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“This is the will of God, your sanctification.” ~ I Thess. 4:3 (Douay Reims)

“But the just shall live for evermore: and their reward is with the Lord, and the care of them with the most High. Therefore shall they receive a kingdom of glory, and a crown of beauty at the hand of the Lord: for with his right hand he will cover them, and with his holy arm he will defend them. And his zeal will take armour, and he will arm the creature for the revenge of his enemies. He will put on justice as a breastplate, and will take true judgment instead of a helmet.” ~ Wisdom 5:16-19 (Douay Reims)

The following is a summary of what we describe as the Science of The Dove and Rose. The Dove and Rose is a comprehensive model that leads the inquirer along the Trail of the Dogmatic Creed with St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse of Lisieux to the Mystical Kingdom of the Blessed Virgin ary’s Catholic and Royal France. The “Kingdom of Catholic and Royal France” described in the model is a phenomenological expression of the Kingdom of God through the reign of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

The expression, “Mystical Kingdom of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s Catholic and Royal France” presupposes three key foundations to the model. The first is that there is a Form of France in the mind of God which applies to the universal Church and therefore is not culturally or temporally reductionist. This is founded on St. Joan of Arc’s declaration to Charles VII that Jesus is both King of Heaven and King of France, “Gentle dauphin, I am Joan the Maid, and the King of Heaven commands that through me you be anointed and crowned in the city of Reims as a lieutenant of the King of Heaven who is King of France.”[1]

 The second is that this Form is referenced in model as being “in the center of the Immaculate Heart of Mary” which means that phenomenologically it is in the Blessed Virgin Mary’s noematic horizon of meaning and is therefore communicable in our union of hearts with her through what St. Edith Stein calls empathy and a shared mode of being.[2] This is founded on the tradition over the centuries of France as the Eldest Daughter of the Church and on King Louis XIII’s consecration of France to the Virgin Mary in 1638 which shadows the Form on earth. Our Lady’s many apparitions in France provide circumstantial evidence of her special love for this Kingdom as an ideal in the mind of God.

The third is that the model’s mystical kingdom reduces to an expression of the universal Kingdom of God “on earth as it is in Heaven” and therefore is not novelty. It is intended to be an expression of the universal Kingdom as revealed in the dogmas, doctrines, and magisterial teachings of the Catholic Church. This is founded on the author’s intention that the Kingdom as expressed in this model be reducible to the universal Kingdom according to the three main ways in which reduction has been understood since the 1920s; that the truths of the particular can be translated into the language of the universal; that the laws of the particular can be reduced to the laws of the universal; and that the observations explained by the particular can also be explained by the universal.[3] By these standards the Mystical Kingdom of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s Catholic and Royal France is reducible to the universal Kingdom of God proclaimed by the Catholic Church and therefore is neither novelty nor culturally reductionist.

The fullness of the spirituality, theology, and philosophy imbued by this Mystical Kingdom is explained below through the lens of Platonic ultra-realism and Catholic phenomenology. Our calling and faith-filled duty as the French Catholic Diaspora and the Royal Line of St. Mary Magdalene are summed up in the following schemes - St. Mary Magdalene as the gestalt embodiment of this expression and St. Joan with St. Thérèse as the point of phenomenological inquiry.

Edith Stein[4] tells us that knowledge is the mental grasping of an object, something that has not been grasped before.

KNOWLEDGE IS the mental [geistig] grasping [Erfassen] of an object. In the strictly literal sense it means grasping something that has not been grasped before. In an extended sense it includes an original [ursprünglich] possessing without beginning and a having-in-possession that goes back to a grasping. All knowledge is the act of a person.

Knowledge as newly grasping can in turn be taken in a broader and narrower sense. It has the broader sense when the perception [Wahrnehmung] stands for sense knowledge and the narrower sense when the object of the knowledge is said to be states of affairs or knowledge is said to appear first in judgment.[5]

Her own background in Phenomenology led her after conversion to reconcile Phenomenological philosophy with that of Thomist Scholasticism.[6] In that comparison, Stein presents Thomas as having no issue with the Phenomenological search for essence, that is, the methodical pursuit of constituent issues through our consciousness in order to construct our world, so long as this search begins with God and the gift of faith as its first principle. A search for essence that relies on our own subjective consciousness as our starting point (as in Husserl, Edith Stein’s philosophy mentor), we must reject, as she herself points out.

Both see the task of philosophy as gaining an understanding of the world that is as universal as possible and as firmly grounded as possible. Husserl seeks the “absolute” starting point in the immanence of consciousness; for Thomas it is faith.

Phenomenology wishes to establish itself as a science of essence and show how a world, or perhaps different possible worlds, can be constructed for a consciousness thanks to its mental functions. In this context “our” world would become understandable as one such possibility.

Thomas's concern was not for possible worlds, but for the most perfect possible picture of this world.

The unifying starting point whence all philosophical problems arise and whither they return again and again, is for Husserl the transcendentally purified consciousness and for Thomas God and his relation to creatures.[7]

The Dove and Rose draws the first half of her Platonic, ultra-real constitution from the principles above with the gift of faith as our starting point and Thomism as our guardrails in the conscious construction of our model. The Dove and Rose begins with St. Mary Magdalene at the foot of the Cross where she is transformed in royal essence for the Kingdom of God through the infinite merits of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection. She later is consecrated for her mission by Jesus at His resurrection, and, through ensuing persecution, ends up on the shores of Provence in what we know today as southern France.[8] Here, St. Mary Magdalene founded spiritually that to which we refer in The Dove and Rose as The House of New Bethany, the royal line of St. Mary Magdalene in the Mystical Kingdom of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s Catholic and Royal France, for which the later earthly Kingdom of Catholic France would be an analogous pedagogical type.[9]

We posit that through grace we are the heirs of the House of New Bethany, the French Catholic Diaspora, in the royal lineage of our foundress, St. Mary Magdalene. Transformed through sanctifying grace, our own essence and calling to the work of perpetuating Mystical France are nurtured and brought to maturity through the loving friendship and sisterly care of St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse of Lisieux, culminating out of that to which we refer as the Thérèsian “Divine Glance.”[10]

The second half of The Dove and Rose’s Platonic, ultra-real essence is that “Divine Glance” which is the combination of love, mercy, justice, and logos transforming us in Christ as new creations in the royal line of St. Mary Magdalene and therefore as members of the French Catholic Diaspora. St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse of Lisieux lead us along the Trail of the Dogmatic Creed to the Kingdom as proximate channels of grace through the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Love creates us anew through sanctifying grace gifted to us through the sacraments, notably through the Mass and the sacrament of confession, along with the sacrament of our vocation such as marriage or holy orders. Mercy bequeaths to us the actual graces of our calling in truth, beauty, and goodness wherein we experience a union of hearts with our saintly sisters and through the Immaculate Heart of Mary with Jesus as the light and substance of our relationships. Justice becomes an oblation to merciful love in the spirit of St. Thérèse coupled with a burning desire, i.e., Hope, for Heaven on earth in the spirit of St. Joan of Arc. In the spirit of Edith Stein, the phenomenological formation of our logos grounded in God, our faith, our understanding, and our intellect, opens the channels of grace further and fortifies our will to walk swiftly and boldly with our saintly sisters, who see in a single intuition the whole of our new essence in the mind of God.

But not everything which is beyond our knowledge naturally is altogether inaccessible to our mind in its original [ursprünglich] makeup. It is on the journey of this life for a time, but once reaching its goal, our heavenly fatherland, there it embraces everything that it can grasp (not, however, all depths of divine truth, which God alone grasps fully). Indeed it will see this everything in a single intuition.[11]

Love, Mercy, and Justice inform us as to the metaphysical Forms and Ideas that we seek to know. Logos goes about the task of phenomenologically interpreting these Forms and Ideas, drawing us closer to God through the knowledge of Truth. Understanding through grace is presupposed in the lived experience of coming to know. Thus, faith is presupposed in reason as St. Thomas demonstrates in the Summa. This combined metaphysical and phenomenological methodology is the Augustinian Platonic “I believe that I might understand” orientation.[12] We call this methodology the Science of The Dove and Rose.

The two halves together make a categorical whole by grace. Together they represent the Kingdom of God on earth as it is Heaven through the pedagogy of Traditional French Catholicism and the Golden Legend of St. Mary Magdalene in France.[13]The Mystical Kingdom of the Blessed Virgin Mary’s Catholic and Royal France is the Lily of Mary’s Immaculate Heart. As the French Catholic Diaspora, our mission is to follow in the footsteps of St. Mary Magdalene with St. Joan and St. Thérèse at our side in bringing about the Renaissance of Catholic and Royal France, the reign of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, and the universal inculturation of the social Kingship of Christ.

Through the first scheme, we recognize our heavenly royal lineage through Mary Magdalene. Through the second scheme, we fulfill our predestined roles in that royal lineage by bringing the Kingdom down into our hearts through the combined hearts of Joan and Thérèse. Through our newly formed Royal Hearts, we go forth to restore the social Kingship of Christ in the hearts of others and to spread the good news of God’s Kingdom to the world.

Edith Stein points out that it is possible for the temporal mind to know something that is timeless if that which is timeless has an analogous relationship with the temporal individual.

We ask first: is it possible for a mind that knows in a temporal process to know something that endures timelessly? For this an actual contact between knower and known is needed that is itself something temporal. This will only be possible if the thing enduring timelessly has a relation to the temporal; that is, either it is analogous to a species in individuo [a species in the individual] as we found in the units of experience, or it has an effect on something temporal. In no case can something that knows in temporal acts know anything timelessly enduring immediately in its timeless existence [Existenz].[14]

The Dove and Rose and the Mystical Kingdom of Catholic and Royal France represent that knowing of the timeless Form through the analogous temporal type. Here, we might enrich the logos of The Dove and Rose with the influence of the mystical which speaks to a similar dynamic and to our directed end within the “Divine Glance” that unites us to the Immaculate Heart of Mary and through her to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In the words of Fr. Jean-Pierre de Caussade:

The soul, enlightened by faith, judges of things in a very different way to those who, having only the standard of the senses by which to measure them, ignore the inestimable treasure they contain . . . the soul that recognizes the will of God in every smallest event, and also in those that are most distressing and direful, receives all with an equal joy, pleasure and respect.[15]

[1] Pernoud and Clin, Joan of Arc - Her Story, 23.

[2] Stein, Potency and Act - Studies Toward a Philosophy of Being, loc. 2064. “In either case, one spirit, by joining with another, comes to share in the other’s mode of being.”

[3] “Reductionism - A Peer Reviewed Academic Source.”

[4] The reader will see references to St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross attributed to her non-religious name, Edith Stein, as the latter is how she is known in the world of philosophy. It is in that context I usually refer to her writings. She is a saint to whom we owe great devotion.

[5] Stein, Knowledge and Faith (The Collected Works of Edith Stein, Vol. 8), loc. 1396.

[6] Stein, locs. 368–1378.

[7] Stein, loc. 1378.

[8] Lacordaire, OP, The Life of St. Mary Magdalene.

[9] The phenomenological gestalt of the House of New Bethany through the royal line of St. Mary Magdalene as the universal eidetic principle of St. Mary Magdalene in Provence is posited speculatively and indirectly by this author through the inspiration of Lacordaire, OP, The Life of St. Mary Magdalene and McClosky, The Life of St. Mary Magdalene - The Life Story of St. Mary Magdalene the First Apostle and Apostle to the Apostles as Theological Biography.

[10] Thérèse, “St. Thérèse’s Oblation to Merciful Love.”

[11] Stein, Knowledge and Faith (The Collected Works of Edith Stein, Vol. 8), loc. 510.

[12] Wikipedia, “Credo Ut Intelligam.”

[13] Lacordaire, OP, The Life of St. Mary Magdalene.

[14] Stein, Knowledge and Faith (The Collected Works of Edith Stein, Vol. 8), loc. 1459.

[15] de Caussade SJ, Abandonment to Divine Providence, 29.