Pâques-marked

How do you say "Easter bunny" in Latin?

We’re in a village in the Sarthe, pop. 374. It’s 10:20 a.m. The only Mass of the week is about to start in the church next door. It’s Easter Sunday, which explains the frenzied pealing of the bells and the spiffy attire of the congregation filling the pews, mostly young families, many of them new converts.

The church is three times fuller than it was last Sunday. This pleases the priest. A young Brazilian man of Portuguese and African ancestry, he was ordained in 2021 at a seminary a few kilometres from the village. He speaks French fluently, but his Mass and sermon will be in Latin.

His flock will not understand a single word.

My body is not a temple. Nor is it a cathedral, mosque, synagogue or megachurch. Nor is it any of the deities whom such buildings of devotion commonly serve. No, my body, the lumpy bit of twat typing these words is, like the me to which it is disagreeably attached, an idiot – I’m sorry to use such an unwoke term but no others are adequate – a crude, unskilled, ignorant moron who should be slumped over on a discarded kitchen chair in a forgotten corner of a basement, or at the open door of a disused shed in an allotment garden that you just see from the corner of your eye through a train window as you flash by on your way to somewhere even less interesting. It most certainly should not be ensconced — yes, ensconced — in a comfy fauteuil in the living room of an early 18th-century house built for Marie-Anne de Bourbon, Princesse de Conti, the daughter of Louis XIV and Louise de La Vallière, the king’s first official mistress.

The princess also had a hand in “modernising” her husband’s chateau just behind us.

The chateau and its church are much older than the house, as is the village – it was besieged by Richard the Lionheart in 1194 and coveted by the English throughout the long sweep of the Hundred Years’ War.

Today, as always, most of the community works in agriculture. Its free-range, ethically farmed “volaille de Loué” chickens, turkeys, ducks, and guinea fowl bring a high price. So does its grass-fed “boeuf de Maine”. Celebrated since the 16th century by writers like La Fontaine, Racine, the Comtesse de Ségur and Edmond Rostand, the high-end, highly prized produce makes for an affluent community, which shows in its commerce. The restaurant below the chateau, destroyed by fire in 2014, reopens next week with a 24-year-old Ferrandi-trained chef who worked under Guy Martin and Christian Etchebest in Paris. The well-stocked épicerie-boucherie makes its own sausages and patés, and placed second in a recent regional rillettes competition. The two bakeries are good, and the man running the bar, a former luxury house CEO, brews a range of delicious beers and makes innovative cocktails with his own tinctures and infusions.

The village is quiet, however. Many of the windows are shuttered. The only sounds, other than birds, are the church bells, which we first heard yesterday morning when they woke us at seven. Which should never have happened. Not just because we were up late and exhausted, but because we are in a French village that consistently gives half its votes to the far-right and has a church that only performs services in Latin.

In France, as elsewhere in the hardest core of the Catholic world, during Holy Week, church bells are meant to fall silent on Jeudi Saint (Maundy Thursday) to symbolise mourning for Christ’s death. They don’t sound again until dawn on Sunday, when the bells ring joyfully to celebrate His resurrection. The reason for this bell silencing is France’s traditional version of the Easter gift-bringer, which is not a bunny but these very bells, “les cloches de Pâques”. Legend has it that at dawn on Maundy Thursday, every church bell in the Catholic world flies to Rome, where the Pope blesses it. Then all the bells take off from the Vatican, a massive formation so thick it blots out the sky, carpet bombing the lands below with chocolate eggs and bells before returning to their belfries to ring in the Rising.

What in blazes was going on? Why were the bells of a church performing Tridentine rite Latin Masses ringing on Holy Saturday? Who, or what, was tasked with delivering the children’s chocolates? Has moral decay reached such a peak already? Is the end nigh?

Read on.

Not that many years ago, the church next door never closed its doors. Masses were held daily. Now, however, as elsewhere in the West, fewer people identify as Catholics, and fewer still attend Mass. Daily practitioners are virtually non-existent. This is why churches like Église Notre-Dame de l'Assomption hold only one weekly Mass.

Meanwhile, however, as in the United States, adult conversions to Catholicism in France since the pandemic have skyrocketed, up more than 150% since 2019. Women, mostly between 18 and 25 years old. And, of course, J.D. Vance, who, at the Vatican today, threw his body at the Pope, clutched his hand and kissed the ring on his fourth finger.

They apparently did not get around to discussing Vance’s use of the Augustinian and Thomistic concept of ordo amoris to defend the Trump administration’s mass deportation plans.

From Mass to mass: ordo amoris usually refers to the hierarchical ordering of love, prioritising God, family, and community while extending charity to all. Vance’s take, delivered on Fox News at the end of January, criticised the “far left” for “hating the citizens of their own country” while prioritising non-citizens. Instead, he said, “You [should] love your family, and then you love your neighbour, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus and prioritise the rest of the world.”

A few weeks later, the Pope, whose 88-year-old body is recovering from a five-week bout of pneumonia, directly challenged Vance’s view of ordo amoris in a letter to US bishops, calling it a “disgrace” and a “major crisis” that strips migrants of dignity:

“Christians know very well that it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity. Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. [...] The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan,’ that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

None of this was discussed today. Instead, the two men exchanged Easter greetings and gifts.

[This was written precisely 12 hours after their meeting, and 12 hours before the Pope’s death.]

In 2009, the Institut du Bon Pasteur, which runs the church next door, broke away from the even more traditional Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX). I discussed the SSPX here a couple of years ago. Warning: it was written in a fevered state and is in one of my weirdest bits to date. Don’t read it now.

It would take an Anthony Trollope to explain the complexities behind the IBP-SSPX schism. For our purposes, let’s just say that the IDP operates under direct Vatican authority, unlike the SSPX, which maintains its independence from Rome, rejects the ideas of religious liberty and ecumenism, and claims a “state of necessity” to justify operating outside normal Church structures. While both follow the Vatican’s opposition to same-sex marriage and view homosexuality as a “grave depravity”, the IBP is considered more moderate than the SSPX, less J.D. Vance apocalyptic, Holocaust denying, and slightly less anti-LGBTQ+. More in line with Pope Francis’s positions (“Being homosexual is not a crime. [...] It is a sin, as is any sexual act outside of marriage”). Etecetera.

Still, the IDP is a hardline unit, with confirmed links to Dies Irae, an extreme-right group with historical ties to the FN (now RN). Ten years ago, they sued France 2 for reporting that IDP schools “tolerated” racism and promoted revisionist history (e.g., praising Philippe Pétain, disparaging Charles de Gaulle). They lost the case, appealed, and lost again.

Breaking for Easter dinner. There will be no lamb – one of our party does not eat red meat, even if it takes away the sins of the world – and no chocolate eggs or bells, as the kids are too old for that nonsense. But there will be volaille de Loué chicken, local white asparagus and good wine. When I come back, if I come back, I will talk more about these churches. And churchiness in general. And the French equivalents to the J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel Christians, and the links, if any, to René Girard. That’s what I should do. But, as is becoming apparent, I, my body and me, he – I’m pretty sure he goes by he – show no understanding or regard for proper behaviour. He does not know how to participate in public life. His reactions are defensive, unchecked, primal, and blind. At night, nights are the worst, he thrashes about sleeplessly through anxious thickets of incomprehension. He never really sleeps. He wakes exhausted. Subsequently, his every encounter with the woken world and its inhabitants is brutish and inarticulate. When he gets up from that broken chair at the garden shed door to wave at your train, he gropes about in a stumbling, aching daze.

He needs your help.