Preamble
This letter to Pope Francis was first written for La Voie Romaine ¹ in order to bear witness to the beauty and effectiveness of the traditional Roman rite and to bear witness to the shock caused by the motu proprio, Traditionis custodes , published on 16 July 2021 by Pope Francis.

Holy Father,
I was waking up from a terrible nightmare: I dreamed that you were limiting access to the traditional liturgy, so I thought it was important to reveal to you how much the Mass of Saint Pius V has marked my existence without my being the least prepared for it. Do you know that it is difficult for me to write Saint-Père, because I had no father. I have one, like everyone else, but I didn't get it when I should have. So he left me before I was born. I found it later, but you understand that I didn't get it at the right time. I didn't have the good times that a child knows with his father. I didn't know him when the need arose, and the need arose at all times since absence created it I didn't have a father to guide me, like a tutor, to share my likes and my dislikes, to marry my views or influence them.

In the late 60s, I opened my eyes to this world. A doctor ahead of his time, considering my mother's loneliness and lack of resources, tried as much as possible to deny me this right! My mother, who could not be influenced by painting her a gloomy picture of life, full of hope that she was, refused to see the doctor again. We were poor. We lived in a low-rent, newly-built house, very comfortable in our eyes, with central heating… The city was still short of housing after the war which had razed it. I discovered when I was born that misery spreads its cloak as soon as money is lacking, but especially as soon as hope disappears. We piled up retirees, unemployed, convicts in these low-rent housing that looked like a cauldron in which politicians cooked a new recipe. All my childhood, I heard the jeers of the children of couples in good standing. They had to enhance the happiness of being born into a normal family, even if this union was often expressed through shouting and beatings. The era was beginning to hate poverty, which represented a stumbling block on the road to progress, and misery was pointing its nose and inciting violence. All my childhood, my friends looked at me as an oddity. I was not born of a father and a mother. I was born of a mother and for that I was a laughing stock. I had narrowly escaped him all the same, if my mother had listened to the learned doctor, I would have been a way of nothing.

Holy Father (I have chills!), because of this lack of a father, I took longer to build myself, the lack of structure informed me. I was helped, that said, I built myself with the idea of ​​God. Sometimes I wondered how this idea had germinated in me? I didn't know. I couldn't tell, since she was ahead of me. How was the path, the truth, the life born and taking root in my clumsy brain while I lived among a population accustomed to surviving without any root to dream of heaven? You know these populations, you have been in contact with them in South America, you know that nothing is easy for those who grow up there. I spent decades building myself with this little light, this flame, that God maintained in me, by his good will, because he saw a soul who dreamed of following him wherever he would ask. I have always lived like this, with this inner fire. "Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more," right? I was driven by faith, and my mother got into debt so that I could go to good expensive schools, with the Jesuits, in order to escape a destiny dictated by my geography. The construction looked like a game of mikado, the wind constantly threatening it. I kept up my little fire by going to mass. I felt that at mass a part of myself culminated in apotheosis. I didn't tell anyone and nobody explained the faith, nobody explained this fire, nobody explained anything to me. I found myself alone with this treasure and no one to talk to about it: neither my friends, nor my teachers, nor the priests who were no longer differentiated from other adults and who seemed to have buried themselves and buried their faith in a same movement only seemed ready to talk about it. We evolved in a kind of unsaid. The closer they wanted to be, the further they drifted apart.

I lived for a few years in Paris, continuing my research without leading it, happy to still have this fire in me. I observed a few people whose manners taught me and founded my life; they knew nothing about it, I am eternally grateful to them. Then I lost my job. I exiled myself, far from everything, above all believing it, but distance is a rapprochement, as Saint Augustine says. This remoteness abroad gave me the strength to start facing my construction again, to say: “Why do I believe in you so irresistibly? » Why do I have faith in you… A very absurd question for a person who had always believed, isn't it? I didn't know why there had never been a why. In the rain, in the frost, without hope, without a future, having lost everything, my soul resisted. Wandering from church to church in this foreign country, I settled there for the silence and the peace that I found there. I haven't always talked to the priests there, but it happened to me. Atheists or religious scoffers convince themselves that man deprived of all material comfort can only take refuge in God. Thus, with a class disdain, they look at the inhabitants of underdeveloped countries, mocking them for their way of taking refuge in belief. They completely miss the depth emphasized by Saint Paul: “It is when I am weak that I am strong! They do not know poverty, but will perhaps know misery, at the time of their death or that of a loved one. Poverty allows us to let go and to give ourselves in order to receive. Life in exile allowed me to experience this reality. This destitution has never ceased to strengthen me.

It was one day that I was strolling through the streets of this megalopolis that I discovered a church that I had never seen. I had visited many churches, beautiful or less beautiful, each time, in my peregrinations, my wanderings, I had found peace there, the same, like the crucible of my fire. I did not yet know the prayer of Saint Francis that I now recite every day: "Lord Jesus, in the silence of this dawning day, I come to ask you for peace, wisdom and strength..." Yes, every day, facing the frost, sleeping under this frost, I confronted my faith as with an angel, and I said: “Why me? How me? And, one day, at the bend of a fashionable and noisy district, I discovered this little church. I entered it gently. A service was taking place where silence competed with contemplation. The floral scent of incense uplifted my soul. I slipped into an almost empty pew at the far end of the church next to a fearless, concentrated man. I was delighted to be there and not to have disturbed anyone. We were in London at the beginning of the 90s, incense was acting on me like an opiate, Latin was waking up in me to open up its forgotten and multifaceted roots; my legacy. I followed the movements of everyone, especially the priest, meticulous and diligent, who got up, sat down, knelt down. A ritual was articulated in front of my eyes which said my faith whereas this one thundered in me of happiness. Finally, I understood, not that one explained to me, but my Lord and my God, gave me to understand this fire which burned without end and ceaselessly. I lived as in a dream. I didn't know this rite, but I felt that I had finally arrived safely, that I was at home. Everything was beautiful and sumptuous. Only robbers on the highways would like to take beauty away from the poor, when often it is their only good, it is their only good because it does not belong to them and they would not wish to possess it, knowing themselves to be unworthy. to hold him, yet always willing to worship him. This good maintains faith in them and prevents them from falling into misery. The poor naturally know the unbreakable link between the beautiful, the good and the good. I wished it would never end. I spent an hour of total delight where my soul bathed in a world where physics and metaphysics mingled in a magnificent alchemy. I discovered much later the marvelous formula of Saint John Newman: “The mass, the most beautiful thing this side of Paradise. But I had never seen masses of this kind where everyone was subjugated and transported by the majestic rite. I had never felt such fervor in meditation. I had never seen anything that resembled it closely or even remotely. However, I had not dreamed. I came back to this church every Sunday and sometimes on other days, because I was conquered. The beauty of the Tridentine form, the name of which I did not yet know, but which I felt I had to name to differentiate it from those which, even if of all the masses I had attended none was really the same, I have always attended. I will soon know her thanks to the priest of the church who sold me an English-Latin missal. I learned the Tridentine Mass in Latin, without much Latin, in a foreign country whose language I only mumbled. The structure of the so-called Mass of Saint Pius V became clear to me, I felt my prayer blossom and flower in it, because it was corseted for its own good. I understood that the mass was coming to take me and caparison me so that my appointment with the Lord would bear fruit. It was an epiphany. The epiphany of the liturgy. Everything was in harmony: frankincense, myrrh and gold in the gesture of the priest who celebrated these mysteries.

Holy Father, I must confess to you one more thing, which, I know, will touch you as it touched me: at the end of the mass, still in ecstasy before a ceremony like I had never seen, where the soul was praised and where, everything was done, to encourage it in its quest, I leaned towards my neighbor, the man next to whom I had slipped so as not to disturb the ceremony. I realized that he was a homeless man, his pestilential odor suddenly attacked me. I thus understood why he placed himself at the very back, far from the faithful, so as not to disturb. I took it upon myself and greeted him before leaving the church. His face lit up. I still see his face thirty years later. I still thank this priest, thirty years later. It was the greatest religious experience of my life, because it was decisive and influenced my whole life. I have nothing against the ordinary mass (I use to differentiate it the name of your predecessor our beloved Pope Benedict, you will not blame me), in fact I have been there very often, all my childhood, and I still go there and I go without prejudice, knowing that its quality will depend on its officiant, and aware of its intention, different from the mass of Saint Pius V, less intimate and more participatory, less sacred and more pastoral, but that is another debate. But, Holy Father, I never saw the face of this man again, this homeless person as they are called across the Channel, except at the Tridentine Mass, sometimes during the Asparagus , sometimes, quite simply, during the prayers. at the bottom of the altar, or at the Sink , or even during thanksgiving... Everything that I had painfully built from odds and ends took on meaning at the Mass of Saint Pius V, and this meaning has never been been denied since. Because there was something there that was beyond me: a crazy dignity, a patina of time, an impeccable and logical progression which discovered me and forced me to know myself intimately, to go where I would never have thought of going , to discover the source of my inner fire. My whole being shuddered, because he saw the path to take, the truth to follow and the life to live. structure and authority by attending the usus antiquior Romanness! We call ourselves Roman Catholic, Catholic and Roman, don't we? Everything that I had missed as a child appeared to me, a tradition, a lineage, the taste of practicing the past in my time, not out of backwardness, but to test my soul and participate in the communion of saints thanks to tradition. I fell in love with the tradition and understood that it responded to the only major event, the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and that no decision or meeting decided by men could interfere with it or cause it to falter. What was sacred to previous generations remains great and sacred to ^both . What a joy to find what I was no longer looking for! Through the traditional pomp, I saw the marvel that religion shines in the eyes of the poor. Beauty opens the window of the marvelous to the poor. I would be tempted to say that you have to be poor to see this marvelous thing. We must keep this poverty of heart which opens the doors of heaven. At the Tridentine Mass, I found the dream father, the one who abandoned no one and who lavished his mercy without any other compensation than the faith we had in him.