The Bishop of Versailles Will Celebrate the Concluding Mass -- 2 Times 100 km: International Pentecost Pilgramage of Tradition Between Paris and Chartres

(Paris) Bishop Marie Eric Aummonier, Bishop of Versailles, is to be the celebrant at the Cathedral of Chartres to the conclusion of this year's International Pentecost Pilgrimage of the Ecclesia Dei communities in the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite on Whit Monday. This decision was announced, the organizers of the pilgrimage traditional Association Notre-Dame de Chrétienté. This is another sign that the traditional Catholics are perceived by the bishops of the region of Paris more and more as self-evidently part of the Church and recognized. The prelude was in 2010 by the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal André Vingt-Trois, with a visit to the pilgrims in the large tent city of the three-day pilgrimage on foot, to be covered in approximately 100 kilometers from Paris to Chartres.

At Pentecost the two largest international traditional pilgrimages will take place at the same time. In addition to the pilgrimage of Fraternity of St. Peter and other Ecclesia Dei communities from Paris to Chartres, another pilgrimage takes place at the same time by the SSPX, which follows the exact opposite way from Chartres to Paris. Both pilgrimages originally go back to the same origin. As when the SSPX came to a break because Rome did not allow episcopal ordinations in 1988 and the Fraternity of St. Peter and the Ecclesia Dei communities emerged, also share the pilgrimage.

The pilgrimage of the Fraternity can use the cathedrals, which is why the Holy Mass is celebrated at the beginning in the cathedral of Paris and the conclusion is at the Cathedral of Chartres. The SSPX are still denied this, which is why Holy Mass is celebrated at the beginning of the pilgrimage outside the Cathedral of Chartres in the open air, as the concluding Mass at Les Invalides in Paris. At these two largest pilgrimages of tradition together, tens of thousands of believers will participate.

There are still free spots at the SSPX. The American group will be led by Father Patrick Rutledge.

Link to katholishes...

Monarchy, Versailles, Museums, Jesuits and Mystery Science 2000

Catholic Caveman has found an article by California Catholic on the most recent foray of the Society of Jesus into art, scandal and sacrilege. The Jesuits in California are doing scary things while turning sacred space into a cultural venue for fascinating multi-cultural goings on, as if the originators of the event had taken a page from Harvey Cox's Secular City.

We thought the above pictured pagan idol reminded us a lot of Crow from Mystery Science 2000.



It may be true that museum goers need not have a religious bent to enjoy sacred art, but we wonder whether these California Jesuits at St. Ignatius Church in San Franciso have a properly formed sensus catholicus. No doubt, their desire to shock and break with tradition have all but completely overwhelmed their stated purpose of doing everything for the glory of God.


In a related event at Versailles, France, a similar kind of artistic, cultural terrorism is happening, which may afright and confuse those of us who are accustomed to a more or less conventional experience. It really is a tribute in a way to the revolutionary nature of Museums in the first place, which were really designed according to an Enlightenment idea that the public could be educated by herding them into large public buildings to view art, apart from their privileged and aristocratic associations.



The Measure

In his New York Times decade-in-art retrospective, Holland Cotter singled out the Jeff Koons exhibition at Versailles as the most significant exhibition of the aughts, and next fall Japanese Pop art star Takashi Murakami (pictured) will have an opportunity to set the tone for the 2010s. (The other contemporary artist to have a show at Versailles, French conceptualist Xavier Veilhan, was featured there in 2009.) Agence France Presse reported yesterday that the Murakami retrospective that was first announced last summer will open on September 12, 2010 and run for three months at the palace outside Paris.

Sadly, [happily for us] because the French have a serious complex about the former seat of their dearly departed monarchy, the art shown therein must be as tame as possible. Or, as AFP puts it:

the palace, a symbol of the system of absolute monarchy, is being careful to avoid displaying works with pornographic or morbid connotations that might offend some visitors.