Dear Father,

It is with great pleasure that I welcome your departure. Not that I am happy that you are leaving the chapel of Notre-Dame du Lys, but because I am happy to have met you and that you are continuing your priesthood by showing the example of the priest according to Benoit XVI.

Yesterday, for the feast of the Holy Trinity, you celebrated your last mass according to the extraordinary rite in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. In this pious little chapel, where you arrived in 2009 when the diocese of Paris began to assume responsibility for the chapel and to appoint priests to its service. And while you had already been ordained a priest for almost ten years, you learned to celebrate Mass according to the 1962 missal! A great lesson in humility! You have cast yourself in the mold of the bi-millennial form. To meet the request of your superiors, but also that of a group of die-hard faithful lovers of the extraordinary rite.

You had to learn everything. Like a young priest fresh out of the seminary. With the same enthusiasm. If it is quite easy for a priest trained in the Mass of Saint Pius V to celebrate an ordinary rite Mass, it is a little more perilous and complicated to do the opposite.

And if I say of you that you are a Benedict XVI generation priest (although you were ordained under John Paul II), it is because you embody the modern priest that our beloved Pope calls for. One who is able to pass from one rite to another. He who knows how to enrich and be enriched by the two forms of liturgical celebration. And it is indeed in this sense that Jean-Michel Guénois' analysis is correct*. There will probably be no other texts after the "Universae Ecclesiae" as indicated by the journalist from Le Figaro, but it seems clear to read the various texts published by Benoit XVI or by his close collaborators, to see the Saint -Father set an example during the Eucharistic celebrations that he celebrates, that it is more of a marked path to be taken absolutely and forming an integral part of the new evangelization. This way has only one objective: the enrichment of one and the other rite by one and the other rite. I can't say if Benoit XVI's deep desire was for the two rites to come together one day, but it seems obvious to me that he wanted them to be enriched.

Dear Father Fazilleau, you are the first diocesan priest celebrating the Tridentine Mass that I had the honor of knowing (I have known in the other direction priests coming from the priestly Fraternities of Saint-Pie X or Saint- Pierre become diocesan). As you told us at the end of the mass: “It was an immense pleasure for me to discover the extraordinary form. Thank you for being lenient with me when at first I was struggling to master it. When I meet a young priest now, I tell him to learn the Extraordinary Form, because this rite is the heart of the Mass of Paul VI, and knowing it greatly enriches the way of celebrating the Mass. »

It was also a great pleasure for us. Fair winds in Poitou where I hope you will find a group of faithful asking you for Mass in an extraordinary rite so that you can continue to celebrate both forms.

Please believe, Father, in the expression of my respectful feelings.

Emmanuel Di Rossetti

* Article by Jean-Marie Guénois: Mass in Latin, Benedict XVI will not go any further

Discover: The chapel of Notre Dame du Lys .

By example! A Eucharistic celebration of Benedict XVI in Venice on May 7-8 began with this request :

“In respect of these divine mysteries that we are celebrating in communion with His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, let us recollect ourselves by praying in silence; consequently, let there be no more applause, not even during the homily, and let no more use of flags or placards. »