I received some messages on Facebook about what I would call the ideal parish, the stuff of old people reminiscing about the distant past (40 years ago or more) or even priests who remembered their days of World War II and earlier. A few days ago, I turned 65 and wondered why I did not have the same nostalgia about the 1970’s. 1974 was fifty years ago. For me, it was a brutal time that had no esteem for beauty. I have never understood why some people like ugliness and noise. In many ways, our own times have continued the same brutalism, though some urban architects have adopted more classical and aesthetically pleasing designs for their projects.

In 1982, I was living in London, one year after I had converted to Roman Catholicism through the Society of St Pius X. I had listened to the noisy apologetics salesmen and taken it all in. I went to traditional Masses both with the Society of St Pius X, the elderly retired monk Fr John Coulson in Wimbledon and the Latin Mass Society in various “real” churches in London. It was all impressive to the Anglican I was from a middle-of-the-road background with a passion for church music and the organ. At the same time, I played the organ for Mass in an east-end parish church with a most uninspiring Novus Ordo liturgy, resembling our old 1970’s Series 3 services I had known at school when modern English was being rolled out.

Traditionalist Roman Catholicism in London seemed to be resumed into rubrical nit-picking, devotional crankiness and apocalyptic ideologies. I even met one of Oswald Mosley’s old supporters whose opinions on Jewish people and Freemasonic conspiracies could have been taken from Streicher’s Die Stürmer! Had I known the full extent of this man’s ideas, I would have run more than a mile! Truth to be told, I was more fascinated by medieval English Catholicism and its surviving churches in the English countryside, the pre-Reformation ideal, the Sarum liturgy and other local uses like York. I was tempted by the idea of monastic life until I eventually discovered its collectivist, regimented and repressive reality. I had also been to France on holiday with my family several times. What if France was a “new old England” without the Reformation or modern liturgies?

I erred by Idealism and Romanticism, forgetting the role of Reason and thinking out the realities. Nevertheless, I decided to go to France – by bicycle (apart from the Newhaven to Dieppe ferry crossing, and the journey from London by train). Fr Coulson gave me a list of names and addresses including Fr Montgomery-Wright in Normandy and a few monasteries and old eccentric priests. I have already related the story:

With the passing years…

Fr Montgomery took his Anglo-Catholicism to the RC Church, and discovered that he would have more or less the same freedom to be an eccentric priest in France as in the Church of England. In his mind, more or less, was a merger between the idealised Sarum liturgy of medieval England, the surviving local rites of Normandy and the Roman Catholic “one true church”. He sympathised with Archbishop Lefebvre but kept his distance from the political and collectivist ideologies of many French traditionalists. During the few months I spent in the presbytery in Le Chamblac, I remember the visits by young French traditionalist idealists from Paris. Each week, Fr Montgomery went to Paris and celebrated a private Mass at St Nicholas-du-Chardonnet. I know, because I served that Mass. At the same time, he kept a respectful distance and a discreetly critical attitude.

The people who went to Mass at Le Chamblac were mostly traditionalists coming from a certain distance. A very few were actual parishioners. Le Chamblac consists of the church and presbytery, the chateau, the Mairie and a few farms dotted around. That’s all. He had two other parishes which were already dead. Fr Montgomery said Mass during the week for a community of nuns in Bernay and Sunday evening for a group of traditionalists in Alençon. The chapel was a hired room and everything was set up before Mass and taken down afterwards, and kept in someone’s home. He got about, accompanied by Christian, who was a man with Down syndrome. This life might be idealised, but the actual parish life was quite bleak which certainly motivated Fr Montgomery to minister to traditionalists in the area. It was less of a local-community parish than one would like to imagine.

When I was at seminary, after my Fribourg days, in the early 1990’s, I had the occasion to use my organ-building skills I had acquired with Harrison & Harrison and London College of Furniture. I began to be asked to find redundant organs in England, transport them and reassemble them in churches. One such priest who asked me to provide an organ was Fr Jacques Pecha at the parish of Bouloire in the Diocese of Le Mans. Fr Pecha was born locally in 1920 and went to seminary in the late 1930’s. He lived through the misery of the Nazi occupation from 1940. His family narrowly escaped being deported to Germany for slave labour for health reasons. He was ordained a priest in 1943 by Cardinal Georges Grente of Le Mans. Like Fr Montgomery, his parish tenure was very long until his death in 2002. I found the organ in Nottinghamshire, dismantled it and loaded it into a van, and installed it in 1992.

The parish of Bouloire is quite unlike Le Chamblac. It is a large village / small town of two thousand inhabitants.

I spent some time with Fr Pecha during the installation of the organ, and also in 1997-98 when my vocation was in a mess. He acted as Archdeacon at my uncanonical ordination to the priesthood in 1998 by an independent Ngô Đình Thục succession bishop living near Limoges. He was an independent-minded priest, also in regard to political and “militant” traditionalism. Some of his congregation were from the parish, but most were traditionalists who drove from their homes to Bouloire. Liturgically, Fr Pecha was less eccentric than Fr Montgomery, and celebrated in the Roman rite with some adaptations from the 1965 pre-Novus Ordo rite. He was much more inspired by French monastic styles than medievalism. He got on very well with his brother Olivier who played the organ, and we often went to have supper with Mme Alix (la “Mère Ollie”) the sacristan or some of the other people who had known him for decades.

Some years before I went there, the diocesan bishop decided to put a stop to this independence. Fr Pecha Pecha replied something like: “I won’t be there when you come, but I fear that my people will be guarding the church with tractors and pitchforks“. A very Vendéen response (sometimes called Chouannerie) lodged in the collective historical consciousness of French Catholics. This courage and independence is something that attracted me to France, even though some of the political reactions (both left and right) of the past few years are quite intimidating. My experience of a whole different world, confirmed my own anti-authoritarian instincts as someone on the autistic “spectrum”. My idealism prevented me from recognising toxic religiosity and fanaticism for what it is.

My prognosis is harsh with the conflict between idealism and reality. My discovery of Idealism and Romanticism has innoculated me from many of the absurdities of internet religion and literalism, or indeed any kind of metaphysics based on materialism. Fr Pecha only ever wanted to be a hard-working and pastoral parish priest. Fr Montgomery was also hard-working and pastoral, but never ceased to be an Anglo-Catholic.

There are still parishes where there is a good sense of community. The liturgy might or might not be to our taste. The fact is that the parishes are dead or dying, except in the cities where people are more educated and motivated by ideas and ideologies. The church in my village (Champgenéteux, Mayenne) is a seventeenth-century building and usually open during the summer. It is well maintained by the Mairie (moderately green and left-wing), and there are occasional Sunday Masses, funerals and weddings. I discovered the old presbytery when I went for a walk yesterday evening, a building that seems to be in fair condition with modern windows, but without sign of life. Perhaps the Mairie has a use for it.

My prognosis? It is the end of Christendom, and Christianity will become an underground movement in cities.  The countryside is becoming a desert, and many houses are secondary residences, at least in touristic areas. My own village is slowly becoming a refuge for very modest income people looking for cheap houses – as is my own case. Interestingly, many people here are English expats – who can aspire to some stability if they have a French passport or permis de séjour, since Brexit has put paid to free movement. Many such people have a rather resentful view of life and have absolutely no interest in religion. So much for the idea of an “ethnic” community! Someone came up with the idea of turning the old boulangerie into a café which is run as an association and not as a business. It is one of the brightest ideas anyone has come up with here, but the melancholy remains. I feel it.

Georges Bernanos said in his Journal d’un Curé de Campagne – “Je me disais donc que le monde est dévoré par l’ennui. Naturellement, il faut un peu réfléchir pour se rendre compte, ça ne se saisit pas tout de suite“. The world is devoured by boredom. It needs thought to become aware of it because it is not obvious. Boredom is like dust that gets everywhere, on your face and hands, everywhere. So, to be rid of the dust, people resort to activity and agitation. Am I an exception? I think not except for something intellectual and spiritual that makes me human. Bernanos was writing a hundred years ago. It was as modern then as now! Village life is boring except to someone with something of a monastic view of life. I stayed for six months with the monks of Triors in 1997, but I could not relate to the absolute collectivism and regimentation of their life. It was a brutal reality that clashed with my inner idealism. It seemed so little different from The Machine of the modern world – so paradoxical. Contemplative life can only be lived by those who are aware of their humanity, person and spiritual freedom. Where is the balance between self-disciple and structure – and letting go of the shackles, like sailing a ship into unknown waters and a new world.

I have found American Transcendentalism (Walt Whitman, Emerson, etc.) very appealing in its optimism compared with the gloom of English Romanticism. Perhaps in a past time, I might have wanted to go to the New World. I was tempted in the early 2000’s as I found sympathy with the late Dr John Grady of the Order of St John in Tennessee and an independent traditionalist bishop in Florida. Something held me back. America is mostly an illusion and a deadly error I had the good sense to avoid. Many Americans I know are very good people, but something always kept me away.

I read many prognoses about the future in America and here in Europe. Are we teetering towards some kind of “Communist-Islamic” nightmare? Or an even worse nightmare of The Machine and techno-feudalism? Christ taught us not to worry about the future – carpe diem. Many threatened future events will happen only after our own deaths. The old priests I knew in their parishes are now gone. I have seen their graves and the signs of their flocks’ love and memories. They take their place alongside Dr Pusey, Fr Mackonochie, the Curé d’Ars and so many others, canonised by the Church or forgotten.

I quote from Michael Martin’s introduction to Novalis’ fragment Christendom or Europe.

A belief in the omnipresence and immanence of God would not on the surface suggest heresy – or even atheism, as some have suggested – but it does lead to an existential moment in which, if God is truly immanent in Creation, “present equally within everyone alike, then we all have equal access to him, and there is no need for a religious or political elite to establish and confirm our relationship with him”.

Christianity or Europe is not a nostalgic fairy tale, but a piece of writing that laments the loss of the Christian imagination. Novalis sought to re-enchant medieval Christendom to counter both the materialist Machine and the west’s own “islam” – bible-bashing Protestantism. Bucolic French parish life is a tiny contribution to the vast vision of those hundreds of young people at the Chartres Pilgrimage. I see the link, but the efforts of the traditionalists pale before the Idealist and Romantic vision. Ironically, those we used to call Modernists may well have had a more firmly grounded aspiration to Christendom than today’s traditionalists. Simply, the label Modernist was glued onto anyone who in the 1900’s dared to suggest the immanence of God and seek a deeper and more spiritualist vision than Aristotelian materialism (you only arrive at the Universal Idea by abstracting from particular matter or foundational truth) and ecclesiastical authoritarianism. The real enemy is aggressive secularism!

We look to the past in order to sheet in the sail and steer towards a new world, one of childhood and magic, of imagination and beauty, of humanity and spiritual freedom. Reality divorced from Idealism is a mirage and an illusion. I am a priest but my parish is cosmopolitan via the technology of the internet. It has taken all this time to learn to be myself, through experience of those ebbing lights of French parishes to the imagination that always “clears new ground”.