Europe is going mad. Mad with scandals. Mad with egoism. Mad with revolt against Heaven. Mad with blood. […] Corrupt in its morality, debased in its faith, puffed up with individualism, fanaticism, and pride, having lost touch with charity, with the love of God and man, anaemic, modern Europe is waiting for the final blow, the last convulsions, the last corpses. The hour is approaching when all accounts will be settled. The hour is also coming when to save the world it will need a handful of heros and saints who will carry out the Reconquest. […]
A country soon gets back on its feet after financial set-backs. It is not too hard for it to find a new political structure. It just calls for able technicians and a collective will to join forces. […] The real revolution is much more complicated, the one which puts right not the mechanism of the State, but the secret life of each soul. […]
It is only the quality and vibrancy of the soul which matters, the capacity for giving oneself unstintingly, its will to place an ideal above all other considerations in a spirit of total disinterest. Only faith counts, burning confidence, the complete absence of egoism and individualism, the striving of the whole being towards service, however lowly it is, wherever it may be, however it may be fulfilled, for a cause which transcends man, asks everything of man, and promises him nothing.
In a century where people only live for themselves, hundreds, thousands of men must no longer live for themselves, but for a collective ideal, and be prepared in advance to endure for its sake every sacrifice, every humiliation, every heroic act. […] I can hear in the night’s darkest hour crowds of people rising to their feet to protest their will and their faith. I see these thousands of men and women renewing their vow. How can one doubt that this heroism will bear fruit? It is these souls which will change the world.
[From Révolution des âmes [The Revolution of Souls] (Ĕditions de la France: Paris, 1938) 145-62]
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