‘For Truth, Justice and Peace’: Reflections and Proposals From the Association Notre-Dame De Chrétienté on the Occasion of the XLIII Pilgrimage

The Liturgy Wars are fought on many fronts, but one of the most important is in France, fille aînée de l'Église. As with the Revolution, France is often an omen for the world.

From The Remnant

By Michael J. Matt

Editor's Note: Here in France, there is a war going on over the future of the Latin Mass throughout the entire world. Given the prominence of the Pilgrimage to Chartres, the fact that certain ecclesiastical operatives are intent on crushing the Traditional Latin Mass in and around this event bodes not well for all of us. Notre Dame de Chretiente is, then, at the front line of defense of the Traditional Mass throughout the world. I call upon all the clans to put partisan differences aside, and to pray for our French allies, keeping in mind that Summorum Pontificum itself was partially in response to requests from the Society of Saint Pius X to liberate the Latin Mass for all. The razor’s edge that Notre Dame De Chretiente is walking in defense of the Latin Mass impacts us all, regardless of affiliation. They need our prayers and support. The Pilgrimage official Latin Masses took place as scheduled, but there are forces at work trying to stop it in the future. Unite the clans on this and pray for the Church, for our Holy Father, and for the future of the Chartres Pilgrimage. MJM

Association Notre-Dame de Chrétienté:

The questions recently raised about the liturgical use of the Vetus Ordo (or Tridentine liturgy) at the pilgrimage of Christendom are an opportunity to shed light on the history and spirit of our pilgrimage, and more broadly of our spiritual family attached to ‘previous liturgical and disciplinary norms of the Latin tradition’.1We regret that this controversy was brought up a few days before the pilgrimage, with unprecedented demands being made at a time when all our teams are clearly in a period of intense activity with the final preparations for this great spiritual event. Above all, we regret that it may overshadow the essential message that the pilgrimage seeks to bring to our contemporaries, namely this magnificent public testimony of faith, joyful and penitential, of a Christendom borne by the hope of the Kingdom of Christ and eager to proclaim Christ in a world that has turned away from Him. We regret that proposals for meetings put forward months ago have not been successful. This lack of open and direct dialogue is a cause for concern. New restrictions, which had never been imposed since the Motu Proprio Traditionis Custodes, are now being put forward, without waiting for the guidelines from the new pontificate on the delicate issue of the place of the Tridentine liturgy in the Church, for that is what this is indeed all about. But perhaps we are indeed experiencing a ‘kairos’, a special moment to be seized, to overcome vain quarrels and seek together the peace that Pope Leo XIV invoked on the day of his election, the fruit of the Holy Spirit who knows how to overcome apparent stalemates, ‘Heal our wounds; our strength renew… Bend the stubborn heart and will… Guide the steps that go astray’(Sequence of Pentecost). This is the sincere wish expressed by the Association Notre-Dame de Chrétienté while developing the following reflections.

A certain simplification in the media suggests that the whole issue boils down to whether or not to allow certain priests to celebrate the Novus Ordo for their personal Masses during the pilgrimage. But this, in fact, is not the main issue. The letters which the association has received are very clear: we are being asked to thoroughly transform the spirit of our traditional pilgrimage, making the Novus Ordo the norm and the Vetus Ordo the tolerated exception, subject to the authorisation of the local bishop or the Dicastery for Divine Worship. For four years, it is this same change that has been demanded of our entire spiritual family, which is (rather inaccurately) referred to as ‘traditionalists.’ We should see this recent controversy, which may seem trivial to many, in the context of other events that we have not made public so as not to strain the dialogue we hope to have with the hierarchical authorities. This year, for the Chartres pilgrimage, and for many pilgrims coming from the various regions of France, restrictions on the use of the Tridentine liturgy have multiplied, in order to stem the tremendous momentum of the apostolates that want to serve the missionary evangelisation of the regions of France. Access to certain sacraments according to the old Ritual is limited or even prohibited in some dioceses. The scope of these restrictions obviously varies, depending on the goodwill of the local bishop, proof that a tolerant interpretation of Traditionis Custodes is indeed possible. In some dioceses however, decrees and prohibitions rain down, according to an overly restrictive application of the Motu Proprio, with a juridical-canonical coldness far removed from the ‘pastoral and spiritual care of the faithful’ evoked by the same text (art. 3, § 4). What we are being told today, in fact, is that the Tridentine liturgy, in its ritual, sacramental and spiritual unity, is an ill, an anomaly, from which the Church must heal and purify itself. 
1John Paul II, Motu proprio Ecclesia Dei, 2 June 1988.

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‘You cannot be in communion with the Church if you do not adopt the Novus Ordo, either partially or totally. Dura lex, sed lex. Fallinto line: the Church has spoken, obey.’ But we remember another,trustworthy, affirmation from the Church, and which is moreover a promise, in which our spiritual family has placed all its trust. In 1988, when Archbishop Lefebvre consecrated four bishops against the will of Rome, the lay organisers of the pilgrimage of Christendom took the deeply painful decision to break away from their path in order to remain in visible unity with the Holy See. It was in the name of the unity of the Church, which we are accused today of undermining, that these laity and priests, deeply attachedto the traditional teaching of the faith, turned to Saint Pope JohnPaul II. On that day, the Holy Father told them that theirattachment was ‘legitimate’; he spoke of the beauty and richness of this treasure of the Church; and to do honour to this filial gesture, he promised to guarantee and protect, in a broad andgenerous manner, the aspirations of the faithful attached to the previous liturgical and disciplinary forms of the Latin tradition, without any liturgical strings attached, other than recognising the Second Vatican Council and the validity of the Novus Ordo.2The Catholic Church, taking into consideration individuals and their history, told us that, in choosing the Tridentine liturgy as an authentic path to sanctification, we are in communion with the Church. We cannot doubt this affirmation, whose value remains because it transcends the distressing historical circumstances of 1988.

Even today, despite numerous injustices, our spiritual family retains a peaceful hope in the words of the Church, from whom it has learned that, as a matter of natural justice, pacta sunt servanda(agreements must be kept). We are told that we have broken this pact by hardening our positions and refusing to accept outstretched hands. But since 1988, we have not changed anything in this delicate balance between fidelity to the See of Peter and attachment to the traditional teachings of the Faith.

Little attention has been given to what this ‘attachment’ to the traditional teachings of the Faith consists of. Some downplay it, reducing it to a sensibility, a political category, a fearful nostalgia or a fear of modernity that will pass with time and the next generation. Others exaggerate it, accusing us of making liturgy an end in itself, or of using it as a weapon in some combat. However, we pilgrims know well that the end is Heaven, that we must not confuse the destination with the road that leads to it, and that there are many paths that lead to the sanctuary of everlasting peace. But we believe in the importance and the intrinsic value of mediations in the order of salvation. We believe in the freedom of the children of God to use, according to their needs and their prudence, the riches that the Church has offered them for 2000 years. Now, forour spiritual family, the traditional liturgy is quite simply the supernatural environment for our encounter with Christ. Its words, sacraments, Mass, offices, and catechesis have been for many of us the raw material of our faith, the vehicle of grace, the instinctive expression of our relationship with God: in a word, our mother tongue for speaking to the Lord, but also for hearing him. For others, these overtones have been the secondary but providential cause of a conversion or a radical renewal of faith. For many priests, this liturgy has become ‘visceral’ in the biblical sense, penetrating every fibre of their priestly being in an all- encompassing way. This is not a matter of vague aesthetic sentimentality, but of life, of breath, of the incarnate expression of faith. Those who believe that Christianity is a religion of the Incarnation understand that these mediations are in no way accidental, incidental or interchangeable by decree or prohibition.

The pilgrimage is a place within the Church where laity and priests come to experience this special atmosphere and language of the Church. But it is not only that: itis also a wonderful opportunity for 19,000 pilgrims to offer our contemporaries a shining testimony to the beauty of the Catholic faith 2John Paul II, Motu proprio Ecclesia Dei, 2 June 1988 and the Memorandum of understanding of 5 May 1988.

and to its spiritual fervour, through processions, adoration, confessions and Masses. It is also a place of international Christian fellowship, of life in the chapters, of meetings, of detachment, of joyful penance. Finally, it is a place where Christendom is experienced, with pilgrims sharing the conviction that it is urgent to promote the social kingship of Our Lord over temporal societies. It is all of these things at once, in a harmony that is not an end in itself, but which in our eyes is by no means secondary when we consider the spiritual fruits it bears. Of course, we are always vigorously reminded that lay people have no authority in matters of liturgy. They however remain free by right to found associations, to invite whomever they wish, and to choose to highlight certain themes as privileged means of implementing the purpose of all lay apostolate: ‘the Christian renewal of the temporal order’ (Apostolicam actuosem, 7). We deliberately quote this text from Vatican II, which recognises the rightful autonomy of the lay apostolate and its choices of action, protecting it from the ever-present danger of harmful clericalism. We are not misleading anyone; we have never hidden our specificity; and we know that these issues are far from being shared by all Christians. But the Chartres pilgrimage is not suitable for all Christians. We have never had the audacity to consider ourselves as providing a universal response that speaks to the entire people of God. We ourselves are surprised by the appeal of this endeavour, which is so special in many ways. Fortunately, there are other initiatives within the Church that value other expressions of faith, using their own unique methods that are not ours, but which complement ours with a missionary dynamism or charitable zeal that inspires admiration. We have excellent working relationships with some of them, and it has never been required that we all be the same and that we dilute our particularities in order to work together. For the mystery of the Incarnate Word is too rich to be expressed in a single language; and, to quote the pertinent words of a theologian who certainly does not belong to our school of thought, ‘there is nothing more contrary to true Christian unity than the pursuit of unification. This always consists in wanting to make a particular form universal, to confine life to one of its expressions.’3

This particular expression of faith that we experience in Chartres is today being suffocated by a kind of violation of its conscience. Yet we know the damage that can be done to a soul when it is forcibly deprived of the connatural and sensory mediation through which it has learned to touch the invisible God: this is what happened in 1969, for example. Nothing is more violent, spiritually speaking, than to be told that our ‘language’ can now only be spoken in exceptional circumstances at the very heart of the Chartres pilgrimage. Or to hear, as several people have told us directly, that it is suspected of heresy, that its sacraments are in fact invalid, that the celebration of this Mass should be prohibited. All this has been said to us. On the other hand, the intrinsic value of the traditional liturgy and the positive benefits that these practices bring to pilgrims over the course of three days are rarely recognised. Our specificity is diminished, even denied, considered trivial or incidental to the spirit of the pilgrimage or to its success; it is seen as the fixation of an older generation that is not shared by the younger generation, according to the oft-heard slogan: ‘Young people don’t come for this’. The fact remains that ‘this’ is what we have been offering over three days for 43 years, and we do not compel anyone to participate. For us to hear that a Mass according to the Vetus Ordo can easily be replaced by a Mass according to the Novus Ordo in Latin, ad orientem, with incense and Gregorian chant, is painfully indicative of the little consideration given to the vitality of and to the spiritual bond that harmoniously ties together the traditional practices of faith. We are told that the pilgrimage will finally be fully “of the Church” when it opens up to the Novus Ordo. We receive this with the same violence as a minority which is told that it will finally be accepted by the majority when it renounces its culture, when it waters down its richness to melt into the masses. We are certain that the Church can also achieve, without detriment to its unity, that which civil society has managed to do to protect the identity of minorities in the name of natural justice and respect for people and cultures.
3Y. de MONTCHEUIL, « La liberté et la diversité dans l’unité », dansL’Église est une, Hommage à Moehler, éd.P. Chaillet, Paris, Bloud et Gay, 1939, p. 252.

Contrary to what has been written, we do not impose liturgical restrictions on the pilgrimage: we have been subjected to enough of these ourselves. But we want the pilgrimage to continue to be a place where the traditional liturgy is loved and promoted, especially by the organisers, and therefore by the priests. Once again this year, several priests have told us that they are happy to learn this liturgy in order to come on the pilgrimage. We are in direct contact with each of them before they register, and we ask them two things: to be at the service of all pilgrims and not just their own faithful, to be all things to all people so that no chapter lacks the ministry of confession, and to highlight the theme of Christendom and the Tridentine liturgy to the pilgrims. We ask them to play along with the spirit of these three days of love and celebration of these spiritual treasures, and not to try to change the pilgrimage. We make a clear distinction between those who do not want to share these fundamental principles and show no interest in them—these individuals do not come of their own accord—and those who sincerely appreciate the pilgrimage and its pillars but are not yet able to celebrate the Tridentine form, either because they do not have time to learn it or because they are forbidden to celebrate it. For them, however rare they may be, we have always tried to find solutions offering liturgical hospitality, enabling them to come.

In order to lay a solid foundation for the dialogue we desire, it is necessary to say a few more words. If we are attached to traditional methods of teaching the faith in their entirety, it is not only because we have a visceral attachment to them, but also because we recognise that the Church has been undergoing a major crisis for too long, a crisis of doctrine and liturgy. Herein lies a difficulty that we are aware of: the existence of traditional communities appears to some as a “living reproach” to other pastoral and liturgical methods, which some would like to force us to assimilate into. Let us therefore clarify matters. Yes, we fully accept the Second Vatican Council and the recent magisterium of the Church. We study it in our manuals of formation and interpret it, in accordance with the wishes of Benedict XVI, in the light of Tradition, rejecting erroneous interpretations that may be made of certain ambiguous passages in the conciliar text.4We are not among those who wish to establish a break between the “pre-conciliar Church” and the “post-conciliar Church.” We believe in the living Tradition (which we do not confuse with human traditions) and in the organic development of dogma, but we know that the Church cannot modify, in the name of progress or adaptation to the world, the doctrine of Jesus on such essential points as the theology of the Mass, the doctrine of the priesthood, the indissolubility of marriage, or Catholic morality. We are deeply concerned to see that doctrinal relativism and moral progressivism continue to flourish in many places in the Church today. Many of our pilgrims, even among the very young generation, acknowledge that they have received no doctrinal formation, consider themselves to be a generation that has been sacrificed, feel that the content of their faith has been hidden from them, and come to the pilgrimage in search of clear answers. The ‘kairos’ we are experiencing requires us to have the courage to make a sober assessment of this crisis in the transmission of the faith that continues today, and to reflect together on the means to overcome it, because the unity of the Church is first and foremost a unity in faith.
4As the Magisterium has repeated on multiple occasions: CCC 2105 onreligious freedom; note of the CDF of 7 July 2007 on the “subsistit in”; the declaration “Dominus Jesus” of the CDF of 6 August 2000 on the unicity and the salvifico universality of Jesus Christ and of the Church.

On the liturgical level, we recognise that the Mass of Paul VI is the sacrifice of Christ, that it is fully valid, and that saints have been sanctified by it, such as Carlo Acutis, whom we took as our patron last year on the pilgrimage, along with many other saints. However, we have never hidden our serious concerns, expressed well beyond the framework of our spiritual family,  on the impoverishment of the liturgical expression of certain truths of faith in the Novus Ordo; nor have we hidden our concerns about the way in which the reform was carried out, which was more a matter of ‘construction’ than of ‘organic development,’ according to the analysis of Cardinal Ratzinger himself.5

Unfortunately, we do not find in the liturgy of the Mass as it is currently celebrated in many places the requirements laid down by the constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium, which are preserved only in the old rite. Like Benedict XVI, “we are convinced that the crisis in the Church that we are experiencing today is largely due to the disintegration of the liturgy.” This is also one of the main reasons why at the pilgrimage we have chosen the Tridentine liturgy and to promote it. Some of the pilgrims attend both forms of the Roman rite: they are involved in parishes, serving their dioceses. At the same time, another group of pilgrims express their difficulty to live spiritually with the new liturgy and share with us their outrage at the liturgical abuses they still witness today, without these abuses being condemned with forceful authority wherever there isa duty to do so. We must simply recognise that, for a minority of Christians, albeit a very real one, the new liturgy is not their language for speaking to God or for hearing Him. And this will not change by force. Is this a tragedy, when we know that there are more than 20 different liturgical rites in the Catholic Church to enable everyone to come into contact with the invisible God? Here more than elsewhere, the unity of the Church has never been afraid of diversity.

We approach this new chapter with immense confidence in the goodness of our mother Church and in the solicitude of the Holy Father. We are convinced that genuine dialogue, respectful of individuals and their spiritual journey, can bear fruit. We do not want to form a separate Church. We simply ask to serve the Church with our identity, our attachment, and our mother tongue. As Father Coiffet, one of the chaplains of the pilgrimage who was present in 1988, regularly reminded us: ‘It is not us who will save the Church, it is the Church who will save us’. It is in this spirit that we gratefully welcomed Pope Leo XIV's call to the Eastern Churches to ‘preserve your traditions without watering them down, even for the sake of convenience.’ Perhaps this is a path to explore in order to give our spiritual family a special status that would allow us to break the deadlock in which we find ourselves.

But it is not just a matter of ‘protecting’ a group or a minority out of charity. We consider it necessary to ask the question: what if the preservation of the traditional liturgy, and the protection of places where this liturgy is appreciated, were an essential, even indispensable, element of the Church’s communion with itself? This “diachronic communion” of the Church with its past was a major focus of Benedict XVI’s thought, and perhaps the main theological reason behind the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum.6This would give a very profound meaning to the mission that the Chartres pilgrimage can fulfill, with its own specific character, in the service of the Church. Until then, we pray that Our Lady of Good Hope will preserve us from bitterness and hardness of heart, and keep us in the joy of serving Christ and his Church. Trials and contradictions are part of the pilgrim experience. There is also the temptation to give up, to throw in the towel, to leave. But we do not want to leave the one column, that of the Church marching towards the Sanctuary so much desired. Our gathering is unique. It sometimes annoys its neighbours, it speaks a curious language

5J. RATZINGER, Ma vie, Souvenirs 1927-1977, Paris, Fayard, 1997, p.134-135.

6J. RATZINGER, Speech at the end of the liturgical conferences at Fontgombault (22-24 July 2001), published in Une histoire de la Messe, by a monk of Fontgombault, La Nef, 2003: ‘To emphasise that there has been no fundamental break, that the continuity and identity of the Church remain intact, I believe it is essential to maintain the possibility of celebrating according to the old Missal as a sign of the Church's enduring identity. This is the fundamental reason for me: what was until 1969 the liturgy of the Church, the most sacred thing for all of us, cannot after 1969 – with incredible positivism – become the most unacceptable thing […].

There is no doubt that a venerable rite such as the Roman rite in force until 1969 is a rite of the Church, a treasure of the Church, and therefore to be preserved in the Church.’

It sometimes expresses itself a little loudly, but it has its place, as it is, in the immense pilgrimage of Christians. In its own way, it wants to proclaim Christ. We do not know how to do this other than with our three pillars of Chartres: Tradition, Christendom, Mission. For some Christians, these three pillars are truly their vital link with Jesus. It is for them, for this portion of God's people, that we ask that the promise made by John Paul II to our spiritual family be kept. And the day when it is no longer Christ that we proclaim, but ourselves or our own human cause, then will be the time to ban us: we will have deserved it.

All in the Church must preserve unity in essentials. But let all, according to the gifts they have received enjoy a proper freedom, in their various forms of spiritual life and discipline, in their different liturgical rites, and even in their theological elaborations of revealed truth. In all things let charity prevail. If they are true to this course of action, they will be giving ever better expression to the authentic catholicity and apostolicity of the Church. (Vatican II, Unitatis Redintegratio 4, §7)

Association Notre-Dame de Chrétienté