France: Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, the 30th anniversary according to the press

Anybody reading only the official press wanting to know about the thirtieth anniversary of the restitution of St. Nicolas-du-Chardonnet’s church to traditional Catholic worship would have learnt the following:

• Mgr François Ducaud-Bourget was a cardinal, in Matin plus, of February 27, the free daily of Le Monde, on p. 3. In fact, Mgr Ducaud-Bourget was not a bishop, but only a Monsignore, an honorific title, much less was he a cardinal.

• Vigils spend 2,800 hours each year guarding the premises at St. Nicolas’, read Le Figaro on February 17. The daily does not indicate which society employs the vigils. And the reason is: the hours in questions are the 2,754 hours priests spend in the church and during which they are at the disposal of the faithful for confessions and interviews! The figure was taken from Le Chardonnet (the parish bulletin) of February, p. 12: “Saint Nicolas’: facts and figures”. The journalist, Sophie de Ravinel could have asked herself what those hours of “vigils” were doing in the midst of the number of extreme-unction administered, and hours spent in the confessional during Holy Week.

• The official organist who was playing on February 27, 1977 had his jaw broken with a baseball bat, we read in the same February 17 edition of Le Figaro which does not reproduce the photo of the unfortunate musician on his hospital bed which made front page in all the newspapers on February 28, 1977. And the reason is: the information was false! We had to wait 11 days for a few lines in Le Figaro of February 28, which gave not even a disclaimer but a mere precision: “the organist was not injured.”

 • Archbishop André Vingt-Trois wished to recall the “rupture” which “many Christians attending religious ceremonies in St Nicolas-du-Chardonnet’s do not know.” Christians who might, besides, be “deceived by the discourses held by the clerics in that church”, we read in La Croix, on February 27, under the pen of Jean-Marie Guénois who related a communiqué of the Archbishop of Paris on that same day. The declaration by Mgr Vingt-Trois ignores that the “rupture” had a cause, and he does not want to believe that the faithful may be aware of that cause. Jean Madiran refreshed Mgr Vingt-Trois’ memory in Present of March 2:

“The year 1969 saw the apparition of a new Mass, the Paul VI Mass. Would the Traditional Mass disappear? In the Summer and Fall of 1969, Archbishop Lefebvre founded the SSPX and his seminary of Ecône in all legality, in order to instruct and train priests capable (and desirous) of celebrating the Tridentine Mass. Hardly a few weeks later, the French bishops, by an ordinance of November 12, took the rash, unexpected and brutal initiative of conferring upon the new Mass a character of obligation which was tantamount to an absolute interdiction of the traditional Mass. Today we cannot hide it any longer, it is a known fact, and the bishops themselves have known it for at least 15 or 20 years: the traditional Mass was never forbidden, and could not even have been forbidden. It was only forbidden by a terrible abuse of power, which besides, was denounced as such by clerics and laymen as early as 1970. I am a witness to this.

But the French bishops, from the beginning, clung to this deceit. Their ordinance of November 14, 1974 came to confirm the interdiction decreed by that of 1969. And in the parishes, all, or almost all, of the diocesan clergy was ordered to repeat again and again, and too often it still repeats that the traditional Mass was and remains forbidden. The governing nucleus of the episcopate, which La Croix calls its “gouvernance”, knows that it can no longer speak of interdiction. Yet it still clutches at straws, and with what arrogance! And it persists in keeping the Mass under the odious regime of the preliminary authorization, which in any case is often refused.”