The cover of the September edition of the <em>Catholic Herald</em> magazine addresses what will be one of the most important moments in the battle for the White House: the vice-presidential debate between Ohio’s pro-life Catholic Republican senator JD Vance and the fervently pro-choice Minnesota governor Tim Walz. The latter was raised as a Catholic in Nebraska but now identifies as a Lutheran who is in favour of no restrictions on abortion at any stage of pregnancy. With Kamala Harris’s entry into the race, the abortion debate will be key. We have three articles on the election in this month's magazine.
On this side of the pond, meanwhile, it has been a summer of remembrance. Eighty years after my grandfather Captain Paul Cash MC was killed in action, on 13 July 1944, during the Battle of Normandy, I travelled with my uncle and my seven-year-old son, Rex, to visit his grave. It is close to where he was killed at the 15th-century Château Fontaine-Étoupefour, near Caen. In 2014, the village’s new community centre was named after him: Salle multi-activités Paul Cash. Bizarrely, this means my grandfather has a local municipal bus stop named after him.
The day started with Rex writing a sad note to his great-grandfather, sitting in the July sunshine on the grass beside his pale-stone war grave, and then laying some beautiful pink and white roses. We then visited the very moving new British Normandy Memorial at Ver-sur-Mer, overlooking Gold Beach where so many died on 6 June 1944. Rex saluted his great grandfather’s name cut into French stone – along with 22,441 others. Without being religious or consecrated, it comes as close to a sacred site as I have ever experienced.
We visited the closed-up moated chateau where my grandfather died from mortar shrapnel; we walked across the Pegasus Bridge (of The Longest Day fame) and had lunch at the Café Gondrée, which has been turned by the Gondrée family into a quirky D-Day memorial museum with framed poems, regimental ties and signed fading photos of heroes like Lord Lovat. The cafe was the first building in occupied France to be liberated, just before midnight on 5 June 1944, in an audacious glider raid.
What struck me was how the D-Day invasion has been turned into an authentically profound modern pilgrimage experience that is not remotely kitsch. Like the Camino de Santiago, the D-Day trail of landmarks and sites has rescued the local economy. Pilgrims are not tourists, and “shrines” such as the Cafe Gondrée – where photos are not allowed – can be just as poignant an experience as religious sites. We were served omelettes made by Madame Arlette, whose parents owned the cafe in 1944. Now 85, she serves champagne to any veterans or visitors present at 11.16 p.m. on 5 June – the moment when the bridge was taken. Long may this rite endure.
Thinking of pilgrims, Mary Wakefield – who writes this month’s Life & Soul Diary – has been on a quest to Shepherd’s Law in Northumbria to find the hermitage of a 90-something-year-old solitary called Brother Harold. She ended up meeting him and concluded that Shepherd’s Law – along with its hermit’s shed and bell tower – is a “sacred place”. On 26 October, Mary and her family will be walking across the sands of Holy Island via the Pilgrim’s Way to raise money to publish Br Harold’s memoirs. Join, she says!
I’m also delighted that we have Dr Joseph Shaw, chairman of the Latin Mass Society, as our On Pilgrimage guest. He extols the enjoyment of leading his society’s annual pilgrimage walk (since 2009) from Ely to Walsingham. The group walk and pray the Rosary, with flags identifying them as Traditional Latin Mass devotees, like a tiny medieval pilgrim army.
In today’s post-Christian world, it’s joyous to know that his pilgrim band will have sauntered along the lanes of Norfolk towards Walsingham this August singing the Ave Maria in English, Latin and French.
Let’s hope that the Holy Father – about whose September trip to the Far East John Allen writes with his usual prescient clarity – allows such pilgrim troubadours to continue.
<em>Photo: Republican presidential nominee, former US President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee, US Vice President Kamala Harris are seen on a screen as they debate for the first time during the presidential election campaign at The National Constitution Centre in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, 10 September 2024. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images.)</em>
<strong><strong>This article appears in the September 2024 edition of the <em>Catholic Herald</em>. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/subscribe/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">HERE</mark></a></strong></strong>.
