Doing It The Old Way (Probably)

Apparently this video 'does the rounds' every few years, but I didn't know about it until my friend Fr Thesis of Kentish Town posted it on LiberFaciorum. 

It concerns the astonishing Fr Quintin Montgomery-Wright, a Cornishman who became a Roman Catholic in 1946 while curate at a church in Hoxton, as he explains, and then having been trained for the Roman priesthood in an English seminary got sent to France to join the worker-priest movement; in 1956 he arrived in the little Norman village of Le Chamblac and stayed there. At first, so it is said, he was quite enthusiastic about the reforms emerging from the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s, but then changed his mind and ever after maintained Le Chamblac as an island of trad-Cath practice. He became a friend of rebel Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, but steered well clear of the sort of sour right-wing politics that so often characterises traditionalist Catholicism (and not just in France). Amazingly the liberal diocese of Evreux in which Le Chamblac is situated - and with which, funnily enough, Guildford is twinned - left Montgomery-Wright completely unmolested, probably because his people were as devoted to him as he was to them, rather like extreme Anglo-Catholics were left alone in England. He eventually took his confirmands to the Lefebvrist Bishop Le Tissier miles away, but one suspects this was because he could be sure it would be done in a way he approved of rather than for any sectarian reason. 'I get on very well with my bishop, I just don't like some of the things he does,' he says disarmingly, 'I'm not an agitator.' 

There are in fact two films, one from 1988 and the second, 1990. Both are lovely, and Fr Quintin comes across from them as a genuinely humble and utterly unassuming. He had already come to some media attention in France (one journalist marvelling that the presbytery was 'une veritable caverne d'Ali Baba' in terms of ecclesiastical tat), and was clearly afflicted by some of the romanticism which could and still can be found from time to time among clergy of his ilk. He acquired the 'Montgomery' half of his name some time after moving to France, and in the second film takes us to Ste-Foy-de-Montgomery, not far from Le Chamblac, which he believes, rather fondly I suspect, is his ancestral seat. Still, he does it all in a delightfully unstuffy way. He acquired his sacristan, Christian, from a family who asked the priest to find him a basic job at a farm somewhere; he couldn't, so kept him, a 'housekeeper' who needed keeping himself. 'What you appreciate most as a priest is that you never grow old ... You are always dealing with successive generations ... One doesn't realise one is getting older, one lives very much in eternity ... and the prayer at the start of Mass says ad Deum qui laetificat iuventutem meam, I will go to the altar of God who gives joy to my youth, it's a perennial experience.' The first film is narrated wonderfully by the great Ray Gosling, but then the TV people obviously realised Fr Quintin was quite capable of doing it himself and so he presents the second. 

Ray Gosling points out Fr Quintin's devotion to his car, which was to prove his undoing. A notably reckless driver, he crashed in 1996, an accident in which Christian was killed outright and the priest himself dying from his injuries shortly afterwards; an incongruously violent end for someone whose life seemed so gentle and, in the best sense, naive. It's a sort of naivety any ordained person would do worse than to cultivate.