O Felix Roma!—Why We Go to Rome
“Rome, Rome still beckoned me,” writes Hilaire Belloc, “and I woke in a struggling light as though at a voice calling, and slipping out I could not but go on to the end.”1 The famous Catholic English author, seeing a beautiful statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary in his family’s hometown church in France, makes a vow to go on pilgrimage to Rome, detailing his travels across Europe in his Path to Rome.
But, why to Rome, one may ask. Belloc in fact never gives this answer directly, seeming to think it is one of the most natural things a reasonable person would do. Later in his travelogue he does hint at the answer.
Rome was intended to be the end and centre of all roads, the chief city of the world, and the Popes’ residence—as, indeed, it plainly is to this day, for all the world to deny at their peril, spiritual, geographical, historical, sociological, economic, and philosophical.2
As the old maxim goes, “All roads lead to Rome.”
As important as the great pilgrimages are, such as Santiago de Compostela, which even attracts pagans to travel the Camino; or Canterbury, which inspired Chaucer’s poetic tales, the two most important pilgrimages in history were to Jerusalem and to Rome. Christians sought to walk where Our Lord walked, and where he died for us; and a Christian is naturally drawn to where Sts. Peter and Paul died in establishing Christ’s Church through which Our Lord’s merits are applied to souls.
Speaking of the parochial church where he discovered the uniquely-beautiful Marian statue prompting his Roman vow, Belloc writes that “[o]ne’s native place is the shell of one’s soul, and one’s church is the kernel of that nut.”3 If that can be said of one’s local parish, how much more is the Mother and Head of all the churches the very kernel of the collective Catholic soul.
Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre clearly understood this. He spent seven years during the 1920s in the French Seminary in Rome. As Vicar Apostolic in Dakar and later Apostolic Delegate to all of French-speaking Africa, the Archbishop would regularly visit Rome to make his reports. Later as Superior General of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, he would live and work in the Generaliate in the Balduina neighborhood of Rome, about one mile from St. Peter’s Basilica. He gained a great love for Rome as a physical place, but most especially because of the Roman spirit and sense which was an enemy of Liberalism and the Gallican spirit of independence. Thus, he wished to establish a seminary in Albano Laziale, just South of Rome near Castel Gandolfo. Initially, the idea was for seminarians to spend a year or more of their studies steeped in the Roman spirit, but practically this became a pilgrimage for seminarians once during their studies for a month, typically during the summer holidays.
His closeness with the Roman spirit and the city gives important context to his 1974 Declaration. It was never intended to be some magnum opus, but a spiritual conference given to reassure his seminarians, scandalized by official Visitors from the Holy See discussing changes to celibacy rules and other Modernist desires. It only became famous later when published without permission by Jean Madrian in his journal, Itinéraires, attracting the ire of the Curia, who redoubled their efforts to destroy this movement and shutter the “wildcat seminary” at Ecône.
While much of the Declaration concerns the crisis in the Church, and a necessary response and fight, the very opening sets a tone, honed by a true Roman spirit when with emotion he could declare, “We hold fast, with all our heart and with all our soul, to Catholic Rome, Guardian of the Catholic Faith and of the traditions necessary to preserve this faith, to Eternal Rome, Mistress of wisdom and truth.”4
Far from just an opening line before a savage attack on the evil undermining the Faith, this very spirit and desire to be Roman Catholics, was something Archbishop Lefebvre communicated to his seminarians and the Society as a whole. It was he who organized the first official international pilgrimage of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Pius X to Rome for the Holy Year in 1975. With the Ordinary Jubilee or Holy Year now celebrated every twenty-five years, the Society of St. Pius X has returned in 2000 and, most recently, in August 2025 to Rome in an official international pilgrimage, following the Archbishop’s example.
The Concept of Holy Year
The concept of a Jubilee or Holy Year is found in the Pentateuch. Moses declares5 that after 49 years, the following fiftieth year—called יובל (yōḇel) from which the Latin jubeleus and the English word jubilee come as a transliteration—would be specially consecrated. In the Jubilee Year, all land would revert to the tribes that originally owned it (except houses in walled cities) to preserve the original divisions. During that year, the land would be allowed to go fallow to regenerate. And, most importantly, debts, both monetary and in service (slavery), would be forgiven.
The Church in its infancy did not continue this concept of the Jubilee, since with the expansion of the Church to include the gentiles, there was no longer a practical need to “press the reset button” each generation. Beyond this, the Church—specifically St. Peter and his successors—was entrusted with the juridical authority of Christ to “bind and loose” sins, and also the debt of the eternal and temporal punishment for sins. In such a scenario, where a priest can absolve the eternal punishment, and the Church, thorough Her treasury of merits, can remit even the temporal punishment for sins by indulgences, there is even less need of the forgiveness of debts the Jubilee envisioned. In a very clear way, the Jubilee was an Old Testament image of the Redemption which Christ would effect, so naturally its practice died with Christ.
Nevertheless, as Belloc would argue of daily Mass on his journey, he felt great satisfaction in “doing what the human race has done for thousands of years,” arguing that, “[w]hatever is buried right into our blood from immemorial habit that we must be certain to do if we are to be fairly happy … and secure of our souls.” This desire to go on pilgrimage to the place where some great event from which humanity has benefited or suffered, and see with one’s own eyes, is deeply buried in the human soul. We seek out cemeteries where loved ones are buried, battlefields where a war was fought, or the house where we were born and raised.
The Church, being a good Mother, and recognizing this drive, eventually began to renew the Jubilee as a special time of pilgrimage. These Holy Years were originally sporadically declared, then once a century, but this did not allow most Europeans in their lifetime to participate. St. Bridget of Sweden urged Clement VI to shorten the period, which then became once every fifty years. For a short time in the fifteenth century a once-per-generation thirty-three-year gap between Jubilees was practiced, before Paul II in 1470 declared the quarter-century Holy Year would be the norm.
Despite the difficulty of such a pilgrimage, when the Holy Doors were opened in 1500, over 200,000 people came to Rome throughout the year on pilgrimage. For 2025, it is expected that over 30 million people will have visited the Eternal City.
Why Does the Society Go to Rome?
To explain simply, the Society goes to Rome, because the Society and her faithful are Catholic and are not merely Catholic, but Roman Catholics. As Belloc asserted, such a desire to go to the Mother and Head of the Church is one of the most natural desires for a Catholic, and the Church has responded to that with the various indulgences given in the Holy Years for such a pilgrimage.
As can be recalled, from the Declaration of Msgr. Lefebvre, while he would “cleave to Rome with all his heart” he would also “refuse, on the other hand, and have always refused to follow the Rome of neo-Modernist and neo-Protestant tendencies.”6 One may reasonably ask in the face of a Church well advanced in this cancerous neo-Modernist infection, why still go to Rome when it is so corrupt? Does this not simply demonstrate a union with, or at least a desire to unite oneself with the disease?
The simple answer, of course, is no. No Catholic worthy of this name wants to unite with the evils plaguing the Church, even if some might at times imprudently or naively think collaboration with a hierarchy beyond the essentials to remain Catholic is warranted.
But of course, any real answer is more complex.
In his last interview, in 1991, despite a very negative assessment of any possible agreements with the Holy See throughout, the Archbishop finished with the same hopeful tone and Roman spirit:
I am deeply convinced that the Fraternity represents the means willed by the good God to preserve and maintain the faith, the truth of the Church, and whatever can still be saved within the Church … and I think that we must thank the good God and continue faithfully to preserve the treasures of the Church, in the hope that one day these treasures will regain the place that is their due in Rome, which they should never have lost.7
Firstly, if the Church offers from her treasury of merits indulgences and benefits for those who make pilgrimage to Rome, it behooves Catholics, especially in a time of great crisis, to seek, receive, and use these graces for the benefit of the Church.
Secondly, the Church, especially in Rome is founded on the blood of martyrs—from the Greek μᾰ́ρτῠρ meaning “witness.” When the Faith and faithful are being persecuted, Catholics are obliged to profess their Faith publicly, and be witnesses, even to the point of martyrdom. Michael Davies makes evident this witness in the first “Credo” pilgrimage in 1975, writing:
[T]he presence of the Archbishop and his pilgrims in Rome so soon after the Pentecostals both symbolized and manifested the two-centuries-old struggle between Liberal and traditional Catholicism, which reached its climax on the ninth of May in this Holy Year of 1975, when canonical approval was withdrawn from his Society of St. Pius X and the Seminary at Ecône.8
While an apostle seeking to witness to the Faith and convert others ought not unnecessarily provoke discord, when the normal expression of the Faith generates tensions, a sign of contradiction he must be. Thus, reports Davies,
L’Osservatore Romano had published an expression of “pained surprise” at the fact that all the Masses for the Credo pilgrims were to be Tridentine Masses and thought this inappropriate in a year of “reconciliation.” The fact of the matter is that precisely in this year of “reconciliation” the prime aim of the Church ought to be to reconcile herself with her own traditions—the abandoning of which has caused nothing but disaster. 9
In doing what Catholics do, the Roman authorities became deeply embarrassed. The witness worked.
In the later Holy Year pilgrimage in 2000, the witness attracted the attention of sympathetic prelates. Cardinal Dario Castrillón Hoyos, then head of the Congregation for the Clergy and President of the Papal Commission Ecclesia Dei sought a meeting with Society superiors. This allowed the Society’s pre-conditions for any doctrinal discussions or canonical agreement to be expressed: Freedom for the Traditional Mass for all priests, and the recognition that the excommunications stemming from the 1988 episcopal consecrations were null. Castrillón Hoyos would be the spokesman for Pope Benedict XVI in the issuance of Summorum Pontificum in 2007 and would oversee the declaration of juridical nullity of the excommunications in 2009.
The witness of Catholics to a Rome that ought to be professing the Catholic Faith, obtained, without compromise, but mere insistence, the recognition that Quo Primum was never abrogated, and led to Rome abandoning one of their chief weapons against the Society and the Traditional movement. As in 1975, the witness of Tradition worked, and more than some might imagine.
Since the Second Vatican Council, Msgr. Lefebvre, along with other bishops in the Cœtus Internationalis Patrum, had argued that the Council was introducing teachings incompatible with what preceded, especially on matters of the “College of Bishops,” relations with non-Catholics, and the novel Americanist concept of Religious Liberty. The doctrinal discussions that followed this series of movements of Rome back towards Tradition (even if not very far), would find the Roman authorities and theologians, even Pope Benedict XVI, tacitly admitting that the Catholic Faith presented by the Society was not immediately compatible with what the Second Vatican Council was teaching. “The problems,” he writes, “now to be addressed are essentially doctrinal in nature and concern primarily the acceptance of the Second Vatican Council and the post-conciliar magisterium of the Popes.”10 The “Hermeneutic of Continuity,” in other words, was de facto dead, even if Pope Benedict would still try to pursue it until the end of his life. The final nail was dealt by his successor who abandoned any pretense of continuity. If the Council changed nothing, and could be read in continuity, the crisis was primarily liturgical and the matter of the Society’s canonical status easily solved. But, as the Pope admits, the crisis was not firstly a matter of liturgy, but of the Faith, and thus placing the Ecclesia Dei Commission under the Congregation for the doctrine of the Faith.
Thus, even in the pilgrimage of 2000, one could echo Davies’ evaluation of the 1975 “Credo” crusade:
It was a success for the honor and glory offered to Almighty God and the graces it brought down on the pilgrims; it was a success for the way in which the strength and resilience of the traditional Faith were made clear to the Vatican and, equally important, to the traditionalists themselves. There was not one who did not leave full of hope and encouragement.11
The admission, if only tacit12, that the Second Vatican Council did teach novel, incompatible doctrines, along with the freedom for the Traditional Mass, and removal of the club of excommunications with which the Society was often beaten, was at least occasioned by the witness of Tradition in 2000.
The final reason for going to Rome is not merely to witness, so as to convert others, but also to strengthen the faith of the pilgrims. While for someone in the time of Belloc, this would be considerably easier, history shows that Rome was not always an immaculate example of the Faith. Yet, pilgrimage did not cease even when Popes were competing with the European monarchs in debauchery or avarice. Pilgrims still benefited from the graces God gave by going to Rome, because it is God who gives graces, not Rome, which is a mere instrument for a pilgrim’s devotion.
As Archbishop Lefebvre said in the sermon during his Mass at the ruins of Maxentius in the Forum (for Rome had closed its churches to the SSPX already in 1975):
May our presence here in Rome be an occasion for us to strengthen our faith, to have, if necessary, the souls of martyrs, the souls of witnesses (for a martyr is a witness), the souls of witnesses of Our Lord Jesus Christ, witnesses of the Church. Here is what I wish you, my most dear brethren, and in this we must be unflinching, whatever happens. We must never agree to diminish our faith; and if by misfortune it were to happen that those who ought to defend our Faith came to tell us to lessen or diminish it, then we must say: “No.”13
The Holy Year Pilgrimage of 2025
From August 19–21, 2025, the third Holy Year Pilgrimage during the history of the SSPX was organized in the Holy City. Beginning near the Basilica of the Holy Cross, just over 7,000 pilgrims processed the 1.25 miles (2 km) to the Papal Basilica of Mary Major, led by Msgr. Fellay and about 600 clerics, passing through the Holy Door for which a plenary indulgence was offered. In the morning on the second day, a Solemn Mass was celebrated by Fr. Davide Pagliarani, the Superior General, in the park on the Oppian Hill (part of the more-well-known Esquiline Hill). After a picnic lunch, the afternoon saw the pilgrims head to the Pope’s Cathedral, St. John Lateran. The final day of the pilgrimage began at Castel Sant’Angelo at the edge of the Vatican territory along the Tiber. Pilgrims solemnly processed into the Papal Basilica of St. Peter through the Holy Door, surrounding the main altar, and filling half of the main nave, numbering close to 8,000 pilgrims.
For proof that the same spirit that animated Msgr. Lefebvre and the 1975 pilgrimage continues, one need look only at the words of the Superior General in the Sermon at the Mass on the Oppian Hill:
When we come here to Rome to bear witness to our faith, what do we ask of the Church? What do we ask of the Church’s hierarchy for ourselves? Do we demand a privilege? Do we demand special treatment? No. We demand the Faith. We demand the Faith that we asked for on the day of our Baptism. And this is for a very simple reason: it is the Faith that gives us eternal life…
Rome must not be just a City of the past for us, a City full of Christian monuments that impel us to recognize the grandeur of the Church’s past. Rome is much more than that. For us, Rome is the City of Hope…
Over the course of its long history, the City of Rome has been invaded, occupied, pillaged, burned…but it has always risen, it has always been rebuilt; that is why it is called eternal. This is, in a way, the material image of the Church: she too has been pillaged, burned, hindered, fought against, shaken…but she has always risen, because she is eternal and divine, and because our Lord sustains her—especially in times of trial, in times of crisis.14
As in 1975, the Society at least poked some unfriendly occupants within the Vatican offices. Initially, the Society’s pilgrimage was (like many other groups, even some non-Catholics) listed on the official Jubilee calendar. After some press coverage, the memory hole opened to consume, like the Sons of Core, any trace of this entry. Traditional Catholics are used to this manner of treatment, but notice was taken at least at some level.
Only time will tell the longer-term impact of this pilgrimage, and success need not be measured in any change or gesture on the part of the Holy See towards Tradition. Witness—not reward—was the goal.
However, with the main intention for the pilgrimage and focus of the Society during this Holy Year on promoting vocations, success need not be measured in some change on the part of the Holy See towards Tradition, but even that a single vocation (and hopefully far more) is fostered by this witness.
Endnotes
1 Hilaire Belloc, Path to Rome, p. 437.
2 Ibid., p. 387.
3 Ibid., p. viii.
4 Marcel Lefebvre, Spiritual Conference, Nov. 21, 1974 as quoted in Michael Davies, Apologia pro Marcel Lefebvre. vol. 1, p. 35.
5 Lev. 25:8.
6 Marcel Lefebvre, Spiritual Conference, Nov. 21, 1974.
7 Marcel Lefebvre, Interview with André Cagnon published in Fideliter no. 79, January-February, 1991.
8 Michael Davies, Apologia pro Marcel Lefebvre, vol. 1, ch. 6.
9 Ibid.
10 Pope Benedict XVI, Letter to Bishops, Mar, 10, 2009.
11 Ibid.
12 It should be noted that the a 1987 treatise by an anonymous theologian claiming to be a response on behalf of the Holy See to Msgr. Lefebvre’s dubia on Religious Liberty, explicitly admits this, but the official nature of this document is in doubt. The 2009 Letter of Benedict XVI is the first official reference to the matter of Tradition as a doctrinal matter.
13 Marcel Lefebvre, Sermon, May 25, 1975 as quoted in Michael Davies, Apologia pro Marcel Lefebvre.
14 Davide Pagliarani, Sermon at the Collo Oppio, Aug. 20, 2025.
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