A friend alerted me to something truly fascinating.
Here is a photo.
This is the Very. Rev. Msgr. François Fleischmann celebrating Holy Mass with the 1962 Missale Romanum at the Chapelle Saint-Paul in Paris. Msgr. is a canon, and the chancellor, and the episcopal vicar for marriages, etc etc.
"But Father! But Father!", you are perhaps saying, with furrowed brow and head scratching. "Big deal! So a monsignor is saying the old Mass. I know it’s in Paris, in France, not exactly friendly to traditional Masses over all, but… so what?"
You see, Msgr. Fleischmann was head of the Vatican Secretariate of State’s French Section for a very long time. If memory serves he left there in abut 2000. He seemed in those days to have loathed anything and everything having to do with the older Mass, and kept a little data base of the names of anyone in France who wrote to the Holy Father about these issues. He was generally the sort who, as one of my friends puts it, would shoot into a bush if I thought a traditionalist might be behind it.
So, in Paris, this fellow is saying the older form of Mass and WDTPRS applauds him. The Cardinal Archbishop of Paris will be pontificating soon.
What do I get from all this? Well… not anything terribly concrete. But, based on my knowledge of how things usually work, I am thinking that someone has said something to the powers that be in Paris, and elsewhere in France. I suspect we may see signs of the ice cracking as the Marshall Paln continues.
The Holy Father is going to France in September, if memory serves. He will meet with the bishops.
