Weathering the storms... praying for our priests

Tonight we dedicated our family rosary to the spiritual welfare of "our" priests (we refer to our parish priests, those who have baptised us, heard our confessions, supported us in many ways and so forth as "our priests") and of all who are ordained to God's holy priesthood. At times like this - and, perhaps, as Bara Brith suggests, all times are "like this", it's the most important thing we can do. 

"The priesthood is the love of the heart of Jesus. When you see a priest, think of our Lord Jesus Christ."  - Saint Jean Vianney

French martyrs

credit: Faithweb.com

Charles François de Saint Simon Sandricourt,the last Bishop of Agde,  was guillotined in Paris on July 26, 1794, one of the last victims of The Terror. Known as a devout, kindly and learned man, he gave away much of his inherited wealth to the poor.

There are very few monuments to mark the murder of the Catholic hierarchy during The Terror. Bishop Saint-Simon is remembered in the name of a narrow street a few steps away from the Cathedral in Agde, and by a small plaque in an innocuous place beneath the former Bishop's palace by the waterfront (now a parking lot next to the Herault).

France is a highly secularised country, where the main discussion of religion involves the banning of burkas and programmes about the Inquisition on  the liberal ARTE  channel which underline the "obvious evil" of religion. Amidst this whitewash, people forget their actual history - the revolution and the hatred that fueled it, the reforms and forced vows, the denunciations, the stripping of the churches -- at their peril.  Charles François de Saint Simon Sandricourt pray for your people, pray for us!

Happy Feast Day of Saint Jean-François Régis

It's appropriate, given that we're currently in the heart of the Languedoc that today's patron saint is a local man whose ministry tied him to the arid impoverished hill country of southern France. At Mass today, our parish priest, himself a local man and proud of his connection to the region, was clearly delighted to elaborate on the life of this patron saint of priests, "less well known than Saint Jean Vianney". Below is my remembered precis of his sermon with some dates supplied by the French Jesuit site about Saint Jean-François Régis

Jean-François Régis was born near Narbonne in 1597 and studied with the Jesuits first at school in Béziers and later at a seminary Montpellier where he made his religious vows in 1618. He was ordained in 1630 in Toulouse. 

At a time of religious tension and (often) violence, where many former Catholics had strayed to Huguenot and Calvinist sects, Jean-François Régis managed to win back a remarkable number of souls with his simple and sincere approach. He felt that God was calling him to go to the New World, but his superior sent him to the Ardèche rather than Canada, and there in the hill country he spent the rest of his life ministering to the poor of the region. 

He became  one of the "missionnaires de l'intérieur" who lead an itinerant life in the rugged hill country, travelling from village to village, bringing the Good News to tiny stone churches, baptising babies, and saving souls. Even though frequent confession was a common occurrence in those days, Jean-François Régis was remarkable in his ability to encourage the faithful to confess their sins, and would spend eight or nine hours at a time hearing confessions.

Sainte Jean-François Régis' death was hastened by his fidelity to the sacraments: he arrived at the village of Lalouvesc in the Northern Ardèche on 23rd December 1640 in bitter winter weather, burning with fever caused by a lung infection, to say the Christmas Masses and hear confessions. Over the course of three days he said seven Masses and heard confessions from dawn to dusk and beyond. After Mass on 26th December Saint Jean-François Régis couldn't reach the confessional, so great were the crowds waiting for the sacrament, so he sat beside the altar and heard confessions there until the evening. Despite his illness he ignored an open window nearby, and it is thought that the draught fro this window caused his collapse. He was taken to a warm place, where, despite the seriousness of his condition, the saint insisted on hearing another twenty or so confessions until he was physically unable to  continue. He remained bedridden in pain and constant prayer until he died five days later. Soon after his death, the villagers spoke of the "saint père" who had died in their service. 

There's a very detailed precis of his life at Catholic.org and a lovely retelling of his life (in French) at Jesuites.com. 

Saint Jean-François Régis, Ora Pro Nobis! Pray for our priests!

I'd love to hear from anybody who has made the pilgrimage to Lalouvesc. Apparently the villagers were so worried about someone coming and removing the body of their beloved priest that they cut down an enormous chestnut tree and hollowed out the trunk to contain (and presumably hide) his body. 

Everybody should know about the Institut du Christ-Roi Souverain Prêtre

Our new "adopted" parish in France is under the Institut du Christ-Roi Souverain Prêtre, an order dedicated to defending Catholic orthodoxy and priestly spirituality, and it's simply wonderful. Talk about a feeling of coming home. These guys are, as they say, way cool...

http://www.icrsp.org/

The real spirit of Vatican II and a parking ticket

Chapel of Our Lady of the Apocalypse

Photo credit: Jean-Louis Zimmerman

Our Parish Priest says that that there is no such thing as coincidence. This makes me even more delighted to report that apparently random and negative events on our journey to our French home (eldest child having massive projectile vomit while we were driving at 130km/h down the motorway) delayed our journey (serious hour spent cleaning car, siblings, and so forth) which motivated us to drive for a further three hours to Clermont Ferrand which meant that we didn't have to worry about "Pottery Masses" at Orleans Cathedral. We did however have to worry about finding another Mass, and a quick Google on my smartphone pulled up a 10am Mass at the Cathédrale de Notre Dame de l'Assomption in Clermont Ferrand.

The Cathedral is a Gothic masterpiece in black volcanic stone. The interior has had a few concessions made to modernity (a "table" altar on the sanctuary in front of the high altar), a few bits of contemporary (or 70s folksy - as you will) religious "art" added here or there, but essentially the place is as it would have been several hundred years ago: it hasn't been vandalised.

The Mass was a revelation as well. I've been to all sorts of Masses in France, and I never know what to expect. One Sunday in Paris, while staying with friends, we wandered to the nearest church and found ourselves to be the only Europeans amidst a fervent congregation from Haiti: the Mass was said passionately (entirely in Creole) by a Haitian priest whose homily alone clocked in at almost an hour. I think it might still be the longest Mass we've ever been to: almost three hours later we met the bemused priest who was wondering what we'd made of his lovely parish community and where we'd come from. We've also seen Masses creatively intoned by barefoot priests in sandals in the round in vandalised churches denuded of their sacred art and hung with macrame banners. So we never know what to expect.

At Clermont Ferrand we were more than pleasantly surprised. The Mass was a crowd pleaser - there's no doubt. The Cathedral was certainly full, and it was difficult to find parking anywhere nearby. But it wasn't tambourines and guitars pulling in this crowd: it was Gregorian chant, rubrics that anybody familiar with the Extraordinary Form would instantly recognise, and a sense of reverence that's all too often missing. Here though, was a sacred liturgy, the sacrifice on Calvary reinacted with reverence, yet it was still both popular and populist. Wonderful!

We started off with the Asperges, in Latin. Much of the ordinary of the Mass was in Latin - mainly Mass I, although the Gloria was from Mass 8 (always a crowd pleaser). The congregation clearly knew their chant, and the phrases alternated between the choir and the people. The alter servers were arranged as in the EF: and followed many of the same rubrics which was refreshing in an Novo Ordus Mass where it's far more common to see a plethora of servers hanging around looking bored, sometimes literally twiddling their thumbs (or waving at their parents as used to happen in a parish we used to go to!).



Nothing in life is perfect, and there were some things that I wasn't happy with -- the choir stood between the "new" altar and the high altar, which meant that they had their backs to the Blessed Sacrament (and blocked the Tabernacle from view) which I found odd. Also, as is common in France, very few people knelt at the consecration: rows of chairs very close together with no kneelers send out a very clear "no kneeling" signal. On the other hand, I noticed a bit of a "kneeling wave": wherever small groups of people knelt, many of those around them also started to kneel, so that many more people were kneeling at the end of the consecration than at the beginning; ditto after the Agnus Dei. Perhaps peer-pressure is what's needed to reinstate reverence: kneeling - Just Do It!

Kneeling to receive the Blessed Sacrament, on the other hand, was clearly not an option, and I have to admit to being too cowardly to try given how quickly the communion lines were moving. However receiving Our Lord on the tongue was clearly not uncommon, even if not the norm, and many people genuflected (as we did) before receiving communion. Somehow seeing people making a deep genuflection (rather than a duck-bob) before receiving Our Lord redeems the standing bit, for me at least. The cloud around the silver lining was that we had to choose our communion queue carefully in order to dodge the crowd of extraordinary ministers of self importance Holy Communion.

The Mass was a real blend of old and new, but with much more old than new. The readings and Eucharistic prayers were in French, but the rest of it was far closer to the EF in many ways than most Novus Ordo Masses that I've been to. This is what I think is the real "spirit" of Vatican II - a genuine hermeneutic of continuity, where the Mass has not been changed beyond recognition, but simply has some bits added in the vernacular. There were "bidding prayers" and the ghastly sign-of-peace (which I have to admit my husband likes and I have always found annoying and cringe worthy in equal measure, but then he's far less of a misanthrope). As I've already said, nothing is perfect, but - oh! - if only every N.O. Mass could be said in this way, how pleased Our Lord would be!

We had a little time to look around the cathedral after Mass - it is beautiful. I took many photos but only a few came out satisfactorily. If you have the chance to visit keep an eye out for the guardian angels on either side of the high altar, and the chapel of Our Lady of the Apocalypse which is really beautiful. I've used a photo I found on Flickr rather than my own, as the photographer  (Jean-Louis Zimmermann) has managed to get a much better image than I did.

We returned to our car to find that we had a parking ticket. As we had a roof box on the car, we'd not been able to fit into the municipal underground parking, and had driven around fruitlessly looking for a space on the roads around the Cathedral. We'd found one space on a long stretch of road running up to the Cathedral where more than a dozen cars were already parked with two wheels up on the pavement. "When in Rome..." (and almost late for Mass) and all that... so we too pulled up and parked "avec deux roues sur la trottoire". Zut alors! Our parking ticket was timed at 10:09am  - and we were more than halfway down the row, every single car of which had a ticket on it. I reckon that every week the Clermont Ferrand police start their ticketing at, oh, about three minutes after Mass. Nice little earner. Don't assume that just because every car with a local licence plate does something that it's OK. Personally, I was happy to pay the 38EU to get a decent Mass with proper plate and good music rather than the pottery Mass that we'd dreaded. So we recommend the Mass at Clermont Ferrand, but you have been warned about the parking.

It makes me feel ill...

OK, so I'm probably feeling a bit queasy because I'm up far too late, but seriously - WHAT is it with the pottery in this picture? Maybe this is not a photo of a Mass, perhaps the priest is in the parish hall (that would explain the flowers in the wicker basket) just about to have a cup of coffee and what he's actually saying is "I really enjoyed my pottery workshop - look at the lovely fruit bowl I made last week". 

http://www.orleans.catholique.fr/cathedrale/index.php?Messes-et-permanences

Seriously though, if this is a photograph of a Mass, what on earth are they using those things to hold the sacred species? It's not just against the rules, it's simply wrong. This isn't just me being picky, the Catholic Encyclopedia says:

According to the existing law of the Church the chalice, or at least the cup of it, must be made either of gold or of silver, and in the latter case the bowl must be gilt on the inside. In circumstances of great poverty or in time of persecution a calix stanneus(pewter) may be permitted, but the bowl of this also, like the upper surface of the paten, must be gilt. 

So that's clear then - the sacred vessels must be made of materials befitting their use:  precious materials. Pottery, earthenware, plastic, even fine bone china is not permitted. So what's going on in this picture then?

Ah - I forgot to mention that the photo comes from the website of the main Cathedral in Orleans. I was looking up Mass times as we're going to be there tomorrow. Argh!

Happy Feast of the Ascension!

We celebrated in our parish with a Missa Cantata with a splash of violet: Mass was said by a visiting Monseigneur. I learned something new about clerical appareil: until today I didn't realise that, like a Bishop, a Monseigneur wears violet (apparently it's a different violet, but we didn't have a Bishop there to compare). The way to tell which is which is that the Monseigneur has a black biretta with a violet pompom, but the Bishop's biretta is entirely violet. Is pompom the right word here - it just doesn't sound dignified enough. Clearly this only works at a traditional Mass; I have no idea how to tell the difference otherwise.


...and today's feast is a wonderful opportunity to say the oldest of all novenas, the Novena to the Holy Spirit for the Seven Gifts. This is the only novena  officially prescribed by the Church. 


The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1831) states:
" The seven gifts of the Holy Spirit are wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord. They belong in their fullness to Christ, Son of David. They complete and perfect the virtues of those who receive them. They make the faithful docile in readily obeying divine inspirations.

Let your good spirit lead me on a level path.

For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God . . . If children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ"

EWTN has a printable version of the novena and for those of you, like me, who lacked rigorous catechism in their youth, EWTN has a sort of "cheat sheet" about the gifts of the Holy Spirit here..