As rumors of an end to the intolerable régime of Traditionis custodes have begun to circulate, the time is ripe to throw open the lid on the treasures, ever ancient and ever new, of the Latin liturgical tradition. Moving past the often sterile, partisan disputes of our own century, and cognizant of our century’s impoverished experience of communal prayer, it behooves us to plunge ourselves into the broad ocean of the Latin rite as it was celebrated in better days.
Jean-Baptiste des Marettes’s Liturgical Travels Through France (1718), translated for the first time by Gerhard Eger and Zachary Thomas, offers modern readers a breathtaking tour of the liturgical life of French cathedrals, parish churches, and religious houses at the turn of the eighteenth century. It reveals a Church in full ceremonial splendour, a Church that embodied the transcendence and majesty due to the Most High in every rite and gesture.
This was no mere collection of quaint local customs, but a living testament to a tradition that remained unbroken for centuries, nurtured by a network of cathedrals employing about 10,000 canons and monasteries whose very stones echoed with the prayers of generations.
The obliteration of this ritual culture by the revolution and the ensuing liturgical upheavals of the modern era was a great tragedy. But it is a culture that today’s faithful, starved of beauty and reverence, must rediscover if the true spirit of Catholic worship is to be restored.
The French Church of Le Brun des Marettes’s time was also engaged in defending the integrity of its rites amidst pressures both internal and external. Under Louis XIV, national pride and fidelity to Catholic tradition combined to assert the legitimacy of local diocesan usages, the so-called neo-Gallican rites, in defiance of homogenizing tendencies that would reduce sacred worship to mere uniformity.
These rites, while sometimes overreaching in their alterations (Guéranger had a point...), nevertheless illustrate a Church aware of the necessity to guard both tradition and authentic liturgical development, an example sorely needed in our present moment when the very essence of the Roman rite is threatened by those who would cheapen and desacralize it.
For the Catholic traditionalist, the Liturgical Travels Through France makes for inspiring and fascinating reading. It offers a window into a world where the sacred liturgy was not a hollowed-out appendage to bourgeois society but the very heartbeat of Christian civilization—a reality pregnant with beauty, mystery, and doctrinal clarity. This is a world that predates the corrosive effects of the Liturgical Movement and the post-Conciliar reforms.
By immersing oneself in this volume, the reader will be reminded of what truly venerable Catholic worship entails: grandeur that humbles the soul, solemnity that lifts the heart to God, and continuity that binds the faithful across the ages. It is a corrective to the false compromises and banalities that have too often passed for liturgical reform.
Above all, it is a call to recover the patrimony that once made the Latin rite the jewel of Christendom.
To read the wonderful Foreword by Fr. Claude Barthe, visit Canticum Salomonis.
Liturgical Travels is available in paperback, hardcover, and ebook, from the publisher Os Justi Press or from any Amazon site.
