Communiqué concerning the Lenten season 2025

Lac-Etchemin, March 3, 2025

Dear Members of the Lady’s Work,

It has already been almost three months since the Church of John solemnly introduced and celebrated in a dignified manner the new liturgy developed at the request of and in accordance with the indications of Marie-Paule.

Apart from a few reactions here and there from persons needing more time to be able to absorb its newness, it has been received very enthusiastically, to the point where many of you noticed what was like a new upsurge in their spiritual life. Thus, certain testimonials received are really impressive. In a few days, the Liturgy Bureau will hold its first meeting of evaluation to see what could be improved even more.

Today however, we are about to begin Lent, a period for which new Sunday readings had not been prepared in 2016. This time, thanks to the intense and generous work of Father Jean-Michel Bouchard and especially Father Leander Van Renterghem, it has been possible to prepare this period like all the others during the year (themes, prayers and readings).

For the penitential ritual of Ash Wednesday, nothing will be changed in relation to the tradition of the Church of John, and then everything will be as usual until Palm or Passion Sunday. However, this year, the memorial of Marie-Paule’s death on April 25, very closely follows the death of Jesus Christ on the 18th and His Resurrection on the 20th, Easter Sunday. As a result many of the readings during Lent will recall the Co-Redemption as much as the Redemption. We will live both simultaneously, uniting Jesus Christ and Marie-Paule “in the same faith, the same love and the same adoration”.

There will be a few small changes in the liturgy for Holy Week. They will be specified in another communiqué to be issued a few days before Palm Sunday.

For the time being, everything is being done to the best of each one’s abilities, but later, a few themes will certainly have to be adapted, some readings changed perhaps or placed at other times in the liturgical year. “Heaven had foreseen everything” was the title in the last issue of the review and the future will prove that this is absolutely true, even more so than we might think.

The future is before us, full of light, blazing, radiant with the incandescent Love the Divinity sets in its new intervention at the heart of the history of men with a view to the full coming of a Kingdom entirely “imbued with goodness, purity, grace and majesty”.

Marc-André I, Church King