Dom Charles-Rafaël Payeur was born the 31st October 1962 in Thetford Mines, a little mining village in the Province of Quebec, Canada. After his primary school, he completed his secondary studies at the Holy Trinity Seminary (Saint-Bruno, Quebec) from 1975 to 1980 before going ahead with college studies in health sciences at Sherbrooke College from 1980 to 1982. He then went up to Sherbrooke University to study philosophy and theology. At the same time, Dom Charles-Rafaël Payeur very soon committed himself, from the age of fifteen years, to studying at an esoteric school where he worked as its principle and an international lecturer for several years. He was thus especially able to deepen the teaching of theosophy, Heindelian Rosicrucianism and Martinism, doctrines he taught very passionately through hundreds of lectures he presented on a multitude of subjects and in some fifty works he wrote in the field of spirituality over this period. Indeed, he then wrote many works on different themes concerned with western esoterism, he has presented more than five hundred radio and television broadcasts on this subject and has delivered more than a thousand lectures in various French-speaking countries.

Dom Charles-Rafaël Payeur had left the Roman Catholic Church from the age of fifteen years, unsatisfied with the answers proffered to him about the great existential questions he was already asking. He moreover sought the basis of a way of psycho-spiritual growth to enable him to progress both psychologically and spiritually, something he obviously did not find either in the teachings given by his parish. Finally, he was seeking a place where he could experience the sacred, an experience to which he aspired from the depths of his being. The post-conciliar Church of Quebec, with liturgical reforms that already went too far, did not offer him the opportunity of such an experience in a Christian context. It is therefore for these reasons he left the Church and took on intensive research in various initiatic schools that brought him answers that seemed satisfactory, for at least a time, to the great questions he was asking.

He also found various training programmes that enabled him to become familiar with interesting tools of personal growth. Finally, an encounter with a wise Sioux, who initiated him into the practices of Amerindian Shamanism enabled him to feel what could represent a true experience of the sacred. The wheels of experience and the sudation tent rituals indeed brought him to approach an experience that went beyond a simple energy level as then proposed by esoteric circles and the New Age people.

It was during a European lecture tour that he met a man who would soon have a great influence on him, an alchemist of the Order of the Elder Brethren of the Rose-Cross who was also the Bishop of the Belgian branch of the Gnostic Apostolic Church. Indeed, this encounter opened up many intellectual and religious horizons, for he progressively received the minor orders, the diaconate and the priesthood from the hands of this man, whilst he deepened his knowledge of the symbolism of the Sacraments and the teachings of the Gnostic Apostolic Church about the nature of Christ in particular. He then began to take his distance from the theosophical and Rosicrucian doctrines, which, without being deprived of elements of value, seemed to him to be increasingly opposed in their deepest meanings to the primordial teachings of the Christian tradition.

Considering the intensity of his religious commitment, his Bishop decided to confer the Episcopate on him, so that the Church he represented could be represented in Canada. This was certainly in the plans of the Lord, who had begun to bring his son towards the Church he had left at the age of fifteen years to explore the universe of esoterism.. Indeed, shortly after his episcopal consecration in this branch of the Gnostic Apostolic Church, Dom Charles-Rafaël Payeur felt the need to become even closer to the Catholic faith and tradition. More and more ill at ease in the Gnostic Apostolic Church, with the authorisation of his consecrating bishop, he founded the Priestly Fraternity of Saint John the Evangelist: this was on 27th December 1987. He then finally adopted the Roman Catholic rite of before Vatican II, and studies further into Catholic theology and the great dogmas. He thus further discovered the distance between these and the esoteric traditions he had hitherto believed to be perfectly Catholic.

Dom Charles-Rafaël Payeur firstly exercised a ministry in a Church on the fringes of Catholicism, then he quickly learned the traditional Catholic liturgy and began seriously to question a good number of affirmations proper to the apparently Christian esoteric teaching he had given so ardently. Among these teachings was the pantheistic perspective to which he had subscribed and the doctrine of reincarnation, at least that presented by Helena Petrovna Blavastky and her theosophical, Rosicrucian, anthroposophical and Martinist successors. Indeed, he increasingly embraced Catholic doctrine, but he kept a symbolic approach to which he became familiar over a long time by reading Biblical texts and the interpretation of Sacramental rites. Concerned to approach the traditional Church, Dom Charles-Rafaël Payeur began to establish contacts with a dissident Catholic Church in Brazil in which he was finally incardinated in July 1990 having received sub conditione the Orders of the diaconate, priesthood and episcopate. The ceremony took place in the cathedral chapel of Saint John the Evangelist of the religious order he had founded three years before at Stoke (Quebec, Canada).

From that day, Dom Charles-Rafaël Payeur has endeavoured to teach the foundations of the Catholic tradition and the Christian faith by showing the fundamental incompatibilities between that tradition and the sayings of the present-day western esoteric schools he knew, especially as he was the director of some of them for more than ten year, and taught their doctrine throughout this period. Even more precisely, his objective is now to get this great Christian tradition better known as an initiatic way founded on a central experience, that of love. He has just published two fundamental works in this perspective. “Aux sources de l'amour” (At the Sources of Love) is his first. He presents the teaching of love as developed in the Catholic tradition around its founding dogma, that of the Trinity. He has also published a collection of lectures he delivered during a pilgrimage to Israel dedicated to studying the seven miracles of Christ as fundamental elements of a great initiatic step as Christianity proposes it. This is the work “Les sept Miracles du Christ” (the seven miracles of Christ), the way of Christian initiation.

He has thus answered three expectations, those that were his when he left the Church at the age of fifteen, bringing the elements of an answer to a certain number of fundamental questions about life, death of the problem of evil, offering a way of well-articulated psycho-spiritual growth allowing one to live in reality this great requirement of the Christian faith: " Love ye one another as I have loved you. " and proposing the necessary tools to live through a true experience of the sacred. Dom Charles-Rafaël Payeur therefore makes himself available to deliver lectures and accompany pilgrimages in this way. He is also very interested in explaining how the Christian tradition differs from modern esoteric sayings, even from those who call themselves “Christians”, and at the same time not rejecting all the elements found in them – which can even be tools for grasping our own spiritual tradition more deeply. The baby is not thrown out with the bathwater! Finally, he is particularly committed to promoting the traditional Catholic liturgy, and explains the sacred symbolism and operating character (energetic). He takes it as a duty, in this perspective, to point out the disastrous consequences of the liturgical reforms undertaken by Paul VI following the last Council.

This being said, it is therefore important not to confuse Charles-Rafaël Payeur as the lecturer in the field of esoterism, in what he now calls his “former life”, with the work he now proposes for the discovery of the profound meaning of the Scriptures and traditional Catholic teaching. These years of teaching in esoteric schools have also enabled him to develop a more enlightened regard of the great aspirations of some Christians left unsatisfied by the Church. He is particularly sensitive and attentive to this point.