In 1910 the bishop of Carcassonne Monseigneur de Beauséjour suspended Bérenger Saunière from his post as parish priest of Rennes-le-Château after receiving complaints from several sources that he was engaging in the trafficking in masses.

In the La Semaine Religieuse De Carcassonne dated 3 February 1911 the bishop issued a strong warning against Bérenger Saunière: advising parishioners that he had no right to receive any money for saying masses either from his parish or from other parishes, and that he was forbidden to perform the Ceremony of the Roman Catholic Mass.

The bishop also cited one specimen example of Saunière’s advertisements that appeared in the supplement to Number 13 of Veillées des Chaumières dated 11 December 1910.

Bérenger Saunière naturally denied he had anything to do with this advertisement in a letter dated 8 April 1911 – however, Saunière kept meticulous records of his trafficking in masses activities totalling several thousand pages – that he naturally withheld from his bishop – in its place he produced a bogus "List of Donors" that he claimed was the real source of his wealth.

Saunière’s Account Books reveal a record of where he placed his advertisements – in Semaine Religieuse, La Croix, L’Eclair, L’Express du Midi, L’Univers, Le Télégramme.

The fact that none of Saunière's advertisments have been discovered in any of those magazines or journals is simply due to the fact that they appeared in Advertisement Supplements – that simply got thrown away – and were not archived by libraries and archive centres like the Départementales of the Aude in Carcassonne.

Romantics who are strongly sympathetic to the existence of a ‘mystery’ at Rennes-le-Château believe that because Saunière’s advertisements have not survived it therefore follows that the priest’s source of wealth did not stem from the selling of masses, and that the several thousands of pages representing his mass-trafficking activities are all falsified: simply to cover-up more sinister activities involving the discovery of a treasure, or perhaps the discovery of a secret of an occult nature.

Saunière’s activities are well-documented and his superiors suspected him of trafficking in masses based on evidence collected from witnesses. There were no reports during Saunière’s lifetime that he discovered a treasure or that he engaged in heretical activities – these allegations are all modern allegations stemming from the 1950s onwards and are devoid of all provenance, always presented by Romantics who have a taste for alternative pseudo-histories.

That Saunière was involved in the selling of masses and that he received payments from all over France and also from other countries is something that can be substantiated through the priest’s own handwritten records involving thousands of pages.

Jean-Jacques Bedu presented this evidence in his book Rennes-le-Château: Autopsie d'Un Mythe (1990).