By being intoxicated by long hikes and high altitudes, dancing around the bonfires on Saint John’s Eve, kneeling at the feet of the Vierges d’Août, hurrying to family Christmas festivities, or those of Epiphany – this is how you will rediscover the gushing source of French folk songs, and how you will be able to savor them in all their richness. These are the things that you will take up again if you wish to resurrect a harmonious and powerful people. And do not then be surprised if we ourselves, having sworn on the tomb of Péguy to rebuild for France “one cult, one soul, and one Faith,” want to teach you how to sing again.

Père Doncœur (1880-1961)
Jesuit, military chaplain in the Great War

“At eight o’clock, the church is white with the immobile and slightly bowed head-dresses of women in prayer. Never have we better felt the unity of a faithful people to its past. What elegance and what nobility! The country churches of Italy, full of flies and sunshine, were the family home, where man and beast found their well-being next to God. Our Paris churches are filled with the ignorant crowd of the street and the metro. This nave, this is the parish, the old eternal parish where the life of the community and of the sacraments are lived in fellowship with the living and the dead. And the dead, how present they are! In his preaching, the rector strings together interminable lists, punctuated by five, six, seven De Profundis. There tombs are there, so close, and gathered around Calvary, it is they who form the ultimate Parish, the one which will rise up behind their rectors at the call of the Angel’s trumpet. (…) At the high Mass, alternating between men’s voices and women’s voices, the whole assembly sings the prayers of the Mass, crowned as in the Basque country, by the singing of the Angelus, half in Latin half in Breton. When Mass lets out, the whole place is nothing but a whirl of head-dresses with jolly arrays, lace ties, and colored ribbons. On their shoulders large starched ruffs frame open necklines, and silk aprons make rich decoration on the fitted bodices. Their faces are lit up with friendliness which is striking in its grace because of its reserve. It didn’t take us long to begin singing in the midst of these groups who become more familiar to us little by little, the young girls more distant, the mothers and children more trusting.”

Père Doncœur (1880-1961)
Jesuit, military chaplain in the Great War