MANIFESTO OF HRH SIXTUS HENRY OF BOURBON
On such date as today’s, my father, in the name of my great-uncle King Alphonse Charles, gave the order for the Requeté to join in the National Uprising. It is now my duty to address you again and call you all to close ranks around our Traditionalist Communion, providential means that has secured and will continue to safeguard the continuity and restoration of the Spains.
In my Manifesto on the feast of Saint James the Apostle, 1981, I said: "Destiny has placed in my hands the clean and immaculate banner of our Tradition. Faithful to this banner I shall live in the fulfilment of the high mission with which Divine Providence has entrusted me, with the firm promise that no interest or personal inclination will ever separate me from the dedication I owe to Spain and Carlism, as the representative and standard-bearer of the Traditionalist Communion." Much has happened since then; not with indifference on my part, even if at times I have chosen to remain silent and intervene rather by personal advice or tacit consent.
After my brother Charles Hugo’s defection, for years I, like yourselves, have hoped that my nephews, his sons Charles Xavier and James would raise the banner of which I have been trustee since the death of my father, our much mourned King Xavier. I have not lost hope. But this situation of Regency cannot and must not go on forever. May I remind my nephews and you all about the foundations of Spanish legitimacy, as my great-uncle King Alphonse Charles defined them in his Decree instituting the Regency in the person of my father:
"1st. The Roman Catholic and Apostolic Religion, with the unity and legal consequences with which it was traditionally loved and served in our realms;
2nd. The natural and organic constitution of the states and bodies of traditional society;
3rd. The historical federation of the different regions and their charters and liberties, integrating the unity of the Spanish Fatherland;
4th. The authentic traditional Monarchy, legitimate both by its origin and its exercise;
5th. The principles, spirit and, inasmuch as practically possible, the same state of law in existence before the ill called new law."
For the better service of these principles and the efficient reorganisation of our Cause, I have resolved to create a Political Secretariat under the guidance of Prof. Rafael Gambra. I expect that all Carlists, putting aside any differences, will give him their most loyal collaboration.
It would seem that Spaniards have fallen prey to indifference, sometimes tinted with false optimism, and that would prevent them from seeing the seriousness of the evils that afflict Spain nowadays. Surrendering Catholicism as State religion has accelerated and worsened the secularising process, itself more excuse than foundation; for this –false– foundation is no other than the ideology of liberalism and its dissociating sequence. Hence all sorts of evils have not ceased to flow, without any serious attempt to stop them in their source. The new "political organization" –which is, strictly speaking, closer to the lack of political order, that is, to anarchy– is a lethal combination of liberal capitalism, socialist statism and moral indifferentism, in a process that summarises the mark of so-called "globalisation", which comes hand-to-hand with the dissolution of nations; particularly of the Spanish nation, crushed between pseudo-regionalism and Europeanism, in false dialectics: for the Hispanic world has always had its own way, the fuero, which is both an expression of autonomy and an instrument of integration, incarnation of Christian freedom, by means of our justly called federative and missionary monarchy.
Our main strength takes root in the Spains, the Hispanic world spread over all continents, Hispanidad, which has been the highest historical expression of Christendom. All our efforts must be directed towards the reconstruction of their historical constitution and the restoration of a government in accordance with their nature. From the moment when a growing portion of Spaniards forgot these, in the days of the Napoleonic invasion, we have only had decadence and instability. The action of Carlism prevented decadence from becoming exhaustion, which might have been fatal. For although our predecessors did not triumph, their resistance, their "ruling from without" prevented the death of our essence. No other can be the rôle of our Communion, bulwark from which we intend to preserve the remains that –if God so rules– will procure our victory, the hundredth for one of our vigilance, together with life everlasting –which is, above all, what we wish to attain. Like my late father wrote in his Manifesto of 3 April 1954: "Even with our limited human vision, we must understand this as part of a providential plan: the surprising preservation of these choice men who along a century have maintained the purity of their ideals in the face of persecution, defeat and tedium." The victory we need shall come from this purity of ideals, not by yielding to temptations to adapt. May this century that is now beginning be the one of the restoration of our Spains.
In exile, 17 July 2001.