Annual Visitation to the ORA Mission in Bergerac and the Dordogne
HE ✠Jerome Lloyd’s annual pastoral visitation to the Old Roman Apostolate’s mission in Bergerac and the Dordogne once again brought together clergy, families and faithful from across the region for the celebration of the traditional sacramental life of the Church.
Among the particular joys of this year’s visitation were the reception of First Holy Communion by younger members of the mission and the administration of the Sacrament of Confirmation to adult candidates. Such occasions give visible expression to the purpose of the annual visitation: not simply to maintain contact with a scattered community, but to strengthen it through the Sacraments, preaching, pastoral care and the bonds of Catholic fellowship.
Following the solemnities of the day, His Excellency ✠Jerome joined the local priest, Fr Lafferrière, First Holy Communicants, Confirmandi, their families and other members of the faithful for an outdoor reception beneath the trees. The white dresses and veils of the young Communicants, the more formal dress of those newly confirmed, and the easy conversation of families gathered around the clergy made for a scene at once festive and unmistakably Catholic.
For the faithful of the Dordogne, many of whom live at considerable distance from one another, such gatherings have a significance beyond the ceremonies themselves. They renew friendships, strengthen a sense of common Catholic life and remind a dispersed mission that it belongs to something larger than its individual households and places of worship.
The photograph captures that character particularly well: the Archbishop and priest standing not apart from the people but among them, surrounded by the newly confirmed, the children who had received their First Holy Communion, their families and fellow parishioners. It is an image of the Apostolate at its most ordinary and, for that reason, perhaps its most eloquent — Tradition handed on sacramentally from one generation to the next, and a Catholic community sustained by worship, pastoral presence and shared life.
The annual Bergerac visitation remains one of the happiest features of the ORA’s ministry in France: a few days in which the dispersed faithful of the Dordogne are gathered together around altar, priesthood and Sacrament, and in which the continuity of Catholic life is seen not as an abstraction, but in the faces of those receiving and living the Faith.
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