The Philosophical Foundations of Le Royaume
The Rule of Life and its Forms
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The Le Royaume rule of life wells up by grace to nourish our souls in the same manner that a natural fresh spring of water wells up to give life to the meadow around it. The rule is that of The Kingdom Blessed of St. Joan and St. Thérèse, a manifestation of The Kingdom of God in the center of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The rule is not “made” by us; instead, it is revealed to us as an eternal substance, a “what” of Heaven’s reality, that unfolds in us over temporal time. It is the form that God places in us as potency and that we actualize throughout our lives if we are faithful to the patronage of our saintly sisters, Joan and Thérèse. The rule is God’s gift and represents the definition and outline of the Heavenly species for which He created us so that we might reveal in the material world its place in the Heavenly genus and family of God in Our Lady’s heart.
The Rule
The rule is lived and actualized in our lives first by deliberate thinking, i.e., “intentionality,” second by sacrifice, i.e., the abnegation of our will in pursuing this intentionality, and thirdly by “knowing” the objective truth inherent in that which we seek. The result is our “being” in union with the combined hearts of St. Joan and St. Thérèse. We desire to think as they think, to desire what they desire, and to go where they are in the center of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
“In either case, one spirit, by joining with another, comes to share in the other’s mode of being.” ~ Edith Stein. Potency and Act (The Collected Works of Edith Stein) (Kindle Location 2064). Kindle Edition.
Our rule stated in the positive is to “Seek ye therefore first the kingdom of God, and his justice” with intentionality. We sacrifice all earthly honors, recognition, and material well-being to pursue this kingdom – “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.” We journey in the certainty of God’s objective truth, beauty, and goodness, trusting Him and His Church as we abandon ourselves to His Divine Providence – “and all these things shall be added unto you.”
The substance of our efficient cause, which drives us from potency to act, is the Lord’s command to bring the Father’s Kingdom “on earth as it is in Heaven.”
Our rule stated in the negative seeks to avoid our eternal loss and the loss of that which we were to add objectively to the kingdom in congruous participation with our Creator, that is, to miss becoming who we are in the mind of God.
“We are thinking of the parable of the buried talent. Someone has a great gift for poetry, say, and feels obliged to develop it as well as he can, to write the poem he has in mind as perfectly as possible. All sorts of obstacles stand in his way.
If despite all his exertion he is overcome by the external obstacles, his failure is a loss for the objective [objektiv] world of spirit, which now is missing something which would have made it the richer.
He does retain the possibility of actualizing it until the final moment of his earthly existence. Then the talent he buried will be taken from him.“
~ Edith Stein. Potency and Act (The Collected Works of Edith Stein) (Kindle Locations 2428-2440). Kindle Edition.
The Forms
We fill three Heavenly forms by following this rule and through which we “become who we are” in union with the hearts of our saintly sisters, Joan and Thérèse. These forms are French, Catholic, and Royal.
French
Le Royaume, The Kingdom Blessed of St. Joan and St. Thérèse, is substantively the combined hearts of these two French Catholic saints. It is a matter of the highest importance to note that their "French" spirit infused in our souls by grace is that of the Heavenly Kingdom of the Blessed Virgin Mary's Catholic and Royal France. "France" is in the center of Mary's heart, and she holds the Fleur-du-Lys close to her heart.
Our devotion to "France" is that of this heavenly form which makes the temporal Kingdom of France the Eldest Daughter of the Church. Temporal France is merely a type of the Heavenly. Therefore, one need not be French, or of French descent in an earthly sense, that is, through the lineage of Cain in the City of Man.
One is called through the combined hearts of Joan and Thérèse as a signal grace that they are of the heavenly lineage of mystical France, one that originated with St. Mary Magdalene at the foot of the Cross and was brought by her to the shores of Provence where she spent the last few decades of her life in contemplative prayer.
We are the "French Catholic Diaspora." We are The French Catholic Diaspora of St. Mary Magdalene's House of New Bethany.
Catholic
Devotion to the combined hearts of St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse of Lisieux is Catholic. In this sense, the term “extra Ecclesiam nulla salus,” “outside the Church there is no salvation,” is an objective truth and necessity. The journey on the Trail to the Kingdom with our saintly sisters relies entirely upon Catholic teaching for the mind, Catholic prayer for the heart, and most importantly, Catholic liturgy, preferably the Traditional Latin Mass, with the sacraments for the bread of life to nourish us on our way. Therefore, we take it as true that “outside the Church there is no salvation,” which means that outside the Church, we will lose our way on this journey and never arrive at the Kingdom. We will let the theologians debate the doctrinal praxis. We obediently confirm the traditions and doctrines of the authoritative Catholic Church that we cannot be saved outside the Church.
Royal
The living substance of our rule is that of the Divine order. Truth, Beauty, and Goodness are represented on earth analogously as a beautiful panoramic landscape. Every flower and every blade of grass is part of the elegant whole, while at the same time, each retains its unique individuality. St. Thérèse best describes this substance.
“(Jesus) opened the book of nature before me, and I saw that every flower he has created has a beauty of its own, that the splendor of the rose and the lily’s whiteness do not deprive the violet of its scent nor make less ravishing the daisy’s charm. I saw that if every little flower wished to be a rose, Nature would lose her spring adornments, and the fields would be no longer enameled with their varied flowers.”
“So it is in the world of souls, the living garden of the Lord. It pleases him to create great saints, who may be compared with the lily’s or the rose; but he also created little ones, who must be content to be daisies or violets, nestling at his feet to delight his eyes when he should choose to look at them. The happier they are to be as he wills, the more perfect they are.”
~ (The Story of a Soul, Day 1951)
We find this substance's living manifestation and spirit through the royal kingship bestowed on earthly rulers through the authority of the Church, i.e., by way of the Catholic Monarchy. The Monarchy, for us, is not simply a socio-political concept separated from our faith. The Monarchy is a type of Divine Order referenced by St. Thérèse. Truth, Beauty, and Goodness flow through the hierarchies of the Divine Order, and only through the Monarchy do we see a visible manifestation of this hierarchy. Monarchy is more than political. Monarchy reflects the people's desire for the Kingdom of God "on earth as it is in Heaven." The democratic, constitutional Republics and the "rule of the People," reflect a vulgarized order that seeks the kingdom as it is on earth. Our royal hearts seek God's Kingdom with singular intention. A "Royal Heart" is a spiritual devotion more than a political or social one.
“We must understand our own royal hearts to be first and foremost hearts grounded in sanctifying grace through a dogmatic confession of Catholic faith. Royalty is not a mere earthly political construct. True royalty and a genuine royal heart are born of the Holy Spirit through the Immaculate Heart of Mary…. with Traditional French Catholicism as a guide, we seek a contemplative counterrevolutionary Catholic worldview which will consequentially influence through us the restoration of Christendom in social, cultural, and political affairs.”
~ Beyond the Counterrevolution by Walter Adams