A parish priest abolishes the Council

A priest from the Caserta region of central Italy restores the old Latin Mass.The bishop asks him to leave. Ratzinger writes, "I understand.”

THE door opens into a place that has the atmosphere of a wood-store, a warehouse, or an old wine cellar. It is, instead, the presbytery attached to the parish of Fontanaradina, a hamlet in the commune of Sessa Aurunca with 170 inhabitants and a handful of old houses clinging to the mountainside in the Caserta region.

Don Louis Demornex, the parish priest, is an amiable giant with a white beard and black cassock who wears sandals even in winter. Sixty years old, the son of French mountain people, he has lived here since 1970, the year of his ordination to the priesthood. He also cares for the spiritual needs of two other villages, Corigliano and Aulpi and he moves up and down the mountain at the wheel of a battered Peugeot whose panel work remains intact only, it seems, in virtue of the miraculous gaze of the little plaster Madonna stuck on the dash board.

"When I came to this house," he said, " the roof had fallen in and the windows were missing. I called it my Bethlehem. Then, thanks to the help of some of the young fellows of the parish we have installed electricity and put in running water. Now I call it my Nazareth.”

This priest who truly lives in poverty – "I own nothing: my only riches are in the tabernacle" – from 1 February 2000 began, all of sudden, to celebrate Sunday Mass in his three parishes according to the ancient Latin Tridentine rite which was in force up to the time of the Second Vatican Council: the Missal of St Pius V prayers strictly in Latin, back to the faithful, Gregorian chant. Padre Louis has written three letters to his people to explain his decision. He explains that, in his judgment, a fundamental lack of respect towards the Eucharist characterizes the new rite of Mass.

"Today the consecrated fragments are profaned; the crumbs fall to the ground and are trampled. And then the priest does not purify his hands, or if he does, tosses the water out: all this makes one think of a woman who throws her own foetus into the rubbish. Whoever does this kind of thing, or does not believe that every fragment of the host is Jesus Christ in his entirety, then, he is a heretic. Either that, or he does believe and is sacrilegious.”

Don Demornex has taken this sensational decision also on account of his "disposition".

"I just cannot say the Mass facing the people," he says. "It distracts me and I do not succeed in maintaining recollection. In any case, the Tridentine rite has never been abolished: John Paul II has granted an indult that permits it. On weekdays, when you can count the worshippers on the fingers of one hand, I have used the old rite for some time. Now I have begun to celebrate it also on Sundays.”

Even if in the churches of Fontanaradina, Corigliano, and Aulpi the clock seems to have been turned back thirty years, Sunday Mass attendance remains high. Some parishioners have protested and others go elsewhere to Mass. However, others are beginning to come in from neighbouring parishes. Then, last May 6 (2000), a Saturday, the bishop of Sessa Aurunca, Antonio Napolitano, intervened. How predictable it all was. He made the corpulent priest come down from the mountain in order to hand him a letter that accused him of discharging his pastoral obligations in a "backward and archaic manner".

"I know" the bishop wrote, "that you have openly strayed from the liturgical provisions currently in force" and celebrate "the Eucharist with your back turned to the people of God and in contravention of the Apostolic Constitution of Paul VI in which he promulgated the missal reformed according to the norms of the Council.”

Conclusion: "I invite you to consider your conduct and perhaps even your position in the diocese of Sessa Aurunca; otherwise you are free to choose other dioceses that better satisfy your own ideas." A clear invitation: change course or pack your bags.

A few hours after he received the letter, Don Demornex read it to all his parishioners during the three Masses he celebrated on Sunday 7 May.

"I ask you to forgive me if I have scandalised you," he said from the pulpit, "if I have misled you, if I have been a bad parish priest. I have to leave here.”

The reaction of the faithful was unexpected and overwhelming. There were tears, embraces, and pleas that he reconsider his decision to go. The young people, as soon as they left the church, leaped into their cars and began to collect signatures for a petition in support of their parish priest. In as little as two hours they collected a good 400 in Corigliano – a place of 600 inhabitants - and in Sessa Aurunca 800 signed.

"Before Don Louis arrived," said the hand-written letter from the parishioners, "there were few people who went to Mass, few who frequented the sacraments. Now the participation is massive; there is a great catechetical work underway; Catholic Action has been re-established; the 40 Hours adoration, novenas to the saints, once widely considered as just so many pastimes for the old folk, are now instead regarded as a help along the path of faith.”

Notwithstanding the affection of the faithful, the "antiquated" padre Demornex decided to leave his three parishes. The demonstrations of the people surprised him, but did not make him change his position: "I have always tried to do the will of God, not that of the people. And the Gospel teaches that the crowd which today acclaims you with palms tomorrow will cry ‘Crucify him!’”

So he took himself off to Naples and to the house of some friends and wrote his resignation to the bishop. "I committed the unpardonable error of coming to love and esteem the pre-conciliar mentality." But the faithful insisted; they organised a protest in front of the curial offices in Sessa Aurunca and asked for an audience with the bishop.

Monsignore Napolitano told them, "I did not send him away." So, after only eight days exile, and so many pleas from the parishioners, the priest returned. He continued from then on to celebrate undisturbed the Tridentine Mass.

"I have trained the young people to follow it and they do it willingly," Don Louis explains. "For me what is important is not the ancient rite itself but its content.

With the Mass of St Pius V it is the Church that celebrates through you. The new Mass, instead, has never existed because everyone celebrates it according to his own fashion, with creativity and introducing changes.”

In the clear eyes of the becassocked giant there is great serenity, notwithstanding the pneumonia that afflicts him. It is touching when he acts as guide through his little church, showing the relics of St Teresa of the Child Jesus and St Pius X which adorn the altar. He has the look of a child to whom all the toys in the world have just been given.

"From the time when I recommenced saying the old Mass, I have been reinvigorated. Now I wait upon the decisions of my bishop. In March (2001) there will be a pastoral visit; then we will see. Perhaps I will have to leave the parish.

But, please, do not say that I am a follower of Monsignor Lefebvre, because it is not true. I belong to no party. I am, and wish to be, by the grace of God, only a Catholic.”

Among the cards that Don Louis has set up on the kitchen table against the peeling walls, there is a missive of solidarity that arrived from the Vatican. It is from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Prefect for the Doctrine of the Faith, who, in his biography My Life (St Paul, 1997) affirms: "I am convinced that the crisis we find in the Church today depends, in great measure, on the collapse of the liturgy. The liturgical reform has caused extremely grave damage to the faith.”

The parish priest who is now seated before a steaming plate of lentil soup just served for his guest and himself, does not wish to speak of this letter. Then, after having resisted for some while the insistence of this chronicler, he admits: "Yes, I wrote to the Cardinal to tell him my story and the reasons that drove me to celebrate the Mass. And he replied.”

On 15 July 2000 this prince of the Church and custodian of Catholic orthodoxy replied directly to him, to the priest with the sandals who lives in the cold and bare "Nazareth" of Fontanaradina.

"Your letter has struck me and moved me," one reads in the reply of Ratzinger to Don Demornex, "What you say about the laicisation of the priests, on the liturgical anarchy, and on the multifarious profanations of the Eucharist is unfortunately true. You have confided your profound discomfort to the bishop: he has not understood you and has invited you to leave the parish. From the formally juridical point of view, it is his right.”

"You know well," the Cardinal concludes, "that I am not able to advise you to rebel. Be confident that the Lord never lays upon us the weight of a cross without helping us to carry it. I promise you to carry your sorrow in my prayers before the Lord.”

(*Andrea Tornelli is a leading Vatican specialist and contributor to the newspaper Il Giornale. This report appeared on 17 January 2001. Translated by Gary Scarrabelotti)

Demornex Sequel

According to reports from our contacts in Italy, Mons. Napolitano conducted a pastoral visitation of Sessa Aurunca on 1 April this year. The bishop celebrated Mass (according to the new rite)and gave a long homily – 45 minutes - in which he sharply reproved Padre Dermonex.

The bishop argued that, with the introduction of the "New Order", it was as if the Church had been led out of "the Land of Egypt": a land of fixity and permanent standstill, of laws and slavery. With the New Mass, the bishop claimed, the Church had set out through the desert and is now marching towards the Promised Land where, finally, we will be free of restrictive laws, from compulsion, and from subjection! Padre Demornex was shaken by the bishop’s homily, as anyone can imagine. He continues, nonetheless to celebrate Mass in his parish according to the traditional rite. He has received no other official reproof or order to depart the parish. Nevertheless, there are fears that the bishop might yet take some tough action.

In the meantime, Father Demornex has won many friends throughout Italy who support him both morally and materially. For his part, he responds simply to the expressions of support and gratitude. "I have done nothing other than my duty as a priest."