Paix liturgique

A group of Catholics brought the Traditional Mass to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, in northern Tanzania. Some might wonder: why not undertake a pilgrimage to a shrine instead? It is a legitimate question. The Church possesses consecrated altars, naves steeped in history, relics and ancient pilgrimage sites. Why, then, climb Africa's highest mountain — 5,895 metres at Uhuru Peak, the highest point on the continent and the world's tallest free-standing mountain — to celebrate a Mass that could, in principle, be celebrated in any church?

Because Kilimanjaro is not merely a backdrop. It is a silent theology. And because, up there, the mountain revealed a freedom that so many parishes have lost today.

Climbing Kilimanjaro has long attracted adventurers to Tanzania. But the “Ave Maria Expedition”, organised in August 2026, was not a form of spiritual tourism. It was a pilgrimage, an act of faith and a liturgical undertaking. Following the Lemosho Route, the Missionaries of the Holy Cross carried the ancient Missal to the summit of Africa. Every day during the ascent, Mass was celebrated at sunrise and sunset. Two priests took part in the expedition. Both reached the summit wearing their cassocks.

Several Tanzanian guides and members of the local staff accompanying the group joined in the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Cross, with the reverence and wonder of those for whom God remains a living reality. They also sang and presented the pilgrims with a cake they had made themselves, bearing the inscription “Ave Maria”. The image of Our Lady of Fatima, carried on the pilgrims' shoulders all the way to the summit, thus served as a reminder of Mary's queenship over heaven and earth.

The expedition had chosen the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary as its banner. Adveniat Regnum Mariae — May the reign of Mary come — was the prayer carried to an altitude where every breath becomes an effort.

From a natural perspective, climbing Kilimanjaro means renouncing the comforts of the world, accepting hardship, facing adversity and refusing to give up. It means consenting to go beyond one's own limits rather than resigning oneself to remaining as one is. All these demands find their counterpart in the supernatural life and spiritual combat. Christ's words therefore take on a particular resonance: “If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross and follow me.”

But Kilimanjaro also carries a militant significance: that of a land of freedom. Up there, where are the prohibitions against the Old Mass? Where are the permissions one must seek? Where is Traditionis Custodes?

Up there, we are simply ourselves, with two thousand years of Church history behind us, with nothing to stop us. Elsewhere, celebrating the Traditional Mass sometimes means finding a church willing to host it, obtaining the necessary permissions, searching for an available priest and overcoming one obstacle after another. Entire communities simply wish to attend the liturgy that nourished the faith of generations of Catholics for centuries. Yet they face growing difficulties, sometimes even an outright impossibility, when it comes to celebrating it in their own parishes.

The paradox is all the more striking when one considers that the very priest who, just a month earlier in Ávila, Spain, had been told that “this Mass is forbidden in this diocese” was able, in Tanzania, to raise the chalice in a place where Creation still seems untouched.

What a strange paradox indeed: climbing thousands of metres to rediscover, at the summit of a mountain, the very liturgical freedom that so many faithful struggle to find at the threshold of their own church!

Yet Kilimanjaro offers no easy passage. Its natural environment is harsh, wild and unforgiving. The cold, ice, lack of oxygen, absence of sanitary facilities and difficult nights put the human body to the test. The final ascent begins after midnight and continues for hours in darkness. Not all the pilgrims reach the summit: the altitude forces some to turn back and descend. Nevertheless, the spiritual objective remains clear: to celebrate Mass amid the eternal snows.

Pilgrims taking the Lemosho Route cross, within just a few days, a succession of some of the most breathtaking landscapes on the planet.

First comes the montane forest, between approximately 1,800 and 2,700 metres above sea level: humid, dense and luxuriantly green. Moss, ferns and mist envelop the trails. Water murmurs everywhere, as though the mountain were carefully preserving the springs that feed the rivers. This is the beginning of the pilgrimage. Already, a certain spirit of recollection takes hold: even the silence seems alive with vegetation.

Then comes the moorland and heath zone, between 2,700 and 4,000 metres. Trees become increasingly scarce. Giant groundsels and lobelias appear, almost prehistoric silhouettes, as though Creation had preserved remnants of an older world. The air grows colder, and the bite of the night begins to make itself felt.

Higher up stretches the alpine desert, between 4,000 and 4,900 metres: ash, lava and wind, beneath a scorching sun by day and biting cold by night. Vegetation becomes almost nonexistent. Words, too, grow scarce. Only what is essential remains.

Finally comes the almost Arctic alpine zone of Kibo, above 4,900 metres. A few lichens still survive, while ice and thin air surround the final approaches to Uhuru Peak. At the summit, the priest turns towards the East… or rather, towards the One who created the East. Holy Communion is received kneeling, on the bare ground. Mass is celebrated in the cold, above the clouds.

Since pagan times, men have climbed mountains to offer sacrifices there. Heights have always been regarded as natural altars: the summit as a threshold, sacrifice as a language addressed to the One whom man cannot control. Divine Revelation does not abolish this profound intuition; it elevates and sanctifies it. It knows Sinai, Tabor and, above all, Calvary.

In September 1990, during his farewell visit to Tanzania in Moshi, at the foot of this very mountain, John Paul II spoke of the spiritual significance of mountains in Sacred Scripture: they have always been a sign of God's presence. He also reminded his listeners that Africa belongs to God. At the summit of Kilimanjaro, in August 2026, this image took on a new dimension. What had until then been merely a symbol became reality at the foot of the altar.

There is a striking irony in this contrast. In certain cities overflowing with Baroque churches, the Mass of the ages is treated as a disciplinary problem: postponed, relegated to side chapels or simply refused. On Kilimanjaro, by contrast, without a nave, an organ or pews, it finds its natural place, as though that silence had been made for it.

Liturgical modernism seems to need microphones, commentary and an assembly constantly directed back towards itself. The Traditional Mass, on the other hand, requires very little: bread, wine, a priest and the faith of the Church. That is why it can climb mountains. That is why it finds its place even in a desert of volcanic stone. At the heart of Creation, it has found its space. No parish walls, no regulations, no disputes: only the mountain, the sky and the Holy Sacrifice.

The Mass first arrived in sub-Saharan Africa through the hands of missionaries. Today, it is through those same missionary hands that it is carried up the slopes of Kilimanjaro, in the very same rite. Africa, which the West sometimes likes to regard as the perpetual recipient of its innovations, once again reveals itself as the guardian of a heritage of which the West seems ashamed. The Tanzanian guides, whether Catholic or not, also took part in this endeavour.

The chalice above the clouds: the Church received from her Lord the mission of carrying the Holy Sacrifice wherever men are to be found. The Mass belongs neither to a particular era, nor to a particular sensibility or group. It is the worship offered to God by His Church.

Those who defend the Traditional Liturgy are not demanding an aesthetic privilege. They are asking for historical justice and spiritual freedom. This Mass did not originate at the Council of Trent. The Missal of St Pius V forms part of a far older liturgical tradition, heir to the Gregorian Sacramentary and to a Roman Canon whose essential elements are already attested in Christian antiquity. To restrict it as though it were a local experiment or a marginal practice is to treat the Church of all ages as nothing more than a faction.

Celebrating it on Kilimanjaro is precisely an affirmation of the opposite: the ancient Roman Rite belongs neither to an elite, nor to a nation, nor to a continent. It belongs to Christ. That is why it finds its place just as naturally in St Peter's Basilica as before an improvised altar on the heights of Kilimanjaro.

Modernism promised closeness, but appears to have produced dissolution. It promised adaptation, but seems to have caused the sense of the sacred to be lost. It promised to bring the Church closer to the world, at the risk of making her forget that her mission is not to speak like the world, but to proclaim Christ to it.

On Kilimanjaro, something entirely different took place. The Church spoke as she always has: in Latin, kneeling, in silence… and all of Creation seemed to answer her. The clouds below, the sun upon the stones, the wind upon the corporal. This was not “inculturation”, but something even more fundamental: the first culture, that of man standing before God, at the highest point his feet can reach.

This is why this Mass matters. Not because the summit possesses some magical power, but because this celebration challenges the notion that Tradition has become impracticable, residual or incompatible with our times. If it is possible to offer the Holy Sacrifice at sunrise, in the high-altitude desert, wearing a cassock and using the Missal, while in certain European dioceses the sacristy doors remain closed, then such restrictions cannot be presented as a universal necessity: they also reflect disciplinary and pastoral choices. And these choices can change. The Mass, however, endures.

A new generation is rediscovering the sacred in the Church's liturgy today. The young people filling the churches where the Traditional Mass is celebrated throughout the world are not asking the spirit of 1968 for permission to pray as their fathers in the faith did.

Africa does not wait for permission from Paris or from a bureaucratic Rome to believe. In the missions, in seminaries with modest resources and in families teaching their children to kneel, something is already taking shape. The priest who climbs Kilimanjaro in his cassock is merely the visible sign of a deeper reality: what is truly Catholic aspires to rise towards God; what is merely temporary eventually fades away.

There is hope here, but it is a hope that has nothing sentimental about it. It is the hope of those who have seen the altar raised above the decrees. At the summit of Kilimanjaro, at the beginning of August, modernism had no microphone: there was only the wind. And the wind does not interrupt the Roman Canon.

One day, Tradition will no longer need to take refuge in the mountains. It will reclaim its place in the parishes, as one returns home. Until then, every Mass celebrated on the ice of Uhuru Peak remains a banner: Christ the King, Mary triumphant, the Mass of the ages, free at the summit of the world.

On Kilimanjaro, nature welcomed Tradition. May the day come when our churches welcome it once again without fear.

Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam.