Institute of the Good Shepherd--New Traditional Institute

I had considered playing the coward on this one and ignoring it, but if the statements in the article reproduced below are true, I cannot remain silent. However, since the news is all over the TradCath blogosphere and forums, I will not go into detail about the new organisation, but just publish some reservations about the news.

If the accusations regarding the members of the new Institute and Alain de Benoist, the founder of le Nouvelle Droite, are true, I'm deeply troubled. I had some personal correspondence with him a number of years ago. I had started an ephemeral TradCath Legitimist magazine called "The Ultra Review" and its salutatory editorial was translated and republished in a couple of French Reviews. He contacted me, I suppose with an hope of getting me to support his nouvelle fascisme and its attendant paganism. I researched him and his movement and realised that no Catholic worthy of the name or with any hope of salvation could be affiliated with him.

As a personal aside, I noticed in the "Scorpion", an English language review of the Nouvelle Droite, published in Germany that there were supportive letters from one Adrian Davies of Bromley, Kent, UK. Intrigued I wrote to Adrian and asked if he was related to Michael. He replied that he was Michael's son! When I met Michael in Chicago at the CVI conference I asked him about it. He rolled his eyes and said, "I don't want to know about it!"

Here is the Wikipedia link to de Benoist. He has also been influenced by the Traditionalist School and one of its founders Anananda K. Coomaraswamy, the pagan father of the prominent sedevacantist Rama Coomaraswamy. Note especially the references to the younger Coomaraswamy's involvement in the pagan Traditionalist School.




Section from Knights of Our Lady Newsletter, #11:



Fascist Catholicism?



As many traditional Catholics are aware, Tradition had its problems in France in 2004 and early 2005, which were the cause of the exclusion of three SSPX priests: Fr. Christophe Héry, Fr. Philippe Laguérie, and, on March 8, Fr. Guillaume de Tanoüarn. Fr. de Tanoüarn, is the director of Servir editions, the editor of two magazines - Certitudes and Pacte – and is in control of several websites. He also owns 40% of the shares of Minute, a far right journal, through which he kindled a national campaign against SSPX superiors and particularly against Bishop Fellay in the French press.



This tragic situation---which is not over yet, and it may ripple into the SSPX at the highest level for example during the Superior General 2006 election, and consequently in other countries---was due to doctrinal dissent over the issues of Liberalism, Tradition, Separation of Church and State, Gnosticism, Masonry, the Plot against Church and Catholic States, and the responsibility of the Jewish people in the death of Our Lord, which resulted in rebellion against authority within the SSPX.



The root of this turmoil seems to lie with the close friendship and admiration of Fr. de Tanoüarn for Alain de Benoist, a fiercely anti-Catholic and Nietzschean philosopher, and the founder and figurehead of the French New Right movement, Nouvelle Droite. In theory, the New Right is anti-socialist and anti-liberal, with nationalistic views, which appeal to part of the right wing public, including Traditionalists. Less widely known is the fact that it also favours neo-paganism, esoterism (or gnosticism), neo-fascism, Indo-European racialism based on the myth of some Hyperborean civilization, anti-Semitism, homosexuality and pansexualism.



The philosophy of Alain de Benoist is in fact quite close to "traditional," symbolist Freemasonry, which uses many ways to infiltrate right wing and far right political parties and organizations, while the longtime anticlerical radical Freemasonry is working in the socialist and left wing camp. Of course, both are serving one and the same "master" and consequently cooperate through their own parliamentary association, just to give one example.



Fr. de Tanoüarn also has admiration for defrocked priest and historian of the Church Emile Poulat, who, like Alain de Benoist, participates in the Politica Hermetica magazine and seminars. He favours separation of Church and State and is also an esoterist.



In addition, the friendship of Fr. de Tanoüarn extends to Arnaud Guyot-Janin, an esoterist pagan, who, despite his supposed recent conversion, still admires and supports Dominique Venner, cofounder of the New Right with Alain de Benoist. Tradition, the Sol Invictus Circle newsletter, of which Arnaud Guyot-Janin is the editor, is well known to St. Nicolas du Chardonnet parishioners.



One indication that the problem is not over is that the French District magazine Fideliter of January-February, 2005, published an article against the very notion of the Social Kingship of Christ and Catholic State. Some weeds still need to be uprooted.



This problem, which is very serious in France since it involves SSPX priests, also crops up in other parts of the world. In fact, far right organisations are courting the traditional faithful, as well as sedevacantists and Feeneyites, who are all the more easily seduced since several far right concepts appear to support their own, i.e., the fight for the survival of their country and resistance to socialism.