Two Roads to Chartres: France’s Pilgrimages of Tradition and the Future of the Church
One walks toward restoration, the other away from compromise—and between them lies the question of the Church’s future
Each Pentecost in France, two pilgrimages take to the road. They move across the same land, under the same sky, carrying the same banners, chanting the same ancient hymns, and kneeling before the same Eucharistic Lord. They are composed, in large part, of the same kind of people: young families, serious Catholics, men and women formed by a rediscovery of tradition in a secular age. They are not divided by doctrine. They are divided by direction. One walks from Paris to Chartres. The other walks from Chartres to Paris. Between them lies one of the most revealing images of contemporary Catholicism in France.
The Paris–Chartres pilgrimage, organised by Notre-Dame de Chrétienté, has grown steadily in recent years, drawing more than 16,000 pilgrims in 2024, most of them under forty¹. They set out from the outskirts of the capital, leaving behind the secular heart of modern France, and walk for days across fields and villages toward the great cathedral that has stood for centuries as a monument to Marian devotion and Catholic continuity. They rise before dawn, sleep in tents, confess their sins in hedgerows, and sing the ancient hymns of Christendom across farmland that has seen revolutions come and go. Yet this growth has not occurred in a vacuum. In the years following Traditionis Custodes, the pilgrimage itself became a focal point of ecclesial tension, with increasing restrictions placed upon the celebration of the traditional Roman Rite within its framework, particularly at its culminating liturgies. What had once been taken for granted under the juridical peace of Summorum Pontificum—the centrality of the usus antiquior to the identity of the pilgrimage—was suddenly rendered contingent, subject to negotiation, limitation, and, at times, direct intervention. The result was not collapse, but adaptation. Pilgrims continued to walk. Chant continued to rise across the fields. But the experience was marked by a new awareness: that even within the structures they had trusted, continuity could no longer be assumed.
At precisely the same time, another pilgrimage unfolds in reverse. From Chartres to Paris, organised by the Society of Saint Pius X, a smaller but no less fervent column sets out, retracing the route in the opposite direction². Here too there are families, priests, banners, chant, penance, and sacrifice. Here too there is seriousness, conviction, and a profound sense of fidelity to what has been received. Yet the direction is reversed, and with it, the underlying ecclesiological instinct. Where one moves toward Chartres in hope of restoration from within, the other moves away from it as a witness to what must be preserved without compromise. France now hosts not one pilgrimage of tradition, but two—and they no longer walk together.
This divergence did not arise from trivial disagreement. It is the product of decades of tension within the Catholic Church following the Second Vatican Council, and of the different judgments Catholics have made in response to that tension. For a generation formed under Pope Benedict XVI, the expectation had been that these paths might one day converge. When Benedict issued Summorum Pontificum, declaring that the ancient Roman Rite had never been abrogated, he appeared to offer not merely a concession, but a settlement. “What earlier generations held as sacred remains sacred and great for us too,” he wrote³, restoring at least conceptually the continuity that many believed had been broken.
For those who would come to be called the sons of Benedict, this was not a marginal reform. It was a horizon. It suggested that the Church, having passed through a period of confusion, was slowly rediscovering her own memory. They read The Spirit of the Liturgy and recognised their own experience in its critique. They discovered chant, Latin, ad orientem worship, and a liturgical grammar that seemed at once ancient and unexpectedly alive. They did not inherit tradition; they encountered it, and because they encountered it, they embraced it with conviction.
For a time, it seemed as though the two pilgrimages might one day become one.
That convergence was not imagined. Under Benedict XVI, the Society of Saint Pius X experienced what was arguably its greatest moment of hope for reconciliation with Rome since 1988, with doctrinal discussions reopened and gestures made that suggested a real, if fragile, path toward regularisation. Nor was this limited to the SSPX. Other traditionalist bodies operating outside formal canonical structures, including the Old Roman Apostolate, had begun—quietly and without publicity—to explore renewed contact with Rome, sensing that a window had opened in which long-standing irregularities might be resolved without the abandonment of tradition. Benedict’s vision created not only space within the Church, but a horizon toward which even those beyond her visible structures could orient themselves. His resignation, therefore, did not simply interrupt an internal reform; it closed a moment of external reconciliation. In this sense, the orphaning was not confined to the sons of Benedict within diocesan life. It extended also to those who had, for the first time in decades, begun to believe that return might be possible without surrender. The divergence of the two pilgrimages, therefore, is not merely strategic. It is the aftermath of a shared hope that was never realised.
Then came the rupture within that hope. The Francis pontificate, culminating in Traditionis Custodes, altered the landscape decisively. What had been presented as a stable reconciliation now appeared contingent. The ancient liturgy was no longer treated as a patrimony to be integrated, but as a problem to be managed. Confidence gave way to uncertainty. The sons of Benedict, who had believed the crisis was receding, found themselves once again confronting its depth.
And yet, unlike those who walk from Chartres to Paris, they did not change direction.
This is the defining fact.
They remained within diocesan life. They continued to build families, to support parishes, to seek vocations within existing structures, and to pursue what they understood as a long work of restoration from within. They did not deny the validity of the reformed rites. They did not abandon communion with Rome. They accepted, instead, the burden of tension. Their wager was not that the crisis was illusory, but that it could be endured without rupture.
To understand this instinct, one must look not only to Benedict, but further back, to Giuseppe Siri. Siri’s response to the postconciliar upheaval differed sharply from that of Archbishop Lefebvre. He resisted doctrinal and liturgical innovations, yet refused separation. When seminarians dislocated by the crisis sought refuge, he provided it at Voltri, forming priests who would remain unmistakably within the Church while preserving continuity where possible. His strategy was neither capitulation nor rebellion, but patience. Institutions, he believed, outlast ideologies. Those who remain within them, if they preserve what matters, may eventually inherit them.
This long game found concrete expression in communities such as the Community of St Martin, whose growth in vocations stands in marked contrast to the wider decline of the French clergy. In 2023, only 88 diocesan priests were ordained in France⁴, yet communities shaped by liturgical seriousness continue to attract disproportionate numbers of seminarians. This is not accidental. It reflects a deeper alignment between the instincts of younger Catholics and a form of Catholicism that takes continuity seriously.
The contrast with those who walk in the opposite direction sharpens the point. Families who travel for hours each Sunday to attend Mass offered by the Society of Saint Pius X, or by smaller apostolates such as the Old Roman Apostolate, embody a different judgment. They accept instability, distance, and marginalisation in order to secure what they regard as doctrinal and liturgical certainty. Their sacrifice is real, and it must be acknowledged. They organise their lives around access to what they believe to be the fullness of Catholic worship, often at considerable cost. They do not choose convenience; they choose clarity.
The sons of Benedict choose something else.
They choose to remain.
Not because the situation is satisfactory, but because they judge that departure would concede too much. They accept imperfection as the price of continuity, tension as the price of communion, and uncertainty as the price of remaining within structures they believe may yet be restored. Their critics are not entirely wrong to perceive a danger. The risk is not bad faith, but accommodation—the slow normalisation of what should be resisted. Against this, the sacrificial witness of those who walk the other road stands as a necessary corrective. It reminds them that hope must never become an alibi for inertia.
And yet, demography suggests that their wager cannot be dismissed. The pilgrims walking toward Chartres are young. They are numerous. They are forming families, founding schools, and entering seminaries. They are, in many cases, the future clergy and laity of diocesan France.
Perhaps both pilgrimages are necessary. One to preserve. One to restore. But they cannot remain indefinitely divergent without consequence.
For the question they pose is not merely where one walks, but what one believes about the nature of the Church. Is she to be endured in her present weakness, in the hope that she will recover herself? Or must fidelity require a certain distance from structures perceived as compromised? Is continuity best preserved by remaining, or by stepping aside?
These are not abstract questions. They are walked, year after year, across the fields of France.
Whether the two roads will one day converge again remains unknown. History offers no guarantees. The Church in France has endured revolutions, dechristianisation, confiscation, and decline. She may yet endure division also. But if she is to be rebuilt, it will not be by those who abandoned her, nor by those who reshaped her beyond recognition, but by those who loved her enough to suffer within her while refusing to forget what she is.
And so, each Pentecost, the two pilgrimages set out again. One toward Chartres, one away from it. They carry the same faith, the same prayers, the same tradition. But they embody different answers to the same crisis.
And between them, the future of Catholic France is quietly being decided.
¹ Notre-Dame de Chrétienté, Chartres Pilgrimage participation statistics (2024).
² Society of Saint Pius X, Chartres–Paris pilgrimage data (annual figures).
³ Summorum Pontificum, Letter to Bishops accompanying the motu proprio.
⁴ Conférence des évêques de France, annual ordination figures (2023).
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- Today’s Mass: July 24 St St Lewinna V&M
St Lewinna, Virgin and Martyr, is commemorated alongside St James the Great’s Vigil. Considered a martyr of early South Saxon Christians, her death is likely around AD 670 amid pagan resistance. Her relics were later moved to St Andrew’s Church, with Alfriston being a possible location, highlighting her enduring legacy in Christian history.
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