Extraordinary Forms
Our gonzo tourism adventures in Paris continue. This morning we set off to explore an often-hidden and seldom-mentioned face of modern France: traditionalist Catholicism and the practice of the Tridentine Mass.
The church of St Nicolas du Chardonnet is located in the 5th arrondissement, in between rue des Ecoles and the eastern end of boulevard St German. It would just be another typical parish church in Paris, were it not for the fact that since 1977 it has been illegally occupied by the Society of St Pius X, a conservative Catholic organisation that rejects the reforms of Vatican II.
Performing the Tridentine Mass – Image: Lawrence OP (Creative Commons)
Without going deeply into ecclesiastical arcana, essentially St Nicolas du Chardonnet is the only place in Paris where the Mass is still said in Latin in its “Extraordinary Form” as laid out by the Council of Trent of 1563. Unfortunately, the parish is also associated with extreme right-wing politics.
So it was with some trepidation that we turned up on Sunday morning for the 10.30 Grand-Messe Paroissale. We hoped an attitude of respectful curiousity would see us through.
Image: Joethelion (Creative Commons)
The service itself was solemnly executed and very beautiful, requiring a robed contingent of about 20 priests, acolytes, and altar servers. Even in Latin the service was largely recognisable to anyone familiar with the Eucharist in French or English, (although the “extra bits” such as the sung Asperges Me with the priest sprinkling the congregation with holy water were novel to us).
The choral singing was generally fairly good, bar some wobbly bits. Unless you brought with you your own copy of the Latin Missal, there was no order of service: the people were clearly expected to know the Mass by heart and respond in Latin (with kneeling and standing and sitting and crossing themselves at appropriate moments). It was as if the regular attendees were members of a special club with secret handshakes and nods and winks that rapidly distiguished those of “true faith” from the curious interlopers.
Tridentine Rite at Oxford Blackfriars – Image: Lawrence OP (Creative Commons)
The sermons and Bible readings were the only parts of the service in French, and the sermon was particularly robust – a 32 minute admonition to chastity and “mastery of one’s body“, with frequent reference to papal encycicals and the lives of saints. Hell was mentioned as a consequence of bodily sin. Not only was the tone marginally threatening, the message seemed explicitly intolerant and offered a very narrow view of the world we actually live in.
The overall impression of the morning was that we had travelled back sixty years in time: even the few children and families at the service looked like they were dressed out of a Jean Renoir film. Outside the church after the service, we emerged blinking into the bright spring sunlight. A man was distributing FN tracts denouncing the European Union, another was selling copies of the royalist newspaper Action Française.
We decided we had had enough, and quickly repaired up the hill to a café for a quick lunch of croques-monsieur. Our brief encounter with radical Catholicism and narrow religiosity was deeply fascinating, but unlikely to repeated. Sometimes, there are better things to do on a Sunday morning.