In recent hours, France has once again come to the centre of attention because of the words addressed by Leo XIV to the bishops gathered at Lourdes and, in the preceding days, because of the letter your Abbot President, Dom Geoffroy Kemlin, addressed to the Holy Father on the liturgical question. In this context, Fontgombault too carries a significant history, deeply bound up with the liturgy. How did you receive these two interventions?
could one fail to receive with gratitude, joy and thanksgiving interventions that seek to calm tensions unfortunately accumulated over decades around the altar and the sacrament of love? The Holy Father does not conceal his concern in this regard and invites us to “a new way of each person looking at the other, with greater understanding of the other’s sensibility... a gaze capable of enabling brothers enriched by their diversity to welcome one another mutually, in charity and in the unity of faith.” He implores the light of the Holy Spirit so that “concrete solutions may be found that will generously include those sincerely attached to the Vetus Ordo, in respect of the liturgical orientations desired by the Second Vatican Council.” The 1965 missal is precisely the implementation of the orientations desired by the Second Vatican Council. Saint Paul VI acknowledged this. As for the proposal of Abbot Geoffroy Kemlin, it would allow priests who use the Novus Ordo to benefit from the richness of the signs and gestures of the 1962 Ordo Missae while retaining the readings and certain prayers from the 1969 missal. For communities using the Vetus Ordo, however, it would be difficult to implement. There would no longer be coherence between the readings of the Mass and those of the Divine Office contained in the breviary and antiphonary. In this connection - and this is little known - a lectionary was drawn up in 1966 that enriches the lectionary of the 1962 missal. It preserves all the existing readings and, for weekdays on which the Sunday readings had previously been repeated, proposes proper readings. Its use was left to the discretion of the local Ordinary. It was used in France. This lectionary responds to the Council Fathers’ request for an enrichment of the lectionary and makes it possible to preserve coherence with the Divine Office. In any case, the decision to address the question of enriching the missals in a pragmatic way, whatever solution may be proposed, seems to me very positive and the only fruitful path in the long term. It makes it possible to avoid two pitfalls: rigidity and ideology. Liturgy, after all, is first and foremost a practice.