THOUGHTS
AFTER MASS CHEZ THE PIUS X FRATERNITY
The Church of St Nicolas de Chardonnet in Paris. It
was truly extraordinary. First of all,
the crowd. There must have been close to a thousand people in the magnificent
early 18C church. There were old people, young people, middle-aged people,
white people, black people, and everything in between. There were priests in
cassocks and a tonsured Benedictione monk with a long beard. There were Sea
Scouts, cubs, and girl guides.
After a while, I realised that this
was a special celebration, beyond the usual Quinquagesima Sunday: the
Confraternity was celebrating the fourth decennium of their takeover of this
church, and so it was a proud affirmation of their separate and schismatic
identity.
The Mass, in Latin of course, and
accompanied by an enthusiastic orchestra and choir (who have much to learn from
Oxford Anglicans, I might add), was quite beautiful, and gave me furiously to
think. Hardened Vatican-Twoers loathe this kind of Mass and are still cross
with Benedict XVI for having permitted it. Living in the normal way of things with a moveable
village Mass led by a charismatically-inclined Algerian, whom I have come to love for his
huge heart if not for his chatty-cum-handclapping liturgy, I find myself
breathing-in the sheer beauty and age-old ritual of such a glorious service.
What this means is that all the
gold, the gilt, the vestments, the grandeur, the incense, the candles, and the
ritual movements, not to mention the Gregorian and polyphonic singing, is not
flummery. It is a way of giving all the best and the most beautiful of our
humble human creations to God, to honour Him. Yes, we are perfectly aware that
He loves the poor widow’s mite more than all the glory; but giving Him all that
we can best create has also to be an acceptable sacrifice. Solomon put much of
the best work by his day’s craftsmen into the Temple. I agree that ‘worship the
Lord in the beauty of holiness’ should not be reversed to ‘the holiness of
beauty’; and yet there is a real and true holiness in beauty that can and
should be offered to God rather than worshipped in idolatry (stay tuned: we
will get back to that in a minute).
So
it was all very grand and very moving. The readings were done in Latin and in
French, which was decent of them; and then we got to the homily, or sermon. It
was a pontifical Mass, so there was a Bishop present, even if to Rome he is a
schismatic and thus not real bishop. And his sermon: O boy. His theme was the
Immaculate Heart of Mary: not a topic given to exciting a Protestant-educated
heart like mine, but I’m willing to make allowances. Except that after a very
few sentences it became clear that he was using the Immaculate Heart of Mary as
a baseball bat with which to club and batter everything that reeked even
faintly of modernity, liberalism, etc. I swear this is this the first time I
have ever heard the Second Vatican Council referred to as ‘une cloaque
immonde’, a vile and unclean sewer. In a light, proud and arrogant tenor he
whipped and fustigated, he lashed and battered, without even the faintest
whisper of humility, doubt, or brotherly love. At the very best it was amusing;
at worst it was appalling.
And then the Mass resumed and was beautiful; I went up and received Communion from a schismatic bishop, upon my tongue (in this crowd you wouldn’t dare hold out crossed hands), and realised that God is here too, and that Yeshua lunched with Pharisees.
And then the Mass resumed and was beautiful; I went up and received Communion from a schismatic bishop, upon my tongue (in this crowd you wouldn’t dare hold out crossed hands), and realised that God is here too, and that Yeshua lunched with Pharisees.
Thinking about it afterwards I
realised several things. 1) These are the people whose spiritual ancestors
started the St Bartholomew’s Massacre, killing around 2-10,000 Parisians in a
week in 1572; 2) I deeply believe they are wrong, because they quite literally
and explicitly consider ‘la tradition’ to be a theological and indipensable
element of the Christian faith, which is quite simply idolatrous: they believe
that the merest adiaphora of liturgy,
vestment and gesture are essential to the Faith; 3) I understand and feel for
them, because they feel much same as
my American Democrat friends would feel if a Trump Presidency had lasted for 40
years, i.e. “the bad guys say they won and have been running the show
authoritatively and vilify us as horrible creeps” – so they need to feel that
they are in the right, that they are the keepers of the True Flame, and that
eventually the Church will get back to the true Faith and reconcile itself with
them; 4) this said, I deplore utterly their lack of charity and humility, their
arrogance and their self-satisfaction.
None of this has anything to do with
the glories of the Tridentine Mass at its best, which is a wonder and which it
was a folly of Vatican 2 to prohibit, until Benedict XVI re-allowed it.
(Anglicans who casually toss away the Book of Common Prayer for the awful
Common Worship should take note: there is a surprising number of people who
really and truly do love awesome, awe-inspiring, awe-inspired liturgy in
age-honoured language, and who should not be fobbed off with brief non-musical
“OK, if you absolutely must” 8 AM Mattins.) The priest facing the grand altar is not
“turning his back on the people”; he is joining with the people, leading them in facing Christ on the altar. If the
priest in question should, moreover, ascend into the pulpit instead of farting
around with a microphone and a squeak-bellow sound system, (s)he would find that
pulpits are intelligent early sound systems in themselves and that, no, the
congregation does not think you
are coming it the toff and looking down on them, it actually finds
you easier to listen to, and might even like to look up to its priest.
So there we are: it is a pleasure
occasionally to visit a different Christian culture. This particular bit of
Catholic France is special: I suspect there were a lot of people there who not
only disapprove of Pope Francis but who think the Revolution of 1789 was a
grave mistake, and who are not 100% sure France was wrong in capitulating in
1940. On the other hand, I have rarely seen an immense church so
chock-to-bursting-full of totally committed and enthusiastic and faithful
Christians in recent years, and my heart responded to the liturgy like a flower
to a shower of rain. Go figure.
