PARIS, France — On a cool, wet June morning on the Left Bank of the River Seine, cheerful throngs of young adults are padding along the streets with packs on their backs. They are converging on Saint-Sulpice, the bulky 17th-century stone church that dominates the Saint-Germain neighborhood of Paris. From the giddiness of the kids, you might think there was a pop concert planned in the large square in front of the old church. Non.
“We’re here to pray,” says Cyriaque, 25, who came to the capital from the country’s southwest. “It will be fun.”
Cyriaque is one of about 20,000 limber young Catholics—and a few stiffer older ones—about to embark on a pilgrimage to the cathedral of Chartres, 62 miles southwest of Paris. The annual Pentecost trek—the 43rd such march in modern times—is a moving youth festival of old-fashioned Catholicism, featuring hymns, devotions, and the Latin Mass. It’s Woodstock for Catholic traditionalists, if Jimi Hendrix had been a Benedictine monk singing Gregorian chant.
“People just want to find something outside of their day-to-day life,” explains Cyriaque. “They’re looking for transcendence.”
Hence the Latin Mass: It’s the “most beautiful,” he says.
In the past decade, the Latin-language rite—which was made the standard liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church in 1570—has been at the center of an apparent Catholic awakening among young people, from France to America.
