There’s a moment on the Latin Mass Society’s annual pilgrimage to Walsingham when the comparison with Chartres breaks down completely. You’ve spent the day walking the English countryside, chanting the rosary, singing hymns, gradually acquiring blisters, until somebody announces there’s a pub coming up in 10 minutes.
Chartres is magnificent – tens of thousands of Catholics marching across France to one of the great cathedrals of Christendom is hard to beat. But Walsingham has its own unmistakably English character. Medieval ruins, Norfolk villages, a bit more rain than Chartres perhaps and, yes, the occasional pub stop. I’ve done both pilgrimages several times, and I wouldn’t want Walsingham to become an English Chartres. Its charm is that it isn’t one. It feels like English Catholicism recovering its own landscape in miniature, exactly what the Latin Mass Society has spent 60 years doing.
