– The poet of the End of the Times –

First Years Raoul was born on March 4, 1906, in Ambrault, France. He spent all his youth there with his good parents and his younger brother, Robert. On May 10, 1932, he married Suzanne Delacroix on May 10, 1932, in Saint-Pierre-de-Montrouge, Paris. They had no children. Beginning in 1941, Raoul was attached to the O.R.T.F. (Office de Radio-Télévision Française [the French radio and television network]), for which he wrote a number of plays, he himself directing their presentation. The fact was, Raoul employed the French language with a rare elegance and a unique literary style to which was added a certain poetical and mystical fervor.

Suzanne Delacroix

When he was about forty, Raoul began to write his first books: Le Livre des Cycles (1947), Le Crepuscule des Nations (1949), and Les Centuries de Nostradamus (1958). He revealed to the reader the meaning of history, in the light of prophecy; it was eschatology, the study of the last ends of man and the world. “Eschatology is a series of markers set up by God which the world must follow and which take it there where God, from all eternity, has destined it to go and to where He leads it,” without, for all that, “infringing on man’s single and extraordinary, marvelous and terrible privilege: his freedom” (Histoire et Prophétie, p. 9). All of Raoul’s thinking can be found condensed in those first writings, thinking that would ripen and mature over the years and would be developed in subsequent works.

The Lady of All Peoples
During this time he continued to gather material on everything concerning the Virgin. On February 19, 1966, at the Théâtre du Tertre in Paris, Raoul gave a conference devoted to Mary’s apparitions at Amsterdam. It was so successful that the conference was at once translated into a number of languages. This marked the opening of the world to the messages of the Lady of All Peoples.

The Lady of All Peoples

Marian and Eschatological Author 1967 seems to have marked an important stage in his career as a writer if one considers the series of works he published as of that date: Les Épiphanies de Marie (1967), which highlighted the eschatological character of the Virgin Mary’s great apparitions; a new French translation of the messages of the Lady of All Peoples (1967); Kerizinen (1968); La Prophétie des Papes (1969); La Fin des Temps (1973); Histoire et Prophétie (1973), a work honored by the French Academy of letters; Prophétie de Catherine Emmerich pour notre Temps (1974); Le Jour de Yahvé (1975); the republishing of a revised and larger edition of Centuries de Nostradamus (1975) and Mystère de l’Histoire (1977).

Raoul and the Army of Mary
Through providential events God brings together those whom He chooses to realize His plan of love. It would be the Lady of All Peoples who would establish the tie between this author – until then reserved to the intellectual and aristocratic elite – and her Work, the Army of Mary, of which she invited him, along with the little ones, to become a privileged witness.
A short time after the founding of the Army of Mary on August 28, 1971, Raoul became acquainted with the Work. His openness of mind and his perspicacity were astonishing: he already perceived the need for the Army of Mary in this time when the Church is in the throes of the most perilous torment of its history: “Never has a pope been so abandoned. And if he is thus abandoned it is because in him and upon him has come the hour of Abandonment, the agony of the Garden of Olives. For there where the Head – Jesus – has gone, the Members – the Church – are now going to go. So blessed be this Army of Mary which, in obedience to Mary, pledges itself to remain faithful to the pope. That is the great need of these times. But, alas, it is also the great rarity...” (Life of Love VIII, chap. 25, Raoul’s letter of December 24, 1971).
But Raoul was also the one whom the Lord had prepared to understand Life of Love, the reading of which he began on May 13, 1976.

At that date, Life of Love had not yet been published and only a few members of the Marian Group had had the privilege of reading it. Despite his spiritual and literary knowledge, Raoul bowed to the mystery he perceived in it: “So I read. And I asked myself: ‘Why you, wretched one – the sense of my wretchedness is only too real and all too often fetters me – yes, why, once again, have you been given the grace to be the direct eyewitness of the mystery of God at work in a privileged soul?’... Up until then I had seen in the Army of Mary a movement which is beautiful, good, useful, timely; one destined to be a counterweight of prayer to the enormous mass of the earth’s sin. And certainly it is also that, but in a dimension and as a necessity which are supernatural, which ‘Life of Love’ is presently revealing to me. ...
Addressing himself to the author of Life of Love [Marie-Paule], he wrote:“For this is what your ‘Life of Love’ is: a Configuration, and a Configuration in Mary, the first and the wholly Configured. Hence, those who will read you – and they will no longer be only the rare privileged souls of today – will see God’s seal, in prophetic signs, placed upon your woman’s life, bearing witness in time to the eternal designs. So if the Lord Jesus Christ imposed upon you the duty of writing your life, it is because He wishes to hold up this narrative, this example and this mystery, to all souls of good will” (Life of Love XII, chap. 42, Raoul’s letter of May 20, 1976).
After his wife’s death on February 26, 1976, Raoul was invited to undertake, the following year, a lecture tour in Canada and the United States, under the auspices of the Army of Mary.

The Blessing as a Son of Mary
In the Army of Mary, Marie-Paule’s first collaborators received a special blessing. During his stay, Raoul received, on March 25, 1977, the blessing as a Son of Mary: “May the Blessed Trinity and the Virgin Mary bless you and send down on you the fulness of grace so that you may become the greatest theologian of all times.”
He came back to Quebec City the following year, this time on a permanent basis, giving himself completely to the Army of Mary.

A Devoted Collaborator and a Well-Informed Speaker
First of all, this collaboration of his took concrete form in the articles he wrote for the paper, Marie, which succeeded the little review, L’Armée de Marie.
During this time, Raoul continued his talks throughout the province, always within the framework of Army of Mary ceremonies. His enlightening dissertations on the mystery of the Co-Redemption and of the mystical incarnation helped prepare the members for the reading of Life of Love.
On May 13, 1979, the first volume of the French-language edition of Life of Love appeared, for which Raoul wrote a preface expressing his thoughts, casting a marvelous light on the mystery in which this “Life of Love” is enveloped.

“A Great Theologian”
As of his first stay in this country, Raoul was occasionally invited to meet with Cardinal Maurice Roy who questioned him on his books, the Army of Mary and likewise on Marie-Paule’s mission.
The Cardinal held Raoul in high esteem, for he recognized the latter’s intellectual and spiritual worth. Twice, the Cardinal even spoke of Raoul as being a “great theologian”. In October 1980, the Cardinal spoke to a French Dominican Father who had come to preach a retreat to the Knights of Mary, and he told him, “The Army of Mary has its own theologian: Mr. Raoul Auclair.”
Some months later, in March 1981, Raoul was invited to another meeting with the Cardinal, at which Fathers Philippe Roy, Denis Laprise and Victor Rizzi were also present. At one moment during the discussion the Cardinal turned to Raoul and said, “And you, Mr. Auclair, you who are a theologian, what do you think?”
Finally, on the occasion of another visit Raoul made to him, the Cardinal said, with insistence, “Keep a careful watch, Mr. Auclair” – as if he were conferring on Raoul the authority to watch over the healthy development of the Army of Mary.

Editor-in-Chief of “L’Étoile”
From 1971 to 1976, the review, L’Armée de Marie, gave an intense spiritual formation to its members, placing the accent on personal interior reform. In 1976, the review gave way to the paper, Marie. In keeping with the evolution of the Army of Mary, which, through Raoul, in March 1977 became affiliated with the Paris Militia of Jesus Christ, the paper, Marie, in 1979 became L’Étoile, with Raoul as its editor-in-chief.
A faithful collaborator, he continued to give the members of the Army of Mary the benefit of his Marian knowledge, constantly increasing their awareness of Mary’s eschatological role in this end of the times

Editor of “Les Éditions Stella”
After his arrival in Quebec, Raoul published through “Les Éditions Stella” of which he was the editor, Sainte Catherine de Sienne (1980); Le Secret de la Salette (1981); Eschatologie de notre Temps (1982); La Dame de Tous les Peuples – Ouverture à l’intelligence des messages (1982 - a new revised and enlarged edition); L’Apocalypse (I) (1984); L’Apocalypse (II) (1985); L’Homme Total dans la Terre Totale (1985); L’Apocalypse (III) (1987); Tous ces mystères dans le Mystère de Marie (1987).

December 4, 1985 - Raoul gives a copy of his most recent book to the Pope : «L’Homme Total dans la Terre Totale».

“L’Homme Total dans la Terre Totale” In 1985, Raoul published what constitutes his masterpiece: L’Homme Total dans la Terre Totale [“The Total Man on The Total Earth”], which Séverin Batfroi, a brilliant French writer, describes as being the most extraordinary of his books: “Never, up to this time, has a like work of synthesis been so successfully accomplished.... ‘L’Homme Total dans la Terre Totale’ escapes any ‘philosophical system’ which imprisons thought in the arbitrary bonds of a sophistical and sophisticated dogmatism. Going back to the original purity of the sacred texts, Raoul Auclair undertakes a veritable task of exegesis, starting from the very sources of the universal mystery... As a matter of fact – and this cannot be denied –, we here find ourselves before a work whose very particular dimension is not altogether unrelated with the ‘prophetic phenomenon’... From being the poet he is, Raoul Auclair sometimes becomes the visionary and the theologian of a new advance of the faith...

“Through this present work, Raoul proves to us that the history of the universe and that of man are intimately linked, and that there is no other redemption than that, global, of the world, for which the human being is, at one and the same time, the revealer and the catalyst,...”

A Son of Mary in the Community
On October 13, 1987, Raoul confirmed his desire to become a Son of Mary religious. He had been prepared for it for a long time, and on the evening of October 15, the feast of Saint Teresa of Avila, he received the habit, desiring to keep the secret name of Père Marie-du-Rosaire [Father Mary of the Rosary], the name he had taken when he entered the Family of the Sons and Daughters of Mary. It was all in God’s plan: October 13 is the anniversary of the last apparition of Mary at Fatima when she said that she was Our Lady of the Rosary. Moreover, it will be remembered that between 1960 and 1980, Raoul had been Commander of the Rosary, in the Militia of Jesus Christ in France. He wrote so much about Mary, especially Our Lady of the Rosary.

Homages Paid to Raoul
A number of times, during all those years, Raoul’s exceptional work was highlighted in a special fashion. During a pilgrimage “in honor of the Apocalypse” to France and Italy organized, in 1984, by the Army of Mary, Raoul received a reproduction, in enamel on a copper base, of the official emblem of the pilgrimage: the Lamb of the Apocalypse.
Three years later, during the pilgrimage to Italy in honor of the Holy Cross, September 16 to 25, 1987, Raoul received the medal of literary merit for his eschatological and Marian works.
Finally, in 1994, Marie-Paule or Mother Paul-Marie, Foundress of the Community of the Sons and Daughters of Mary, paid a third public homage to Raoul in order to recall the work accomplished by “this man of great literary ability, who having grasped the mysterious message of ‘Life of Love’, did not hesitate to leave Paris, his friends, his great renown as a writer 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”(“The Kingdom”, no. 99, May-June 1994, pp. 10-11).

The Last Years
On April 18, 1992, at the age of eighty-six, Brother Raoul moved into the Center of the Immaculate where he was wrapped in the affection and the care of his confreres. His last days flowed by peacefully until December 26, 1996, when he was rushed to the Enfant-Jesus Hospital, Quebec City, following a serious malaise. Fourteen days later, at 4:25 p.m. on January 8, 1997, God called His servant back to Him. Raoul was ninety years and ten months old.

The Raoul Auclair Pavillon
The Spiri-Maria complex was inaugurated at Lac-Etchemin in the year 2000. It perpetuates the memory of three valuable collaborators of the Marian Work: Father Philippe Roy, Raoul Auclair and Mrs. Lucienne Poulin, each of whom has a Pavillon in his name that serves as a museum. The Raoul Auclair Pavillon gives us an opportunity to admire the refined taste of this writer who was also at times an artist. In it there are works of art and a part of the furniture he had in his apartment on 26th Street in Quebec City, including his desk and his library.

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A more complete biography, articles and testimonials concerning Raoul Auclair
were published in a special issue of Le Royaume, no. 115, February 1997.

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© 1998 - All rights reserved : PAVILLON RAOUL AUCLAIR INC., Quebec, Canada