Can Pope Leo end the liturgy wars?

Last weekend, under windswept banners depicting the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, nearly 20,000 young pilgrims marched through fields and forests between the cathedrals of Paris and Chartres. All of them carried rosaries and chanted in Latin, sometimes breathlessly: it’s a punishing 60-mile trek through mud and rocks.

Each ‘chapter’ of the column was accompanied by priests. Like the lay pilgrims – drawn from 30 countries but dominated by French teenagers in scouting uniform – they wore backpacks and trainers, but also full-length cassocks or habits. They were traditionalists and so were the young people: despite their informality, they were utterly committed to intricate Latin worship.

From a distance, the banners and fleur-de-lys flags summoned folk memories of St Joan of Arc. When the Maid’s forces approached Orléans in 1429, her English enemies were startled by the hymn ‘Veni Creator Spiritus’ sung by priests emerging from the woods. Was this an army or a religious procession? It’s tempting to ask the same question about the Chartres pilgrimage, an event that grows bigger every year. Though the atmosphere was joyful, this time the gathering was overshadowed by the ‘liturgy wars’ raging most fiercely in the United States and France. Pope Leo XIV, himself an American, must know how desperate the situation is; making peace is the first great challenge of his pontificate.

The casus belli is the old Latin Mass that a growing number of young Catholics are discovering, more than half a century after the Church decided that it was too reactionary for their grandparents’ generation. Celebrated ad orientem (facing east), it follows a rubric of crossings, bows and genuflections that can take years to master. Until recently it was known as the Tridentine Mass, a name derived from the Council of Trent that codified it in 1570.