Official recognition for the Community of the Beatitudes

Source: FSSPX News

The Community of the Beatitudes, founded 30 years ago by Gerard Croissant, a former Protestant pastor, was recognised of « pontifical right » on 8 December last year. The official decree will be presented to the leaders of the charismatic movement on 31 January 2003.

This community is certainly a leaven of good will, but unenlightened and marked by its protestant and ecumenical origins. Here we find characteristics of Protestant sects : the feeling of being in direct contact with Heaven, the importance attached to experience of the divine and the seeking after the extraordinary in matters of religion.

One could also legitimately ask how Rome can approve of such a mixed community, where priests, layfolk, married and single, with or without children, all live together with all the disadvantages that this kind of situation can bring about.

In the face of the general lapsation from religious practice, there is no doubt that Rome wishes to take in these movements, which are so successful, and whose spirituality is totally in keeping with a pneumatic Church true to the advances of modernist theology.

The last youth rally (25th Taizé meeting in Paris) saw 80,000 there from all parts of the world. At Taizé itself from March to November, there are invariably between 1,000 and 6,000 people, searching relentlessly, since Mother Church no longer gives them the bread of the Truth, which is theirs by right.