Against the Robots

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

Holy Father,
I was just emerging from a terrible nightmare: I dreamt that you were restricting access to the traditional liturgy. I felt it was important to tell you how profoundly the Mass of Saint Pius V has marked my life, without my having been prepared for it in the slightest. Do you know that it's difficult for me to write "Holy Father" because I didn't have a father? I have one, like everyone else, but I didn't have him when I should have. He abandoned me before I was even born. I found him again later, but you understand that I didn't have him at the right time. I didn't have the precious moments a child experiences with their father. I did not know him when the need arose, and the need arose at all times since absence created it. I did not have a father to guide me, like a tutor, to share my likes and dislikes, to adopt my views or to influence them.

In the late 1960s, I opened my eyes to this world. A doctor ahead of his time, considering my mother's loneliness and limited resources, tried his best to deny me this right! My mother, whom no one could influence by painting a bleak picture of life, so full of hope was she, refused to see the doctor again. We were poor. We lived in a newly built, very comfortable, low-income housing unit, with central heating… The city was still short of housing after the war that had razed it. I discovered at birth that misery spreads its cloak as soon as money is scarce, but especially as soon as hope disappears. Retirees, the unemployed, and ex-convicts were crammed into these low-income housing units, which resembled a cauldron in which politicians were cooking up some novel recipe. Throughout my childhood, I heard the taunts of the children of well-to-do couples. They needed to enhance the joy of being born into a normal family, even if this union was often expressed through shouting and beatings. The era was beginning to despise poverty, which represented an obstacle on the road to progress, and misery was rearing its ugly head and inciting violence. Throughout my childhood, my friends looked at me as an oddity. I wasn't born to a father and a mother. I was born to a mother, and for that, I was a laughingstock. I had narrowly escaped death, though; if my mother had listened to the learned doctor, I would have been nothing.

Holy Father (it gives me chills!), because of this lack of a father figure, it took me longer to develop; the lack of structure informed me. I was helped, though; I was building myself with the idea of ​​God. Sometimes I wondered how this idea had germinated within me. I had no idea. I couldn't say, since it preceded me. How had the path, the truth, life been born and taken root in my unskillful mind while I lived among a population accustomed to surviving without any roots left to dream of heaven? You know these populations; you've been in contact with them in South America; you know that nothing is easy for someone who grows up there. I spent decades building myself with this small light, this flame, that God kept alive within me, by His will, because He saw a soul that dreamed of following Him wherever He asked. I've always lived like this, with this inner fire. "Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more," isn't that right? I was driven by faith, and my mother went into debt so I could attend good, expensive Jesuit schools, to escape a destiny dictated by my location. The building resembled a game of pick-up sticks, constantly threatened by the wind. I kept my little fire burning by going to Mass. I felt that at Mass, a part of myself reached its apotheosis. I didn't tell anyone, and no one explained faith, no one explained this fire, no one 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 distinguishable from other adults and who seemed to have buried themselves and their faith in the same movement—seemed willing to discuss it. We were living in a kind of unspoken understanding. The more they tried to be close, the further they distanced themselves.

I lived for a few years in Paris, continuing my search without actually pursuing it, happy to still have that fire within me. I observed a few people whose ways taught me and shaped my life; they knew nothing of it, and I am eternally grateful to them. Then, I lost my job. I went into exile, far from everything, believing it above all, but distance is a way of drawing closer, as Saint Augustine said. This exile abroad gave me the strength to begin confronting my own construction again, to ask: "Why do I believe in you so irresistibly?" Why do I have faith in you… A rather strange question for someone who had always believed, wouldn't you say? 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 land, I settled there for the silence and peace I found there. I didn't always speak with the priests there, but it did happen. Atheists or those who mock religion convince themselves that a person deprived of all material comforts has no other option but to turn to God. Thus, with class disdain, they look upon the inhabitants of underdeveloped countries, deriding them for their reliance on faith. They completely miss the profound point emphasized by Saint Paul: "It is when I am weak that I am strong!" They don't know poverty, but they may well know destitution at the time of their own death or that of a loved one. Poverty allows one to let go and give of oneself in order to receive. My life in exile allowed me to experience this reality. This destitution only served to strengthen me.

It was one day, as I was wandering the streets of this sprawling metropolis, that I discovered a church I had never seen before. I had visited many churches, beautiful or less so, and each time, in my wanderings, my aimless exploration, I had found peace there, the same peace, like the crucible of my inner fire. I didn't 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, braving the frost, sleeping beneath that frost, I grappled with my faith as if with an angel, and I would say: "Why me? How can I?" And then, one day, at the turn of a bustling, fashionable neighborhood, I discovered this little church. I entered gently. A service was taking place, where silence vied with contemplation. The floral scent of incense uplifted my soul. I slipped onto a nearly empty pew at the very back of the church next to a stoic, focused man. I was delighted to be there and to have disturbed no one. It was London in the early 1990s; the incense acted on me like an opiate, Latin awakening within me, revealing its forgotten, multifaceted roots—my heritage. I followed the movements of others, especially the priest, meticulous and attentive, as they rose, sat, and knelt. A ritual unfolded before my eyes, expressing my faith as it thundered within me with joy. Finally, I understood—not that I was being told, but my Lord and my God, granting me understanding of this fire that burned endlessly and ceaselessly. I was living as if in a dream. I was unfamiliar with this ritual, but I felt I had finally arrived safely, that I was home. Everything was beautiful and sumptuous. Only highway robbers would wish to take beauty away from the poor, when often it is their only possession, their only possession because it does not belong to them and they would not desire to possess it, knowing themselves unworthy of holding it, yet always willing to worship it. This possession sustains their faith and prevents them from falling into destitution. The poor naturally understand the unbreakable link between beauty, goodness, and righteousness. I wished it would never end. I spent an hour in total rapture, my soul immersed in a world where the physical and the metaphysical intertwined in a magnificent alchemy. Much later, I discovered the wonderful phrase of Saint John Newman: "The Mass, the most beautiful thing on this side of Paradise." “But I had never seen Masses like this, where everyone was captivated and transported by the majestic rite. I had never felt such fervor in the contemplation. I had never seen anything even remotely resembling it. Yet, I hadn't imagined it. I returned to that church every Sunday and sometimes on other days, for I was enthralled. The beauty of the Tridentine form, whose name I didn't yet know, but which I felt I should name to distinguish it from those I had always attended, even though none of the Masses I had ever truly known was the same. I would soon learn it 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 barely spoke.” The structure of the Mass of Saint Pius V became clear to me; I felt my prayer blossom and flourish within it, for it was bound up for its own good. I understood that the Mass came to embrace me and envelop me so that my encounter with the Lord might bear fruit. It was an epiphany. The epiphany of the liturgy. Everything was in harmony: the frankincense, the myrrh, and the gold in the gesture of the priest who celebrated these mysteries.

Holy Father, I must confess something else to you, which I know will move you as it moved me: at the end of Mass, still in awe of a ceremony unlike any I had ever witnessed, where the soul was praised and everything was done to encourage it in its quest, I leaned toward my neighbor, the man beside whom I had slipped so as not to disturb the ceremony. I realized he was homeless, and his stench suddenly assaulted me. I understood then why he had positioned himself at the very back, far from the faithful, so as not to cause a disturbance. I mustered my composure and greeted him before leaving the church. His face lit up. I can still see his face thirty years later. I still thank that priest, thirty years later. It was the greatest religious experience of my life, for it was decisive and influenced my entire life. I have nothing against the ordinary mass (I use the name of your predecessor, our beloved Pope Benedict, to differentiate it, you will not hold it against me), I went there very often throughout my childhood, and I still go there sometimes 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 that man's face again, that homeless man as they call them across the Channel, except at the Tridentine Mass, sometimes during the Asparagus Me , sometimes simply during the prayers at the foot of the altar, or at the Lavabo , or even during the thanksgiving… Everything I had painstakingly built up from bits and pieces took on meaning at the Mass of Saint Pius V, and that meaning has never been contradicted since. Because there was something there that transcended me: a profound dignity, a patina of time, an impeccable and logical unfolding that revealed me and compelled me to know myself intimately, to go where I would never have thought to go, to discover the source of my inner fire. My whole being trembled, for it saw the path to take, the truth to follow, and the life to live. In attending the usus antiquior, structure and authority. Romanitas! We call ourselves Roman Catholic, Catholic and Roman, don't we? Everything I had lacked as a child appeared to me: a tradition, a lineage, the desire to practice the past in my time, not out of nostalgia for the past, but to test my soul and participate in the communion of saints through tradition. I fell in love with tradition and understood that it corresponded to the only truly momentous event, the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and that no decision or gathering orchestrated by men could interfere with it or shake it. ^previous generations remains great and sacred to us . What joy to find what I no longer sought! Through the traditional pomp, I saw the wonder that religion makes shine in the eyes of the poor. Beauty opens the window of wonder to the poor. I would be tempted to say that one must be poor to see this wonder. We must keep this poverty of heart which opens the gates of heaven. At the Tridentine Mass, I had found the ideal father, one who abandoned no one and who lavished his mercy with no other return than the faith that one had for him.