"The traditional liturgy is our mother tongue" Statement of the Association of Our Lady of Christendom on the Occasion of the Chartres Pilgrimage 2025
OPINION. At a time when the Chartres pilgrimage is flourishing, the Tridentine liturgy is divisive. Faithful to a living tradition, its defenders plead for its recognition and freedom within the unity of the Church.
A liturgical storm over the column! As the 43rd edition of the Pilgrimage of Christendom gets underway, a wonderful opportunity for 19,000 pilgrims to offer our contemporaries a luminous testimony to the beauty of the Catholic faith, liturgical fervor, popular piety, and Christian friendship, the controversy is there. It's a "traditional" pilgrimage: it promotes the ancient liturgy, the "Tridentine" Mass! But it should open up and allow priests who wish to do so to celebrate, during these three days, the current liturgy, the one in force in the Church since 1969. The subject may seem trivial. But in reality, the issue is much broader, and that's not the point. What is truly required is that the pilgrimage fall into line, making the Novus Ordo its norm, and the Vetus Ordo the tolerated exception (for the moment!), subject to occasional authorization.
Chartres Pilgrimage 2025: 19,000 walkers expected, record turnout for the traditional rite
Pilgrimage today lives under the threat of increasing bans and constraints, and for many pilgrims from all our provinces, restrictions on the use of the Tridentine liturgy are increasing to stem the tremendous momentum of the apostolates who want to work in the service of missionary evangelization in the regions of France. What we are told today, in fact, is that this ancient liturgy is outdated, that it is an anomaly, from which the Church must heal and purify itself: barely tolerated, often suspected, sometimes forbidden. As if the sacraments that have nourished generations and sanctified so many saints had suddenly become an obstacle to ecclesial communion. "You cannot be in the communion of the Church if you do not adopt the current liturgy; fall into line: the Church has spoken, obey."
But we, for our part, remember another word of the Church, in which our spiritual family has placed its complete trust. In 1988, when Archbishop Lefebvre consecrated four bishops against the advice of Rome, the organizers of the pilgrimage made the painful decision to depart from this path in order to remain visibly united with the Holy See. That day, Saint Pope John Paul II told them that their attachment to the Tridentine liturgy was legitimate; he spoke of the beauty and richness of this treasure for the Church. He promised to protect the aspirations of these faithful, without any compensation, other than to recognize the Second Vatican Council and the validity of the new Mass. The Catholic Church, in its sensitivity, took into consideration individuals and their history, and told us that we are in communion with the Church by choosing the Tridentine liturgy as a true means of sanctification. Even today, our spiritual family maintains a peaceful hope in this word of the Church.
Who are we? Some reduce our attachment to the Tridentine liturgy to aesthetic sentimentality, a fearful nostalgia, a fear of modernity, which will pass with time and the next generation. Others accuse us of using the liturgy as a weapon in a political struggle. Let's put it in a nutshell: for our spiritual family, which has supported and organized the Chartres pilgrimage for 43 years, the Tridentine liturgy is our mother tongue, to speak to the Lord, but also to hear Him. Its words, its sacraments, its Mass, its services, its catechesis have been for many of us the raw material of our faith, the instinctive expression of our relationship with God. It is a matter of life, of breath, of the incarnate expression of faith. And this cannot be wrested away with decrees and prohibitions; for us, that would be an abuse of conscience.
It is also a question of doctrine: our Church is going through a profound liturgical and doctrinal crisis, a crisis in the transmission of the faith; and while we readily acknowledge that the new liturgy is valid and that it has sanctified saints (such as the future Saint Carlo Acutis, whom we adopted as our patron saint last year), we have never hidden our serious reservations about the impoverishment of this liturgical expression for expressing the truths of the faith. This is how it is: for a part of the Christian people, a minority certainly but very real, the new liturgy is not their language for speaking to God, nor for hearing Him. Is this a tragedy, when we know that there are more than 20 different liturgical rites in the Church to allow everyone to come into contact with the invisible God? Here, more than anywhere else, the unity of the Church has never been afraid of diversity.
Today, a part of the Christian people is suffocating because others are trying to hinder the breathing of their souls. Nothing is more violent, spiritually, than being told that our "language" can now only be spoken in exceptional circumstances, at the very heart of the Chartres pilgrimage. Or to feel, as many have directly told us, that it is suspected of heresy, that its sacraments are in fact invalid, that the celebration of this Mass should be prohibited... For all this has been said to us. On the other hand, the profound value of this liturgy, and the positive benefits these pedagogies bring to pilgrims over the course of three days, are rarely recognized. We are told that the pilgrimage will finally be fully "Church-like" when it opens to the Novus Ordo. We receive this with the same violence as when a minority is told that it will finally be accepted when it renounces its culture, when it dilutes its wealth to blend into the majority. What civil society has managed to do to protect the identity of minorities in the name of natural justice and respect for individuals and cultures, we are certain that the Church can also achieve for our spiritual family without destroying its unity.
We have never had the audacity to consider ourselves as providing a universal response that speaks to all the people of God.
So no, contrary to what has been written, we do not impose liturgical prohibitions on the pilgrimage: we suffer enough of them ourselves. But we hope that the pilgrimage will continue to be a place where the traditional liturgy is loved and promoted, particularly by leaders, and therefore by priests. This year again, several priests told us that they are happy to learn this liturgy in order to come to the pilgrimage. We still have the freedom, as lay people, to choose the themes we want to promote in our events, and even more so since Vatican II, which recognized the proper autonomy of the lay apostolate and its choice of actions, protecting it from the ever-threatening danger of a dangerous clericalism. The specific nature of the pilgrimage is known to all; it is not suitable for everyone.
But we have never dared to consider ourselves as providing a universal response that speaks to all the people of God. We ourselves are surprised by the appeal of this work, yet it is so special in so many ways. We therefore distinguish clearly between those who do not wish to share these fundamentals and show no interest in them—they do not come of their own accord—and those who understand our spirit but cannot yet celebrate the Tridentine form, either due to a lack of time to learn it or because they have unfortunately been forbidden to do so since the Motu Proprio Traditionis Custodes. For those who have loved the pilgrimage as it has been for 43 years, who do not want to change it, who share with us the conviction that these methods bear fruit, we have always found solutions, however rare, to exercise liturgical hospitality and allow them to come.
What is the Tridentine Rite?
We are grateful for Pope Leo XIV's appeal to the Eastern Churches to "preserve your traditions without watering them down, if only for the sake of convenience". Perhaps there is an avenue to be explored here to give our spiritual family a special status that would enable us to break the deadlock we have been in since Traditionis Custodes. As pilgrims of hope, we don't want to leave the only column, the only pilgrimage of the Church on its way to Heaven. Our gathering of "tradis" is special, it sometimes annoys its neighbours, it speaks a curious language and sometimes expresses itself a little loudly, but it has its place, such as it is, in the immense column of Christians. In his own way, he wants to proclaim Christ. We don't know how to do this other than with our liturgical traditions; for some Christians, they are their vital link with Jesus. It is for them, for this small part of the people of God, 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 we are proclaiming, but ourselves or our own human cause, then there will always be time to forbid ourselves: we will have deserved it.
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