“The Pilgrim” in war

We didn’t really see the war coming in the pages of the Pilgrim . On July 5, 1914, a half-column, without even a title, announced the assassination in Sarajevo of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The issue of August 2, 1914, completed a few days later, opens with a portrait of the Pope’s cardinal legate at the Eucharistic Congress which has just ended in Lourdes.

Then publication is abruptly interrupted. Several printers from Pilgrim will unfortunately not wait for its reappearance, on All Saints’ Day, to fall on the field of honor. Two rotativists, Louis André, 29, and Henri Manceau, 25, were killed three days apart, on September 23 and 26, 1914, at the end of the Battle of the Marne.

Albert Aerts, team leader on the color rotary press, 41 years old, fell in Belgium, near Ypres, in May 1915, two months after the very young Henri Péchon, 19 years old, died of exhaustion.

► Photo. On the cover of November 19, 1916, two poilus read Le Pilgrim in a trench.

Among the fifty deaths at La Bonne Presse during the Great War, around ten worked at Pilgrim . Among them, Julien Le Liboux, Assumptionist priest. The latter took over the management of the newspaper after the mobilization. Discharged, due to very fragile health, he was sent back to the armies in 1917, after a campaign of re-evaluation of the exempted where anticlericalism played an important role.

Restricted to auxiliary tasks, he became a guard for German prisoners who worked in the fields in the middle of winter 1918, in Larchant (Seine-et-Marne). There he contracts pneumonia in the wind, cold and rain. Meningitis took him away at the age of 37, on June 28, 1918, at hospital 272.

This auxiliary hospital was installed between August 1914 and February 1919, in the very premises of the Maison de la Bonne Presse. On the exact floor where the editorial staff of the Pilgrim in 2008, before moving to Montrouge.

Unusual fact in this anticlerical era: Julien Le Liboux and another Assumptionist religious, Raphaël Rétaud, 36 years old, editor-in-chief of a Bonne Presse magazine, appear in the Pantheon… on the plaque of writers who died for France.

The Pilgrim like the newspaper The Cross insisted throughout the war on the role played at the front by priests and religious men and women. The daily newspaper publishes the names of those killed there every day. The two newspapers thus fought what they called the “infamous rumor”.

In fact, the anticlerical newspapers argued that the Pope would have wanted war to punish secular France and that the “priests” were all “hidden”, “ambushed”, well protected, in the rear. The titles of the recurring sections of the Pilgrim reflect the priority concerns of the newspaper. For example: “The faith of our soldiers” or “The clergy in war”.

Not an issue where the action of military chaplains and combat priests is not valued. There are many photos of improvised chapels or masses celebrated in improbable conditions.

Even in the trenches, thanks to one of these portable altars whose readers of Pilgrim and of The Cross have financed more than 10,000 copies by subscription. Not to mention the 18,000 packages of altar linen, sacramental wine, candles and 80 million hosts shipped throughout the war!

► Photo. Cover of Pilgrim No. 2003, dated August 15, 1915, representing Notre-Dame des Trenches.

Carried out during the four years of the war with great economy of means, The Pilgrim is not able to precisely follow the successive episodes of the conflict nor to publish any political or strategic commentary.

Even if it appeared in full, the peace proposal addressed to the belligerents by Pope Benedict XV in August 1917 will not be the subject of the slightest line of comment. However, the war is omnipresent in the newspaper, where we find practically no subject of information other than the conflict.

For example, we had to wait until January 1918 to read some substantial articles on the Bolshevik revolution and on the man whom Le Pèlerin called “the Boche emissary Lenin”. We learn that Germany facilitated his transfer from Switzerland to Russia.

Every week, readers find in their newspaper two pages of photos from the different front lines with, sometimes, a white space, the military censor having deleted a photo or a paragraph in an article.

► Photo. “Our Lord returns to Saint Martin, on November 11, his feast day and armistice day, the restored mantle of France.” One by Pèlerin published on November 24, 1918.