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Overview
The Counterrevolutionary and Royal Army of America (CRAA) is a contemplative initiative dedicated to the reign of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and the Social Kingship of Christ through the Catholic Monarchy. It is lived in friendship with and under the sisterly care of Ste. Jehanne d’Arc and Ste. Thérèse de l’Enfant Jésus. The CRAA draws direct inspiration from the Armée Catholique et Royale, an eighteenth-century counterrevolutionary movement in the Vendée/Bocage region of western France during the French Revolution.
The CRAA is the spiritual counterrevolutionary arm of The Dove and Rose. This sister initiative is devoted to Ste. Jehanne d’Arc and Ste. Thérèse de l’Enfant Jésus and seeks to help us grow in sanctifying grace. Together, the CRAA and the Dove and Rose Devotees seek to expand the Kingdom of God on earth—the seed of which is the Catholic Church—where Jesus Christ is worshiped and honored as our mighty King, the most holy and immaculate Virgin Mary is rightfully honored as our glorious Queen, and the Saints are honored as our noble sisters and brothers. Is this not what our Master taught us to pray? “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
The “heart” of the CRAA is a desire to work in the friendship and sisterly care of Ste. Jehanne d’Arc and Ste. Thérèse de l’Enfant Jésus for the Social Kingship of Christ and the reign of the Immaculate Heart of Mary through a Catholic Monarchy. We see ourselves as fulfilling the noble objective of the Militia of the Immaculata of St. Maximilian Kolbe, though the CRAA itself has no association with the MI. We do so particularly through devotion to the Renaissance of Catholic France, the restoration of the French Catholic Monarchy and all Catholic Monarchies of Christendom, and even the establishment of a Catholic Monarchy in the United States.
The Kingdom we love, defend, and for which we must be prepared to die
This is the Kingdom we desire with all our hearts. It is our true home, and we seek to defend it even to the death against a militant, anti-God secularism that seeks to destroy God’s Kingdom on earth. This secularism acts in an unholy alliance with Eastern New Age spirituality and a steadily dissipating wave of Protestantism that, after five centuries of rebellion against God’s Church, now calls itself “spiritual but not religious.” The Counterrevolutionary and Royal Army of America would defend the glory of the Catholic Kingdom against these evils in the same spirit as the Vendéan Counterrevolutionaries who fought the diabolical French Republic during the Revolution.
We could also draw an analogy with Joan of Arc’s efforts during the Hundred Years’ War. The spirit of the CRAA—and, we believe, of the eighteenth-century Armée Catholique et Royale before us—is the same spirit that animated Joan in the fifteenth century. In the name of Jesus, the true Monarch, she defended the true Kingdom of France, with Charles VII as its earthly steward, against the usurping and unjust alliance between England and French Burgundy. Indeed, this spirit of defending the glory of the Kingdom reaches back to Christ’s first Apostles and, we could even say, to the beginning of time itself: “I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shall lie in wait for her heel.” (Gen 3:15, Douay-Rheims).
This war between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of the evil one spans the entire history of the created order. “And a great sign appeared in heaven: A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.” (Rev 12:1, Douay-Rheims). “And the dragon was angry against the woman: and went to make war with the rest of her seed, who keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.” (Rev 12:17, Douay-Rheims). The spirit of the CRAA would be that of the woman—the holy Mother of God, Immaculate in Conception (Luke 1:28, Rev 12:14)—with her seed, Jesus Christ, true God and true man, and His followers, who are “of her seed” and “have the testimony of Jesus Christ.” The opposing spirit, that of the satanic army arrayed against our most holy Queen in heaven, runs deeply through our culture today in the philosophies of militant, anti-God secularism, New Age spirituality, and the “spiritual but not religious” rebellion against the authentic moral order. That same vulgar spirit has co-opted our culture and our political process.
This is not about establishing a “kingdom of this world” (which Jesus specifically stated He had not come to establish) but about establishing “God’s Kingdom on earth,” a subtle but crucial distinction and the very Kingdom for which Jesus instructed us to pray. This Kingdom will reign eternally after the earth disappears, yet we are called to do our part for it while we are here. Working for the Kingdom is the point of our existence. We are not here to amuse ourselves with luxury, the newest technologies, and bawdy television shows, blending into secular society while merely sharing “our personal views” in a superficial, relativistic manner. To the contrary, we are called as Catholic witnesses—even martyrs—to fight the forces of darkness. Rise from your slumber, Catholic warrior.
To paraphrase G. K. Chesterton, the CRAA would fight out of love for what is behind it rather than hatred for what is before it. As Catholic Crusaders for the glory of the Kingdom, for our Divine King, and for our most honorable, Immaculate Queen, we know that our battle is not against flesh and blood but against the spiritual powers of darkness. We are driven by love for our fellow man, hoping that all men may partake of this Kingdom through the grace of our Savior.
All would be under the co-patronage of the glorious Sts. Joan of Arc and Thérèse of Lisieux, for the honor of Mary most holy, our beloved Queen, and her Son, Jesus Christ, Who is true God and true man, our Divine King and the only Savior of the human race.
Our inspiration, the “Armée Catholique et Royale” fighting the French Revolutionary Republic
The Armée Catholique et Royale was a popular uprising of the peasant class against the evils of the Revolution, including the ruthless, bloody suppression of the Catholic Church and, with it, the whole of Christian tradition. The Counterrevolutionaries were known as “Chouans” or, in English, “Royalists.” They supported the thousand-year-old French Catholic Monarchy, embodied at the time by Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the most Christian Monarchs of France, and later by the boy King Louis XVII, their son, who was imprisoned and never ruled. The Chouans came from a region heavily influenced, a generation earlier, by the missionary zeal of St. Louis de Montfort and his teachings on True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin. There can be little doubt that their deep love for our holy Queen in heaven and for her Son in the Eucharist drove their noble Crusade against the madness of militant, unmerciful secularism.
The Vendéan Chouans wanted their Church, their King and Queen, and the fullness of their Catholic Faith. The merciless, wild-eyed Republican totalitarians wanted to be “free” of the Church and those traditions. They were bent on making the entire population “free” as well, whether people wanted it or not. The guillotine was used obsessively and unmercifully to eliminate these “enemies of Liberty.”
The Vendéans died heroically fighting the Republic. The Republic eventually massacred more than 300,000 Vendéans in a brutal suppression, including women and children. Women were even executed while holding their children in their arms. Some historians consider this the first state-sponsored genocide in modern history. The Republic committed these crimes in the name of “liberty, equality, and brotherhood.” So it typically goes when mankind seeks to build its own kingdom of man in opposition to the Kingdom of God. Those who wish to be “free” from God will kill, without mercy and in the name of “freedom” and “rights,” the religious souls who oppose them.
Current situation: The American Republic has fallen victim to the spiritual anarchy of the “Revolution” against God
The Republic of the United States is following the same course as the blasphemous French Revolution, though more slowly. The French Revolution can be seen as a time-compressed demonstration of where democratic-republican forms of government ultimately lead: toward an endlessly unstable dictatorship by whichever group is most powerful on a given day in a naturally pluralistic system. The “will of the people” is an abstract principle, commonly usurped in practice by powerful minority interests. A hypothetical example—though not necessarily hypothetical in America—would be a country whose majority favors eliminating or severely restricting abortion, while powerful, pluralistic, elitist minority alliances use the legal system to continue the execution of children as if by guillotine. The “will of the people” is usurped by the “will of the elite.” This is the true nature of Democratic Republics.
Yet the “will of the people” is itself an insufficient and capricious principle to exalt, especially in the face of God and His Divine Will. Are we to believe that God is pleased when the “will of the people” (or that of a powerful minority) chooses the killing of children through abortion “rights”? Is God pleased when the “will of the people” denies God a place in public life and forces vulgar, immoral values on our children in public schools? Is God pleased when “the will of the people” chooses to legalize intrinsically evil homosexual unions? (These are erroneously called “marriages” because, in objective reality, there is no such thing as “marriage” between same-sex couples.) Does God change His morality according to the “will of the people”? Is God Himself subject to “the will of the people”? How ludicrous! Can the “will of the people” ever be wrong? Of course it can—when it yields to a morality outside God’s own.
Such is the situation in the United States of America today. The “will of the people”—or of usurping minority interests, as the case may be—is wrong. It is a grave and tragic error to think that people can guide themselves toward a life-giving, truly progressive society (with “progressive” properly understood) by their own “will,” without regard for God’s will. Just look around. Through the “will of the people”—or that of usurping minority interests—and particularly since “the Sixties” revolution, the United States has developed the most vulgar, obscene, “life-taking,” religious-phobic, and brazenly blasphemous culture ever known on earth. Our culture expresses the value systems of those who live in it. A culture reflects what “the people” believe. It is obvious that “the people”—or the usurping minority interests—do not believe in God.
The political and social solution, a superior form of government, the Catholic Monarchy
What is needed is a society founded on the authentic and unchanging morality of God. We know this morality through the Catholic Church, the seed of the eternal Kingdom of God on earth and the Body and Bride of the living, resurrected Jesus Christ. He founded the Church, which teaches in every age through the Holy Spirit. Such a society existed in ancient Christendom, ruled by Kings and Popes. It is a far superior model for the United States today than its own broken and mostly ignored constitution within its “Democratic Republic”—in reality, a pluralistic system of competing, usurping minority ideologies.
God created us with free will and gave us the magnificent freedom to “eat from any of the trees in the garden.” That is astonishing freedom! However, we must not eat of the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” lest we die. In other words, when the “will of the people” capriciously determines for itself what is morally right and wrong, outside God’s eternal law, it leads us to death. That is the contemporary situation in the United States of America, already dying from the spiritual malignancy of moral anarchy.
The Catholic Monarchy is a superior form of government to the Republic, with its whimsical “will of the people” and that will’s aimlessly shifting and decaying morality. The Catholic Monarchy most closely resembles the authentic, aristocratic hierarchy of the Kingdom of Heaven. By Divine Right, the King and Queen rule as father and mother and ensure that society follows the proper norms of Catholic morality—the very morality the United States inherited from ancient Christendom and has now thrown aside. By answering to the Holy Father, Our Pope in Rome, on matters of faith and morals, a King’s potential tendency toward totalitarianism is checked. That is the historical record of ancient Christendom. In that time, Popes served as counterbalances, checking Kings who tried to exceed their proper bounds.
The balance between King and Pope is far superior to the checks and balances in the United States Constitution. Those constitutional checks and balances have not prevented a totalitarianism of moral anarchy in the social order. The Constitution checks the branches of government in enforcing whatever the whimsical “will of the people” has established as law. It does not—and is not designed to—check the “will of the people” itself. The checks between Popes and Kings do exactly that.
The objectives of the CRAA
The Counterrevolutionary and Royal Army of America is set forth here as a potential social and political Counterrevolutionary movement. Its objective is to turn America back toward the goodness of Catholic government and culture, developed over more than 1,500 years through the Catholic Empire of ancient Christendom. The rejection of this millennium and a half of religious and moral development—and the ill-fated substitution of the Democratic Republic for the Catholic Monarchy—is what is killing the United States and the West today.
The CRAA would seek
· To promote the understanding that the American Republic, having run the natural course of Democratic Republicanism and fallen victim to the spirit of anti-God revolution parading as the “will of the people,” is irreparably lost and must seek a more authentic and more freeing form of government, with “freedom” properly understood: a Catholic Monarchy.
· The establishment of a Catholic Monarchy in the United States as the right hand of the Catholic Church. This Monarchy would restore an authentic moral order guided by the Church while still allowing religious freedom in the land and upholding the high principles sought in our now-usurped Constitution, such as freedom of speech and association. Law and culture, however, would reflect Catholic morality. The country would be governed by a Monarch checked by a truly sovereign and independent Church, not by a flock of politicians checking one another—the fox guarding the hen house.
· In the interim, changes to current United States law, including changes to the Constitution, that would pave the way for a Catholic Monarch and, through the Church’s social teachings, begin establishing a legitimate hierarchy of values to guide society.
· To support the restoration of Catholic Kingdoms throughout the West, most importantly in France, the “eldest daughter of the Church,” whose principal role in history—until the dreadful Revolution and the implementation of the vulgar Republic—was to defend Christendom and the Church.
The ultimate aim would be the restoration of a united Christendom in the West, ruled by legitimate Catholic Kings. This civilization would honor Jesus Christ as our true King, the most holy and glorious Virgin Mary as our rightfully exalted Queen, and the Saints as our noble sisters and brothers.
The Counterrevolution, driven by the CRAA and its spiritual organization, The Dove and Rose, would be a form of Crusade against the tyranny of secularism and the “revolution” against God waged by the evil one since the beginning of time. This revolution raises its diabolical head in every century and has now infested the Republic of the United States of America. The Counterrevolution is a Crusade of love for our fellow man and an act of self-defense for our culture and way of life.
Summary
A restored Catholic civilization is our only hope. Yet the world’s primordial enmity and hatred toward Jesus Christ, His Church, and therefore us as well may mean that restoring it will require us to shed our blood in the ultimate sacrifice, as our Fathers in the faith did before us. We are unworthy of such an honor; nevertheless, if called, we pray for the grace to remain obedient even unto death to Christ and His Church, to the Holy Virgin, Mother of God and our glorious Queen, and to the Saints reigning in heaven with them.
Vive le Roi. Vive la culture catholique. Vive les États-Unis. Vive la France. En avant, monarchie catholique!
St. Joan of Arc, pray for us! St. Thérèse of Lisieux, pray for us! Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us! Jesus Christ, Savior of the human race, have mercy on us!
“Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Amen, so be it.