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Catholic Ritual’s Appeal to Imagination: Émile Zola’s Low Mass

Tradition and Sanity

Today, I treat my readers and listeners to a delightful passage from a nowadays seldom-read work of French literature: the author is Émile Zola, the novel is Abbé Mouret’s Transgression, the passage is chapter 2 of Book I, so very near the start. What I find so striking about this chapter is how vividly and beautifully Zola can narrate the words and rituals of a Low Mass in spite of his being a notorious unbeliever, distant from the Church. Even an anticlerical secular Frenchman could see and understand the (old) Mass as religious ritual. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.traditionsanity.com/subscribe