In the forests of the Thar valley, in the shadow of Mont St Michel, lies the Abbaye de la Sainte-Trinité de La Lucerne D’Outremer.
Built originally in the 11th century (in the Premonstatensian style) it has flourished, collapsed and been rebuilt over the centuries. During the French revolution it was supressed and turned into a cotton mill. Much of its stone was liberated by locals, and it was left in a ruin.
One of its most effective modern rescuers was the eccentric Abbe Marcel Lelegard who, in 1959, bought the Abbey personally to help rescue and restore it.
In a mixture of piety and adventure Fr Marcel decided to enter a popular TV game show “La Roue Tourne” hosted by a famous French TV compere, Guy Lux. Astonishingly he won a car, a Renault Ondine in the show. In a flurry of publicity he brought the car back to the abbey to sell it at auction, providing more funds and publicity for the restoration.
Since then the chapel has continued to be painstakingly rebuilt and the stones replaced.
But last year, the Bishop of Coutances decided to more than repair the fabric. He planned to replace its heart. He had read Rod Dreher’s ‘The Benedict Option’ and under its influence invited two of his younger diocesan priests to start a eucharistic community in the Abbey.
Abbot Guillaume Antoine and Fr Henri Vallançon were commissioned last autumn with the mission of developing a spiritual and cultural centre, intended to “quench the thirst for beauty and transcendence of a growing number of people disenchanted by the ephemeral attractions of postmodernity.”
Bishop Laurent Le Boulc’h shared his vision during the Sept. 8 inauguration Mass last year.
“In our uncertain world which seems to have reached a crossroads, and which is struggling to orient itself in the future, there is a growing need for certain places. Our world is in search of spiritual oases in which people can freely settle down, find refuge and refreshment from the stress of their daily lives, discern, discovering meaning and aspiration.
The Catholic Church hears this call which whispers hollowly in the contemporary world. She then wishes to offer her aesthetic, cultural, biblical and liturgical resources to help quench the most authentic thirsts of men and women today. It is not a question of building here a closed or sectarian place, but on the contrary, a place of breathing. A place in which the draft of our time will meet the wind of the Holy Spirit in the creative breath of the tradition of the Church.”
As it happens I have a small ex-mill in Normandy where I go to pray and write. It is 25 minutes to the east of L’Abbeye de St Lucerne and it occurred to me that I should go to Mass there at the next opportunity. I ought to support what seemed to me to be a brave and prophetic initiative.
I think I expected to see two brave priests buried in the depths of the Normandy countryside, with a congregation of perhaps half a dozen friends, and a passing admirer or two.
What I found instead was a congregation of about 400 celebrating a mass mainly in Latin, but interspersed with French. The air was thick with incense and Gregorian chant.
Priests deacons, cantors and servers filled the sanctuary with a dozen people. The homily was vigorous and spiritually sharp. And perhaps as a symbol of the fusion of ancient and modern, a brightly lit hand-held debit card reader was passed around accompanying the baskets for the offering.
As striking as anything else were the ages of the congregation. Few elderly. Instead, so many pews filled by families of two parents and a row of their children.
Atmospheres are notoriously hard to describe and inevitably subjective, but it may be that that the Western Church is not well served by talk of looking forwards or backwards.
Historically, linearly, an 11th century abbey with Latin liturgy and Gregorian chant may direct the aesthetic attention back in time. But Eastern Orthodoxy offers a corrective when it reminds us that in the liturgy, heaven and earth are joined together; both time and space become permeable to a more profound reality in which we find a taste and an echo of heaven.
Perhaps instead of talking about looking backwards or forwards, we should be using the language of looking up, or even better through?
It seems at least at the Abbey de la Lucerne, the linear view doesn’t do justice to the metaphysics. This was a liturgy where heaven and earth kissed; where the membrane that separates time from eternity became translucent for an hour.
It may be that the progressives in Catholicism do themselves no favours with their preoccupation with the time as a matter of pushing forwards into the future. There is no vision of anything politically and culturally attainable that aligns itself with the anticipation of heaven. Time is useful in that it gives us an opportunity to prepare for death and judgement rather than any heaven on earth in whatever shape it presents itself. The denigration of the past maybe less a rejection of earlier practices, than a denial of the language and experience of the soul and the spirit, in favour of the here, the now, and the future then.
The magnetic attraction of the renewed traditional Catholicism is indeed partly, as the bishop of Coutances foresaw, a place where the soul can breathe more easily, but it also provides a place where Catholic families can create micro-communities.
As Catholic parents in particular, start to plan to move their homes nearer to centres of renewed Catholicism, schools become more Catholic, local politics become more Christian, and the tide of secularism, so instinctively antithetic to Christian reflexes and instincts, is at least held more effectively at bay. The old adage, like so many old adages remains true, there is strength in numbers. There is nothing to be lost and much to be gained by a reorganisation of the numbers of Catholics so as to create and sustain communities or prayer and piety.
The French have a phrase “reculer pour mieux sauter’– we draw back to jump higher.
The renewal at the Abbaye de la Sainte-Trinité de La Lucerne D’Outremer may demonstrate that the ‘back’ in liturgy and spirituality may not be so much about ‘rigidity’ or ‘devotion to the past’, as a resource that gives us the means to raise our souls and lives ‘higher’ in our pilgrimages; a higher that is for faithful Catholics, more proximate to heaven.
On the way home on my motorbike my eye was caught by a wayside sign and shrine. It was the entrance to a small clearing amongst a copse of trees where there lay a well-kept and honoured monument. The sign read “For Maurice Garland. Chief of the Granville Resistance. Assassinated in this place by the Gestapo July, 1944.”
It was a reminder that in those periods of history when evil gains the upper hand, collaboration is no longer an option. The truly honourable as well as ethical response becomes one of determined, courageous and intelligent resistance. I knelt to pray for the soul of Marcel Marland, those who executed him, and those whose passivity made the evil possible.
(Photo courtesy of the Abbaye de la Sainte-Trinité de La Lucerne D’Outremer)
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.