Between October 23 and 25, the XV International Summorum Pontificum Ad Petri Sedem Pilgrimage was held in Rome, which opened with the Pax Liturgica meeting. The writer and journalist Natalia Sanmartín Fenollera, author of The Awakening of Miss Prim, participated in it with the lecture The Battle for the Liturgy and the Burning Bonfires. In it, she defended the traditional Mass and the communities that, despite restrictions, keep it alive in a Church in crisis. With her permission, we reproduce her intervention in full:
THE BATTLE FOR THE LITURGY AND THE BURNING BONFIRES
Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera
Pax Liturgica Meeting
Pontifical Patristic Institute Augustinianum
Rome, October 23, 2026
Good morning to all of you. First of all, thank you to the organizers, to the president of the Coetus Internationalis Summorum Pontificum, Christian Marquand, to abbé Barthe, chaplain of the Pilgrimage, and to Dr. Ruben Peretó, whom I also thank for this kind introduction, and thank you all for being here today, at this Pax Liturgica Meeting, to which I return seven years after having been present for the first time, and which gives us the opportunity to listen to lessons, reflections, and experiences that speak of the beauty and mystery of the traditional liturgy, but also of its persistent vitality and the way it continues to illuminate the time in which we live, a time in which we often feel as if the sun is setting.
As the title of this paper expresses, my intention in coming here today is to speak of the battle for the traditional liturgy, but especially of the role played in it by what we might call the burning bonfires: the centers, communities, institutes, fraternities, orders, and all the other realities that participate in that battle, and that demonstrate how the traditional liturgy, far from being the dark and moth-eaten object that some would wish it to be, is a source of rich and beautiful fruits in the life of the Church, grown sometimes in the midst of true deserts and despite the tenacious persecution by those who should protect them. One of those examples of burning bonfires, and lit by laypeople, will be presented here today, this very afternoon, by a good friend, Jorge O’Reilly, who knows firsthand, as he will explain to you, what I could only describe from a distance with respect and admiration.
The private association of the faithful that he founded eighteen years ago in Buenos Aires, whose spiritual axis is the ancient Roman liturgy, is part of the heterogeneous crucible of realities that make up what we might call the traditional universe, a universe that fits in a singular way into some famous words with which Joseph Ratzinger described the Church of the future in 1969. It is a text that I would call prophetic, and that has rightly become famous for its beauty and insight.
“From today’s crisis,” Ratzinger wrote, “will emerge tomorrow a Church that will have lost much. It will become small, and will have to start everything from the beginning. It will no longer be able to fill many of the buildings built in a more favorable situation. It will lose adherents, and with them many of its privileges in society. It will present itself, in a much more intense way than until now, as the community of free will, which can only be accessed through a decision. As a small community, it will demand much more strongly the initiative of each of its members.”
“From that Church,” the text continues, “will emerge a great strength, which will speak to human beings who are unspeakably lonely in a fully planned world. They will experience, when God has completely disappeared for them, their absolute and horrible poverty. And then they will discover the small community of believers as something completely new, as an important hope, as the answer they have always groped for.”
Thirty-eight years later, as Benedict XVI, he would promulgate what for some, among whom I count myself, constitutes the document by which his pontificate will be remembered in the history of the Church, Summorum Pontificum, ending with these words: “Certainly it will no longer be the dominant force in society to the extent that it was until recently, but it will flourish again and become visible to human beings as the homeland that gives them life and hope beyond death.”
Burning Bonfires, Hidden Bonfires
“In concentric circles, the liturgy weaves destinies,” wrote Cristina Campo, an Italian writer, poet, and translator who spent her life and fragile health tirelessly defending the cause of the traditional Mass. It is in that network of intertwined lives that is mysteriously woven around the liturgy and the battle for its survival, of which she herself was a part, where I wish to place not only the burning bonfires, which openly defend and preserve the worship we have received from our ancestors, but also what we might call hidden bonfires, which burn in silence, pray in secret, and fight under forced anonymity and in that common ground that constitutes the communion of saints.
Since what Cristina Campo defined as the long night of liturgical plunder or the slaughter of the rite began, a night that has stretched over more than half a century, Catholics faithful to the traditional liturgy have been faced with the difficult challenge of loving this cause amid the destruction of Troy and Carthage, in Simone Weil’s words, without institutional support or paternal consolation, but without ceasing to be aware, as Weil also said, that we could not have been born in a better time than this, in which it seems to us that everything has been lost.
“I love my time, because it is the time when everything fails,” wrote Cristina Campo. “It is the age of beauty in flight, of grace and mystery about to disappear; (…) of everything that certain men never renounce, which all the more impassions them the more it seems lost and forgotten.” An age that tries to drown beneath the frenzied clamor of consumption, constant advertising, and virtual unreality the silent fury of despair, anguish, and existential loneliness, a culture in dissolution inhabited by souls that increasingly resemble that steppe wolf portrayed by Hermann Hesse, “lost among us, within the cities, in the midst of the most convincing flocks,” “without homeland, joy, or sustenance”; rough, restless, nostalgic wolves who desperately seek a home they lack. An era in which Joseph Ratzinger’s prediction seems to begin to come to life, the hour when those desolate wolves, who no longer know their Creator, begin to perceive their terrible indigence and grope for bonfires where they may learn what man is and for what he was created.
The bonfires that shine in the night are lit with splendor in places we all know and toward which we look with hope: institutes and priestly fraternities, convents and abbeys, churches, chapels, and oratories where the ancient liturgy is regularly celebrated; also in acts of public defense, like this one that brings us together here today, in meetings, debates, studies, publications, media, blogs, and virtual communities that bear witness to the growing interest in the rite throughout the world; not forgetting flourishing pilgrimages that seem in themselves a miracle.
But the fires also burn in the silence of the cells of contemplatives and hermits, in the prayer of religious cornered in their orders and convents, in the Masses of priests who celebrate in private, in the effort of the laity who promote the celebrations, in the talent of those who sew chasubles and ornaments rescued from oblivion, in the families who travel kilometers for Sunday Mass, in those who teach the Mass behind closed doors to newly ordained priests, in those who explain the liturgy to those who approach from the labyrinths of social networks, in the souls who recover the discipline of the old fasts, in all those who keep forgotten feasts while the world spins madly or sleeps.
Lex orandi, lex credendi
The burning bonfires and the hidden bonfires burn in a Church in which many lament the denaturalization of doctrine, but few see the relationship between that collapse and the destruction of the liturgy. “I am convinced,” wrote Cardinal Ratzinger, this time in the volume of his memoirs published in 1997, “that the crisis in the Church we are experiencing today is due in large part to the disintegration of the liturgy.” The idea that the liturgy constitutes in some way an armor of doctrine, which sustains it as the skeleton sustains the flesh, is certainly not new. It is expressed in that old adage we all know, ‘lex orandi, lex credendi,’ and proven in many of the attacks and scars the Church bears. As Dom Guéranger recalls in his work ‘On the Antiliturgical Heresy and the Antiliturgical Movement,’ from Vigilantius to Calvin, whoever has wished to introduce a new doctrine has inevitably and frontally collided with the liturgy.
We live in a time of hidden miracles, a time in which, as Cristina Campo wrote, “a boy, in a dormitory city on the outskirts, can still keep vigil all night with an immemorial text” and “a drug addict hungry for death can end up on Mount Athos.” On that bubbling and subterranean lava that irrigates God’s good earth, burn the fires that continue to show the world the way the Church worshiped for centuries. Their model, if it is possible to speak of a model, are those fires on the summits—again the image of the bonfire—of which Cardinal Newman, saint and doctor of the Church, spoke with such beauty and conviction when he anticipated that, in the time of darkness, as has so often happened in the history of the Church, it will be the saints and not the masses, nor the groups, nor the institutions or carefully studied strategies, who will carry forward the silent work of God.
“A handful of men, with a sublime grace, will rescue the world during the coming centuries,” he points out in one of his great sermons. “These men are placed on their watchtower, as the prophet was, and light their beacons on the summits. Each one receives the sacred flame and then passes it on to another, replenishing its coals and adjusting them better if possible so that it remains as bright as when it came into their hands. And so, the same fire that was kindled on Mount Moriah, although it sometimes seems to go out, has remained intact until it reaches our hands, and we trust that they will keep it alive until the end.”
Beacons on the Summits
The beacons on the summits, of which Newman speaks as the great hope of the Church in the coming centuries, will operate under the logic of the communion of saints, which teaches us that every pious and sacred action performed by one belongs to all, “by charity, which seeks not its own.” It is under that prism that all works, all lives given, all prayers, all fasts, every silent sacrifice, every public defense and every silent plea, all the efforts that sustain and nourish the struggle to keep the sacred liturgy alive as we have received it, find their place—a task whose fruits, if they are true, do not belong only to us or to our own, but to the entire Mystical Body.
“Every great change,” Newman reminds us, “is caused by a few.” A few who will be, as it has always been, those whom God chooses, not those we decide; who will be where God decides and not where we expect them to be, and whose distinctive seal will also be, as always, humility and charity. “It is possible that men of good will and even saints may sit on both sides of this dispute, perhaps for decades, for all we know, until the end of the world,” wrote John Senior, professor of Humanities, intellectual, and tireless defender of the traditional cause, who did not live to see Summorum Pontificum, but neither, fortunately, Traditionis Custodes. “In the meantime,” Senior continues, “‘the wisdom of the just,’ says St. Gregory the Great, ‘is not to practice pretense, but to speak what is in the heart, to love the truth as it is.’ No more polite evasions. Truth and charity are sharp as any two-edged sword.”
In ‘The Death of Christian Culture,’ published in 1978, Senior makes a reflection especially valuable in the times of confusion in which we live, when Christians in the Church seem to align ourselves in two opposite extremes: that of unbridled optimism, which sees bread where there are only stones, and that of bitter pessimism, which sometimes borders on the sin of despair. “Without the Church, even broken as it is, the darkness would be unbearable,” he wrote. For those who are on the verge of despair, “it is essential to remember that the Church never resembles Christ so much as when it is seen broken and betrayed from within.”
What the Eternal Offers to the Temporal
“The liturgy is older than we are, older than our fathers, older even than the world,” wrote Pavel Florensky. If that is true, if the liturgy is something given and not fabricated, even though its custody sometimes requires polishing and purifying it of adhesions as the centuries polish a perfect landscape, if it constitutes the very heart of reality and the deep structure of the cosmos, as fathers of the Church, theologians, and saints have maintained, if its function is to give glory to God and save the world, then the battle for the liturgy is a battle that is not anchored in the past, but exceeds the historical situation and penetrates the heart of eternity. Once again, Cristina Campo, with that exact and refined language like the edge of a razor, condenses the essence of that battle in a single phrase. “Tradition for us is not so much what the past offers to the present as what the eternal offers to the temporal.”
Many of those of us here today, if not all, surely know fires that burn on the summits, either by being part of some of these communities or by having experienced the way the liturgy and its defense weave destinies and connect people in the concentric circles of which Cristina Campo spoke, where friendship, true friendship, that is, founded in Christ, constitutes one of the great and silent tools with which God acts in the world. “There is no true friendship except between those whom you gather together,” says St. Augustine in his Confessions. In The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis’s essay, the same idea is taken up. “In friendship we believe we have chosen our equals, and in reality any chance could have kept us apart. But for a Christian, strictly speaking, there are no chances. A secret Master of Ceremonies has come into action. Christ, who said to his disciples: ‘You have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you,’ can really say to every group of Christian friends: ‘You have not chosen one another, but I have chosen you for one another.’”
Lewis defines in his work with enormous simplicity and truth what the magic and mystery of friendship consists of, and he does so in a single line: “‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’” It is an experience that those of us who have returned to the fullness of faith through the discovery of the liturgy have lived very deeply. “I thought I was the only one.” The only one who was moved to tears before the beauty of the prayers at the foot of the altar, who saw before his eyes the sacrifice of Abraham or the image of Melchizedek when contemplating the figure of the priest; the only one in thinking that the human being is never so great as when he kneels and strikes his breast while confessing himself a sinner before God, the only one in loving Latin without mastering it, in appreciating its musicality and sweetness, the only one in awkwardly entering into the riches of the divine office, in discovering the perfect way it expresses the joy and afflictions of the soul, the only one in finding meaning in these beautiful words of Soren Kierkegaard, in which he speaks of Abraham’s journey, of youth and eternity, and which resonate in my heart every time I hear the priest say “Introibo ad altare Dei” and I murmur “ad deum qui laetificat juventutem meam.” “But Abraham believed, therefore he was young,” wrote Kierkegaard; “for he who always hopes for the best grows old, and he who is always prepared for the worst grows old early, but he who believes preserves an eternal youth.”
First Fortress: Sacrifice
What are the strengths of the bonfires that tradition is lighting in the night? What defenses does it have to oppose the forces that seek to stifle them? The first of them is, in my opinion, a capacity for sacrifice that has been forged by hammer blows and fed by the scarcity of opportunities for celebration and growing restrictions. From the promulgation of Traditionis Custodes in 2021, many readings can be made, and probably all have already been made, but perhaps the most evident is the absolute ignorance on the part of those who promoted it of the profile of the Catholics who are nourished by the traditional liturgy.
In a Church in which a good part of ordinary parish life languishes, with baptisms, marriages, and vocations in constant decline, despite upturns we will speak of later, and where the centers of activity focus on a pastoral ministry tinged with sentimentalism and emotionality, rich in resources and institutional support, the price a traditional Catholic must pay to attend Sunday Mass constitutes an anomaly difficult to classify. From material barriers unthinkable for the average Catholic, mainly transfers and distances that often require organizing the entire day around Mass, to an atmosphere of incomprehension and suspicion that on many occasions turns attendance at worship into a decision that separates one from one’s surroundings.
The religious life of the faithful attached to the ancient liturgy requires a level of commitment and a capacity for resistance that can only be understood from a conception of worship as the pearl of great price or the treasure buried in the field. Making the celebration of Mass difficult seems the perfect final solution to end the liturgical problem of traditional faithful, except for the fact that those faithful love the liturgy and are accustomed to sacrificing for it. In some way, we all intuit the profound truth of those words of Gustave Thibon, when he wrote that “nothing pure and great has grown here below without pain.”
Second Fortress: The Consolation of Gravity
The second strength we have is the youth of a good part of the faithful who attend the ancient liturgy, but not because of youth itself which, as Bernard Shaw once said, is a disease that is cured with time. Young people can be found in abundance at mass evangelization events or in the large families that make up some post-conciliar movements. But while in the rest of the Church youth ministries focus on offering massive concerts, Masses animated with songs and guitars, and retreats and adorations articulated around songs and personal testimonies, those who go to the churches where the ancient liturgy is celebrated find something that has been lost not only in the world, but also in the Church: the deep consolation of gravity. Young people who have learned before their time, and this is a sign of the times, the fleetingness of the present moment and the fragility of everything that for past generations seemed immovable, whether it be the family, in a world of broken families, whether it be love, reduced to a succession of bonds that are established as quickly as they are extinguished, whether it be friendship, in a universe of virtual individualities, whether it be the value of one’s own existence. Suicide constitutes the second cause of youth mortality in the West, the first in some countries, like mine.
This epidemic of loneliness and despair, the absolute and horrible poverty of which Ratzinger spoke, plausibly explains the growing interest of young people and adults in Christianity, as we have seen recently in France, who seek answers in the only institution that continues to speak of Truth in a world that denies every absolute affirmation. From the Church itself, however, it is recognized that a good part of those baptisms and approaches do not translate into the continuity of a stable sacramental life. In the case of France, only half of the newly baptized attend Sunday Mass. “Sometimes these paths begin with a strong emotion, but then arises the need to enter into the mystery of the faith,” noted the president of the French Episcopal Conference shortly before the visit of Leo XIV.
That increase in baptisms among young people and adults not only in France, but in other European countries, contrasts with the general data on religious practice, which continue to decline: only 5% of the French go to Mass on Sundays; in Spain, in the once Catholic Spain, the figure is 11%. Studies on the doctrinal aspects professed by the majority of practicing Catholics, belief in the real presence, necessity of the sacrament of penance, dispositions for receiving Communion, the last things, indissolubility of marriage, show an even more critical panorama, fueled by preaching that is often confused, when not openly contrary to the traditional doctrine of the Church, which is imparted in parishes, communities, and from the hierarchy itself.
The Unexpected Data on Young Priests
In that photograph of lights and shadows emerges with force a surprising datum, for being unexpected, made public shortly before the Pope’s visit to France. According to a survey conducted by IFOP, the polling company with the most experience in the country, 45% of young French priests, aged 25 to 35, say they habitually celebrate the Mass of Paul VI, but that sometimes or frequently they also celebrate “the Mass in Latin and/or the extraordinary form of the Roman rite.” To that percentage must be added another 3%, who say they sometimes celebrate one and sometimes the other, and finally 6% who say they celebrate only the ancient liturgy. From the age bracket of these priests it can be deduced that a good part of them, in the case of diocesan priests, celebrate without permission, according to the guidelines of Traditionis Custodes, which remains currently in force.
How is this phenomenon to be explained? What gives special relevance to the abundance of young people among the faithful who attend the traditional liturgy or to the increase of priests who celebrate it outside traditional communities? Perhaps the fact that it is, in itself, palpable proof of the power of attraction and evangelization of a worship that was discarded, among other reasons, because it did not sufficiently foster the “full, conscious, and active” participation of the faithful, but which, against all odds, without support, without backing, and under a restrictive regime, continues to speak to the human heart beyond time. A worship that does not need to adapt to the young, nor speak their language, nor resort to their music to attract them, but reaches them from a sobriety that traverses the centuries. The traditional liturgy offers the same to contemporary man, whether they are twenty or ninety-five years old; it offers them the same it offered their ancestors and the same it will offer their descendants. Therein lies its profound catholicity and the demonstration that the Church, which has always proclaimed itself a teacher of humanity, erred spectacularly when it diagnosed that modern man needed a worship adapted to his time. “The whole law of human existence consists in that man is always capable of reverencing the infinitely great,” wrote Dostoevsky in The Demons. Because each man is different in his individuality, but he is always the same in his nature.
Cardinal Newman, who is serving as our guide in this talk, gave a celebrated description of the Catholic Mass in 1847, in his novel Loss and Gain, where he shows that in the ancient liturgy there is no room for a made-to-measure Mass, because the liturgy is first of all for God and, precisely because it is for God, speaks to the heart of all. “Each one in his place, from his own heart,” wrote Newman, “his desires, his thoughts, his intentions, with his own petition, distinct but united, contemplating what is happening, contemplating how it happens, uniting themselves to the consummation of all that. There are little children and old men, ignorant people and seminarians, priests preparing to say their Mass, priests making their thanksgiving, souls who have not sinned and souls who have sinned and asked forgiveness; but from all those distinct souls there rises to God a single eucharistic hymn.”
The Danger of Ideology
It is said that opposite every strength there is a danger. Traditional Catholics share the same threats and temptations that beset the rest of Catholics. Some of them are proper to this time, such as making our cause an ideology in the age of ideologies, placing adherence to the group or collective identity above truth and charity. We are not the only ones who must protect ourselves from this risk, however much we are frequently accused of that vice, but that does not exclude that it is a real temptation. As Hilaire Belloc reminded Dean William Inge in a famous letter published in 1923, in which he defends his Catholic faith, “those of us who boast of having such a firm legacy do not for that reason claim personal peace; we are not saved by that alone,” but “even in the midst of our earthly miseries, we always hear in the distance the echo of eternal music.”
No, personal peace is not guaranteed to us, nor is peace even guaranteed within our communities or among those who share the defense of the same cause. There is often talk of the need for greater unity in the traditional world, but as long as there is unity in what is essential, and what is essential is faith and worship, the lack of uniformity only confirms something evident: that traditional Catholicism is not an ecclesial movement nor an institutional organization, it is Catholicism pure and simple, it is only Catholicism. Movements within the Church undoubtedly have the advantages of uniformity, but it is not possible to seek uniformity among faithful who drink from a millennial tradition, and who differ not only in circumstantial or prudential aspects, such as approaches or strategies, but also in diverse pieties and spiritualities. In traditional Catholicism one can find faithful who long for pontificates like that of Pius XII or St. Pius X and others who already see in those pontificates part of the problems we suffer today; one can find souls who drink from baroque spirituality and cannot conceive their life of faith without Ignatian exercises and others who are nourished by the Fathers of the Church and the example of the Desert Fathers. That is the richness of Christianity and the freedom we enjoy as children of God.
The Patience of the Monks
We have been born in the age of immediacy, but great battles require patience, a virtue that St. Thomas teaches us as an ingredient of fortitude. As Josef Pieper explains in that precious book, The Fundamental Virtues, “to be patient means not to let the serenity or clarity of soul be snatched away by the wounds received while doing good.” Pieper cites Hildegard of Bingen, who defined patience as “the column that bends before nothing.” Patient were the men of St. Benedict, for example, when they built where no one had built, sowed where no one had sown, and saved what no one would have saved. Newman teaches us, once again, to look at the past with eyes of eternity in a beautiful text, written in 1858, entitled The Mission of St. Benedict. “Silent men appeared in the field or in the forest, digging, clearing, and building; and other silent men, who did not appear, sat in the cold cloister, exhausting their eyes, and with attention fixed on the effort of deciphering and copying and recopying the manuscripts they were saving. None of them fought or shouted or boasted of what they were doing, but gradually the wooded swamp became a hermitage, a religious house, an abbey, a village, a seminary, a school, a villa. …For the monk, Heaven was behind the door.”
Praying Among Ruins
Patience and fortitude are virtues that abound in the stories narrated to us by Sacred Scripture and in the vicissitudes and crisis that the Church we love has gone through, a Church that bears wounds and scars. Scars that remind us that life on earth is warfare, as Job teaches, and that here below we live in a continuous tension between what we build for God and what the enemy destroys, until the day his time runs out. “The state of Christian life today, as always, is that of praying among ruins,” writes Daniel Mitsui, a contemporary religious art painter, in a text written a few years ago called precisely Permanent Scars. “Raking among the rubble of a long-destroyed Church in search of pieces we can recognize; clinging to them and treasuring them in a way the men who enjoyed them in their splendor never did. Venerating these pieces and studying them to get an idea of the way they fit together and the meaning they once had. Rebuilding what we can in the time given to us. Building something beautiful for God, so that the memory of the ancient faith may survive for the next generation. And doing so until the forces of evil destroy, burn, and bury all our constructions again.”
Doing so while we pray to God, as Cardinal Newman taught us, to guide us “through deserts and marshes, through rocks and torrents, until the night ends, and with the dawn, the smile of the angels breaks forth,” that which we have always longed for.
Thank you very much.