Among the lay faithful, principally among traditionalists, there is a sort of idolatry of priests that lacks any good sense. Going far beyond the due respect owed to their elevated mission, they consider priests as infallible and morally perfect.

Trying to correct this unbalanced position, we offer a text in which Our Lord himself speaks to the Servant of God Marie des Vallées, a 17^th century French mystic whose spiritual director was St. John Eudes, the apostle of the Devotion to the Hearts of Jesus and Mary.

The source of these words is the well-documented book La Vie Admirable et les Révélations de Marie des Vallees, written by Emile Dermenghem

She [Marie des Vallées] was afflicted by the disagreements that too often appear among the pious: "The envy, the jealousies and the divisions that reign in the cloisters are a stumbling block for the faithful." The mockery appeared to her as a great sin. Many of her visions are a very severe satire of the diverse defects of the religious.

About the heavy responsibility that weighs over ecclesiastics who are in charge of souls, Jesus told her:

"They will be judged more severely than others. Those who fall in their mission will be punished for the faults of all: that is, for those of the people [they directed] and for those of the nobles and the magistrates (or officials of justice). The nobles and the officials of justice will be punished for the faults of the people; the latter will be judged just for their own faults.

"Misfortunes are ready to fall upon the Church because there is more justice among soldiers than among priests, and of all states of life in the world, the priests are those who most populate Hell.

"The Bishops will have to answer for all their sheep in a prodigiously exact way."

Benefices are things very dangerous for salvation. It is necessary to carefully avoid accepting persons without vocations into religious orders. To accumulate benefices, to enrich oneself with the goods of the Church, which should not be used except for the poor and the strict necessities of worship and its servants, is one of the most abominable sins. To dispute about these goods and argue over them gives a terrible scandal.

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Emile Dermenghem, La Vie Admirable et les Révélations de Marie des Vallées,
Paris: Plon, 1926, pp. 136-138
Posted on February 5, 2022

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