How to Join the Catholic Battle

Brother John Marie Vianney, M.I.C.M., (Tert.)


In any war there must be a battle plan to win. I reveal no secret to you when I say we are in a war. The war, in our case, harkens back to the word “crusade.” The Crusades were holy wars that were undertaken by Catholic powers to free the Christian Holy Land from its Mohammedan conquerors. The crusade of Saint Benedict Center is a spiritual one. As you know it has two ends: 1) to defend all the dogmas of the Catholic Faith, especially extra ecclesiam nulla salus (outside the Church there is no salvation) and 2) to convert America to the one true Faith. Ours is a holy war in that we are “fighting” to free our non-Catholic brothers and sisters and bring them to the liberating light of the Catholic religion. This is a work to which the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary have been particularly devoted for sixty years. The goal is good and true, but the laborers are few.


St. Paul encourages us to use spiritual weapons in order to fight the enemies of our souls (Eph. 6:11-17). “Therefore take unto you the armour of God, that you may be able to resist in the evil day… having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of justice, and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace”. One of these spiritual weapons is Catholic knowledge; we must have plenty of it if we are to teach our countrymen. “That in all things you are made rich in him, in all utterance, and in all knowledge” (1 Cor. 1:5). And what will we teach? The Faith, without compromise.The crusade was launched by Father Leonard Feeney who sought to save the salvation dogma of the Church from obscurity and, in so doing, rescue all Catholic dogmas from the “dictatorship of relativism” — to borrow a term of Pope Benedict’s. That effort began in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with, as Sister Catherine writes in The Loyolas and Cabots, the consideration of the “authentic doctrines of the Church through the study of Holy Scripture, and the writings of the Fathers, doctors, and saints of the Church. This program of studies achieved immediate success, filling the spiritual vacuum created by an obvious deficiency in the neighboring academic institutions. The Center was attended in large and growing numbers.”Father Feeney chose Brother Francis Maluf, our recently deceased superior, to help him establish a strategy for the doctrinal crusade. When Brother Francis received his assignment in the 1940s he knew he had to prepare by prayer and study. And that is just what he did. He did not activate his dream to initiate a school of studies nationwide until the 1970s when he saw the time was right. It was only then that he launched the Saint Augustine Institute of Catholic Studies (SAI), announcing the program to friends of the Center across America. Brother’s assignment is now our assignment. One of the best ways to re-ignite our enthusiasm for the conversion of America is to listen to the words of the man who so deeply desired the personal sanctification of his students and religious disciples and their education in the Faith. Brother Francis had a charism when he spoke. Anyone who heard him was instantly cognizant of it. And, thanks be to God and Brother’s loyal students, we still have his words recorded on tapes and CDs. Although his knowledge was immense in the breadth of its extension, wisdom was his greatest gift. As a true philosopher, he always sought for the causes of things, going from the immediate to the first causes. Yes, he was deep, but he also had the gift of communicating his wisdom in a clear, simple, and, at times, even in a child-like manner. Brother loved to quote an often-repeated exhortation of Saint Paul: idem sapite, “be of one mind.” To effect this end, a much greater emphasis will be placed on the link, the connection, the training ground, the school we refer to as the Saint Augustine Institute of Catholic Studies. Brother Francis often called the Institute and its circles of study, the “engines of the crusade.” Engines require fuel to operate. If we do not work at being reservoirs filled with the fuel of holiness and erudition, we will have ignored one of our founder’s prescriptions for the conversion of our own homes and of our fellow citizens, our neighbors. In order to be good aqueducts we must first be reservoirs. SAI is under the Third Order and the Third Order will support SAI. In fact, we wish all tertiaries to be active in study circles, or, at least, progressing in the program individually. Why? Brother Francis, in his very first recorded talk about SAI, said he believed that if you gave him a couple of hundred souls working to study the Faith in the friendly atmosphere of the circles of study, that number could eventually turn into many thousands — to the point where America could be converted as the Faith spreads from one soul to another.Today, sixty years after the founding of our crusade, our purposes are the same. Third Order brothers and sisters, what are we waiting for? Please make it your goal to start or join a circle of study, to obtain the tapes or CDs of Brother Francis, and to share your knowledge and joy with others.Finally, let me suggest that you purchase two sets of recordings: the “Introduction to the Circles of Study” (by Brother Francis) and “Why Be a Tertiary?” (by Brother André Marie).

Email Brother John Marie Vianney at toprefect@catholicism.org.

Converted by the Resurrection

By Brother Francis, M.I.C.M.

We are indebted to Sister Anna Maria, M.I.C.M., of the Vienna, Ohio community, for transcribing the following from one of Brother Francis’ recorded lectures.

Difficilius est id quod non sit incipere quam id quod fuerit iterare. And it’s translated, “It’s more difficult for that which had never been to start to begin, than that which had been, to be brought back.” In other words, the fact that we were created is more surprising than the fact that we are going to be resurrected from the dead. That’s the point Minucius Felix, a pagan Roman, was making when he used this quote from Octavius, a Christian of the age of the catacombs, the first Latin apologist. In his work, Felix was recounting a dialogue between the Christian, Octavius Januarius, and the pagan, Caecilius Natalis, at the seashore in Ostia on a Roman holiday in the time of vintage.

The argument proceeded. The first one to speak was Caecilius (a pagan of the second century) and in a very suave, clever way, he presented the argument against the Christian religion from the point of view of a Roman. He insisted that man has a duty to uphold the religion of his ancestors. A false principle, but an attractive one. There are an awful lot of people today who go on living in the wrong religion, just because they think they have the duty to be loyal to “the religion of my grandparents, of my father, or my mother, or my good aunt, or good uncle.”

Now, is loyalty to father and mother and aunt, and relatives, and country a bad thing? No, it isn’t. As a matter of fact, this kind of loyalty is the greatest thing in the natural order, and the only thing it has to yield to, is God.

That same issue that arose among these early Romans of the second century, would arise in the eighteenth century, the century in which the anti-Catholic Masonic conspiracy arose, the century of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, the century of Adam Weishaupt, and Jacob Frank. It was also the century of Saint Alphonsus Maria de Liguori.

In that century a very respectable theologian established a false principle in a catechism that was going to be taught in Italian schools. He was trying to placate the Masons, the Carbonari, who had their hand in public education throughout Italy at that time. Italian Masons didn’t become atheists and they certainly didn’t become Protestants. They claimed to be Catholic, even though they were bad Catholics.

So, according to this theologian and his catechism, the principle was that “one has to be true to the religion of his fathers.” Therefore, “one has to be true to the Catholic Faith.” Saint Alphonsus Maria, when he saw that sentence, was absolutely furious! He said, “That is a false principle; Catholics do not talk like that. If this statement could be true in Italy, it must be true in Turkey! So, are you saying that the Turks have the duty to go on being Moslems? Are you saying that the Chinese have a duty to go on being Buddhists?”

So, Saint Alphonsus Maria de Liguori, God bless him, blasted this theologian and raised quite a crusade against him. He said, “That’s wrong! You can’t say that!”

Now here, in the Dialogue, we find Caecilius saying that it’s patriotic to worship the gods approved by the Roman senate. As a matter of fact, Rome was so generous and so broad-minded in apostolic times that the biggest problem that Saint Peter and Saint Paul and the Christians had when they came to Rome, most of them to shed their blood, was not the bigotry of the Romans, but the broadmindedness of the Romans. They invited the Christians to have a statue of Jesus placed in the Pantheon, the temple of all the gods. “No, thank you!” said the Christians. If Jesus Christ entered the Pantheon, all the other “gods” must go. He is not “a god,” He is the only God, one in three Persons, with the Father and the Holy Ghost.

Resurrection: The argument of the Dialogue was finally mooted on one issue. Who in the world could believe that, after this body is disintegrated, it’s going to be gathered and brought back to life? So, it came down to the Resurrection of the body. That was the big scandal to the pagans. So, it is today with the rationalists, materialistic scientists, and false philosophers. How many physicists, chemists, geologists, astronomers, in our universities believe in the resurrection of the body? I met a Teilhardian once who said to me, “Do you mean to say that the cadaver of Jesus was brought back to life?”

To the rationalist the subject of this incredulity isn’t just the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, who is God, the first fruit of His own victory over death. It is all those who would be united to Him by the Eucharist, by the Faith, by Baptism, all of those who will be resurrected in glory through His glorious Resurrection. It is the challenge for our mind, but it is the only hope that we have! If we lose faith in the Resurrection, then there is nothing left but pagan despair. And pagan despair leads to degeneracy, the very degeneracy that is taking over our country, taking over the whole world today.

Is the world pagan today? I think we owe an apology to the pagans! Minucius was a pagan, but there was some decency about him. At least some of the pagans of Rome and its empire had natural virtue, natural ideals. They would be converted, and from among them there were millions of martyrs in the first centuries of the Church. When a Christian society falls, they don’t fall back to nature; they fall to un-nature, to abnormality, to degeneracy! Corruptio optime pessima est (the corruption of the best is the worst). And the only way to save nature today is to be supernatural, because grace builds on nature and shows the beauty of nature.

“Can you, Octavius, really convince me, Caecilius, a well-educated, reasonable man, a philosopher, that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, and therefore, that all of us can rise from the dead, that there is such a thing to look forward to — that we will exist forever”? Just imagine discussing a point on which there is so much at stake!

Just imagine the difference between dying like the rabbits, and going on like gods, forever, children, sons of God, forever! You’d think we are talking about some point that you could settle in one way or the other. What difference does it make? It makes all the difference in the whole world!

So it was at that point that this sentence was uttered: It’s more difficult for that which had never been to start to begin, than that which had been, to be brought back. And — Deo gratias! It converted Caecilius. He became a Christian.

“Supposing,” said Octavius, “you were a sheer angelic intelligence and were allowed to look over and see this earth, and you saw the wind blowing and the trees, the rabbits running around and the dogs and the pigs and everything. And then somebody told you that out of that same mud we are going to make the kind of being that you are, a rational, spiritual, intelligent person. Would you think it were possible?” He said, “No, I wouldn’t.”

Octavius replied, “But you know this is a fact. Not only could no man have done it, no man could have even conceived it possible!” So, he said, Difficilius est id quod non sit incipere quam id quod fuerit iterare. What a beautiful classical sentence! Is it not more difficult to have put that amazing being, which is in fact what you are, in existence in the first place, than having existed, to restore it? And at that point, Caecilius was converted to the Catholic Faith, on the issue of the resurrection!

I hit that story just on the week of the Resurrection, and I thought it was a little grace that I should be telling you.