France Encounters
By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
In last week’s column I limned for our readers some of the highlights of the Paris-Chartres pilgrimage, a hike of over 60 miles on Pentecost weekend from the French capital to the double-spired masterpiece of Romanesque-Gothic architecture which looms over the surrounding countryside like a heavenly beacon.
My stay began with three nights at an AirBnB in the “city of light.” My room was virtually a glorified crawl space with exposed wooden beams lit by two windows over the front door of seventeenth century building — just off the Seine close to Notre-Dame. One had to stoop to get into the bathroom. It served my simple needs quite well: a place to sleep and quite near the important ecclesiastical highlights, situated between the Isle de la Cité and the Church of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet.
I was blessed with the acquaintance of two American pilgrims even as I stood on the street, newly arrived, waiting to get into my AirBnB. They watched my luggage as I popped into the Moroccan restaurant across the way for an urgent biologically necessary pitstop.
Daily Mass at a welcoming nearby traditional parish served on Wednesday and Thursday. Friday Mass was to be with members of the U.S. pilgrimage chapter of Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary, for which I served as chaplain, at St. Roch across the Seine near the Tuileries Garden, followed by lunch with the group in the Latin Quarter. Mass on Saturday morning, the first day of the pilgrimage, was quite early at St. Sulpice, the starting point for the pilgrimage and the High Mass for the 16,000 who had registered to participate.
Planning to keep in athletic form I brought running shoes that would double as pilgrimage footwear. I made my way to the Luxembourg Gardens the first full day in Paris for a run three times around the park. Multitudes sat on the grass picnicking and visiting, others strolled and groups of students moved through with their guides in tow.
As for meals, it was on an evening stroll in the Latin Quarter and on the Rue de la Harpe when I heard a man speaking Italian. That made me feel at home in Paris. I immediately fell into animated conversation with him. Having believed it was a pedestrian street, I moved confidently back and forth between the sidewalk and street chatting. In a flash I both heard him warning me and pulling me toward him and at the same time felt the full weight of a car wheel pressing down along my left ankle. It was because the wheel pushed my ankle out of the way that my foot did not fall beneath the full weight of the vehicle, but not before the rolling tire separated my heel from my shoe.
When it was all over the restaurateur laughed and talked rapidly recounting the incident, somewhat in a state of shock, with his co-worker while I stood in disbelief in the road looking at the heel of my shoe on the cobblestones. The tables on the sidewalk presented a good alternative in my situation needing reassessment. I sat down after collecting the heel and asked for red wine. I did not feel pain in my foot, to my surprise. With the pilgrimage of over 60 miles yet ahead of me this was certainly welcome news. One cannot make the long walk to Chartres on only one good foot without vehicular assistance.
A visit next day to a grumpy African cobbler who insisted on 35 euros to refasten the heel, after I had already reattached it myself with the help of two remaining hobnails, was useful only for witnessing his amusing defense of his astronomic prices by insistence that, as an “artisan,” he was deserving of the posted prices without debate. Situated as it was between the pressing hardness of the street below and the pressure of my foot above, the heel was promising thus far to remain in place on the shoe, perhaps even all the way back to the United States and a more reasonably priced repair.
The Pizza Sarno restaurant, the site of my encounter with the car on rue de la Harpe, served as my familiar hangout for a meal and a cigar the first few nights in Paris. The owner and colleagues were from Sardegna, Sicily and Salerno. As mentioned above I felt at home speaking Italian in preference to my yet rudimentary grasp of French.
Garbed as I was in cassock and saturno, you might imagine I stood out a bit from the surrounding crowd. Even in fashionably aware Paris, traditional Catholic garb remains remarkably rare. I overheard a man chatting with confreres mentioning my “chapeau” in passing on my way to morning Mass.
On my last full day in Paris, I walked the streets with a number of further chance encounters. A young man stopped and knelt, almost wordlessly in what was mostly familiar sign language, to request a blessing, which I of course gladly gave in the Traditional Latin. In unicorn tapestries room of the Cluny Museum, close to my hotel, I witnessed two sisters in traditional Dominican habit with schoolgirls giving lessons to the others in turn. A man stopped and asked in French about my “philosophy of agnosticism.” I responded with the help of another man who had some English that it means one doubts God’s existence but that it can coexist with faith. The prayer in the Gospel, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief,” speaks eloquently of our fragile nature and struggle to trust in the mystery of the Logos which we do not yet fully grasp in this life.
Someone quizzed me recently as to whether I’d ever been asked for Confession in an airport. The new generation of traditional young Catholics, in dramatic contrast to their older counterparts, seek the sacramental forgiveness of sins almost as often as they receive Communion at Holy Mass. If it never happened before, it did occur at Charles de Gaulle after Paris-Chartres, with a young Australian on his return home after also participating in the pilgrimage. I don’t know if the older Americans seated near me and also waiting for the flight to Ireland, where I would connect for the U.S. and they were staying for vacation, noted the irony. A young Catholic man talking at length with a cassock-garbed priest while they, middle-aged D.C. area Catholics rent a space for weekly Mass without the bishop’s okay, because they were long ago denied Communion under both Species. Which they now do not have anyway due to overly cautious lingering COVID hysteria.
The gray-haired Protestant hall-rent Catholics served by devious religious priests outside of diocesan parish life seem oblivious to their increasing irrelevance as the new younger generation embraces the Catholic faith in all its traditional rigor and comfort.
The record crowd of over 16,000 Catholics, most of them young, who encountered our Lord and one another, many of them already old friends because annual participants, are the future of the Church. The Lord began with 12. I think 1,333 times the original number of Apostles who seeded the Church 2,000 years ago are pretty good odds that many more will meet Christ through the new apostles. They will marry and generously bear new life. They will people the parishes of the future. They will embrace and hand on the integral faith. They will advance the earthly reign of Christ the King. Viva Cristo Rey!
Thank you for reading. Praised be Jesus Christ our King, now and forever. See photos and more on the Paris-Chartres pilgrimage at apriestlife.blogspot.com.
