Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Religious Considerations

The deceased published the first volume of his memoirs in March 2018. Under the title Fils de la Nation, [Son of the Nation] he recounts his journey, from his childhood in La Trinité-sur-Mer to his studies at the Faculty of Law in Paris, then his commitments in Indochina, Suez, and Algeria, May 68, his love of the sea, his encounters…

In the first two parts, he paints a picturesque tableau of his childhood and his native Brittany, bearing witness to a rough and harsh era, far from material opulence and contemporary individualism. He talks about his education and his faith, up until this personal break with the Church that occurred at the age of 16.

God, the Dead, and the Homeland

He tells of the impressive crowds of the St. Anne pilgrimages, and explains how "the Catholic religion, the family and the homeland were linked in the cult of the dead. The Great War had made the union sacred in the cemeteries. The fratricidal battles of secularism had been overcome in the fraternity of the trenches.”

"The cult of the dead for France seemed to me then, and still seems to me, one of the founding elements of the homeland, as is also the respect for the French to be born: the people of the past give a hand to those of the future. However, our society mocks veterans and practices mass abortion, in a total disregard for tradition that implies a refusal of life.”

"I remember the great gatherings at the war memorials of St. Anne of Auray where the names of two hundred and fifty thousand Bretons who died for France were inscribed, and what we sang there: Your Breton sons who died for France / Have hoped for St. Anne in you / Grant them the reward / Of their love and their faith."

Having lost confidence in the Church and its men, Jean-Marie Le Pen stopped practicing. As a student, he even sang anticlerical songs, just as he intoned anarchist, Bolshevik, or fascist songs.

Two Mistakes: Progressivism and Modernism

More interesting is his analysis of the evolution of the Church: “I wanted to rebel a little against a Church to which I owe a lot and which I had loved a lot. Since then, I have followed its evolution with a burning concern and a desolate heart.”

“My sympathy remains with the traditionalists. With its worker priests, its liberation theology, and its left-wing Christians that I endured at university, the Church that drifted towards Vatican II made two mistakes.”

"The first is political. It aligned itself once again with the powerful. In this case, the unions, the left-wing parties, the proletariat, at a time when Marxism, even communism, was on the rise all over the world.”

"It was all the more stupid because this movement, which was said to be irreversible, with ‘the tide of history,’ was fleeting. Today, the same people are rushing to the aid of the triumphant invasion with the approval of the world and the media, it is the clergy on the side of the world.”

"The second fault of the Church with modernist tendencies, the most serious, was to largely renounce the sacred. Under the guise of liturgical reform, there was a brutal rupture, a shocking secularization manifested by the abandonment of the cassock and habits. No doubt the clergy feels that it no longer deserves to wear them.”

"The new direction of the Mass, the abandonment of hymns, of ornaments, the silliness of the forms that replaced them, sadden me. The abandonment of Latin, at the very moment when we needed unity the most, in the face of the cultural imperialism of English, seems to me so absurd that it could only have resulted from a conscious desire to break with tradition in order to disturb the faithful, to cut them off from their faith of all time and from their predecessors.”

"Always this hatred of tradition, this refusal to transmit. The opposite of what I learned and what I tried to do. All things being equal, I thought for a moment that Archbishop Lefebvre was applying to the Church what I was trying to do in politics: to stop decadence as much as possible while waiting for the reversal, for the tide to rise. But the intellectual, spiritual and demographic ebb never ends and everything happens as if it were to be eternal.”

"France and the Church have fallen from a great height, and me with them." (Part One, Chapter 6).

A Pertinent Analysis

Everything is connected. When God, family, and country are honored, people are united.

The State and civil society, like the Church and the clergy, are in crisis. At the root of the dramatic developments that Jean-Marie Le Pen describes in a few well-felt paragraphs, there is - what he does not say but nevertheless suggests - revolution, rejection.

Revolution wipes the slate clean of the past. We forget where we come from: the land, the dead and the history of our civilization. The refusal of tradition leads to the murder of innocents in their mother's womb.

In the spiritual order, it is the break with Tradition, the taste for innovation and adaptation to the world, the questioning of the most holy rites and the constant teaching, doctrinal and moral, of Catholicism. The Church is not only aimed at sanctifying souls. She educates people by bringing them true civilization. 

This supposes, against liberalism and modernism, the alliance of throne and altar, in other words the collaboration of the temporal and the spiritual, their union and goodwill, without confusion or separation. A balance that allowed Christianity to flourish for centuries and the Church to civilize the world.

Like all the politicians of his generation, Jean-Marie Le Pen ignores the reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ over individuals, families, and societies. However, the kingship of Christ over nations is not to be relegated to the end of the world. It must be understood as the remedy for the decadence of morals, the mediocrity of men – politicians or ecclesiastical – and the apostasy of societies.

If “France and the Church have fallen from a great height,” it is never too late to raise them up.

Jean-Marie Le Pen, Fils de la Nation.

Mémoires, volume 1, Muller éditions, 450 pages.