The midnight mass is one of the most beautiful there is, and for this it plays an exceptional role in the Christian world.
At the other end of the world, a child was born, in the most absolute innocence, to ransom in a sacrificial way the sins of the human race and reveal to men the meaning of their presence on this earth.
Everyone is free to believe or not in this story, or even to believe in it in their own way. But no one will dispute that it is at the heart of our civilization, that it constitutes an essential myth.
Catholicism
Alas, we learned on Sunday in The newspaper that this universal and Quebec tradition was compromised.
Not that Quebecers shun it. On the contrary. It is often the last mass they attend.
In our history, it finds its most touching representation in the famous episode of Time for a Peace, which revolves around an amusing plot: will Joseph-Arthur, ill, with the flu, be able to regain his strength in time to sing his Minuit Chrétien there, certainly the most beautiful of songs there is?
And yet, there are fewer and fewer midnight masses in Quebec.
Simply because there are fewer and fewer priests.
Men are less and less to hear the call of the sacred.
Those who hear it no longer necessarily associate it with the Catholic religion and even less want the sacrificial existence of priests, which contradicts everything that the modern world allows and promises. It’s not that our world is indifferent to the sacred or to faith, but it relieves religion of its cultural charge to reduce it to a form of à la carte spirituality.
He is also looking for spiritual authorities. However, he prefers them in the guise of a life coach or a religious leader from the far East. Of the priest, he is wary.
Allow me to confess: I love priests. I know a few. Some even honor me with their friendship. She is precious to me. They are, whatever one may say, the guardians of a tradition, they embody a relationship to the world that no one else can embody.
I know very well, moreover, that Quebecers have renounced Catholicism, that they even have the impression of having freed themselves from it.
priests
We understand them.
In our history, the Church has two faces. Like the Poles and the Irish, it served as a collective identity refuge and allowed us to survive the English Conquest. But she also showed herself guilty of a suffocating clericalism. And too many priests, let us say it politely, have not had the exemplary conduct that was expected.
We should be able to celebrate our secularism and confess our attachment to our Catholic heritage.
Because I am convinced of one thing: a people who no longer have places to pray, who no longer have immemorial rituals to mark their existence and who can no longer celebrate midnight mass, are a people dispossessed of a part of himself.