Holy Blood, Holy Grail (31 page)

Not long after the publication of this letter, Lionel Burrus was killed in a car accident which claimed six other victims as well. Shortly

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before his death, however, his letter elicited a response even more curious and provocative than that which he himself had written. This response was published as a privately printed pamphlet under the name of S. Roux.e

In certain respects S. Roux’s text would appear to echo the original attack on Schidlof which prompted M. Burrus’s letter. It also chastises M. Burrus for being young, over-zealous, irresponsible and prone to talk too much.

But while seeming to condemn M. Burrus’s position, not only does S.

Roux’s pamphlet confirm his facts, but it actually elaborates on them.

Leo

Schidlof, S. Roux affirms, was a dignitary of the Swiss Grande Loge Alpina the Masonic lodge whose imprint appeared on certain of the “Prieure documents’. According to S.

Roux, Schidlof ‘did not conceal his sentiments of friendship for the Eastern Bloc’.” As for M.

Burrus’s statements about the Church, S. Roux continues:

one cannot say that the Church is ignorant of the line of the Razes, but it must be remembered that all its descendants, since Dagobert, have been secret agitators against both the royal line of France and against the

Church and that they have been the source of all heresies. The return of a Merovingian descendant to power would entail for France the proclamation of a popular monarchy allied to the USSR, and the triumph of Freemasonry in short, the disappearance of religious freedom.”

If all of this sounds rather extraordinary, the concluding statements of S. Roux’s pamphlet are even more so:

As for the question of Merovingian propaganda in France, everyone knows that the publicity of Antar Petrol, with a Merovingian king holding a Lily and a Circle, is a popular appeal in favour of returning the Merovingians to power. And one cannot but wonder what Lobineau was preparing at the time of his decease in Vienna, on the eve of profound changes in Germany. Is it not also true that Lobineau prepared in Austria a future reciprocal accord with

France? Was not this the basis of the Franco-Russian accord?”

Not surprisingly we were utterly bewildered, wondering what the devil S. Roux was talking about; if anything, he appeared to have outdone M.

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Burrus in nonsense. Like the bulletin M. Burrus had attacked, S. Roux links together political objectives as apparently diverse and discordant as Soviet hegemony and popular monarchy. He goes further than M. Burrus by declaring that “everyone knows’ the emblem of a petrol company to be a subtle form of propaganda for an unknown and apparently ludicrous cause. He hints at sweeping changes in France, Germany and Austria as if these changes were already ‘on the cards’, if not indeed faits accomplis. And he speaks of a mysterious “Franco-Russian’ accord as if this accord were a matter of public knowledge.

On first reading S. Roux’s pamphlet appeared to make no sense whatever. A closer scrutiny convinced us that it was, in fact, another ingenious “Prieure document’deliberately calculated to mystify, to confuse, to tease, to sow hints of something portentous and monumental. In any case it offered, in its wildly eccentric way, an intimation of the magnitude of the issues involved. If S. Roux was correct the subject of our inquiry was not confined to the activities of some elusive but innocuous latter-day chivalric order. If S.

Roux was correct the subject of our inquiry pertained in some way to the upper echelons of high-level international politics.

The Catholic Traditionalists

In 1977 a new and particularly significant “Prieure document’ appeared a six-page pamphlet entitled Le Cercle d’Ulysse written by one jean Delaude.

In the course of his text the writer addresses himself explicitly to the

Prieure de Sion. And although he rehashes much older material, he also furnishes certain new details about the Order:

In March 1177 Baudouin was compelled, at Saint Leonard d’Acre, to negotiate and prepare the constitution of the Order of the Temple, under the directives of the Prieure de Sion. In 1118 the Order of the Temple was then established by Hugues de Payen. From 1118 to 1188 the Prieure de Sion and the Order of the Temple shared the same Grand Masters. Since the separation of the two institutions in 1188, the

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Prieure de Sion had counted twenty-seven Grand Masters to the present day. The most recent were:

Charles Nodierfrom 1801 to 1844

Victor Hugo from 1844 to 1885

Claude Debussyfrom 1885 to 1918

Jean Cocteau from 1918 to 1963

and from 1963 until the advent of the new order, the Abbe Ducaud-Bourget.

For what is the Pieure de Sion preparing? I do not know, but it represents a power capable of confronting the Vatican in the days to come. Monsignor

Lefebvre is a most active and redoubtable member, capable of saying:

“You make me Pope and I will make you King. “z

There are two important new fragments of information in this extract.

One is the alleged affiliation with the Prieure de Sion of Archbishop Marcel

Lefebvre. Monsignor Lefebvre, of course, represents the extreme conservative wing of the Roman Catholic Church. He was vociferously outspoken against Pope Paul VI, whom he flagrantly and flamboyantly defied.

In 1976 and 1977, in fact, he was explicitly threatened with excommunication; and his brazen indifference to this threat nearly precipitated a full-scale ecclesiastical schism. But how could we reconcile a militant ‘hard-line’ Catholic like Monsignor Lefebvre with a movement and an Order that was Hermetic, if not downright heretical, in orientation?

There seemed to be no explanation for this contradiction: unless Monsignor

Lefebvre was a modern-day representative of the nineteenth-century Freemasonry associated with the Hieron du Val d’Or the “Christian, aristocratic and Hermetic Freemasonry’ which presumed to regard itself as more Catholic than the pope.

The second major point in the extract quoted above is, of course, the identification of the Prieure de Sion’s Grand Master at that time as Abbe

Ducaud-Bourget. Francois Ducaud-Bourget was born in 1897 and trained for the priesthood at predictably enough the Seminary of Saint Sulpice.

He is thus likely to have known many of the Modernists there at the time and, quite possibly, Emile Hoffet. Subsequently he was Conventual Chaplain of the Sovereign Order of Malta. For his activities during

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the Second World War he received the Resistance Medal and the Croix de Guerre.

Today he is recognised as a distinguished man of letters a member of the

Academie Francaise, a biographer of important French Catholic writers like

Paul Claudel and Francois Mauriac, and a highly esteemed poet in his own right.

Like Monsignor Lefebvre the Abbe Ducaud-Bourget assumed a stance of militant opposition to Pope Paul V1. Like Monsignor Lefebvre he is an adherent of the Tridentine Mass. Like Monsignor Lefebvre he has proclaimed himself a “traditionalist’, adamantly opposed to ecclesiastical reform or any attempt to “modernise’ Roman Catholicism.

On May 22nd, 1976 he was forbidden to administer confession or absolution and, like Monsignor

Lefebvre, he boldly defied the interdict imposed on him by his superiors.

On February 27th, 1977 he led a thousand Catholic traditionalists in their occupation of the Church of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet in Paris.

If Marcel Lefebvre and Francois Ducaud-Bourget appear to be

‘right-wing’ theologically, they would seem to be equally so politically. Before the

Second World War, Monsignor Lefebvre was associated with Action Franqaise the extreme right of French politics at the time, which shared certain attitudes in common with National Socialism in Germany. More recently the “rebel archbishop’ attracted considerable notoriety by warmly endorsing the military regime in Argentina. When questioned on this position, he replied that he had made a mistake. He had not meant Argentina, he said, but Chile!

Francois Ducaud-Bourget would not appear to be quite so extreme; and his medals, at any rate, attest to patriotic anti-German activity during the war. Nevertheless he has expressed a high regard for Mussolini, and the hope that France would “recover its sense of values under the guidance of a new Napoleon’ .”3

Our first suspicion was that Marcel Lefebvre and Frani~ois

Ducaud-Bourget were not, in fact, affiliated with the Prieure de Sion at all, but that someone had deliberately attempted to embarrass them by aligning them with the very forces they would, in theory, most vigorously oppose. And yet according to the statutes we had obtained

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from the French police, the subtitle of the Prieure de Sion was Chevalerie d’Institutions et Regles Catholiques; d’Union

Independante et Traditionaliste. An institution with such a name might very well accommodate individuals like Marcel Lefebvre and Franpois Ducaud Bourget.

There seemed to us a second possible explanation a far-fetched explanation admittedly, but one that would at least account for the contradiction confronting us. Perhaps Marcel Lefebvre and Franqois Ducaud-Bourget were not what they appeared to be. Perhaps they were something else.

Perhaps, in actuality, they were agents provocateurs whose objective was systematically to create turmoil, sow dissent, foment an incipient schism that threatened Pope Paul’s pontificate. Such tactics would be in keeping with the secret societies described by Charles Nodier, as well as with the Protocols of the Elders of Sion. And a number of recent commentators -journalists as well as ecclesiastical authorities have declared Archbishop Lefebvre to be working for, or manipulated by, someone else.”

Far-fetched though our hypothesis might be, there was a coherent logic underlying it. If Pope Paul were regarded as ‘the enemy’, and one wished to force him into a more liberal position, how would one go about it? Not by agitating from a liberal point of view. That would only have entrenched the pope more firmly in his conservatism. But what if one publicly adopted a position even more rabidly conservative than Paul’s? Would this not, despite his wishes to the contrary, force him into an increasingly liberal position? And that, certainly is what Archbishop Lefebvre and his colleagues accomplished the unprecedented feat of casting the pope as a liberal.

Whether our conclusions were valid or not, it seemed clear that Archbishop

Lefebvre, like so many other individuals in our investigation, was privy to some momentous and explosive secret. In 1976, for example, his excommunication seemed imminent. The press, indeed, was expecting it any day, for Pope Paul, confronted by brazen and repeated defiance, seemed to have no alternative. And yet, at the very last minute, the pope backed down. It is still unclear precisely why he did so: but the following excerpt from the Guardian, dated August 30th, 1976, suggests a clue:

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The Archbishop’s team of priests in England .. . believe that their leader still has a powerful ecclesiastical weapon to use in his dispute with the Vatican. No one will give any hint of its nature, but Father Peter

Morgan, the group’s leader .. . describes it as being something

“earth-shaking’.”5

What kind of “earth-shaking’ matter or ‘secret weapon’ could thus intimidate the Vatican? What kind of Damoclean sword, invisible to the world at large, could have been held over the pontiff’s head? Whatever it was, it certainly seems to have proved effective. It seems, in fact, to have rendered the archbishop wholly immune to punitive action from Rome. As

Jean Delaude wrote, Marcel Lefebvre did indeed seem to ‘represent a power capable of confronting the Vatican’ head-on, if necessary.

But to whom did he or will he allegedly say: “You make me Pope and I will make you King’?

The Convent of 1981 and Cocteau’s Statutes

More recently, some of the issues surrounding Francois Ducaud-Bourget seem to have been clarified. This clarification has resulted from a sudden glare of publicity which the Prieure de Sion, during late 1980 and early 1981, has received in France. This publicity has made it something of a household name.

In August 1980 the popular magazine Bonne Soiree a kind of amalgam between a British Sunday supplement and the American TV Guide published a two-part feature on the mystery of Rennes-leChateau and the Prieure de

Sion. In this feature both Marcel Lefebvre and Francois Ducaud-Bourget are explicitly linked with Sion. Both are said to have paid a special visit fairly recently to one of Sion’s sacred sites, the village of Sainte-Colombe in Nevers, where the Plantard domain of Chateau Barberie was situated before its destruction by Cardinal Mazarin in 1659.

By this time we ourselves had established both telephone and postal contact with the Abbe DucaudBourget. He proved courteous enough. But his answers to most of our questions were vague, if not evasive; and,

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not surprisingly, he disavowed all affiliation with the Prieure de Sion. This disavowal was reiterated in a letter which, shortly thereafter, he addressed to Bonne Soiree.

On January 22nd, 1981, a short article appeared in the French press,”s of which it is worth quoting the greater part:

A veritable secret society of 121 dignitaries, the Prieure de Sion, founded by Godfroi de Bouillon in Jerusalem in 1099, has numbered among its Grand

Masters Leonardo da Vinci, Victor Hugo and Jean Cocteau. This Order convened its Convent at Blois on 17 January, 1981 (the previous Convent dating from 5 June 1956, in Paris).

As a result of this recent Convent at Blois, Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair was elected Grand Master of the Order by 83 out of 92 votes on the third ballot.

This choice of Grand Master marks a decisive step in the evolution of the

Order’s conception and spirit in relation to the world; for the 121

dignitaries of the Prieure de Sion are all eminences grises of high finance and of international political or philosophical societies; and