makes it a crime of Mary of Ágreda for having said that Lucifer and his demons, immediately after their fall, plotted against the God-Man and against his Mother, because the proposal of the mystery of the Incarnation had been the test to which the fidelity of the Angels was subjected; that God, in creating the first man and the first woman, took Jesus and Mary, who were later to be the honor of humanity, as his types; that St. Joachim and St. Anne, who had vowed their only daughter Mary to God, felt great sorrow when they had to part with such an accomplished child; that St. Anne knew early on the future destiny of her happy daughter, while St. Joachim did not know of it until the moment of his death; that the conception of Mary took place on a Sunday; that thousands of Angels were assigned to the guard of honor of a creature called to such high destinies from the first moment of her existence; that Mary, in her mother’s womb, paid her respects to God and shed tears over the misfortunes of humanity; that God sent to the inhabitants of Limbo the news of the birth of the Mother of their Liberator, etc. All these propositions and others have nothing contrary to the divine perfections; many of them are in the obvious analogy of the faith; and there are some that were supported by learned theologians before Mary of Ágreda, for example, that the trial of the Angels consisted in the manifestation of the mystery of the Incarnation; and Bossuet himself, an approver of the Censure, teaches, according to the Fathers, that Adam was formed on the future type of Jesus Christ. The doctors treat Mary of Ágreda, in this fourteenth article as if she had invented all these details; this was to prejudge the question very indiscreetly. If they intended to reject any private revelation as a reckless dream, it is not clear what they would gain from it with regard to the Protestants; for after all, the Catholic Church admits private revelations in principle, and recommends many of them in fact. But at that time people wanted at all costs a religious doctrine that was national. It was already in place, since 1682, regarding the constitution of the Church; one should not be surprised to see this claim extended to other points. But our heart sinks when we realize how narrow the French idea of the Mother of God had already become in 1696. No more enthusiasm, no more love, no more life; everything is extinguished and frozen, and the 18th century is at the door.

    15. I stop here this long episode, which carried me so much beyond any foreseen limit. It was about the unknown; it is the best excuse I can offer, with the intention well allowed to a child of the Catholic Church to avenge the Queen of Heaven of an outrage which she received almost two centuries ago, and which had not yet been repaired. I regret that typographical errors, quite excusable in a rapid printing, have too often obscured my thought and my expression; but, in order to comply with the numerous requests made to me, I will try to remedy this inconvenience by publishing again and in volume this fragment of dogmatic history which competent judges have been kind enough to believe worthy of their interest. (pp. 398-401.)

A Comment:

The private revelations given to the Venerable Mother Mary of Jesus of Agreda are not contrary to the Holy Faith. One can, as noted in part one of this study, save his soul without ever reading The Mystical City of God or without believing in any private revelations whatsoever.

However, it has been up open up channels of Divine Grace that God has seen fit according to His ineffable Divine Providence to chosen souls to help Catholics turn away from worldly concerns and to meditate upon Heavenly joys so that they can have a deeper appreciation of His inexpressible greatness and the depth of the love to which He showed by giving us His own Co-Equal, Co-Equal Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, to come to us through Our Lady as part of His Divine Plan to win us back to Him by means of His Son’s inestimable Sacrifice of Himself on the wood of the Holy Cross on Good Friday in which the Queen of Martyrs on Mount Calvary participated fully as our Co-Redemptrix, Mediatrix, and Advocate.

Jansenism produced—and sadly, still produces given its influence even in some fully traditional Catholic circles—a cold rationalism replete with merciless hearts that finds endless ways to punish the sheep of Christ’s one Sheepfold to deny them access to the Sacraments and/or to deny them “permission” to read such works as The Mystical City of God.

What Father Edward Leen wrote about the pagans of antiquity is very applicable in our own time today to the hardness of heart found in many Catholics and their unwillingness to forgive wrongs, whether actual or perceived, while grudges of one sort or another are not only nursed but pursued and prosecuted in an unremitting, almost obsessive manner:

Under the reign of Satan men were hard and unfeeling, without pity or tenderness. The one thing they looked up to was the physical power to dominate, and the one thing they feared was the helplessness of poverty. Their life was divided between pleasure and cruelty. Pride and haughtiness instead of being regarded as defects were regarded as manly virtues. Weakness was almost synonymous with vice, and all this tended to fashion hearts imperverious to the grace of God and to every human feeling. Conversion of heart was for them extremely difficult. What God required on the part of man as a necessary condition of their friendship with Him was to them abhorrent, for the practice of the Christian virtues of submission, humility, and patience would be regarded by them as degrading. They had to learn that what was not degrading to God--since nothing could degrade Him in reality--could not be degrading to them. Turning to God postulated on their part not only a change of heart, but also a change of mentality. Their human values were almost all wrong. In the terse words of St. Ignatius describing the pagan world" "They smite, they slay and they go down to Hell".

In other words, it is the law of things as they actually are that we must continually suffer from others; it is the condition of our being that we shall be the victims of others' abuse of their free wills; it belongs to our position that our desires and inclinations should be continually thwarted and that we should be at the mercy of circumstances. And it is our duty to bear that without resentment and without rebellion. To rebel is to assert practically that such things are not our due, that they do not belong to our position. It is to refuse to recognize that we are fallen members of a fallen race. The moment we feel resentment at anything painful that happens to us through the activity of men or things, at that moment we are resentful against God's Providence.

We are in this really protesting against His eternal determination to create free beings; for these sufferings which we endure are a consequence of the carrying into effect of that free determination. If we expect or look for a mode of existence in which we shall not endure harshness, unkindness, misunderstanding, and injustice, we are actually rebelling against God's Providence, we are claiming a position that does not belong to us as creatures. This is to sin against humility. It is pride. (Father Edward Leen, In The Likeness of Christ, Sheed and Ward, 1936, pp, 17-18; 182-183.)

It is the prideful refusal to forgive others and to project onto the true God of Revelation a like hardness of heart that was at the essence of the heresy of Jansenism (a recrudescence of the Albigensianism that Our Lady taught Saint Dominic de Guzman to fight with her Most Holy Rosary) in the Seventeenth Century. Jansenism, which drew great strength contemporaneously from the wretched evil that is Calvinism, believed in a concept of an impersonal God, One Who is stern and unforgiving. It was to correct and to squelch this false concept of God from the minds and the hearts of men that Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ chose Sister Margaret Mary Alacoque of the Visitation Sisters to reveal the treasures and the secrets of the tender Mercies of His Most Sacred Heart, who had suffered much in her life well before she entered religious life at the age of twenty-four on May 25, 1671.

An eminent biographer of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, the late Right Reverend Emile Bougaud, wrote the following concerning the state of France at the time of her birth on July 22, 1647:

The violent attacks of Protestantism against the Papacy, its calumnies and so manifest, the odious caricatures it scattered abroad, had undoubtedly inspired France with horror; nevertheless the sad impressions remained. In such accusations all, perhaps, was not false. Mistrust was excited., and instead of drawing closer to the insulted and outraged Papacy, France stood on her guard against it. In vain did Fenelon, who felt the danger, write in his treatise on the "Power of the Pope," and, to remind France of her sublime mission and true role in the world, compose his "History of Charlemagne." In vain did Bossuet majestically rise in the midst of that agitated assembly of 1682, convened to dictate laws to the Holy See, and there, in most touching accents, give vent to professions of fidelity and devotedness toward the Chair of St. Peter. We already notice in his discourse mention no longer made of the "Sovereign Pontiff." The "Holy See," the "Chair of St. Peter," the "Roman Church," were alone alluded to. First and alas! too manifest signs of coldness in the eyes of him who knew the nature and character of France! Others might obey through duty, might allow themselves to be governed by principle--France, never! She must be ruled by an individual, she must love him that governs her, else she can never obey.

These weaknesses should at least have been hidden in the shadow of the sanctuary, to await the time in which some sincere and honest solution of the misunderstanding could be given. But no! parliaments took hold of it, national vanity was identified with it. A strange spectacle was now seen. A people the most Catholic in the world; kings who called themselves the Eldest Sons of the Church and who were really such at heart; grave and profoundly Christian magistrates, bishops, and priests, though in the depths of their heart attached to Catholic unity,--all barricading themselves against the head of the Church; all digging trenches and building ramparts, that his words might not reach the Faithful before being handled and examined, and the laics convinced that they contained nothing false, hostile or dangerous. 

God keep me from saying any harm of the old French Church! We have not forgotten that, only a century before, the bishops of England apostatized at the command of Henry VIII; whilst, in 1793, even after the enervating effects of the eighteenth century, the French bishops and priests ascended the scaffold, or went into exile, rather than separate from Catholic unity. It is not less true that the Church of France at that period was no longer closely united with the Pope. That great luminary of the Church, as St. Francis de Sales calls His Holiness, met in France too much that was opposed to the benign influence of its rays; consequently there resulted a diminution of life-giving warmth, of sap, and of fecundity. This was the first wound dealt us by Protestantism, and from it the Church of France bled for two centuries.

There was at the same time a second, perhaps a more dangerous, wound. The blasphemies uttered by Protestants against the Blessed Sacrament could not heard without a thrill of horror. Was there not, however, some truth in what the reformers said? Was it not the light and irreverent conduct of Catholics toward the Holy Eucharist that gave rise to those blasphemies? Would it not be better to abstain from Holy Communion, or henceforth make use of it with more reserve? Vainly did Fenelon, whose intuitive perception told him all, write his famous letter on "Frequent Communion." Vainly did Bossuet pour out his great soul in his admirable"Meditations on the Discourse after the Last Supper." Naught availed. Arnauld's book on "Frequent Communion," or rather against it, received universal approbation, and began to direct the conscience of many.

Such writers did unquestionably reject with fear the blind predestination of Protestantism; but under the pretext of a reaction against the softness of Catholic morals, they led souls to despair. Massillon unconsciously headed the crusade against the mercy of God by his famous discourse on the small number of the elect;and Pascal followed with his biting irony on the Society of Jesus, guilty only of the crime of maintaining and defending the goodness and mercy of God in His relations toward sinners.

All these tendencies were floating, so to say, in the air, vague and undecided, when Jansenism appeared, seized upon them, and reduced them to definitive shape. Jansenism is the most astonishing heresy that has afflicted the Church. Its doctrine is, after all, only a shameful form of Protestantism, for their fundamental principle is the same. It is the doctrine of a God whose love is half-hearted; who came upon earth, but who had not the heart to die for all men; who dwells, it is true, in the Holy Eucharist, though one does not precisely know why, for He wishes that we receive Him therein as seldom as possible; who has established the tribunal of mercy and pardon, but has hedged it round with such conditions as to render it unapproachable.

In order to get a hold on the mind of the people and make these ideas familiar to them, Jansenism concealed the beautiful crucifixes of Christian ages, on which the Saviour is represented with arms widely extended to embrace all mankind, and eyes tenderly lowered to the earth to attract all souls to Himself. They replaced them by the hideous little images still found in some houses, poverty-stricken and ugly, the hands of the Saviour fastened perpendicularly above His head, to enclose within them as few souls as possible, and His eyes so raised toward heaven as no longer to behold the earth. Instead of these words, so sweet to faith, engraven above tabernacles in which the God of love resides: Quam dilecta tabernacula tua Domine ("How lovely are Thy tabernacles, O Lord of hosts!") they substituted such words as these: "Keep my Sabbaths, and reverence my sanctuary. I am the Lord." Jansenius wrote treatises on frequent Communion, that is to say, against it; and he made lavish use of his erudition to teach the Faithful to absent themselves from it as much as possible. Toward the Sovereign Pontiff this serpent-like heresy pursued the same policy. It did not deny His power, as do Protestants, but it worked with incredible skill. It knew how to do without Him, and even to disobey Him with profound respect. That is to say, wherever Protestantism denied, Jansenism was hypocritical. Both aimed, though by different means, at the same result, namely, the diminution of divine love in souls.

There was no hope of escaping such dangers except by an energetic reaction of faith and piety. The infinite love of God should have been boldly affirmed; souls should have been urged to approach the holy table, to frequent Communion; they should have been cast into the arms of the Sovereign Pontiff, as children more obedient, more tenderly devoted, than ever. But this was not the case. Some allowed themselves to be rightened by simulated austerity, and others were seduced by these grand words: "Return to the discipline of the primitive Church." Sentinels did not perform their duty, some were traitors; and little by little Jansenism penetrated everywhere, not as a doctrine in which souls believed, but as an influence to which they yielded. The most fervent communities, the most austere cloisters, were not preserved from it. They inhaled it, almost unsuspectingly, like those subtle poisons floating in the air, which bear within them death sometimes, disease always.

From these combined influences there resulted in France, at the end of the seventeenth century and during the whole of the eighteenth, a corruption of the true spirit of the Gospel, a kind of semi-Christianity, commonplace and cold, utterly incapable of captivating souls. The conquering charm of Christianity, the principle of its eternal fruitfulness, is the dogma of God's infinitive love for man, that grand doctrine, at once so full of mystery and yet so luminous, of a God who loves man unto passion. In the same measure as one approaches it, whether entirely to deny or merely to diminish this infinite love, one sees die out or sensibly decrease that sublime inebriation which makes virgins, apostles, and martyrs, that folly of man responding to the folly of God. The world had had a first example in the absolute sterility of Protestantism; and France was about to offer a second, which, though less perfect, was none the less striking; since, without absolutely denying infinite love, it was content with an unintelligible concept of it.

In proportion as this quasi-Christianity spread over France, the sublime inspirations of faith and piety became weaker. During the whole of the eighteenth century there was but one new institution, that of de la Salle, a tardy scion of the great tree of which some years before it was impossible to number the new shoots. The old institutions languished, and some literally died out. In France, virgins and apostles, souls consecrated to God, became fewer and fewer. The old abbeys were too spacious for their inmates daily diminishing in numbers; and in revenge at not being able to people them, they pulled them down. The riches no longer necessary, since the monasteries were now deserted, were used in demolishing the old cloisters of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, so interesting in point of art, which had been erected by saints, and embalmed with the still living traces of their footsteps. They replaced them by magnificent abbeys in the style of Versailles, that is to say, as destitute of style as of reminiscences. The same spectacle was witnessed in the ranks of the clergy, among whom were found some zealous priests, some men of duty, but no saints. All was mediocre, no enthusiasm, no fire. Missions died out, and a sensible diminution of warmth and life was everywhere felt. As one sometimes sees a grand old tree no longer shooting its huge branches toward heaven, no longer clothed in luxuriant foliage, because of the wound at the root, so the Church of France gave signs of deep-seated disease. (Right Reverend Emile Bougaud, The Life of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque. Published in 1890 by Benziger Brothers. Re-printed by TAN Books and Publishers, 1990, pp. 24-29.)

It was into this spiritual mess, so similar in many respects to our own days, that Margaret Mary Alacoque was born while Mother Mary of Jesus of Agreda was still alive in Spain, being favored in her youth with visions of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ which she, being meek and humble of heart like unto the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, believed were given to everyone, learning later that she, through no merits of her own, was a chosen soul through whom Our Beloved would make known the tender devotion that to His Most Sacred Heart that He wanted instituted to combat the coldness of the stony hearts of men who had conceived of a God as unforgiving of them as they were of each other.

Our Lord’s revelations to Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque about His Sacred Heart began in 1673, eight years after the death of the Venerable Mary of Jesus of Agreda, thus proving that Our Lord did indeed want to use these chosen souls to inflame the puny, cold hearts of ungrateful sinners and thus calling them to scale the heights of spiritual perfection.

How ironic it is that the very description of Bishop Emile Bougaud, a Vincentian who also wrote a two-volume biography of the founder of the Congregation of the Mission, Saint Vincent de Paul, of the Protestant and, in turn, Jansenist hatred of Our Lady applies perfectly to the cabal at the Sorbonne who dared to “censure” The Mystical City of God.

Perhaps it is best to draw some inspiration directly from The Mystical City of God itself:

My dearest daughter, if thou art of a meek and docile heart these mysteries about which thou hast written and understood shall stir within thee sweet sentiments of love and affection toward the Author of such great wonders. Bearing them in mind, I desire thee from this day on to embrace with new and great esteem the contempt and neglect of the world. And tell me, friend, if in exchange for this forgetfulness and scorn of the world God looks upon thee with eyes of sweetest love, why wouldst thou not buy so cheaply what is worth an infinite price? What can the world give thee, even when it esteems thee and exalts thee the most? And what dost thou lose if thou despise it? Is not its favor all vanity and deceit (Ps. 4:3)? Is it not all a fleeting and momentary shadow (Wis. 5:9), which eludes the grasp of those who hasten after it? Hence if thou didst have all worldly advantage in thy possession, what great feat would it be to despise it as of no value? Consider well how little thou shalt do in casting it aside in order to gain the love of God and mine, and that of the holy Angels. And if the world does not neglect thee as much as thou dost desire, do thou on thy own behalf despise it in order to remain free and unhampered to enjoy to the full extent the highest Good with the plenitude of his most delightful love and conversation.

 465. My most holy Son is such a faithful Lover of souls that He has set me as the Teacher and living example of the love of humility and true contempt of worldly vanity and pride. He ordained also for his own glory as well as for my sake that I, his servant and Mother, would be left without shelter and be turned away by mortals, so afterwards his beloved souls would be so much the more readily induced to offer Him a welcome, thus obliging Him by an artifice of love to come and remain with them. He also sought destitution and poverty not because He had any need of them for bringing the practice of virtues to the highest perfection, but in order to teach mortals the shortest and surest way for reaching the heights of divine love and union with God.

466. Thou knowest well, my dearest, thou hast been incessantly instructed and exhorted by divine enlightenment to forget the terrestrial and visible, girding thyself with fortitude (Prov. 31:17) and raising thyself to the imitation of me, copying in thyself, according to thy capacity, the works and virtues manifested to thee in my life. This is the very first purpose of the knowledge which thou dost receive in writing this History, for thou hast in me a perfect model, and by it thou canst arrange the converse and conduct of thy life in the same manner as I arranged mine in imitation of my sweetest Son. The dread with which this command to imitate me has inspired thee as being above thy strength thou must moderate, and thou must acquire courage by what my most holy Son said as recorded by the evangelist St. Matthew: Be you perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect (Mt. 5:48). The fulfillment of this command of the Most High imposed upon his holy Church is not impossible, and if his faithful children on their part dispose themselves properly He shall deny to none of them the grace of attaining this resemblance to the heavenly Father. All this my most holy Son has merited for them, but the degrading forgetfulness and neglect of men hinder them from maturing within themselves the fruits of his Redemption.

467. Of thee particularly I expect this perfection, and I invite thee to it by the sweet law of love which accompanies my instruction. Ponder and scrutinize by the divine light the obligation under which I place thee, and labor to correspond to it with prudence like a faithful and solicitous daughter. Let no difficulty or hardship disturb thee nor deter thee from any virtuous exercise, no matter how hard it may be. Neither must thou be content with striving after the love of God and the salvation of thyself alone; if thou wouldst be perfect in imitating me and fulfilling all the Gospel teaches, thou must work for the salvation of other souls and the exaltation of the holy Name of my Son, making thyself an instrument in his powerful hands for the accomplishment of mighty works to advance his pleasure and glory. (The New English Edition of The Mystical City of God: Volume II: The Incarnation: Book Four, Chapter IX.)

Our Lady exhorted the Venerable Mother Mary of Jesus of Agreda to work for the salvation of souls and exaltation of the Holy Name of her Divine Son, Our Blessed Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

How can any priest or lay Catholic say that a work containing such truths expressed by the Queen of Heaven and Earth herself has been condemned by the authority of the Catholic Church?

Hateful Jansenists used rump proceedings to “censure” The Mystical City of God, and no one with a shred of intellectual honesty should not be able to recognize this as such if he has taken the time to read the book itself and to familiarize himself with the true facts about its Sorbonne “censure” as provided by the scholarly and holy Dom Prosper Gueranger, O.S.B.

May the Rosaries we pray during Passiontide help up us all to have the humility to pour out our hearts to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus as His consecrated slaves through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary and thus to enter deeper into the mysteries of our redemption as we approach the Paschal Triduum, especially by reading at least a few pages from The Mystical City of God’s books on the Transfixion each day.

Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

Venerable Mother Mary of Jesus of Agreda, pray for us.