Over the recent Whitsun weekend I, along with more than 20,000 other pilgrims, descended upon the city of Chartres, in a walking pilgrimage of about 100 kilometres from Paris to Chartres over two and a half days, to hear a Solemn High Pontifical Mass in the traditional Roman rite sung in Latin in the great cathedral of Chartres, a rite for which that cathedral was designed, I need hardly add.
His Eminence Cardinal Müller was the celebrant at that Mass for Whit Monday.
It is estimated that some 30,000 attended – so many, in fact, that many of the pilgrims could not get anywhere near the cathedral and had to sit on the causeway leading up to it, watching events on a big screen.
Over 80 per cent of the pilgrims were under the age of 35 and from all over the world.
Troops of scouts and girl guides from the <em>Scouts d’Europe</em> attended in their uniforms, literally hundreds of young priests and seminarians and scores of nuns from various orders.
This is the biggest walking pilgrimage in Europe, apart from the annual Polish walking pilgrimage to the shrine of the Black Madonna at the Jasna Góra monastery in Częstochowa.
Some 300 pilgrims came from Britain and Ireland and another 300 came all the way from America, and again most were under 35.
I had the honour of meeting American media commentator Candace Owens (a recent convert to Catholicism) on the road to Chartres as she and her husband, George Farmer, had decided to attend.
The pilgrimage column stretched for miles along the pilgrim route which starts at the famous church of St Sulpice, in the Sorbonne district of Paris, and ends at Chartres Cathedral, and, save that its objectives are all entirely peaceful and beneficent, it resembled nothing so much as a medieval army on the march, the pilgrims carrying flags, banners, crosses and even statues.
Priests, seminarians, monks, friars, nuns and religious sisters all walk in their soutanes, cassocks and full religious habits, together with the laity singing hymns, praying and chanting as they march along, a riot of colour, music and song.
It was like something out of Chaucer’s <em>Canterbury Tales</em>.
The pilgrims walk a gruelling 30 miles a day and then camp in a camp site which is like a huge “tent city”, constructed by volunteers from the organisation behind the pilgrimage called <em>Notre Dame de Chretienté</em> meaning “Our Lady of Christendom”.
The celebrant Cardinal Müller is a former Bishop of Regensburg in Germany and a former head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith at the Holy See. He is also a well-known and outspoken defender of the Catholic faith.
But not everyone was happy about the Mass being so celebrated.
In the early days of the pilgrimage, which began in 1982, the pilgrims were barred entry to the Cathedral and Mass was sung outside. However, that changed once the Bishop of Chartres gave permission and he began to attend himself. But disapproval from other sources has never been far below the surface.
Even now, there were widespread rumours of some officials in the Dicastery for Divine Worship trying to prevent Cardinal Müller celebrating the Mass.
If that is so, then it tends to show how out of touch such officials are with what is happening on the ground. Moreover, it does not sit well with the spirit of the Synod on Synodality that entailed listening to the people.
One feels bound to ask why, what are<em> </em>they afraid of?
How can attendance at a long-established rite of Mass be an offence or a threat to anyone, let alone to fellow Catholics?
However, as is well known, it has been the policy of the Dicastery for Divine Worship under its current head Cardinal Roche to make it significantly more difficult for priests everywhere to celebrate the TLM. Much of the freedom of individual bishops to grant permission for the celebration of the traditional rite has been removed.
The position now is that the Dicastery must first give permission for the TLM to be celebrated, which at best means that permission is often inordinately delayed if, indeed, given at all. This again seems to run directly counter to the synodal spirit of listening to the people.
It is fair to say, however, that this is a continuation of a policy of trying to prevent Catholics, who prefer the TLM, from being able to attend it, a policy that goes back to the 1960s. It was radically reversed by Pope Benedict XVI in <em>Summorum Pontificum</em> of 2007, but, since his death, matters seem to have reverted to a policy of prevention.
It is an unprecedented policy in the history of the Church since, until our time, it has been unheard of for any bishop to try to prevent any Catholic from attending any long-established rite that has had the approval of the Church for centuries.
It consists, in effect, in telling ordinary Catholics that their preference for the rite of Mass that the vast majority of Western Catholics heard and attended for the first 2,000 years of Christianity is now somehow to be deprecated and censured.
Again, one feels impelled to ask why. What harm is being done by permitting Catholics to attend that Mass if they prefer it?
Catholics with a preference for the traditional Roman rite do not try to stop fellow Catholics from attending the new rite of Mass of Pope Paul VI. Why, then, the other way round?
No-one need be in any doubt that the traditional Roman rite has remained, in its core, virtually unchanged since at least the 4<sup>th</sup>century and probably since the time of the Apostles. True there have been additions but no pope or council ever attempted to amend the core elements of that rite, let alone to do so radically, as happened in the late 1960s. Every previous reform of the Roman rite had been to <strong><em>restore</em> </strong>it to its original form, not to radically change that original form.
Now, those Catholics who prefer the traditional Roman rite do not object to the invention of new liturgical rites if that be for good pastoral reasons, and if the leadership of the Church deems it proper, but they do object to being effectively compelled to attend the new and to abandon the old.
That seems alien to the good traditions of the Catholic Church. It also seems like a form of cultural discrimination on a grand scale, if not also a form of cultural misappropriation. Moreover, it is not achieving its aim.
On the contrary, as witness the Chartres pilgrimage, the numbers who prefer the traditional Roman rite of Mass are growing, and mostly among young people.
After many decades of experimentation, it turns out that young people want beauty and holiness in their liturgy and religion, not “pop” music or vapid ditties more suited to the nursery than to the public worship of God.
If older people want those things, then no-one is stopping them, but it cannot be right to try to force the same upon those who prefer Gregorian chant, polyphony and the sublimely beautiful choral music written down the centuries for the traditional Roman rite of the Mass.
Doubtless some may prefer Brian Howard’s <em>The Butterfly Song</em>, sung at new rite Masses, with its words:
“If I were a wiggly worm
I'd thank You Lord that I could squirm
And if I were a fuzzy wuzzy bear
I'd thank You Lord for my fuzzy wuzzy hair…”
But pastoral solicitude must allow for those who prefer Byrd, Tallis, Palestrina, Victoria, Bruckner, Mozart, Beethoven and the finest music ever written by the hand of man.
Indeed, so central to Western culture is the traditional Roman rite of the Mass that many composers, even including our own Andrew Lloyd Webber with his <em>Pie Jesu</em>, have felt that their work is incomplete until they have written music for that rite. It is, in truth, a rite which has ever been a cynosure and inspiration for composers, painters, sculptors, poets, writers and architects, since the beginning of Christianity.
Compare the words of <em>The Butterfly Song </em>with, for example, the <em>Sequentia Aurea</em>, the so-called “Golden Sequence” of Pentecost, written by our own Stephen Langton, the 13<sup>th</sup> century Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury:
<em>Lava quod est sordidum,</em>
<em>riga quod est aridum,</em>
<em>sana quod est saucium.</em>
<em>Flecte quod est rigidum,</em>
<em>fove quod est frigidum,</em>
<em>rege quod est devium</em>
“What is soilèd, make Thou pure;
What is wounded, work its cure;
What is parchèd, fructify;
What is rigid, gently bend;
What is frozen, warmly tend;
Strengthen what goes erringly.”
Not to mention the beautiful double "Alleluia" chant that precedes it in the Mass of Pentecost and at every Mass thereafter during the Octave of Pentecost, the week following.
As the Chartres pilgrimage demonstrated so vividly, many young people prefer the dignified, reverent and ancient beauty of the old Roman rite and the sublime music that has, over the centuries, been written for it.
This is perhaps unsurprising since liturgical scholars have long recognised that the traditional Roman rite of Mass is the oldest rite in the Christian Church.
In England there has been a long tradition of defending and supporting the Traditional Latin Mass. The men and women of the Western Rising of 1549, in Cornwall, Devon, Wales and Somerset, who rose up in protest at the new prayer book devised by Thomas Cranmer at the start of the English Protestant Reformation, protested saying “we will have the Mass in Latin, as we were wont to do, and none shall take it from us”.
Happily, any need for such risings is a thing of the past, but, in the spirit of the Synod on Synodality and listening to the people, it surely behoves the Dicastery for Divine Worship to recognise the legitimate aspirations of the 30,000 mostly young people who went to Chartres at Pentecost this year to hear and participate in the traditional Latin Roman rite of the Mass with Cardinal Müller.
<strong><a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/interview-george-farmer-on-his-catholic-faith-and-being-married-to-a-us-media-star/">George Farmer on his Catholic Faith and being married to a US media star</a></strong>
<a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/us-media-star-candace-owens-converts-to-catholicism-at-the-brompton-oratory/"><strong>US media star Candace Owens converts to Catholicism at the Brompton Oratory</strong></a>
<em>(Pilgrimage to Chartres | Getty)</em>
