Vision and Mission
Vision and Mission
Through a life of slavery to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the French Catholic Royal of the diasporic House of New Bethany receives a call to the teleology of the combined hearts of St. Thérèse of Lisieux and St. Joan of Arc. Through phenomenological reduction, we unite in holy friendship with the Royal French hearts of our saintly sisters to participate in their mission.
The Reduction
Royaume France reveals a transcendent kingdom of the French royal hearts of St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse of Lisieux. The reduction developed through the influence of the life of St. Joan of Arc, Thérèsian Carmelite spirituality, and the philosophical lens of St. Edith Stein. The kingdom’s purpose is Faith, Hope, and Love "on earth as it is in Heaven" through the majesty of French Catholic spirituality and True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Its pedagogical method is phenomenological devotion to the combined hearts and spirituality of St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse of Lisieux.
Mission
The Mission of Royaume France is to empathically project St. Joan and St. Thérèse’s intersubjective noetic map of meaning through every corner of our hearts. The resulting transformation of our being becomes the transcendent stairway to Magdalene's mystical mode of being as the gestalt of France in Heaven.1
Vision
The Vision of Royaume France is the combined hearts of St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse of Lisieux as a phenomenological prism through which the Holy Spirit reflects the syntax of Magdalene's heart, Our Lady’s Catholic and Royal France, throughout our being.
Method
The method of Royaume France is phenomenology guided by Catholic metaphysics. It is to “contemplate how we think” to better “see what we have already seen”2 through a single-minded phenomenological devotion to St. Joan of Arc and St. Thérèse of Lisieux within the context of the metaphysics of the Catholic Church, its sacred tradition, and magisterial teachings. Phenomenological devotion in this context means to receive, record, interpret, assert, and articulate what these saints give us faithfully and prayerfully. This method of discourse is our "journey" with the saints.
Goal
The goal of Royaume France is “descriptive fidelity” to what is given to us through this devotion "precisely as it is given, and within the limits of how it is given.”3
Outcome
The outcome we seek through Royaume France is a mystical friendship with St. Joan and St. Thérèse and a sharing in their abiding union with Jesus Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary.
See Stein, Knowledge and Faith (The Collected Works of Edith Stein, Vol. 8). Kindle location 1701 for the inspiration behind “the transcendent stairway to Magdalene’s mystical mode of being as the gestalt of France in Heaven.”
“A thread runs through all of Dionysius's writings that have come down to us. In the prologue of his commentary on Dionysius, Albert the Great summed it up in a quotation from Ecclesiastes: Ad locum unde {69} exeunt flumina revertuntur ut iterum fluant [the streams return to the place whence they have issued to again flow forth]. This flowing should be taken first as the order of being: every be-ing issues from God as from the First and returns to him again. Iterum fluere [flowing forth again] after reuniting implies not a separation but an inclining to what lies below in order to raise it up. Like the law of issue and return of which it forms part, hierarchy is not only an order of being but also an order of knowing.”
Detmer, Phenomenology Explained - From Experience to Insight. p. 18. “Its (phenomenology) aim is to help us to see more clearly what we have already seen…”
Ibid. p. 18. “One of the principal goals of phenomenology, then, is simply descriptive fidelity. The aim is to describe accurately what is given in experience precisely as it is given, and within the limits of how it is given.”