The Memorial (1910)

The material is distributed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. From Mariano Tomatis.

With many thanks for Mariano in giving me permission to reproduce his excellent researches!

In his memorial Bérenger Saunière reconstructs in detail the works of recent years:

I have built and furnished, for a few years now, in Rennes-le-Château where I am currently in retirement a small and very comfortable house that I had initially designed for myself, wishing to spend my last days at my old parish, and later to replace the presbytery I lived in, being also, like everyone else, threatened with seizure by the government; finally I thought that I would like to offer this house – once finished – to Monsignor Bishop of Carcassonne, along with all its dépendances, to be used as a retreat house for elderly and sick priests, place where these poor old people would not have missed anything: a chapel for mass, a library, a reading room, various gardens, terraces, a veranda, beautiful landscapes, etc. Yes, I repeat that nothing would have been missing from them, not even a place specially reserved in the cemetery to welcome them after death... I built all these different buildings that I raised with my income, my earnings and my savings, but the ecclesiastical authority insinuates, suspects and seems to accuse me of having raised them not thanks to the donations received and my savings but through fees of never celebrated masses with which I would have enriched myself.

The priest has come to the point: the accusation by the Bishop is precise, and concerns precisely the illegal enrichment through the sale of never celebrated masses; the memorial continues with a sarcastic astonishment:

You have to be crazy to think about such a thing. But how? Where I could have earned with the sale of masses the 140/150 thousand francs necessary to pay for all these works, and from this amount I excluded the excavation and labour, etc. that I did personally. You really have to be crazy to think so. 

The origin of money is explained as follows by Saunière:

I put my church in order; I have adorned it, furnished it, decorated it. I repaired the presbytery, built my house and its outbuildings; I furnished it not with the money from the sale of uncerved masses, but with my savings of 30 years of ministry, with the offerings, alms, with donations made by people whose names - apart from a few exceptions - cannot be made. To disclose these names would mean putting discord in some families, causing unrest in others. Some ladies have made donations to me secretly from their husbands or their children, other elderly have made it secretly from their heirs, etc. Not only am I not allowed to mention those names: it is even formally forbidden to me. It would be unforgivable if I violated this ban. [...] It is enough for you to know that the money that was given to me by these people was entrusted to me unconditionally and in a personal capacity. I was free, as a result, to make use of it as I wanted and to spend it as I intended. 

The technique is clear: being required to keep the names of the donors secret, Saunière has an excellent loophole to avoid describing in detail the origin of each of the sums received over the years. In any case, the priest claims that he is unable to provide any summary document on the expenses incurred:

I do not have any record of accounts and expenses, no note of the work carried out, no piece of support if not some sporadic receipts which, however, would be of no use. As for the register on which I recorded the masses at the beginning of my ministry, I actually had a small notebook that I destroyed and burned once I finished and since then I have used nothing but a flying note kept from time to time between personal notes. Whenever the slip was full, I would get rid of it to replace it with another one.

However, Saunière provides a list of priests to whom he would transfer the fees of the masses when he was unable to celebrate them:

As for the honors of the masses that I had in my hands, both received by the diocese and from outside, after celebrating all the ones I could celebrate during the current year, I had them celebrated by some confreres and priests who had not reached the number and in doing so I conformed to a way of doing things widespread everywhere. Of these masses still to be celebrated, I entrusted them to my brother - when he resided in Montazels – to Don Tisseyre, old parish priest of Serres and to his predecessor Don Straband  to Don Gabelle old curate of Arques to Don Cassignac old parish priest of Bécède retired in Limoux – to don Raynaud old parish priest of Fa, and to others from the diocese or from neighbouring dioceses and whose names I do not remember. I also entrusted some of them to the Lazarist father Ferrafiat of Notre Dame de Marceille so that he would in turn distribute them to the priests of whom he was director. I have often donated, and continued to donate until recently, to three exiled religious in Spain: Don Angelot, Dogat and Crabier, who visited me every year, their last visit was in April [1910].

The "detail" that the priest omits is the fact that all the religious mentioned have died and cannot in any way confirm or deny his testimony. The memorial closes with a list of revenue in the amount of 71,600 francs:

List of some people who have donated causal money from the funds used for various jobs, with the corresponding sums of money.

It is useless to ask me for other names of people who have not authorized me to disclose them. If in the following, as I have already told Monsignor, I can make names, I will not fail to report them.

1. It will be interesting to compare this first partial report with a more complete one that you will provide later, for an amount of 193,150 francs.₁. The entire memorial cited here is reproduced in Claire Corbu, Antoine Captier, L'héritage de l'Abbé Saunière, Bélisane, Nizza 1995, pp. 193-200.