This book is a work of prophecy. Like Jeremiah or Ezekiel under the Old Law, Roger-Thomas Calmel spoke and wrote as a priest who suffered to see God dishonoured and His people led astray. Those ancient prophets were charged by God to speak against false doctrine; to warn the people of God and their leaders to return to the fear of the Lord, in their worship and in their daily lives; and thus to prevent Israel from being dissolved into the nations round about. Father Calmel, simple priest of the New Law, likewise spoke out against what his sometime mentor, Jacques Maritain, had called 'immanent apostasy': the widespread dissolution, within the visible Church, of dogma, and the replacement of supernatural faith, hope, and charity by merely human simulacra.
Father Calmel's soul remains with us. It is present in his writings, standing on tiptoes, full of the Church's common doctrine and common prayer, stretching upward to grow in God's love. For him theology, liturgy, and the Dominican constitutions were not guides or regulations, but a source of inner nourishment. In our midst he fulfilled his task as a friar preacher, son of Saint Dominic, disciple of Saint Thomas, priest of Jesus Christ, and apostle of the Rosary.
He endures.
