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A  Man of  Prayer

Divine Designs

Through providential events, God brings together those He has chosen to fulfill a plan of love. The Lady of All Peoples would be the link between this author – until then reserved for an intellectual and aristocratic elite - and her Work, the Army of Mary, inviting him, along with those who are little or lowly, to become a privileged witness of it. A short time after the Army of Mary was founded on August 28, 1971, Raoul was informed of this Work.

 

 

The Army of Mary

 

In December 1971, Raoul received mail from Quebec containing the first issue of a review entitled The Army of Mary, accompanied by a letter signed by Marie-Paule Giguère, the foundress of the Army of Mary. In a few words, Marie-Paule explained what this Work was and gave a few specific details with regard to the Lady of All Peoples. 


Raoul’s openness of mind and his perspicacity were astonishing. He immediately perceived the need for this divine Work in this time when the Church was in the throes of the most perilous torment in its history.

 

 

First Meeting with Marie-Paule

 

Two years later, in 1973, he met Marie-Paule who had gone to Paris with Father Philippe Roy, her mother, Laura Bégin, and Mrs. Rose Dessureault, the godmother of the Army of Mary. At that time, Marie-Paule informed Raoul that he would one day be associated with the Army of Mary in a special way. Obviously, Raoul could not understand how that would come about.


And yet, events would follow one another and all lead in that direction. Thus, his wife Suzanne died on February 26, 1976, after a long and painful illness. Now that Raoul was free, he offered his services to the Army of Mary and, the following May 13, he began, with joy and emotion, the reading of the volumes of Life of Love, the unique nature and mystery of which he grasped.

 

 

Conferences

 

The following year, the directors of the Army of Mary suggested that he come and spend a few months in Quebec and he accepted the invitation. Thus, it was under the auspices of the Army of Mary that he began a lecture tour throughout Canada and in Connecticut in the United States, inviting his listeners to be attentive to the signs of the times.

 

During his stay, Raoul participated in the implanting of the Militia of Jesus Christ in Canada. Thanks to the Army of Mary, this latter would spread very quickly.

 

However, Raoul’s contribution to the Work would go much further than that. Through his knowledge, he came up with notions that have permitted us to understand what the Co-Redemption really is. At the end of the 1970s, during which time Marie-Paule ascended in an impressive manner the different worlds of the Total Earth, the understanding Raoul had of this allowed him to support her by explaining to her what she was experiencing. As for Marie-Paule, she confirmed, through her experience, that Raoul’s inspiration was authentic.

On March 25, 1977, he received the blessing of the Sons and Daughters of Mary with a special formula, so that he might become “the greatest theologian of all times”. The holy picture that accompanied the blessing was that of Our Lady of the Cape, crowned Queen of the most holy rosary.

 

 

Definite Move to Quebec

After two other stays in Quebec, Raoul came to settle there definitively in December 1979, moving into a suite on the ground floor of a building across the street from the International Center of the Army of Mary in Quebec City. On a smaller scale, he reproduced the interior of his lodgings in Paris: the books, the works of art, the paintings he himself had made with dried seaweed or butterfly wings. He did not have everything, but the essential things were there. Even the faithful female parrot was there, it having witnessed the writing of so many impressive works.

 

 

Editor-in-Chief  and Work as an Author

 

For the next three years, Raoul was the editor-in-chief of L’Étoile, the Work’s paper that followed the paper Marie. L’Étoile was the paper of the signs of the times, all the signs to which the Council and especially Pope John Paul II asked that we pay much attention.


Raoul also continued his work as a writer: Sainte Catherine de Sienne (1980), Le Secret de la Salette (1981), a new edition, revised and augmented of La Dame de Tous les Peuples (1982), a book in which he opened the minds of readers to an understanding of the Lady’s messages, L’Apocalypse, volume 1 (1984) in which he revealed, chapter by chapter and verse by verse, the hidden meaning of this prophetic work that closes Holy Scripture. This would be followed by volumes 2 and 3.

 

 

L’Homme Total dans la Terre Totale

In 1985, he published what many have considered to be his masterpiece, L’Homme Total dans la Terre Totale [the Total Man on the Total Earth]. He gave a copy of it to the Holy Father during a papal audience in December of that same year.


Though in appearance he was dignified and serious, not to say severe, Raoul also liked to laugh and he was often the target of Father Philippe Roy’s teasing. In fact, there was a bond of sincere friendship between these two men who took their meals together at the International Center. Raoul, for his part, because of his childlike simplicity, was able to laugh at his own distractions...

 

 

A Son of Mary

 

Open to the Marian Work which is the Army of Mary, Raoul’s soul was also open to the Community which issued from it. Nevertheless, it was to everyone’s great surprise that Raoul took the habit of the Sons of Mary on October 15, 1987, on the feast of Saint Teresa of Avila.


Later, to one of his confreres, he explained the reason for his gesture in these terms: “I understood that I had to enter into Community in order for Raoul to disappear.” However, that which seems so simple to recount must not have been so easy to live for this man who was used to giving orders, and sometimes more energetically than was required...

 

 

Interior Reform

 

But Raoul had changed; he had worked at his interior reform. Having been accustomed to the honors of this world, he then became a Brother, similar in all respects to the others; having been used to the pleasures of good eating in high society, he was easily content with the more modest meals served within the Community; having been used to imposing his tastes and his opinions, he had become like a little child. His days were filled with witty remarks, good humor and the joy to be found in little things. At the end of his life, the Lord even stripped him of his intellectual faculties. On days when he was more lucid, it was painful for him to realize this, and sometimes he could not hold back the tears.

 

 

Final Moments

 

Hospitalized on December 16, 1996, Raoul passed away peacefully on January 8  1997. God finally manifested Himself to His faithful servant who had made Him known so well through his lectures and writings.

 

 

Stirring Homages

An author and playwright honored in France in the 1960s and 1970s, Raoul Auclair had progressively slipped into oblivion, dedicating himself to the Work of the Army of Mary, so scorned and decried. But the Work did not forget him and, on three occasions, Marie-Paule rendered him a vibrant homage.

 

 

Homage to Raoul Auclair - 1984

 

In 1984, during a pilgrimage the Army of Mary made to Europe in honor of the Apocalypse, Marie-Paule presented him, in Lourdes, with a reproduction of the Lamb of the Apocalypse done in enamel on a copper base, and she paid him this homage:  

 

    But for us of the Army of Mary, it is to Mary Immaculate in particular that our gratitude rises for the invaluable contribution Raoul has made to our Work since his arrival on Canadian soil. He has made it possible for us to define, in the context and light of eschatology, the role the Army of Mary is called to play in this end of the times, in the wake of the Co-Redemptrix, the “One Sent” by the Father and the Son to drive out Satan and to announce the Holy Spirit.


    With Raoul we have lived unforgettable hours. So many young and not so young, have understood, after reading his writings, the grandeur, at once sublime and tragic, of the time through which we are passing, this turning point between two worlds, one already finished and the other yet to be revealed. Motivated by this new faith, they have come back to the path of the Church and the practice of religion. In the steps of him who has thus opened to them the way, they have set out to conquer this new world whose nature can already be discerned and whose first beginnings have already been seen.

 

In that case, how can our sentiments of gratitude not be won over to you, dear Raoul? In fact, you know that they have been for a long time. Thus, it is with a deep joy that the Knights of Mary associate themselves to the offering of this humble gift of the official emblem of the “Pilgrimage of the Apocalypse”, done in enamel on a copper base, presented to the “witness of the Apocalypse” which you are and to whom we reiterate our most sincere tribute as well as the assurance of our prayers.

 

 

Homage to Raoul Auclair - 1987

Three years later, during the pilgrimage to Italy in honor of the Holy Cross, Raoul received the medal of literary merit for his eschatological and Marian works.

 

 

The first medal to be discerned will be that of merit in the literary field. It is for the Marian and eschatological works of Raoul Auclair, which we appreciate all the more because they are based on the Bible itself. We will give Raoul the medal of the Virgin of the Apocalypse which is that of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Our congratulations, Raoul, and our gratitude for your writings.

 

 

Homage to Raoul Auclair - 1994

 

Finally, on May 31, 1994, a last homage was rendered him in the context of a pilgrimage to Austria:

 

In closing, may I be permitted to remind you that I do nothing in the Work that is not commanded me. More than a month ago I was “asked” to prepare a homage to Raoul Auclair for the pilgrimage. This request was repeated to me five times. I did not refuse it, but was awaiting details in order to act. This homage ought to be a remembrance of the eschatological and Marian work accomplished by this man of great literary ability. Having grasped the mysterious message of “Life of Love”, he did not hesitate to leave Paris, his friends, his great renown as a writer (an international renown, if you please), in the lofty aristocratic places in which he evolved, in order to come and live in New France, with us little ones, sublime moments as he came to know the celestial interventions and their realization.

It was asked of me that this homage be rendered Raoul at the moment of the banquet, the day of the ordinations. Only when I was carrying out this request from Heaven, at the moment I was finishing this homage, did I realize that the divine demand for the day of the banquet would make it May 31, a much-favored date of the Lady of All Peoples, one mentioned numerous times in her messages. (1.40) May you be blessed, Raoul, and may Mary, Mother and Lady of All Peoples, welcome you into her paradise and reward you for so much work accomplished for her with love. And here, as a souvenir of this great day, is the statue which so well represents her and which will be presented to you by Father Victor Rizzi. (2:01)

 

It was with emotion that Brother Raoul received this homage, desired and requested by God who, in this way, apposed a divine seal upon his work and his life.

 

 

“The Greatest Theologian of All Times”

 

Today, the Work continues to perpetuate the memory of this man of great ability who was Raoul Auclair, and, among other things, it has reconstituted his apartment in Quebec City in a little museum at Lac-Etchemin, to be found in the basement of Spiri-Maria.

 

Raoul departed without having been able to finish the fourth and last volume of L’Apocalypse, even though he had had a feeling for such a long time and had already explained so often and so much that the content of Saint John’s book referred to our present era. In fact, already in July 1960, he had written to a lady friend: “It will be necessary to be strong during the time of fulfillment for those who are born today. They will experience times of seduction; they will have to resist something that will be almost irresistible... Now, there is no longer any other alternative. We must make saints of the children with a view to the days of the great Passage.

 

“Those who will be strong because they will be pure, will live through some terrible and yet wonderful times, the bliss they will enjoy, even here below, will be in the measure of the dangers that will assail them and over which they will be victorious only through the most perfect charity and the most total surrender to God, or rather, to Mary, who was offered by God to men as the ultimate recourse in the darkness that will cover the earth.”


Raoul delivered himself over to Mary with a childlike love and he entered into her mysteries with a joyous faith. He departed, open to the Light in which everything lives anew, leaving behind him an impressive literary work. Future generations will understand that Raoul “fulfilled” perfectly the blessing that promised to make of him “the greatest theologian of all times”!

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