AFTER A VICTORIOUS PEACE

New Zealand Tablet, 14 December 1916, Page 25

AFTER A VICTORIOUS PEACE

JOINT PASTORAL OF THE FRENCH BISHOPS. i We give below a full translation of the Joint Pastoral of the French Bishops announcing a national pilgrimage to Lourdes after the conclusion of a victorious peace. It is dated September 15, and runs as follows: —- Dearly Beloved Brethren, — We have entered upon the third year of war. Thanks to the ' coolness, energy, and ability of our chiefs, to the courage and endurance of our soldiers, to the generosity with which the nation has imposed upon itself all the sacrifices necessitated by circumstances, and to the powerful assistairce of our Allies, the certainty of final victory in our favor becomes stronger and stronger. All our. gratitude, all our admiration, go out, with all our sympathy and prayers, to our armies which have so nobly sustained the honor of France by saving her from the most formidable invasion which she has ever undergone. But the struggles still continues: the blood of France flows day by day on some part of our territory ; the number of wounded, prisoners, widows, orphans, and of families in mourning is ever on the increase : many of our people have left their homes and are dispersed over the country, and others groan under the yoke of the enemy’s occupation ; quite recently we heard, with indignation and sorrow, how our enemies, once again trampling under foot every law of morality and civilisation, had brutally torn thousands of women and young girls from their homes to deport them to a distance, there to subject them, like the slaves of old, to a kind of forced labor. When to all this you add that commerce, industry, and agriculture are all lacking workers, it is plain that the national life is profoundly troubled. Keenly concerned with the interests of the country, dearly beloved brethren, pitying your sufferings and your sorrows, moved by the sacrifices which the prolongation of the war imposes on our dear soldiers, and especially upon so many fathers of families so long withheld from their homes, and desiring to hasten the hour of the decisive victory which will put an end to the shedding of blood and give us a glorious and lasting

peace, we Bishops have decided to do violence to heaven by a solemn act corresponding to the importance of the blessing we ask. God, dearly beloved brethren, loves not war. He is the God of peace, and His Church classes war with famine and pestilence in the three scourges from which she beseeches the Lord to preserve His people. God is not the author of the war; it is not He Who has let it loose upon us; it is men that have made it, and history will tell the names of those who have designed and declared it. ~ But God, Who loves not war, still permits it as a consequence of the liberty which He has given to men, and when they in their free will have let it loose. He makes it serve His designs of justice or mercy. If He calls Himself the Lord of Hosts, it is not that He is

pleased with the work of death they , accomplish, but because, on the one hand, He wishes to remind them that they hold from Him their right to shed blood, and should only use it for just causes; and, on the other hand, it is He Who has the power to inflict defeat or grant the victory, according to the ever righteous counsels-of His wisdom.

■ Supreme arbiter of peoples arid of events, He is the . force against which no other can - prevail, the Ally Whose support is above that of all other alliances. In all human things He reserves some hidden way through which He may, in His own good time, intervene; a secret spring which He moves when it pleases Him, and by which He sets everything going, and sometimes changes in an instant the fortunes of armies and the fall of kingdoms. Mad indeed would that people be which should pretend to do without Him. So it was that, as soon as the scourge of the present war fell upon us, we saw all the peoples concerned in the struggle throw themselves at the foot of the altars to implore the assistance of Him upon Whom all empires depend, and Who holds in His hands the destinies of nations.

When a people is under the shock of some great trial, and especially in the critical hours when its national independence and the integrity of its territory depend on the ! fate of its arms, it feels the need of turning to God, Who alone can safeguard it from the evil it dreads or ensure it the good which it desires.

Oftentimes, in grave and critical circumstances, and the more surely to touch the heart of the Almighty, it accompanies its prayer with a vow by which it pledges itself to a thing known to be pleasing to Him. Such vows God accepts because they are an act of faith in Him and His Providence, an act of confidence in His justice and goodness, an act of humility by which man recognises the need he has of Him, a treaty of alliance by which we call Him to our aid. History is full of instances of this, both among pagans and the people of God, under the New Testament as undpr the Old. At the very threshold of our history it was by a promise to embrace faith in the God of Clotilda that Clovis obtained the victory over the forefathers of the same enemies with whom we are at grips to-day. In 1871, France, making her own the vow of pious Christians, promised to erect in the capital a sanctuary to the, Sacred Heart of Jesus. The Basilica of Montmartre is the fulfilment of the National Vow, which Parliament ratified by the passing of a Law which authorised the construction of the building as a recognised work of public utility.

Urged by many demands which, however different in form or special object, have all one end—to provoke a manifestation of national faith in order to obtain the help of heaven for our arms and to hasten the hour of decisive victory and of peacewe have resolved to make a solemn promise of a national pilgrimage to the sanctuary of Lourdes.

The devotion of France to the Blessed Virgin is as ancient as our history. Our soil is covered with sanctuaries erected in her honor -by the piety of our forefathers. And Mary, in response to their confidence in her, has at all times shown herself the protectress of our ■ Country. She became its patroness by the solemn act of one of its sovereigns, whose vow was ratified by the people’s faithful annual fulfilment of it for nearly three centuries. France has not retracted her consecration, nor has Mary withdrawn her patronage. With what , motherly solicitude has she not fulfilled her role as our protectress! Speaking only of our own day a-nd of facts which, though not a matter of faith to our people, still find credit amongst them, as duly attested by legitimate authority, is there in the world a nation which during the same hundred years has been so favored with apparitions of the Blessed Virgin as France was during the last century? In 1830 there was Mary’s apparition to a lowly Sister of Charity in a form which the miraculous medal has made

familiar throughout the whole world. In 1836 a voice

from, heaven invited the pastor of one of the- least

devout parishes of the capital to consecrate his people to the Immaculate Heart of Marya consecration which transformed the parish, and made its church, hitherto unknown, the illustrious sanctuary of Our Lady of Victories. In 1846 Mary appeared on the mountain of La Salette to recall Christians to . their religious duties. : In January, 1871, when the country lay in agony and drained of its blood after a series of awful disasters, she came to Pontmain as the harbinger of peace to announce the approaching end of the war. But the most remarkable of all these apparitions is that, eighteen times repeated, of the Immaculate Virgin among the Massabielle rocks at Lourdes, where she opened a fount of grace which has not, for more than half a century, ceased to work wonders, and has made of this place in our Pyrenees a land of miracle and blessing. ' 1

Is it not natural, dearly beloved brethren, that in these, serious moments of our national life we should turn to the Heavenly Patroness who has given our country so many pledges of her maternal benevolence, and that we should go to offer her our supplications on that blessed spot in our land of France where she shows herself so unfailingly helpful to all our needs?

So, then, to hasten the hour of decisive victory and the conclusion of a peace such as the justice of our cause and a legitimate love of our .country make it a duty to look for, the French Cardinals, Archbishops, and Bishops, each in the name of his own diocese, and all together in the name of France, have determined,to make a solemn vow to lead or cause to be led in their name, after the conclusion of peace and within a period of time to be decided later, a pilgrimage of their respective dioceses to the feet of the Immaculate Virgin at Lourdes. By the unanimity of their action and intention, they wish, so far as lies in their power, to invest this vow, and the pilgrimages by wtych it will be fulfilled, with the character of a national act.

May ' Almighty God, through the intercession of Mary the Queen of Peace, graciously vouchsafe to receive our vow may He sustain the courage of our gallant soldiers and reward it with victory ; may He quickly bring this bloodshed to an end, and restore husbands to their wives, fathers to their children, brothers to their sisters, and sons to their aged parents;' may lie clear the earth for ever of those barbarian theories which, by placing might over right, permit an abuse of force in the humiliation of little peoples and the destruction of the weak ; may He inspire nations and those who hold rule over them with fidelity to the principles that safeguard the security and peace of kingdoms ; may He put into the hearts of all the sons of France respect for the rights of God and of all legitimate liberties, and sentiments of concord and justice, in order that, renouncing the dissensions that were rife amongst us, we may devote all our care to (he healing of our wounds, all our efforts to repairing the ruins around us, and to winning back for our country the strength and prosperity of her best days. But, dearly beloved brethren, if we wish that the

Blessed Virgin may efficaciously intercede for us with God, is not repentance for the evil we have done against Him, and a promise to amend it, the surest way of obtaining our desire?

God desires to save ns. Our cause is just; we fight for our national independence and for the integrity of our territory ; we fight in defence of principles outside of which there is no civilisation worth the name. , ' •;■ rn God desires to save us. We have the proof of it in the resistance of heroic Belgium, in the alliances which He has given us, in the visible assistance He vouchsafed to us in our struggles on the Marne and the Yser and at Verdun. ' But if, since the battle which broke the flood of invasion, we have been able to hold the enemy, we have not yet succeeded in flinging him back. God is perhaps waiting to crown His blessing until we render ourselves worthy of it by making reparation for the sins we have committed against Him. It will be our

honor to acknowledge and confess them, to ask pardon' and make reparation for them. ’ Let us strike our breasts and acknowledge that we have all sinned much ; and this humble acknowledgment ( will. merit for us the Divine mercy which is besought by so many ardent and persevering prayers, so much untiring devotion, so many heroic sacrifices and so many services rendered in the past. Here follow the signatures of all the Bishops of France, and the text of the prayer and vow which is to bo made.