About the St. Marcel Initiative
Welcome to the new website of the St. Marcel Initiative. We thank you for visiting and encourage you to take your time browsing through this new Internet endeavor. If you haven’t done so already, you might also wish to listen to a brief recorded message from Dr. David White that will give you a quick overview of the site and the Initiative.
The St. Marcel Initiative is a broad enterprise patronized by, and operated for the benefit of, His Excellency Bishop Richard Williamson. Its primary aim is to serve His Excellency’s vision, that in our historical circumstances, as he wrote in November 2012, God may possibly want “a loose network of independent pockets of Resistance, gathered around the Mass, freely contacting one another, but with no structure of false obedience such as served to sink the mainstream Church in the 1960’s.” If you agree with this assessment, or are at least intrigued by it, please keep browsing. This page should give you a sense of how the St. Marcel Initiative and its new website hope to serve as both a common port of call and a means of support for the “pockets of Resistance” that His Excellency envisions.
The St. Marcel Initiative is the flagship entity of BRN Associates, Inc., the parent company of the Initiative and of Marcel Editions, its publishing imprint. BRN is a public, non-profit corporation registered in Virginia and doing business in St. Louis. We are happy to be able to report that in September of this year we received our official tax-exempt certification from the IRS in the United States, which means that any state-side contributions to St. Marcel are fully tax-deductible. Do be sure for your own tax-reporting needs that you obtain from us a receipt for any contribution you might wish to make. We strive to provide them without any need for requests from contributors, but things do occasionally sip through the cracks. So don’t hesitate to contact us with a reminder.
Under BRN are the St. Marcel Initiative and Marcel Editions. The most important work of the Initiative is distributing and publishing Bishop Williamson’s Weekly Eleison Comments. Not only do we distribute the Bishop’s columns, but this new SMI website also makes every back-issue available with just a few clicks of a button. We encourage you to browse His Excellency’s multi-year weekly columns and avail yourself of the new site’s features to find the issues you are looking for.
The other highlight of the new site is the wide range of talks – conferences, sermons, doctrinal sessions, and literature seminars – that are available in all the standard formats. You can even download them immediately after going through the process of placing an order on the site, paying with your credit card, a U.S.-based bank account, or Pay-Pal. The collection of conferences on the site represents the combined efforts of His Excellency and Dr. White over several decades to bring to a wide audience a knowledge of the Catholic Faith and of the history and culture that it has inspired down the ages. We very much hope that you will take advantage of and enjoy the opportunity that this collection of conferences represents.
Other aspects of the new site will by now be obvious if you’ve been doing a bit of browsing. The donate button brings you to a page where you can make a contribution to t he Initiative either separately or as part of any other purchases you may be making. You may also, if you wish, set up a recurring automatic contribution, at a set amount and frequency, and you may also set the recurring contribution to continue indefinitely or stop at a time of your choosing. Please do take advantage of the convenience and near total customization that our custom donation feature offers in the event you would like to contribute.
The “events” and “information” aspects of the site should be self-explanatory. The information in the former category is being updated rather quickly our communications and organization improves with the advent (finally!) of the new site. We hope that if you check back from time to time there will be more to see.
Finally, a word about Marcel Editions. This is the publishing house of the Initiative. God willing it will be rather busy next year. Newly edited editions of His Excellency’s Rector’s Letters are planned, along with other new editions, reprints, and other new books, including, we hope, Dr. White’s in-progress biography of His Excellency.
If you’ve read this far, we thank you for your interest in the St. Marcel Initiative and its new website. We also remain grateful to Our Lord and His Blessed Mother and to our benefactors, without whose help it would neither exist nor long survive. Come back to visit the site frequently, as, God willing, we’ll be adding new features and new talks as time, talent, and Providence permit.