From Chartres to Rome via Paris

Already on Pentecost Monday, facing the dome of St. Louis des Invalides, we saw, as if superimposed, the dome of St. Peter's in Rome with Bernini's colonnade welcoming, with open arms, the procession of thousands of pilgrims from all over the world to pray at the tomb of the first Pope.

There is, however, one shadow on this journey to Rome: the pilgrimage from Chartres to Paris was magnificent, but as every year, the media ignored it, and all the bishops remained silent. They are unanimously mute.

For them, these thousands of pilgrims from France, Europe, and overseas were invisible: they walked valiantly across the Beauce plains, but they did not see them; they prayed and sang loudly, but they did not hear them. The cause of this blindness and deafness is not physical, but ideological.

For 60 years, in the name of opening the Church to the modern, secularized world, a pastoral approach has been promoted that seeks to bury the sacred, with a reformed liturgy, a revised catechism, and a moral code aligned with the spirit of the times. This pastoral approach, which buries the Church's 2,000-year-old treasure, is a blatant failure. For 60 years, it has been emptying seminaries, parishes, and the collection box!

Today, the architects of this reform are being struck by an immanent justice: the buriers are burying themselves. By continually burying the sacred—allegedly "Tridentine," even "Constantinian"—it is their own heads, their own judgments, that they are sinking into the shifting sands of modernity.

And their pastoral approach of burying is transforming into an ostrich-like approach: they have eyes but do not see, ears but do not hear.

They are mitered, crosiered, and mute in the face of these young and numerous families who, by their mere presence, demonstrate the vitality of the 2,000-year-old Tradition. They show the sterility of a reform that is running out of steam. It is as outdated as the blissful optimism of the "Thirty Glorious Years" from which it drew inspiration and whose sad fate it now shares.

The conciliar reforms claim to be dictated by the "signs of the present times," but they are above all marked by the signs of the wear and tear of time: staleness and obsolescence. 

In Rome this summer, traditional Catholics will publicly proclaim their adherence "to Catholic Rome, Guardian of the Catholic Faith and of the traditions necessary to the maintenance of this faith, to the eternal Rome, mistress of wisdom and truth, to Catholic Rome” [cf. Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, Declaration of November 21, 1974].T

Traditional Catholics will profess their love for their Mother, the Holy Church, firmly established on the rock of Peter, and not mired in the sand of shifting ideologies. With all their heart, they will ask God for those vocations of which souls today have such an immense need.